Several elite universities have taken steps to make attending college vastly cheaper over the past few months, including instituting loan-free financial aid programs and cutting tuition.
Yale University announced a new financial aid program Jan. 14 that cuts tuition by up to 50 percent for students from middle or high-income families.
At the start of December, Harvard University unveiled a similar program. Both plans eliminate tuition for students from families that make $60,000 a year or less and deeply cut costs for students whose families make from $120,000 to $200,000 a year.
A week later, the University of Pennsylvania announced that it was abolishing loans and replacing them with grants, letting students graduate without debt, a reform made famous by Princeton University in 2001.
But NYU has no plans to change its financial aid policies, NYU spokesman John Beckman said.
He said NYU cannot afford to, pointing to those Ivy League universities' resources.
"Harvard, Yale and Princeton all have endowments that, on a per student basis, are 30 or more times larger than NYU's," Beckman said in an e-mail. "That simply enables them to have a degree of financial flexibility that we do not."
Harvard and Yale have the two largest endowments in the country; each university has more than $1.5 million per student in their coffers. Because NYU has a much larger student population and a much smaller endowment than both of these schools, its endowment only provides about $52,000 per student.
In a press release about Yale's new program, Yale President Richard Levin said, "We want all of our students to make the most of Yale, academically and beyond, without worrying about excessive work hours or debt."
Tisch sophomore Kate Gellene has worked up to six nights a week at a variety of jobs to afford NYU. She receives barely enough financial aid each semester to cover room and board, she said. She blames NYU's financial aid program, which she called "pretty unfair."
"They waste a lot of money from what I hear," she said.
Gellene figures that with the kind of financial help that Yale is offering its students, she could breathe easier at school. "It's really stressful to think about how much debt you're racking up when you're studying," she said.
Rachel Smith is city/state editor.
E-mail her at rsmith@nyunews.com.
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