Need-blind for all? - Juan Machado

I am only here today because Middlebury College, at the time I applied to college, was one of a handful of colleges in the US with a need-blind admissions policy for international students. This is no longer the case.

In its first round of budget cuts, back in 2009, the administration decided it was essential to keep a need-blind policy for domestic applicants, but revoked it for incoming international students. “I don’t think you can put a price tag on being need-blind,” Liebowitz said at the time, without explaining why the principle did not apply to international applicants. One year later, the college announced it would maintain the policy, effectively making it much more difficult to qualified international applicants in need of financial aid, with the exception of UWCers, to gain admittance.
I find it surprising that a college that advertises its efforts to create “a diverse and inclusive community” and provide a “multitude of international opportunities” should, in its first cuts, differentiate between domestic and international applicants. Particularly surprising when Leibowitz calls need-blind admissions for domestic students key “if we seek socioeconomic and regional diversity.”
It is hard to take the college’s international focus seriously when it chooses to save money by discouraging international students unable to pay the Comprehensive Fee in full from applying. Its international vision excludes providing an educational opportunity to international students of modest means, but includes volleyball matches and pageant plays in foreign languages during summer school.

I fear that without a renewed commitment to international diversity, Middlebury in the future will be international in the way Epcot is international. We will have a bit of narrative journalism here and there on the website about where we are from and once every so often Indian food at Atwater, but there will be nothing beneath the surface.