Get Herald RSSTransfer and RUE students received good news last weekend. $400,000 will be earmarked for transfer and RUE financial aid for next year. I was ecstatic when I heard that transfer students, who received absolutely no money from Brown University last year for financial aid, would be lucky enough to get some financial aid next year.
Yet I didn't throw a party or send out congratulatory e-mails to friends and transfers I know across campus. Instead, I was deeply saddened by the allocation plans for the pledged transfer financial aid money. Under current policies, no transfer student currently enrolled at Brown will ever be eligible to receive any financial aid from Brown, according to Michael Bartini, the director of financial aid. Not one penny.
Brown is a place where students are happy. Surely I am one of many students who really love Brown. I relish my time here. At Brown, things usually work out. Exceptions can be made. The curriculum and faculty are flexible. Yet when it comes to financial aid, Brown's iron inflexibility is reminiscent of the quota-loving, discriminatory, won't-bend-the-rules practices made for and by the white Protestant man mentality that unfortunately ruled Brown in years past.
Even just a hundred dollars would be helpful, one transfer I know has said. Many others have pointed out that not being able to qualify for a penny of financial aid during their entire Brown undergraduate career, merely because they transferred into Brown and did not enroll as a first-year, is demeaning and disheartening. A policy wherein many transfer students apply for financial aid, most students get rejected and the rest receive only a pittance is far superior to being told that under no instance will current transfers ever receive any money from the University.
The financial aid office believes that to allow even one transfer student currently enrolled at Brown to receive financial aid would be unfair to the rest of the transfer student body. This is a ludicrous argument. Transfer students' needs are pressing today. To meet very little of this need is unfortunate. To meet none of the need is unacceptable.
In years past, the policy of the Brown financial aid office was to provide $50,000-100,000 a year total in financial aid to the 7-9 percent of the student body that are transfer students. Transfer students were eligible for some financial aid. Then Brown decided to eliminate all transfer financial aid under the premise that improving financial aid at Brown meant supplying need-blind financial aid only for incoming first-years. Leaving transfers out to dry and cutting all financial aid for transfers currently enrolled at Brown became the official policy of Brown University. For the University to claim that it was improving financial aid while it was in fact eliminating all financial aid for transfer students was hypocritical and truly an act of malice directed toward a much-abused segment of the Brown student body.
The University, under the wise eye of President Ruth Simmons, has now officially taken the wonderful step of providing some financial aid for transfer students again. Yet the University has not fixed the error which it committed in the first place. All currently enrolled transfer students, under present University policy, will remain ineligible for any financial aid from Brown for the duration of their undergraduate careers at Brown. This is unacceptable.
Transfer students who would have been eligible to apply for financial aid had the University never eliminated transfer financial aid funding must be allowed to apply for financial aid next year. To do anything less is unfair and an unjustifiable distribution of limited resources. Until such an action is taken, I shall not celebrate. While the situation for future transfer students in need of financial assistance is brightening, the situation for all currently enrolled transfer students in need of financial aid remains, as before, as bleak as ever.
Michael Thompson '06 is the president of the Brown Organization of Transfer Students.
