Unpacking The Myths Of Financial Aid
Why would the university award aid in this way? Couldn’t it just adjust the ratio of merit aid to need-based aid? Unfortunately, the “high tuition/high aid” model only “works” when it’s organized like this. That’s because, for many university administrators, financial aid is not so much a form of charity as it is an instrument for maximizing tuition revenue. If that seems hard to believe, consider a recent article published in Forbes magazine about a new trend in the field of higher education finances: “financial aid leveraging.”[6] While in the past university executives thought of financial aid strictly as an expense, as public universities search for new sources of revenue they have begun to see it as a way of boosting not only the university’s prestige but also its tuition revenue.
