In a move that is certain to make other colleges rethink their own practices, the trustees of Amherst College voted to eliminate loans from student financial aid packages.
The policy, which will be implemented during the 2008-2009 school year, will replace student loans like the Perkins and Stafford loans, with scholarship money. It will affect new as well as returning students.
A third of Amherst students receiving financial aid are forced to take out loans to attend Amherst. This policy change is believed to be a godsend to the middle-class students whose families earn too much for the students eligible for full Amherst scholarships but earn too little for them to be able to afford to go to Amherst without the aid of loans.
Not surprisingly, there is not much going on at Amherst in the summer time. Still, I am often surprised to see that Amherst is not completely dead even when most of it’s students are elsewhere.
Case in point, sitting in Schwemms this afternoon, I overheard a few professors from the Computer Science/Mathematics and Physics departments discussing the issue of the practicality of merit-based scholarships, with some professors being solidly opposed to them, and other professors seeing the their advantage but expressing disappointment in their execution. I couldn’t catch the specifics of their debate, but I did notice that the conversation did shift to the whole Annapolis Group vs. U.S. News & World Report situation.
For some reason, I had assumed that professors did not pay attention to such things. That was obviously a grossly-erroneous assumption on my part.
