All Facts Must be Known in Need-Blind Admission Debate

To the Editor:

As reported in the last The Mac Weekly, the Board of Trustees is currently discussing whether Macalester should adopt the proposals that originated with us, the Resource Planning Committee. We on the RPC—students selected by MCSG, elected representatives of the faculty and staff, and administrators—have an obligation to help inform the broader community of the facts surrounding need-blind admissions and our proposals. Last year and this semester, we have arranged briefing and information sessions for students, faculty, staff, and alumni. We think that people can be best informed when they have an opportunity to hear from all perspectives, both those supporting and those opposing our proposals.

To accomplish this, we have organized a financial aid discussion that allows both sides to be presented. We’ve invited people to speak in opposition to the RPC proposal, including the two authors of critical commentaries in last week’s newspaper, Professor of History Peter Rachleff and William Sentell ’02. In order to further broaden the possibilities for participation, following the advice of Adrienne Christiansen, we will have an “audience centered debate” that will allow individuals from the audience to speak briefly to whichever side of the issue they favor. The debate has been scheduled for Tuesday afternoon.

The students on RPC are organizing follow-up information sessions for the week of October 18-22. The debate and these follow-up sessions will provide a way for informed opinions to be conveyed to members of the Board of Trustees, who are the ultimate decision makers on this issue. Strong views have been expressed about the importance of retaining need-blind admissions, but expressing those views to the Board will not serve much purpose if they do not specifically address the actual proposals that are under consideration.

To help focus the discussion, we summarize the RPC proposals here.

First, that Macalester should commit itself to meet the full financial need of all new and continuing students, foreign and domestic. This policy is much stronger than that found at most need-blind colleges, and seems not to be controversial here, despite its great expense.

Second, that Macalester should adopt a budget for financial aid. Almost every school—even need-blind schools—already has such a budget. Macalester does not. RPC has recommended that the size of this budget should be set to allow Macalester to admit a far larger proportion of needy students than all of the elite need-blind schools.

Third, that admissions decisions at Macalester should continue to be made in a way that support the diversity that everyone here cherishes, based on the academic, cultural, and social attributes of our applicants.

The large financial aid budget that we have proposed will continue to make Macalester a distinctively diverse place. The vast majority of admissions decisions—more than 90%—would be the same as they are under our present policies. But, since the budget will be fixed, and since we will be committed to meet the full financial need of all admitted students, some domestic applications will be treated in the same way that all international applications are currently handled: in a need-aware fashion.

The RPC made these proposals because we see them as the best way to continue to make Macalester a college that is attractive and accessible to the best students, regardless of their family income. In this, the members of RPC share the values and goals of the broad Macalester community. Perhaps we disagree with some about how best to honor those values and the most likely means to achieve those goals. That will be the subject of Tuesday’s debate.

We hope you will be able to join us.
 

100% Need-Blind Aid Would Render Mac Insolvent

To the Editor:

During our more than two decades teaching together in the History Department, my good friend and colleague Peter Rachleff has compiled a superlative record of empowering students from marginalized backgrounds by insisting on the highest expectations of achievement and innovation. No other academician that I know of, anywhere, comes close to Peter in his ability to invite students of color and students that are economically disadvantaged to envision the best that they can become, and then to challenge and inspire them to fulfill these visions. For living out so admirably its values of democratic inclusion as well as of excellence, the college owes him an enormous debt of gratitude.

Granting all this, I nevertheless believe that Peter’s defense of maintaining Macalester’s need-blind admissions policy at any cost is, in the long run, self-defeating. My contrary view is that unless the policy is altered, Macalester’s prospects for sustaining academic democracy and accessibility will soon become deeply compromised.

Why? Because one single fact in President Rosenberg’s explanation of the economic impact of continuing need-blind admissions hits like a bludgeon across the forehead:

Unless need-blind is revised in order to predict and contain financial aid spending, the entire earnings of our (comparatively modest) $450,000,000 endowment will become exclusively dedicated to supporting financial aid—and nothing else—by the year 2006.

What would that mean? It would mean that earnings on every accumulated endowment dollar ever donated to or earned by the college endowment in its 125-year history would now need to be given out as scholarship aid and used for no other purpose.

No endowment income for anything else. Think about it: not for new academic programs or sustaining existing programs, not for faculty salaries that can keep pace with inflation or reward great teaching, not to attract highly sought after faculty or retain them, faculty of color included, not to ensure that our bi-weekly staff is justly compensated, not even to pay for heat and electricity, for cleaning the dorms, removing the snow, running the food service or heating the buildings, not to pay for the next generation of computer labs and science equipment, for additional volumes in the library, and for much-needed fine arts technology. No return of the Nordic ski team. No Middle East Studies major, that’s certain.

Instead, the rapidly rising costs for all these items would have to be paid for by tuition dollars alone. That’s because our endowment income would remain exclusively devoted to financial aid. And as ongoing costs for all these goods and services continue to outpace the growth of the endowment and income from tuition charges as well, the only way to keep the college solvent would be to continue to cut budgets.

Non-tenurable faculty, lower level staff of all kinds, and maintenance of the physical plant would all be first in line for reductions, followed by cuts in curriculum support, co-curricular programming and admissions.

Once our endowment’s income no longer meets ever-rising demands of financial aid, and once serious budget cutting has taken its toll, the only alternative left for the college’s survival would be to abandon our claims to academic excellence and accessibility. We would then begin to lower admissions standards in order to attract students who can “pay the freight,” which means reshaping our student body into something almost entirely “white,” wealthy, non-international, and academically unexceptional.

Such a future, in my view, would amount to the near-total abandonment of Macalester’s core beliefs and commitments. (I lived through a period in the college’s history, the 1970s, that worked exactly this way. It has taken us a full two decades to begin recovering from the trauma.)

We must therefore take our one remaining opportunity to control our financial aid cost, with the view of maintaining as full accessibility as possible to low income applicants to Macalester. That, I believe, is what President Rosenberg is proposing to do. If we don’t act now, ever-increasing financial pressures in the years ahead will force us to abandon both of these goals. Ultimately, we’ll be forced to jettison need-blind admissions anyway, and with it, all possibility of sustaining either accessibility or excellence.

On one very overarching point, however Peter Rachleff and I are in fullest agreement. To remain accessible, the college needs to raise money. Enormous amounts of money. Two decades of pitifully inadequate fundraising by Macalester’s previous two presidents and their Boards of Trustees go far to explain the fiscal pain we endure today.

But to raise the minimum amount we actually need by the end of the decade, a whopping $400 million or so added to the endowment, we need to offer potential donors compelling chances to invest in a Macalester that is full of new ideas, that is continuously raising its aspirations, and that is multiplying its successes. Asking donors instead to invest in a college whose faculty, staff, curriculum and student body are being beleaguered by constant budget cutting in order to protect need-blind admissions simply will not get results. Heavyweight donors seldom invest in financially troubled institutions.

Macalester, at this moment, is a truly wonderful college, distinctive for its honest and often successful attempts to reconcile social democracy with academic excellence and broad accessibility with high selectivity. President Rosenberg’s plan to gain control over our financial aid budget seems to me to offer our most reliable hope for keeping it that way.

James B. Stewart

James Wallace Professor of History
 

Ethics Should Take Priority Over Economics

To the Editor:

As the school considers moving away from its need-blind admission policy, the issue of need-blind admission has become a hot topic around campus. It is an issue that some argue is a matter of money, or, supposedly, Macalester’s lack thereof.

But need blind admissions isn’t a matter of money, it’s a matter of principle. Money is important—after all, we do live in the real world—but what about ethics? Is it really okay to deny someone admission based on their parents’ salaries? A school’s primary aim should always be to provide a quality education to students regardless of race, gender, or economic status. If racism isn’t okay, then why is classism?

The debate over the admissions policy is only one instance in which the issue of money is pitted against our own principles. This clash is something we confront everyday, from decisions on where to buy our groceries, to the bigger questions of life, like what sort of career path to take. Unfortunately for our future, money tends to win over principle, but that doesn’t mean we should let it happen. Just because profits over people has become the status quo, does not make it okay.

Principles are not an afterthought to be considered only so long as they do not affect profits. Economic viability is necessary, I’ll grant that, but upholding our values is just as important, if not more so. It may be clichÈ, but at this time the question must be asked—if we give up our principles, as an individual or as an institution, what do we become?

Whatever it is, I know it’s not what I want to be.

Veronica Cassidy ’08
 

Student Government Needs a Direction

To the Editor:

Serving on the Trustees’ Academic Affairs Committee has done a lot to bring into focus my frustrations with student government and its practices. I believe MCSG has a lot of potential, but to realize this potential a few key organizational issues must be dealt with. I have a list of challenges for MCSG:

1. Be willing to stand up as representing the student body.

2. Become an active policy body that brings forth proposals to the president, faculty, and trustees and that works to set the agenda of what is important and what changes should be made. In this area I would recommend the current budget issues highlighted by the RPC and their proposal to eliminate need-blind admission, the current curricular renewal process being undertaken by the Faculty and EPAG, and the evaluation of campus programs whose purpose is to better the lives of students on campus.

3. Have a coherent budget plan that puts all spending (capital funds, funds to clubs, event funds, etc) into one vision so that you don’t judge each request outside of its larger context.

4. Communicate issues better with the student body and experiment with new ways to inform it of what is going on: a summary report to The Mac Weekly seems essential.

5. Demand to be part of the creation process on administrative and faculty initiatives, do not let us only react to finished products. This is the compelling problem with the need-blind admission fiasco.

6. Extend student judgment on all aspects of campus life whenever it seems applicable—faculty reviews, cafeteria issues, graduation honors, administrative planning and projects, ResLife issues, environmental improvement, everything. In short, build legitimacy for your position for yourselves, the powers that be, and the student body.

I sincerely hope you read this and decide for yourselves what MCSG should be, but please decide. Have a strategy, a vision, and a goal. Obviously I don’t have all the answers, but I will do whatever I can to help in legitimizing MCSG and make the vision of this body a reality. And I know others will too.

David Boehnke ’07