During a weekly “dealing with COVID” Zoom call with several colleagues a couple of weeks ago, I heard the following story. One of the counselors on the call either knew or had heard about a college student who had run into an unexpected financial aid issue.
The student attends an expensive, private, urban university located in a city with a high cost of living. She (as I recall the student was female, but gender is not germane to the story) earned enough credits to graduate ahead of schedule after seven semesters, but was planning to take additional classes for the spring semester and then graduate.
What threw a wrench in her plans was that the university informed her that she would no longer receive institutional financial aid given that she had accumulated enough credits to earn her degree. That led to a debate among those of us on the call about whether the student had been wronged.
I don’t know enough about the particulars of this case to weigh in knowledgeably (which of course has never stopped me or any blogger or pundit from expressing an opinion). I am, however, interested in thinking through the underlying issues and principles.
When I first heard the story, it sounded like a “Suburban Legend,” my term for the “truths” about the college admissions process that are shared among parents at the grocery store, on the sidelines of games, and at social gatherings. Like urban legends, Suburban Legends are repeated often and assumed to be true, and they are most likely to be believed by people who are educated and affluent.
Suburban Legends never seem to happen to someone you know, but rather an FOAF (Friend of a Friend) or a co-worker’s brother-in-law’s daughter’s boyfriend’s sister’s best friend. Just as urban legends often reflect deeper fears and anxieties, Suburban Legends arise in response to a college admissions process that can seem mysterious or even unfair and from fears that there are “secret handshakes” in college admission that everyone but you know about.
A couple of the counselors on the call felt that the student had been treated unfairly. I argued the other position, that the university was within its rights to end its support of the student.
What is financial aid designed to accomplish? That’s the key question in this case. The purest answer is that the purpose of financial aid is to ensure that students aren’t prevented from receiving an education due to lack of financial resources. The underlying principle is that access to a college education should not be determined by ability to pay.
That, of course, is not the same thing as saying that a college education is a right. Many people believe that, and it is a perfectly defensible position to hold. The lack of government support for students attending college suggests that we as a society don’t really believe that, or at least aren’t willing to put our money where our mouths are. There are unfunded mandates; this is an unfunded ideal.
Complicating that ideal is the fact that today most institutions treat financial aid as a strategic outlay. Financial aid, whether need-based or merit-based (and Jon Boeckenstedt has argued there is no real difference), is a tool to help colleges achieve strategic goals. “Financial need” as a guiding principle has been supplanted by “willingness to pay,” and there is a cottage industry of consultants using data mining to advise colleges on how much aid they must offer, both to individual applicants and the aggregate applicant pool, to achieve the right mix of students and net revenue. For colleges the awarding of financial aid is less a moral commitment and more an economic investment.
The other answer to the question, “What is financial aid designed to accomplish?” is that financial aid is an investment in a student to help them obtain a degree, with the key phrase being “obtain a degree.” In this case the student has earned enough credits to obtain a degree, so the college’s investment has accomplished its purpose, regardless of the time frame. The university is not obligated to provide eight semesters of funding if earning a degree only takes seven. Once the student has qualified to earn a degree, whether or not they have actually received the diploma, the college or university has discharged its obligation to the student. If you assume that institutional funds are not unlimited, withdrawing support for a student after they have earned enough credits for a degree allows the institution to benefit other students.
There is one other issue that enters in to the calculation of what is the right thing to do in this case, the timing and quality of the university’s communication to the student. The university does have a moral obligation to communicate the conditions under which it is awarding aid, including what circumstances lead to the loss of support. If the student learns about the university policy only after she has completed her degree requirements early, then the university has been negligent and potentially harmed the student (if the end of aid means she can’t pay rent or loses university housing). That would override the fact that the university is not obligated to continue the financial aid through the eighth semester.
In ethics there is a distinction between acts that are morally obligatory and those that are supererogatory, or morally praiseworthy. In this case it would certainly be praiseworthy for the university to continue to award aid to the student for another semester, but it is not required to do so. Does it make a difference that the student has gone beyond the call of duty in earning a degree in less than four years? That might be a reason for the university to reward the student by allowing her to remain on aid for the remaining semester, but in my opinion there is no obligation to do so.