Mention the words "financial aid" and you will likely pull yourself into a heated discussion about Brown's priorities. Financial aid has helped many. Without financial aid, thousands of talented and motivated students could not attend Brown. But, though important, increasing financial aid should not be the University's top priority.
Advocates for placing financial aid at the top of the University's agenda mistake the forest for the trees. They hope to help more students afford Brown, but they miss the main problem: The financial difficulty in attending Brown is not that there is insufficient financial aid. The problem is that tuition is so high. Increasing financial aid reduces the tuition burden only in the short-term. It does not prevent the net cost of college - after subtracting aid - from increasing year after year. In the last 13 years, tuition at Brown has increased by about 75 percent, and has averaged a 3.84 percent annual change in the last four years. Financial aid is therefore a red herring, driving attention away from the much bigger problem of the out-of-control cost of college.
Excellent education does not have to be expensive, but it will be, so long as Brown diverts its funds across every interest group - a new aquatics center for the swim team and water polo teams, a lavish creative writing building for English and literary arts students, new staff positions in an already bloated administrative bureaucracy, as well as funding for every student group under the sun. If the University instead focused only on the essentials of education - professors, classrooms and teaching materials - the core education would improve and education would become much cheaper. Lower tuition would allow students now receiving financial aid to need none of it, or at least far less of it. Critics of my view should consider that cutting costs is more effective in helping students attend Brown than increasing financial aid. The purpose of a university should be to provide the greatest possible education at the lowest possible price. Brown is in an excellent position to pursue this goal. But unfortunately, we cannot make progress so long as the University maintains the attitude of "Get all the money you can get. Spend all the money you get," as Charles Miller, head of the Spellings Commission of Higher Education put it. Rather, we would be wise to follow the age-old advice that "less is more."
Oliver Hudson '14 wants college to be more affordable for everyone and can be reached at
oliver_hudson@brown.edu.
