For all Wesleyan fans and prospective Wesleyan applicants, the university announced today that financial aid packages will be completely loan-free beginning academic year 2024/25. Great news, and a long time coming–this should make their already excellent aid some of the most generous around. Go Wes!
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Love this. For some families a modest amount of student loans are no big deal, but for others they are a very big deal, and therefore policies like this really expand the pool of families who can comfortably afford these colleges.
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But will Wesleyan’s net prices (for the same financial aid situation) be $5,500 lower than they were before they made this announcement?
My understanding is that usually when at least famous colleges announce this sort of policy, it does mean an increase in grants and therefore a decrease in true net costs.
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The policy only makes sense as a substitution of grants in place for loans. Otherwise, it becomes a net increase in out-of-pocket expenses for the family which doesn’t solve anything. Wesleyan’s policy for the past twelve years has been to limit the number of students receiving grants (need -aware), but to maximize the amount of money available to however many are admitted.
I think their calculations are very transparent: here’s what we think you need; then, here’s where that’s coming from. This change simply means loans are removed from the second equation (replaced by grant aid), with no change to the first. I trust Wes not to try to pull a fast one with this–and they surely have little interest in trying to do so, particularly when it’s so easy to do quick aid assessments and compare between institutions.
That is certainly implied, but not explicitly stated, in the press release. Plenty of persons and organizations have crafted marketing messages that imply something that is not actually the case without actually lying, so there is reason to be skeptical.
Had they said “we will continue calculating demonstrated need as before, but we will now meet it with grants in place of the loans assumed previously”, that would have been a more explicit promise.
I see.
I’d say it’s a lot more than implied.
They state “starting in the fall of 2024, Wesleyan University will no longer include loans as part of its financial aid packages. The University will meet all students’ demonstrated financial need without the burden of borrowing.”
If you take loans out of the equation to meet demonstrated need, you need to fill with grants.
I note I think part of what is going on here is colleges like Wesleyan, WUSTL (who also announce a no-loan policy), and so on have gotten dinged for not necessarily the best economic diversity profiles. WUSTL, like Wesleyan, was quite explicit about this being part of trying to change that.
But I don’t know if that would work out so well for them in the long run if they were just eliminating loans and not replacing them with grants. Presumably that would not make them more competitive for non-full-pay families, and in the future they would still get dinged.
So while anything is possible in theory, in practice I suspect these schools really are trying to do a better job enrolling non-full-pay families.
Yes, for sure. In Wes’s case it’s also important to note that this new policy is firmly aimed at middle-income families, as the university already had a no-loan policy in place for those with, I think, incomes under 120k. This never quite made full sense–if you need financial aid, whatever your family’s income, why should you be burdened with thousands of dollars of loans?–so I’m happy to see this simple, transparent, and generous policy put in place. Wes now has, unequivocally, some of the best financial aid in the country.
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Wes is also still need-aware, but I don’t think that policy ends up impacting many applicants. Any thoughts @circuitrider?
The way need-aware works at Wesleyan is that at a certain point they take a look at how much money has been awarded and if it is bumping up against the amount that has been budgeted, they begin making decisions based on how much FA the remaining candidates need. It often affects the last 5% of the applicants who make it to the final round of decisions, although IIRC, there have been years when it affected fewer.
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My impression is that this no-loan policy is far more significant, and will impact far more applicants/students–across the board rather than just at the very, very end of the application pool as you describe.
No loan policy will benefit families in the middle and that’s great. Having a bar bell student body in terms of income doesn’t fully reflect the diversity Wes is trying to achieve.
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Except that they did not promise to calculate demonstrated need the same way that they did before.
Indeed, “meet need” claims mean much less than what they seem, since the college can calculate need however it wants.
Thanks for clarifying. This is how it’s supposed to work at Haverford as well.
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This seems like a very conspiratorial way to look at it. Perhaps the case, but if so then Wesleyan is a very different type of institution than many of us take it to be!
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If it is helpful for comparison sakes, I ran the net price calculator two years ago for D22 and then again now for D24. I make slightly more money now than before, but the estimated net price is less than half of what it was before. With D22, the price included a parent contribution, a student work contribution, and student loans. With D24, the price includes a lower parent contribution, the same student work contribution and no loans at all.
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