op-ed Relieving the burden of a Middlebury education

Author: Chris Anderson

I read in The Campus recently that Dartmouth was eliminating loan and aid packages for lower income students. After reading that headline, my internal dialogue was something like:

"Outrage! How could they - oh. This has to be a good thing. Because of course they have to supplement their incomes. So if they're eliminating loans, they must be replacing them with …"

Grants, and grants aplenty. For students whose parents make less than $75,000 annually, Dartmouth will foot the bill. This, according to the paper, comes as part of Dartmouth's recent $1.3 billion fundraising effort. Out of that chunk, 10 percent (or $130 million) will be devoted to assisting those students. 10 percent (a substantial portion of a massive amount of money) will go to the lowest branch of the Dartmouth tree (below building maintenance, the purchasing of new buildings, the "betterment of the campus," and the grinding gears of the college machine) - to its students.

According to the Princeton Review, Dartmouth is "home" to roughly 4,000 undergraduate students. That makes it almost twice as big as us. Their projected donations will be almost three times as big as ours (we're gunning for $500 million). That means we would have to donate a larger percentage per student to institute the same kind of plan. It means we would have to do more than Dartmouth (or Yale or Harvard) is doing. And it means two other things: 1.) that we won't, because … we just don't. We don't do those types of things that really help our students. We prefer the property, the Chocolate whatevers, the failed social endeavors (Xanadu?), the "indirect" methods. We prefer to let the Dartmouths try and fail, or succeed, or do it first and be the testing ground. And 2.) that we will continue to squander our money on failed college insignias and tire art and chocolate bars and God, I can't believe I just wrote "chocolate bars," because are we serious? Really?

Dartmouth is a different kind of college than Middlebury, and it must be structured differently. Tuition is not the same as a comprehensive fee, and I get that our aid packages will have discrepancies. I also get that Middlebury furnishes each of its students with a big chunk of aid and some great opportunities. But Dartmouth is targeting a specific income bracket with the knowledge that theirs holds the greatest financial burden. They're also offering scholarships to the same students to pay for room and board, books, and other expenses. They seem to get that the average middle class family pays more than $7,000 a year for insurance - not a part of the calculator for "Expected Family Contribution" - and that children of families with small (read: not always profitable) businesses have an added burden placed upon them. They seem to understand that 70 percent of the United States populous falls into the definition of "Middle Class." They seem to understand a lot of things that we don't, and that makes me sad.

Middlebury will never be a Harvard, a Yale or a Dartmouth. And that we have some clout now makes it all the more imperative to use it for "good." Rather than posing and posturing, or denying we care about the results of U.S.News' Best Colleges List, or being eco-conscious/eco-friendly/biomass-capable/carbon-offset/powered by soundbites, can we please lend more of a helping hand to the people who need it? Please?

When it comes to alumni giving, I promise to give what I can if we use it for that.

P.S.: Colby just did the same. Check their Web site out sometime.

Chris Anderson '10 is from La Crosse, Wis.