The Triangle ran an editorial today about other universities cutting costs for lower-income students and that Drexel should follow suit, RATHER than following their Master Plan. I disagree.

According to the editorial: “In 10 years, Drexel may have state-of-the-art buildings, a beautiful campus and high rankings in The Princeton Review. But its reputation will surely suffer if high-quality students are attending other academically comparable schools because the bill is 50 percent less.”

I think that Drexel, being 108th in the country and rising, needs to continue to focus on the kind of improvements in the Master Plan before it can do what these other schools are doing. If Drexel were to back off on the Master Plan and put a significant amount of money towards this, that would tell me that they are happy with being only 108th.

I also believe it’s much easier for these other universities to give free rides to lower income students because they simply accept LESS of them. Here is an excerpt from an article on Drexel.edu:

“Of (Drexel) undergraduates who applied for financial aid last year, 2,412 are from families earning less than $60,000 annually, 2,406 from families earning $60,000 to $109,000 and 2,473 from families earning more than $109,000. About $108 million in financial aid was provided to 70 percent of undergraduates in the current academic year. The federally based Pell Grant supported 2,024 of Drexel’s neediest students, about four times as many as Harvard, Yale and Lehigh and about twice as many as Penn.”

Drexel has about 2,000 students who need Pell Grants to about 500 for Harvard and Yale. It is much easier to pay tuition for 500 students than it is for 2,000. Drexel was founded on giving lower income families a chance to learn skills. Numbers like these make me believe that Drexel still has that mission in its acceptance process. However, that mission, and also the fact that Drexel is NOT content with 108th, are both great things, but make it hard for them to give similar tuition credits as these other universities do, at least right now.

Source: 2/29/2008 Triangle Edboard, Drexel.edu Applications Article
Photo courtesy of mbbc.edu