Is Northwestern meeting students’ financial needs?
While Northwestern University will proudly advertise that it meets “100 percent of demonstrated financial need” within every brochure, website and tour guide speech that can include the phrase, that may not provide a reassuring answer for all prospective and current Wildcats.
It is a key concern for the approximately 50 percent of students that receive need-based aid at Northwestern.
“Whenever [students] are looking for support or managing their financial aid package, I find that a lot of them don’t know how to communicate with the Financial Aid office, or the Financial Aid office is just extremely insensitive, or just doesn’t know how to properly communicate all of their expectations to students,” said Christian Reyes, a low-income and first-generation senior at Northwestern.
Reyes is a co-president and liaison at Quest+ (formerly Northwestern University QuestBridge Scholars Network), a student organization that provides support and resources for other students in situations similar to Reyes himself. He says the most common questions that Quest+ receives are about specific details of aid packages that the Office of Undergraduate Financial Aid hasn’t clarified.
“They have very complicated wording, their marketing is not accessible,” Reyes said.
What is “100 percent of demonstrated financial need,” exactly? And even if Northwestern does meet full demonstrated need for students, is that enough? Is there still a social climate that stigmatizes low-income students? Does one’s low-income status hinder one’s ability to fully engage oneself in all parts of the Northwestern experience, even with the tools the university provides?
Sources: https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities?_sort=rank&_sort-direction=asc
https://www.internationalstudent.com/schools_awarding_aid/
■ Blue — Need-blind universities (all applicants) that meet full demonstrated need
■ Red — Need-blind universities (domestic applicants) that meet full demonstrated need
■ Yellow — Need-sensitive universities that meet full demonstrated need
■ Green — Need-blind universities do not meet full demonstrated need
■ Orange — Need-sensitive universities that do not meet full demonstrated need
“Low-income students regularly under-attend prestigious universities, and as a Quest Scholar I know firsthand many of my peers feel ostracized at places like Northwestern even in spite of the tremendous resources available, like Student Enrichment Services or Northwestern Career Advancement,” wrote now-alumnus Kevin Corkran, a current law student at Boston College, in a letter to The Daily Northwestern as a student last year. “Every day is a battle for validation.”
Northwestern has made recent progress toward increasing access for students of all socioeconomic backgrounds, such as eliminating loans from financial aid packages in 2016 and adding student input into the financial equity process with the founding of Student Enrichment Services and NU Quest Scholars Network. When University President Morton Schapiro set a goal to admit a class with at least 20 percent Pell Grant-eligible students by 2020, Northwestern accomplished this goal two years ahead of schedule.
Senior Associate Director of Financial Aid Brian Drabik said the university’s next focus is to make sure aid packages are less one-size-fits-all.
“What’s really important is to ensure that we have all of the resources in place that are necessary to support these students […] and I think there’s a number of aspects that we should address,” Drabik said. “One would be financial, another, I think, would be academic and a third would be experiential. I think we need to make sure we’re hitting the mark on all three of those to ensure that students are getting the full experience they’re entitled to.”
Indeed, there are some shortcomings in the system. Despite an 11-figure endowment, Northwestern remains unable to extend its need-blind admissions provision to international applicants (international students are unable to fill out the FAFSA, the standard form used to assess financial need for domestic students, which makes determining an accurate estimate for an expected contribution even harder).
Furthermore, an opinion piece in The Daily last year noted the disparity between tuition requests for middle-class families compared to peer institutions; according to net price calculators on both websites, Northwestern’s requested contribution for families in the $75,000 to $110,000 income bracket is more than double than the approximately $12,000 Harvard asks for. There’s no legally standard definition for “100 percent of demonstrated financial need.”
According to Reyes, Northwestern has yet to fully narrow these gaps.
“The university loves to preach diversity, and they claim that they want all these students to be on campus, but once we’re here, we’re not supported, and when we complain, they tell us that we shouldn’t be complaining,” Reyes asserted. “There’s a difference between diversity and inclusion, and we’re not feeling included on campus the way we should be.”
Even though the Financial Aid office does send targeted communications to students to inform them about help such as SES or the Financial Wellness Program, this doesn’t always lead to a major increase in students seeking these resources. When updates are delivered via emails or on-campus flyers, the information is functionally withheld from prospective students.
Additionally, campus activities, Greek life and other parts of the social scene can make participation more challenging for low-income students, especially for those balancing these activities with work-study programs, although these problems aren’t exclusive to Northwestern. Per Corkran’s letter, “it can be ostracizing to have to stay in because you cannot afford going out with friends during the weekend.”
“I was on a campus that’s highly selective, and it was summertime and there was a young man working a summer job on campus, and he was driving his golf cart around,” said Jean Wall, director of college counseling at a private school in Los Angeles. “I got into his golf cart […] and I said, ‘How’s it been for you at this particular university?’ And he said, ‘It’s really hard, there are so many people here with money.’”
Wall argues one’s financial status can shape their undergraduate experience, both socially and structurally. Generous financial aid policies can start to level the playing field for tuition and housing, but these policies can do very little about school culture.
It has been well-documented that Greek life can be difficult to deal with for students from low-income backgrounds, but Assistant Director of Student Organizations and Affairs Joseph Lattal observed that results may vary for other student clubs and groups because students take different approaches.
“I manage the Student Activities Assistance Fund, and one of the most important values is confidentiality of the information of students who submit requests for funding,” Lattal noted. “I think there are some students that appreciate that, and really value it, but I’ve also heard from students who are really open about their financial situation with their peers, and don’t really see a need to make that identity private.”
Of course, even though some students have noted these differences in experiences, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a multitude of resources already available to help students overcome financial obstacles of all sorts. From the aforementioned SES, NCA and Quest+, to the Financial Aid department’s collaborative efforts with other departments and organizations on campus, including Admissions, SES, Student Organizations and Affairs and Undergraduate Learning Abroad, the Northwestern community has been combatting this problem institutionally. The main question is whether it’s actually doing enough with effort and resources.
Some, such as Reyes, would answer “no.” He claims that bureaucratic obstacles, intentional or not, end up frustrating some students to the point where they can’t figure out how to receive adequate assistance.
As these students remain stuck in appeal processes, Reyes argues, they are left with less time to dedicate to working, studying or socializing. It would be natural that those students feel like less-than-full-fledged members of the campus community.
“Access and inclusion is something that is important to Northwestern generally, and there are lots of offices that are focused on that,” Manager of Study Abroad Financial Services Krista Bethel pointed out. “Financial aid is intrinsically [linked] to access, that’s the point of it.”
