RPC Has Done an Admirable Job

To the Editor:

I wish to register my support for the proposal of our Resources Planning Committee to restructure Macalester’s financial aid policy. This committee has done an admirable job of tackling a challenging issue head-on and producing a balanced and well-conceived proposal. I also appreciate President Rosenberg’s active leadership in bringing this issue before the campus and the Board of Trustees, and his willingness to articulate his views clearly with the entire community.

It seems clear that the college cannot continue to provide need-blind aid to absolutely 100% of our domestic applicants without seriously jeopardizing our commitment to a high quality academic experience for all of our students. Academic quality lies at the heart of our mission as a liberal arts institution, and we must make wise and courageous decisions to ensure that we can continue to provide an outstanding education to future generations of Macalester students.

The unmanaged growth of our financial aid budget threatens to overwhelm that commitment. I support the President’s observation that these two valued goals—access and quality—must be brought into a sensible and appropriate balance. The Committee’s proposal to shift a small portion of our domestic applicants to a need-aware basis strikes that balance sensibly and appropriately.

While adequate financial resources certainly do not guarantee academic quality, without them the efforts of our faculty and staff to offer an outstanding education for all our students will be significantly undercut. Consider just one example from my own perspective as a member of the science division. The science faculty work diligently to raise the external funds necessary for the college to purchase state-of-the-art instrumentation for our rapidly changing disciplines. Students use this equipment throughout their coursework and collaborative research at Macalester, and in a very tangible and demonstrable way the instrumentation adds significantly to the quality of their academic experience here. Yet maintaining, servicing and running these instruments requires real dollars that come from the college’s operating budget. And to ensure that we have those dollars in the future requires making real choices because our resources are not without limit.

In my opinion, the twin goals of access and quality are not mutually exclusive. If we continue to set the highest expectations of ourselves for academic quality, and make the decisions necessary to ensure that adequate funds are available to reach those expectations, then we will find that our applicant pool will continue to grow in strength and diversity. The high quality of our academic program is presumably what attracts our talented students to enroll at Macalester in the first place (and also attracts our benefactors to give generously to support our outstanding programs).

The best strategy for ensuring that we maintain an economically diverse student body here for years to come—a goal that I believe has both broad and deep support across all the constituencies of the college—is to continue to expand the quality of the academic experience. I am proud of Macalester’s historic commitment to offer an excellent and affordable education to students from all segments of society, and the proposed changes to our financial aid program offer the best hope of continuing that commitment far into the future.

Thomas D. Varberg

Professor of Chemistry
 

An Open Letter to President Rosenberg

President Rosenberg,

We have not met. I was on my way out of Macalester as you were on your way in. I am a graduate of the class of 2003, and am on my way to law school at the University of Pennsylvania. I am writing to you, as so many others have, to strongly urge you to consider all the ramifications of eliminating need-blind admissions.

Let me be upfront, honest and blunt: If Macalester College eliminates need-blind admissions, I eliminate Macalester from life. By introducing rich-kid admissions, Macalester will become a fundamentally different institution from the one that I attended. As such, I will see no need to give money to Macalester, whether at the “poor-student” level I currently do, or as a successful professional in the future. Further, the decision has the potential to embitter me to the point where I will actively campaign my classmates (which, as you know, had record levels of participation in alumni giving) to stop giving money, as well. We may currently not have much in our aggregate totals of giving, but, into the future we are the alumni base for which the school will lean on.

Macalester is a wonderful place. It is obviously unable to erase all the inequalities that exist in our society. But, to further exacerbate them makes me sad, angry and frustrated. The thought of Macalester looking at a poor kid and a rich kid, and choosing the one who has been born with advantage after advantage is disturbing, to say the least.

Maybe, if you are willing to make this decision, you are willing to look back at past admissions records and let recent graduates know which ones of us would not have made it in. At least that way, as we imagine erasing our friends from our experience, we will have a better idea of what a future at Macalester will look like.

President Rosenberg, you may succeed in changing the fundamental values of our wonderful college. But, the values of the alumni will not be simultaneously altered. We know what we experienced at Macalester, and why. And if Macalester becomes just another liberal arts college tailored to the privileged, expect your alumni to treat it as such: just another college.

Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg ’03