The whole idea of excluding a student simply because of money clashed with the college’s ideals, Leslie Limper, the aid director, acknowledged. “None of us are very happy,” she said, adding that Reed did not strike anyone from its list last year and that never before had it needed to weed out so many worthy students. “Sometimes I wonder why I’m still doing this.”
That decision was one of several agonizing ones for this small private college, celebrated for its combination of academic rigor and a laid-back approach to education that once attracted Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, to study on its leafy campus minutes from downtown.
With their endowments ravaged by the financial markets and more students clamoring for assistance, private colleges like Reed are making numerous changes this year in staff, students, tuition and classes that they hope will tide them over without harming their reputations or their educational goals.
Reed and others have admitted more students to bolster revenue with larger classes.
Read it all from the front page of yesterday’s New York Times.
Oh what a loss; Reed College in need! Go look at the website and note the student associations. Nothing more than a higher tuition version of goofy undergrads. With a very, very lefty atheist twang. Weep not.
No. 1: Then weep for the many excellent colleges that are in even worse straits: with smaller endowments, more demands on their fincancial-aid budgets, and hence even greater pressure on their annual operating budgets.
Turning away academically deserving students is a hard way to go. Such a policy could narrow some students’ choices to large state universities where they might not receive the individual attention they need in order to thrive academically and grow intellectually. Having a range of options is good for students, good for higher education.