“In recent months, some students have expressed the fear that Swarthmore pulls a ‘bait and switch’ on their students. This tactic involves attracting students with good financial aid their first year, only to reduce the aid in subsequent years once students have already made friends and invested time and energy in Swarthmore.” …
http://daily.swarthmore.edu/2015/12/09/does-swarthmore-bait-and-switch-financial-aid/
Interesting article. My kid who was accepted a few years ago got no need based aid from Swat, although othet comparable institutions awarded some. We politely requested a review, and got a fairly curt response that no aid was forthcoming. It was one reason my kid picked a different school.
I’m the parent of a junior and can report there hasn’t been any bait and switch for us. The NPC has accurately predicted our FA package each year which has decreased in proportion to an increase to our income.
I have a senior at Swarthmore and we receive very generous financial aid. Throughout the four years our financial aid has been consistent and reflected the income and/or expense changes we experienced. The aid increased immensely when our second child entered college. The Financial Aid office at Swarthmore has always been extremely responsive and helpful. No bait and switch here!
My child was admitted but the aid was so low (lower than very other school by 15K-- not merit based aid, apples to apples. So I went looking for articles and noticed this written by students at Swarthmore. The story of a student working two jobs beyond work study made me cringe. http://daily.swarthmore.edu/2015/12/09/does-swarthmore-bait-and-switch-financial-aid/
Swarthmore, although a wonderful place, was off of our list. I think the whole “no loan” in our FA package is bogus. I am delighted to say my child is thrilled with the other school, will have no loans, and limited work study. Just a few regrets about Swarthmore but since graduate school for science is in the future the idea of less debt is more appealing.
FWIW, We did do an appeal and were given less than a few thousand more to help us. The attitude was not much friendlier than “oh, well, you will have to make another decision, then.” Not what I thought after the school was solicitous of our child applying. Sad really that a family that does okay is expected to put almost 35% into college tuition.
Swarthmore explains how they calculate financial aid:
http://www.swarthmore.edu/admissions-aid/how-we-measure-ability-to-pay
Each college has their own financial aid formula. Swarthmore has a net price calculator: http://www.swarthmore.edu/admissions-aid/net-price-calculator
“The Financial Aid Office reads each aid application carefully to determine a family’s fair share of College expenses and a student’s eligibility for our support. Given the simplicity of the calculator and the complexity of some families’ financial situation, this tool may not be useful for you. Results may not be accurate for you if your parents are not together, if they have married others, if they are involved in corporations, partnerships, or sole proprietorships, if they have rental properties, claim investment losses, are ill, or have lost jobs.”
While individual cases are exceptions, the average financial aid award at Swarthmore and the percentage of students who receive aid is broadly similar to other colleges. http://www.universityherald.com/articles/10803/20140807/pomona-college-tops-best-financial-aid-ranking.htm
You may disagree with their decision, and other schools may have given your child better financial aid packages, but the data does not support the conclusion that Swarthmore is any worse than other liberal arts colleges in financial aid. Debt per student at graduation also cannot tell you whether aid is worse either. What would prove that is if there is data demonstrating the rate in which aid decreases relative to increase in income is more skewed at Swarthmore than other schools.
Bait and switch implies a specific process where they are giving you more the first year to get you through the door only to reduce it second year onwards since you are already there. If they tell you upfront they can’t give more, then they are being very honest in terms of where you stand.
I was expressing my experience. I did not say that I was bait and switched. If either of you, Jademaster or texaspg, read the article you would see that the question of how aid is dispersed once students are there is the issue, not necessarily my issue. FWIW, students in the article detail how THEIR AID was decreased over time or did not increase although their financial situation stayed the same and tuition went up.
I’ll give you the link again— http://daily.swarthmore.edu/2015/12/09/does-swarthmore-bait-and-switch-financial-aid/ And, you can see the students writing the article use bait and switch. Probably why this thread came to be.
The students writing the article talk about the lack of transparency in the FA office—not my experience but their experiences. They interview the FA officer from Williams who talks about transparency and the Swarthmore students wish for more. It made me worry that we would be making a stretch and have something similar happen.
I think the vignettes of students shared in the article are the bait and switch. Students who describe getting less aid even though their finances had not changed. One of our thoughts had been that the aid package might stay similar across our child’s experience. That was clearly not the case for the students profiled in the article. AND…these are only the students who were polled and a small sample. My guess is that there are some who never felt a concern for their aid package while there will also be more who wind up with loans (although their packages are constructed without loans but don’t meet their real need but do meet what Swarthmore’s metric says they can afford) and a bad taste for being treated poorly when they feel a desire to finish at the school and crunched into debt.
When a student in the article states that they waited until late summer to get aid reviews and didn’t feel that the FA office was responsive, then, I think there is a FA problem for the school. I don’t need metrics thrown at me to see that there is clearly the data side but the students at the school feel there is something amiss when the office hides behind data.
Did you read the article? It states:
“an analysis of our results did not yield statistically significant differences at any level. We performed an ANOVA test, which sought to check whether there are systematic differences in the mean aid package for first-years, sophomores, juniors, and seniors. Although the mean aid package from the first year students is higher than the other means, our sample was not big enough and there was too much variation within years to conclude that the mean grants were different in different years.”
That means as catchy as “bait-and-switch” sounds, it’s not borne out by the data they collected. Vignettes, as helpful as they may be in understanding individual dealings with the FA office, cannot tell you about bait-and-switch. Only data on aid amount across the years will.
As for transparency, I’ve linked to Swarthmore’s FA website about their criteria for determining aid amount. Swarthmore, like Williams and any other school, considers taxes, properties, assets held in the students’ name, etc, in its aid decision. These are things that change yearly. This creates possible problems when a student feels that their financial situation is worse than in a previous year, but their aid decreases or remains the same.
What some of the students profiled are speaking about are administrative inadequacies. I agree, every financial aid office should be communicative and responsive. For students to have to wait weeks after their requests for loans have been processed to hear back is shameful. But whether this something specific to Swarthmore is a different question. Some students have positive dealings with the FA office. Others do not.
THEY do state that the sample was not big enough for an accurate statistical analysis. That said, they also note that the aid given to freshman showed a difference between first year and other years. The data does not indicate which students received the same,less, or more aid.
Students have further commented that study abroad with an award was more difficult at the school because Swarthmore waits until you return to decide if you get credit. This would limit the portability of financial aid for students who are on large amounts of aid. Another topic all together.
We can certainly agree that there is a communication issue in the department. Our experience was a communication issue. The admissions officer promoted the idea that some families take out loans to help their students learn about credit or build a credit rating. When you are discussing student need the idea of student loan debt as a teaching tool is laughable as these students are some of your most vulnerable financially. Swarthmore speaks about not adding loan debt to their packages as a selling point that students are not saddled with debt. Then to offer that taking on debt for some students is a family choice does not square. I have yet to meet a family (when I asked at my child’s high school parent transition meeting) who thought that a student loan was a great way to help their child develop a credit history. All I spoke to have been trying to lessen their child’s ultimate debt rather than trying to build a credit history because the job market has not necessarily been favorable to liberal arts grads. You might know some families who would ask their child to take on debt when they can afford to pay tuition but I do not evidently.
You can keep citing data. It makes sense to do so but Swarthmore is so small that it will be hard to get a large enough sample to do an analysis. At the end of the day, the students at Swarthmore are questioning the school’s practices and what they note as non-transparency. You and I as outsiders (I am assuming we are both outsiders) can look at the qualitative and quantitative and argue all we want. Swarthmore has work to do. This is not the first time the question has been raised either. Similar questions were raised in 2008.
My child is going to another school so I don’t need to massage this much further. I just object when schools don’t take care of the middle income students who are the most vulnerable to the financial issues we are discussing. It is shameful that a small, community-based college could leave some students out in the cold. That is one of the major reasons our family chose not to take the risk. Isn’t that the whole point of choosing a small college —too feel that they are responsive to your needs?
The data is from a survey. It is not meant to indicate specific instances of aid increasing or decreasing, but the general trend of aid amount across four years. It is also misleading to say that there is a difference between the first year of aid and subsequent years when the students running the tests stated they found no significant difference in aid across the years. This is why the data from that article cannot be used to make a conclusive statement about “bait-and-switch,” which is the point I am emphasizing.
Additionally, Swarthmore’s size has no bearing on whether or not you can get a representative sample. If you are concerned with “bait-and-switch,” you can send surveys to sophomores and upperclassmen. Given that Swarthmore is a little under 1600 students, and a little over half of those students are on financial aid and assuming that class size remains constant over all four years, there are roughly around 600 students on campus who are sophomores or upperclassmen and who are on aid.
Swarthmore requires students get a pre-evaluation of credits from their departments. Credit approval is usually guaranteed for typical study abroad programs like Oxford, but for students interested in less traditional study abroad options like studying dance in Ghana, discussing credits with faculty beforehand and keeping a diligent record of one’s work is advisable. Since students can take a leave-of-absence for study abroad, Swarthmore cannot restrict where students want to go. But it does not have to give credit for what the faculty deems inadequate work. If you are on aid, you pay the amount you would at Swarthmore to go abroad. Or you can take a leave of absence and pay the price of the abroad program yourself. Neither option determines credit approval, which is contingent on faculty pre and post evaluations.
There are plenty of reasons why a student’s family may take out loans. One assumption we can make is that it is because they cannot afford tuition. Statistically, this is not an issue localized to Swarthmore versus other liberal arts schools. The infographic in the article shows that Swarthmore is in the middle out of peer schools for average debt per graduate. Why is it higher than Amherst? Is it because Swarthmore is less generous to middle-income families, or is it because Swarthmore just has a higher proportion of middle income families? Like I stated, the only way to tease this question out is to get data on the rate of financial aid against family income. If Swarthmore’s aid decreases more rapidly the higher one’s income is, then we can assume that Swarthmore is less generous with middle-income families than Amherst, rather than just having a higher proportion of middle-income families. I don’t know where schools publish this information, if at all. If this is an issue of transparency, Swarthmore publicly describes on its website its financial aid criteria, includes a financial aid calculator, the same information that schools such as Haverford and Williams provide.
I am not trying to deny that students’ personal experiences with the financial aid office are wrong or that Swarthmore’s financial aid office can be more communicative with students and their families than they already are, I’m only stating that if you choose to paint a broad stroke over how Swarthmore treats middle-income families worse (as in giving them less money) in matters of financial aid, you need to be aware that this is a question that can be answered by data. The lack thereof means you cannot make this argument. I agree with you that we can stand to have more transparency on this front not only with Swarthmore, but with all colleges. I honestly have no idea if any college publishes financial data on family income and aid received.
I am sorry that your child could not afford to go to Swarthmore, I truly am. It was a transformative experience for me. At Princeton, a family making under 140k does not have to pay for tuition. Ironically, I got a better financial aid package than a friend there, despite our families being in the same income-bracket.
I think you want to hold with data is the answer when my point is that data is not. We can agree to disagree. Swarthmore chooses its metrics. There are students who are/were your peers who are hurting because of communication and the metrics. It behooves all institutions to respond when their students are asking important questions. If I ran a business, I would never feel like the system is set because we know X or Y-- looking again is the hallmark of great businesses that do well and are seen by the customers as responsive and thought leaders. Hopefully, the Swarthmore FA office will hear the questions raised by its students and make change.
I think we can both agree that any financial aid office can be more prompt with student aid decisions and loan requests. This is not my point of contention. But when you mention metrics and transparency, I’m confused. How is Swarthmore’s metric different from Williams? Both institutions publicly state that they take into consideration annual income, property values, assets held in a student’s name, and etc for financial aid purposes.
You stated that “I think the vignettes of students shared in the article are the bait and switch,” and my point is that vignettes cannot supply an answer to “Does Swarthmore “bait and switch” financial aid” because we are dealing with a question about something quantifiable. We are talking about money, about amounts. I think the question you’re trying to get at is how much financial aid Swarthmore gives to middle-income families. You made the assertion that Swarthmore does not give good aid to middle-income families. I simply stated that unless schools in general, not just Swarthmore, publish information about aid amounts versus family income levels, we cannot assume that Swarthmore treats middle income students any worse than other liberal arts colleges. Vignettes can tell you that students are dissatisfied with their aid. And there may be more of those at Swarthmore than at other places. But there may be more students who fall into a middle-income bracket than at other places. What kind of response can a student expect from the financial aid office when they do not qualify for aid? I assume that in this case, there is not much the office can do besides suggesting certain payment plans or taking out loans. If this comes off “curt,” then it really has to do with not receiving aid that one feels is adequate. Does saying, “We’re sorry, there’s nothing we can do, it’s a formula” amount to bad customer service? For example, what can a bank do when someone does not qualify for a loan? Are their services bad because someone is deemed by metrics to not qualify? Is this an effect that can be localized to just one bank, or is this standard practice across the industry?
Swarthmore has an appeals process, just as Williams does. While that may not have worked out for some families, it has worked for others. I have had friends who’s aid dramatically increased after their appeals. And I know others who did not. I’m not callous as to the grievances of other students, I know what it’s like to worry about aid packages on a yearly basis. I’m only stating that we are ultimately asking a question that can be answered by data, and until we have that data, we cannot single out Swarthmore as being particularly bad at aid for middle-income families.
@jademaster: That is an excellent series of posts.
@texaspg: I agree about the use of the term “bait and switch.” When financial circumstances change, it is legitimate to alter aid packages. I am reminded of another case mentioned in a Daily Gazette or Phoenix article. A student had moved off campus to save money only to find that the financial aid package was then reduced. The student was indignant about being punished for being thrifty, but moving off campus had cost Swarthmore money. (It costs almost nothing to put a student in an existing room and to feed the student, whereas paying rent and buying food off campus costs many thousands of dollars.) As good stewards, Swarthmore should spend its financial aid budget in a way that maximizes the benefits as it sees them.
The most recent respondent to the cited Daily Gazette article wrote the following:
That echoes a comment here by @Irismygirl:
I always shake my head when people complain about financial aid offers. The 2015-15 Swarthmore budget projects “expenditures” of $146,261,000. http://www.swarthmore.edu/sites/default/files/assets/documents/institutional-research/Budget.pdf Since there were 1581 students in 2015-16, this yields an average expenditure per student of just over $92,500. By this (albeit imperfect) measure, * everyone * is getting a large subsidy, all thanks to annual giving and income from the endowment.
Life is full of disappointments. I may test drive two cars with equal list prices, only to find that the dealer selling the car I prefer will not bargain much. Or, I may get two job offers, but the job I prefer comes with a less generous salary package. At that point, the best thing to do is to make a decision and then just let it go.
If your child goes to a good Ph.D. program in the sciences, tuition will be covered, and the stipend will be above $35k annually.
@Irismygirl @coase Just to be clear, I have no children attending Swat. 2016 kid was offered an admission with zero FA but so did other schools who did offer an admission and so I am not certain Swat treated my kid any differently than other schools at the same level this year.
OTOH, it is not uncommon for different schools to look at your financial situation differently. We have parents on 2016 thread discussing the packages they got from the tippy top schools such as HYP (there is one person who did for a true comparison) and determined they were off by 10s of thousands of dollars even though they are all peers. The only way to get someone to change their package seems to be if they are in a peer group willing to consider a package from another school and adjust theirs.
Whenever someone complains that middle income people are somehow unfairly treated, I’d like to say “So you want to change places with that poor person so you can get that big FA offer?”
@coase, You write, “This sense of entitlement borders on hysterical. Swarthmore is very generous when it comes to financial aid. If Swarthmore skews in favor of the neediest, so be it. By definition, they have the most need.”
No one denies that students in low or very low income families should get what they need in terms of financial aid. I don’t think I or anyone else for that matter deny that our lower middle income family is better off. Your nasty tone of referring to entitlement is offensive. If I had the tuition funds to pay 60K or 100K, I would. The metrics many schools utilize don’t take into account expenses that a family might have that go beyond the norm.
It is water under the bridge. But your comment is uncalled for, I did not, nor did anyone else, make any statements that lower income families should shut be out or given less.
To call what I am discussing as hysterically funny entitlement is uncalled for and, quite frankly, obnoxious. The article discusses factors of openness. Your comments demonstrate why an open conversation is not safe for many. Students who shared their experiences felt that they had to hide their issues with financial aid as well because of that kind of atmosphere. A student at Swarthmore had hoped for a more transparent process back in 2008.
You are right. Life is full of disappointments. Reading your comments and snark was, indeed, a disappointment as I came here to talk, vent and get some better understanding. I don’t really think I can learn anything from you.
@donnaleighg, that is such a kind and inclusive statement. Was it really necessary? No need for my family to change places. My husband and I are first generation to go to college, coming from poor families. We have been there. It is good to know that current Swarthmore families are supportive and kind to families whose kids might be middle class and struggling. That is the kind of openness that promotes…
@Irismygirl What would your idea of supportive be? You stress more openness, but what does that mean? I think the people who are least likely to talk about aid at Swarthmore are not middle income students, but students receiving full or near full aid. The most dismissive thing I heard at Swarthmore was when upper/middle income students complained that their tuition money goes to low-income students.