The result of several months of legislative maneuvering has been the adoption of a maximum family income of $75,000 a year for GSL users--a restriction which can be waived if professional scholarship-computing services find that a family incurs enough other costs such as that of other children in college. The new maximum would affect only about 25 undergraduates here, Lyman says.
But Lyman says her office is receiving a different variety of panicked phone calls this year--ones from families which, though not qualifying or not even applying for aid, are aghast at the heights to which tuition has risen. She describes frequently panicked freshman parents who "have many other expenses, a whole lifestyle, and here they are three months before making a substantial payment. It's not a good time to be planning."
But the automatic recommendation many would make--that the alarmed family seek a loan--highlights for Lyman the problem of the "lend 'em $5,000 bucks and send 'em out the door approach," a strategy graduate students particularly rely on. "Whether a student can borrow an infinite amount of money is a real problem," Lyman says.
Heavy borrowing is equally problematic for the unprepared middle-class family with expenses, and for the student with no resources at all. Aid officers calculate that, with rising interest rates and with the new GSL stipulation that students start repaying the loans while still in school, a student relying on them through both college and grad school could amass tens of thousands of dollars in debt.
Neither the loan program nor the Pell Grants--direct grants for needy students, targeted by Reagan for nearly $1 billion of cuts--will have suffered substantially by the time next year's aid applications go through. But the College has already seen some disturbing signs of the deeper problems that officials cite.
William R. Fitzsimmons '67, acting director of admissions and financial aid noted a significant percentage drop in the number of applicants to the the Class of '86 whose parents did not attend college. Interpreting the drop as a communications gap--students from working-class backgrounds wrongly assumed they could not afford Harvard and eliminated themselves from the applicant pool without finding out that Harvard had maintained its aid-blind policy--Fitzsimmons echoes the its aid-blind policy--Fitzsimmons echoes the alarm voiced by the Coalition for Student Aid (CSA), a newly formed student group to combat the cuts threat.
"You can't really go back to your hometown anymore and tell people to apply and not worry, not when you don't know what's going to happen," says Christina Spaulding '83, incoming president of the Democratic Club and a CSA member, who helped organize an April rally supporting equal access to education and protesting the cuts. The coalition also publicly stressed equal access as a broad goal for higher education when it sent a letter to President Bok criticizing his annual report, which examined what the federal government's role should be in higher education. That issue, most officials say, underlies the current cuts controversy and will make it crop up again every few years until it is resolved.
Bok's 32-page report drew harsh local criticism but considerable attention in Washington, as it endorsed higher education principally because it makes students more productive members of society. That philosophy led Bok to suggest that, if necessary, the federal government could target aid only to those students-deemed most likely to finish college.
Bok says the practical suggestions that caused such controversy--like using SAT scores and high school records to determine which students are "likely" to finish college and thus qualify for aid--were only "meant to generate discussion" and not intended as actual proposals. But his perception of education as a benefit primarily to society, rather than the student, drew the most violent objection from the CSA. Its letter criticizes Bok for failing "to stress the importance of maintaining equal educational access for all students" and accuses him of valuing education not "for its own sake, but because a diploma may make a person a more productive economic unit."
Officials here, however praised Bok for having directly addressed the issue they say underlies all other arguments about financial aid, regardless of whether or not Harvard rides out the storm. Bok opens his report with an anecdote of meeting with Education Secretary Bell for a much-sought-after 15 minutes of lobbying time, only to have the secretary ask, almost casually, what he thought the role of the federal government in education should be. O'Brien, in defending financial aid as a priority for university money, similarly sticks to that level of discourse, calling aid-blind admissions a symbol of "the promise that higher education has assumed as its burden--the promise of democracy, that able people can get ahead."
"Of course we're doing a job for ourselves too," O'Brien says of aid-blind's benefits, "Our faculty likes to have bright students, they like to have diversity. But if we fail to make the more fundamental argument. I think we are missing the best reason of all."