The Regent's "Return to Aid" Policy at King Hall

In the fall, the LSA and the King Hall administration hosted a Town Hall to discuss tuition. At that meeting, the administration distributed a pamphlet outlining the expenditures at King Hall.

Here is what we were given:

There is a lot in this handout. In this blog post, I am going to focus on one of the most significant expenditures, "Return to Aid." This is highlighted above in the box on the right.  Regent rule 1303  requires at least 33% of Professional School's tuition be redistributed to students in the form of financial aid. In compliance with this, King Hall spends about $8,652,000 on various forms of financial aid every year.

One aspect of financial aid are scholarships and grants. Here is a chart provided by the administration roughly outlining the average amount of scholarships and grants in 2011-12:

 

Although a helpful outline, this chart is not detailed. 30% of students receiving between half and full scholarships and grants seems like a lot, but the distribution within that range is not known. There could be a bulk of student receiving just over half of tuition in scholarships, with only a few receiving  more than that. Another important detail would be to know what portion of Financial Aid is spent on Scholarships and Grants. Are there other forms of financial aid that do not fall in this pie chart?

Most importantly, this chart does not distinguish between need, merit, and retention scholarships and grants. Who receives scholarships and grants, and why, is a black box. In the 2011-14 PDST proposal, King Hall explained their Financial Aid policy as following:

These vague commitments to recruit the "best" students and "underrepresented students" are not supported by statistics. Since 2005, our ability to recruit the best students or underrepresented students has not increased.

The entering class LSAT and GPA 25-75% have remained relatively the same.

Entering Class of 2005 (source):

Entering Class of 2012 (source):

 The enrollment of under represented students is also falling abysmally (source): 

King Hall must follow the Regent Policy of 33% going to return to aid. This policy is a well-intentioned policy to force schools to redistribute funds back to students. However, King Hall has not demonstrated that it is using these funds effectively for either stated purpose of recruiting top students or underrepresented students. Many students are receiving substantial scholarships or grants, but to what end? What is the real purpose behind return to aid at King Hall?

The policy should be examined closely at the Regent level. There are two clear options. The first option is to enforce the stated purpose of the return to aid by requiring successful recruitment of highly qualified or under represented students.The enforcement mechanism must require more than an aspirational statement. It should require higher disclosure requirements such as describing the formula used for distributing need based and merit based aid, and disclosing the 25%-median-75% distribution of merit and need based aid. 

Alternatively, lower the return to aid requirement in exchange for a correlating reduction in overall tuition. The potential benefits of substantially reducing tuition would reduce the sticker shock of $50K a year for a public education. This would arguably be a more effective way to recruit the best and underrepresented students than our current broken system.