Even though Northwestern promises to meet full financial need, the math doesn’t always add up.
After a four-month-long appeals process, Emma Krupp decided she had no choice. She’d have to give up her place at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications, at least for the time being. The University had offered her a financial aid package, but it wasn’t enough to meet her full demonstrated financial need as she and her family saw it.
A Class of 2014 graduate from Cary-Grove High School in Cary, Ill., Emma acted in every school production after her freshman year. And as an upperclassman, she began directing some of them as well. Midway through her junior year, she became the editor-in-chief of the school paper.
For about 20 years, Cary-Grove’s school colors were purple and white. Since it opened in 1961, the high school has used the tune of Northwestern’s fight song as its own. And for Emma, Northwestern admittance had been a goal since she was eight years old - her college of choice without competition. Alongside 2,827 others, she applied early decision in the fall of 2013, a binding agreement stipulating that Emma enroll if accepted unless financial incapacity prevented her from doing so. During a break in rehearsal, as she stood in a circle of chatting troubadours, she checked her email and spotted a new subject line: “Northwestern Application – Status Update.”
“I called my mom - she was the first person I called when I was at school - and she was absolutely thrilled for me,” Emma says. “And then I called my dad, who was also happy, but said, ‘You know you’re going to have to be realistic about this. I don’t know if this is going to be something we’re going to be able to afford,’ was one of the first things he said to me. So it was in my mind immediately.”
A week later, as she sat on her bed reading an email with a callback list for another school musical, Emma received her Northwestern financial aid statement.
“I looked at it and did the subtraction of how much the total cost of attendance would be every year, and just closed my laptop and was like, ‘Oh, my God, how are we going to be able to do this?'
“I thought, ‘Okay, I’ve got to quit musical. I’ve got to quit everything I’m doing at school and get a job immediately and start working to pay for this,’ which is ridiculous because no minimum wage job is going to finance Northwestern,” she says. “But I was like, ‘I can’t let this go. I can’t just give up on this.’”
Emma says she appealed the decision because the school’s determination of her need did not account for the financial costs of her parents’ divorce, a process that included both parents hiring lawyers, selling their home at a loss and purchasing new properties. Her father, Fred Krupp, 55, says he had to begin paying child support and that his primary source of income would be cut off in 10 years. Krupp flies for a commercial airline, which mandates retirement at age 65, per Federal Aviation Administration rules.
In the end, the cost was simply too much. Following a lengthy appeals process, which extended beyond the decision deadlines of all the other schools to which she applied, Emma and her parents finally decided that her only option would be to take a gap year in Cary. Northwestern would have to wait.
Emma’s story isn’t unique. Other students, like DePaul University sophomore Margaret Schlofner and Columbia College freshman Will Nicholson, were also admitted to Northwestern but received financial aid packages that they say weren’t enough to allow them to pay for four years in Evanston. Margaret, an aspiring opera singer who applied to the Bienen School of Music, says she has two sisters who just graduated from college and a car that needs significant repairs, expenses that knocked Northwestern out of her financial reach. Will, who applied to the School of Communication to study theatre, says his father, a non-custodial parent, wasn’t willing to help pay for his education. Will’s father didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.
“I said, ‘Mom, come look at this - it’s my financial aid from Northwestern,’” Will says. “And she looked at it and was like, ‘So, they want us to pay $60,000 a year? Alright, so - let’s have a talk about how we can’t afford that.’”
Will thinks his aid package would have been much larger had he not been required to provide income and asset information about his non-custodial father on the College Scholarship Service (CSS) Profile.
What, then, does “full need” really mean? And who’s to blame when students like Emma, Margaret and Will still can’t afford the cost even after their full need, as Northwestern determined it, has been met? The applicants? The University? Or is this a systemic problem wrapped up in the highest levels of financial aid distribution - the United States Department of Education?
Northwestern was one of 62 American colleges and universities that covered applicants’ full need in 2013, according to data compiled by U.S. News & World Report. According to Northwestern, 64 percent of undergraduates receive some form of financial aid, and the University doled out about $126 million in scholarships for undergraduates in 2014.
On paper the phrase “full need” refers to the total cost of attending a university minus the expected family contribution (EFC) as calculated using the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) and, for some schools (including Northwestern), the CSS Profile. Theoretically, that number should be the same across different schools - what you’re able to contribute toward a Northwestern education should be the same as what you’re able to contribute to, say, an in-state public school. But the math is rarely so objective.
The EFC refers to the amount that a family is expected to contribute toward its student’s college every year. Northwestern is one of a group of primarily higher-end private schools that uses the CSS Profile to determine this number. Whereas the FAFSA allows students to apply for aid from the federal government, the CSS Profile allows students to apply for aid from the coffers of the university itself. Google “FAFSA formula,” and the first result is a 36-page PDF on the Information for Financial Aid Professions website, where you can see the two-page, 51-line process that determines the EFC for dependent students.
First, the formula calculates how much the applicants’ parents are expected to pay based on their income from the previous year, their available income, the value of their assets and any tax allowances. Then it calculates how much the student is expected to contribute using a higher percentage of the same factors and adds the two numbers - expected student contribution and expected parent contribution - to determine the EFC.
But the math becomes hazier when university dollars enter the formula. Many colleges use the standard CSS Profile algorithm, which although similar to the FAFSA, includes a few key distinctions. Whereas the FAFSA adds 20 percent of a student’s assets to that student’s EFC, the Profile adds 25 percent. However, the main difference lies in the Profile’s inclusion of home equity in its calculus, a factor the FAFSA leaves out. The Profile adds about 5.6 percent of the net value of the student’s home to the EFC - that is, sales value minus mortgage value. The Profile, therefore, would add about $33,600 to the EFC of a student with a home net valued at $600,000. This means the FAFSA might say a student with that house owes $17,000 a year, while the Profile would say he owes $50,000.
Additionally, colleges can append special questions to the form - some schools, for example, may incorporate a family’s car models. “Demonstrated need” at School A, therefore, may be a different number at School B, even if both schools cost the same.
Divorce lawyers, a parent who is unwilling to pay or multiple siblings are just three of the countless factors that might inhibit a family’s ability to pay for college. Because each student’s financial situation is unique, crafting a formula that completely levels the financial playing field is impossible. It might seem, then, like a more complex formula, one that asks more questions and accounts for even more factors, is the correct solution. But financial aid expert Paul Wrubel disagrees.
Though high schools have employed him as a teacher and an administrator, Wrubel is widely known for his expertise in the college finance realm, co-founding the non-profit MindWorksUSA, which aims to make college accessible to more high school students.
The fault, Wrubel says, lies not with the employees of aid offices at schools like Northwestern, but rather with the system itself, and it starts at the highest level.
“In 1965, the federal government provided enough support system dollars to make it a viable system,” Wrubel says. “But as the cost of college has risen at least 300 percent since then, the federal government, which invented this whole system - per person, their contribution is a tiny fraction of what it used to be in real dollar terms. It is simply not sufficient and that deficit continues to grow annually, leaving colleges and families who are almost always underfunded by financial aid to fend for themselves.”
In other words, colleges aren’t receiving the same federal subsidization they used to, and while costs have risen because of inflation and increasing demand for a college education, colleges have been left to cover a much higher proportion of these costs than they used to. Higher education institutions have responded to this increasing financial burden in different ways, often dependent on the amount of resources at their disposal.
But what about elite schools like Northwestern? The University is in the midst of the largest fundraising campaign in school history. Called We Will, the campaign’s push for $3.75 billion plans to allocate $1.163 billion to “Student Experience,” which includes increasing financial aid for all students. Northwestern’s We Will website says one of the campaign’s goals is to “make a Northwestern education more accessible to the very best students, regardless of their financial resources.”
There’s no circumventing the cost of paying world-class faculty, constructing state-of-the-art facilities, maintaining campuses on different continents and investing in revolutionary innovation. Competing with elite universities costs money. But even so, Wrubel says we could do better with some systemic changes all revolving around a larger federal investment in higher education.
Wrubel wants to eliminate the FAFSA, which he says is inaccessible to people who lack the financial understanding to fill it out because of its complexity. He also wants to do away with the CSS Profile, which Wrubel calls “a swamp of uncertainty.”
“The CSS Profile is a way for colleges to avoid giving out financial aid,” Wrubel says, adding, “Colleges are largely victims of the system too. Their financial aid offices are filled with real heroes who have to try to help needy families every day but who simply have inadequate resources to do their job.”
“Getting in was supposed to be the hard part. Getting in was supposed to be the hurdle.”
Wrubel’s plan would require students’ families to submit their previous year’s Adjusted Gross Income from a 1040 tax return. The U.S. Department of Education would publish a Family Contribution Index, or FCI, which would set a percent of the total cost of college that the family would be expected to contribute. The FCI would establish a baseline income level, and college would be free for all families whose income doesn't meet that level. For all other families, their expected contribution would increase by a portion of a percent for every $1,000 above the baseline.
In Wrubel’s plan, income is the sole determinant of a family’s ability to pay for college. He says assets, especially savings, should not be incorporated into the EFC calculus because that discourages preparing for other parts of life, such as retirement.
After a university receives income validation for all continuing students, which it would compile alongside that of its entering class, it would calculate how much it could expect to receive from its entire student body that year.
The U.S. Department of Education would then create an Institutional Contribution Index (ICI) to determine the university’s ability to pay for itself and its students, incorporating data like the size of the university’s endowment, its level of debt and the level of outside funding it receives, like that through a We Will-type fundraising campaign. Wrubel adds that the ICI would incentivize consistency and fair tuition prices, and would reward universities that consistently succeed with “high four-year graduation rates, post-college placement in grad schools and the job market, student outreach and diversity programs, successful fund-raising efforts, cost-lowering programs and exemplary use of technology.”
Wrubel’s plan calls on the university to invoice the federal government for the remainder of the cost after the expected student-body contribution and expected university contribution are calculated. This exchange would occur on what Wrubel calls an “Institutional Financial Aid Verification form,” or IFAV. He offers on his website the following estimates for what differently-priced schools operating under his system would then cost.
According to this math, at a $65,000 college like Northwestern, the family pays $5,580 + the college’s required contribution of 30 percent of $19,500 + the federal contribution of $41,405 = $65,000.
Even so, Wrubel says Northwestern’s aid program is more generous than most, and he said the problem schools tend to be public universities whose endowments aren’t large enough to satisfy the financial needs of their applicants. Wrubel says his plan focuses on making the system fairer for all, but especially for students attending schools that lack the resources to fully meet their needs.
On the whole, Wrubel’s plan aims to make the federal government more accountable for assisting the financial aid programs of all universities. He advocates for a return to the level of federal investment in higher education in 1965, before rising college costs began significantly outpacing government support.
For Wrubel, what many perceive as stinginess by universities represents only a symptom of a much larger systemic problem that starts at the federal level. The Northwestern aid board doesn’t need to be fairer or any more generous, even with a massive endowment and We Will resources. But perhaps the process does. College represents an expensive investment, but where does the sticker price become unreasonable, even for those who can afford it? What if colleges, with a check from the federal government, could go beyond merely meeting the full need of their admitted students, but exceeding it? Few people disagree that an upfront investment in Northwestern returns dividends along the scope of its graduates’ careers. But what if a top-down overhaul could make that upfront investment less uncomfortable? Wrubel’s plan might strike some as radical, but the idea that we as a people, and by extension, our government, should invest in higher education is perhaps the most practical idea of all, especially if it means cost would no longer be a reason students say no to Northwestern, even if Northwestern says yes to them.
“Getting in was supposed to be the hard part,” Emma says. “Getting in was supposed to be the hurdle.”
The Northwestern Office of Undergraduate Aid and the Office of Alumni Relations and Development both declined to comment for this article.