Brown's financial aid program "is probably in the middle among the Ivy League," according to Michael Bartini, director of financial aid.
Brown and all other Ivy League institutions offer need-blind admission to all domestic incoming first-years and promise to fulfill 100 percent of their need. However, the methods these universities use to calculate need vary from college to college and are unavailable to the public.
"It's not a cookie-cutter approach. We're all using (different strategies) to determine need. But we may have a little different policy than Harvard has or Columbia has," Bartini told The Herald.
Brown instituted need-blind admission for the Class of 2007 for domestic undergraduate students, Bartini said.
With need-blind admission, the University accepts students regardless of their ability to pay the $39,808 that a Brown education cost in the 2004-2005 academic year.
Annie Cappuccino, senior associate director of admission, said the University has seen a significant and positive difference in applicants since the University went to need-blind from need-aware.
"I think the nice thing is that we have a financial aid program that continues to get better. We are not even finished administering need-blind," Bartini said.
One area in which Brown's financial aid package is more accommodating than other universities' plans is its first-year "no-work policy" established three years ago. Unlike other institutions, Brown does not require first-year students to contribute work-study money and instead provides an additional grant, Bartini said.
Princeton students on financial aid are required to work nine hours a week, according to Princeton's Web site.
Harvard students are expected to work 12 hours a week during the semester to fulfill the student contribution and contribute approximately $200 a week during the summer, according to Harvard's Web site.
Having the smallest endowment of all Ivy League universities - about $1.65 billion - limits the size of Brown's financial aid packages. Brown students continue to graduate with debt, but students at other Ivy League institutions may graduate debt-free.
Sixty percent of the average financial aid package Brown awards is made up of grants and 40 percent is composed of loans and work, Bartini said.
"We assess through our policy procedure what a family is going to be able to pay. We will meet that with financial aid," he said.
The University announced last summer that Sidney Frank '42, the billionaire liquor distributor and Brown dropout, donated $100 million to support the neediest of Brown students. The donation will create approximately 32 four-year scholarships per year, starting with the Class of 2009. The recipients will not accumulate any loans from their undergraduate education.
"On average, students (on financial aid) graduate $15,000 in debt, but a student who gets an outside scholarship can conceivably graduate debt-free," Bartini told The Herald.
Other institutions, including Harvard, Yale and Princeton, have instituted programs to eliminate the need for loans to pay for college.
With an endowment of $22.6 billion in 2004, Harvard eliminated the contribution expected from families who make less than $40,000 and reduced the family contribution for students whose families earn $40,000 to $80,000, according to the Harvard Crimson.
With the largest endowment of any private university in the world, "almost 20% of the families receiving need-based scholarship assistance from Harvard have incomes above $130,000," according to Harvard's Web site.
Princeton had an endowment of $8.2 billion in 2001, according to its Web site. The school has replaced the student loan portion of its financial aid packages with grants as part of an effort in 2001 to eliminate student debt, said Don Betterton, director of undergraduate financial aid at Princeton.
"Loans are minuscule. We don't give loans as part of our financial aid," Betterton said. Financial aid is "well over 90 percent grants (and) could be as high as 95 (percent)," he added.
"I think we wanted to be able to say that Princeton is affordable for any student," Betterton said. "Without the loans, Princeton (is) a better choice (than before), and Princeton would cost the same as their local public institution."
Earlier this year, Yale announced a new policy to begin in the 2005-06 academic year that will eliminate the family contribution for students whose families have incomes of less than $45,000.
"The motivation of the changes is to ensure that Yale remains accessible and affordable to students of limited or modest means," said Tom Conroy, deputy director of public affairs at Yale.
