After Howard Thomas, director of Financial Aid, reported the average self-help component of Oberlin's financial aid packages for this year's entering class to the Consortium for Financing Higher Education (COFHE), COFHE contacted Thomas to make sure he hadn't erred and submitted incorrect data.
But Thomas assured COFHE that the data was correct: Oberlin really had decreased its self-help component by about 20 percent, making the average loan for entering students around $4,000. Prior to the decrease, the average loan was around $5,500, according to Thomas.
COFHE keeps track of financial aid practices for the top liberal arts and Ivy League schools across the country. Thomas said the decrease has brought Oberlin more in line with other members of COFHE in terms of the average self-help component awarded.
The Board of Trustees gave Financial Aid and Admissions an additional $800,000 last spring, most of which went toward reducing the self-help component. The rest of the money went toward merit awards, which comprise a little less than 10 percent of Oberlin's financial aid budget.
Thomas said that the Financial Aid budget more accurately reflected how much money incoming students would need.
Thomas didn't know whether this resulted in more students selecting Oberlin. "We don't have enough information," Thomas said. He also said, "The cost of living is going up every year," Thomas said. "Need is probably going to go up, too."
This year, the average need-based financial aid package was around $19,000, and the average grant was around $14,000.
Last year also saw the elimination of Oberlin's race based merit program. Before the change, there was one pool of merit money for African-American and Latino students, and one pool of money for all other students. Now, the merit programs have been combined. But, said President Nancy Dye, "We conferred merit awards exactly as before." She said that the distribution of the awards and the criteria for the awards had not changed.
She also said that this year more merit awards were given, though these awards were smaller.
Dye said that race based merit awards were eliminated to prevent the possibility of lawsuits. "The problem is now a series of legal decisions. We don't think we'd be in a good position to defend [the race based merit program]. We'd rather do what we want to do rather than be told to do something else."
In light of a drop in African-American enrollment, from 72 to 46, Dye said, "We have not weakened our commitment to African-American students ... I think there may well be something in how we distributed financial aid this year, that though we enhanced yield over all, [there was a decline in African-American enrollment]."
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