Is Princeton meeting its goal of increasing the economic diversity of the student body?
The first thing I usually say is that my colleagues stopped inviting me to financial aid meetings. Kidding aside, I would say that not long after we made our changes virtually all of our competition looked at their financial aid programs and improved them to some degree. Among selective private colleges, this has led to students in general getting better aid packages than they did five years ago. Our alumni and friends of the University have been very supportive. We’ve also gotten a favorable response from some members in Congress. If you remember the climate in the late ’90s, we made our improvements at a time when colleges were raising costs at about two times the rate of inflation while their endowment returns were very high, so it looked like colleges were getting a bit greedy. The fact that Princeton went in the other direction and decided to relieve some of the pressure on hard-pressed low- and middle-income families sent a positive message to Congress. Also, Princeton had the re
