North by Northwestern sat down with University President Morton O. Schapiro to review the best of the questions Northwestern students had submitted for the White House / Huffington Post competition. Click on a subject to see Schapiro’s response:
Financial aid for international students || Minority enrollment || Students who don’t qualify for financial aid || How to be a global student
Our first question comes from a student who was born in Canada and moved to Texas when she was six. She’s studied in U.S. schools all her life. But because of immigration policy changes over the past few years, her family’s application for permanent residency is still pending. Technically, she’s considered an international student. For that reason, she’s not eligible for federal assistance. What resources does she have to pay for college?
Unless you’re one of the handful of schools in the country that are need-blind for international students and meet their full need, they’re not going to get very much institutional aid.
Is there any chance Northwestern will change the way it provides financial aid to international students?
It’s incredibly costly, because you’re not packaging them with Pells and any other guaranteed student loans. So if you’re going to be packaging from zero on your own aid it’s going to cost an absolute fortune. That’s why there are only three or four schools in the whole country who are need-blind for international students. So you know you’ve got to decide if that’s a high enough priority and you have to have obviously a serious rebound in the value of your endowment. It’s costly stuff.
Our second question comes from a student who wants to know what schools can do to encourage minority students to apply to top universities.
In fact I’m chairing — co-chairing with the dean of SESP — a task force exactly on this. And it’s comprised of quite a number of students who have done outreach programs or themselves felt — in one case — somewhat of a disconnect in the way she was recruited and the reality that faced her when she got here.
There’s a lot of aspects to this. Some of it’s price, some of it’s sticker shock, some of it’s sociology, some of it’s psychology. It’s a pretty complicated setting. But I think we’re certainly rapidly increasing the diversity of our undergraduates. And then there’s the whole question of what do you do once they get here? How do you make sure they feel not just tolerated, but included? And that’s tough. But we’re working on it.
What kinds of things are you doing?
We’re flying guidance counselors in, we’re flying families in, we’re targeting quite a number of specific high schools. We’re working on different financial aid packages for people from certain schools. Which we haven’t been doing, and now we’re going to be doing. And once they get there, we think from changing how we do orientation to changing how we do housing to making sure we have the right support networks when they get here.
What message do you want guidance counselors and families to take back with them?
That they can take ownership in the school. And first of all that we’ll figure out financial aid packages that make it affordable. And then secondly that we really want them — not just to improve our numbers but to be fully engaged members of the community. And that we have plans and support systems to make sure that that happens.
Another student said that his family’s financial situation made him ineligible for student aid, even though he found it very difficult to pay tuition. What can the university do about families in his situation?
If you don’t have aid formulas that are such that even if you’re making $200,000 a year, that you get a decent amount of grant aid, you’re going to lose a lot of those students. You’re either going to lose them to publics like the University of Michigans of the world. Or you’re going to lose them to the WashUs, [which] are generous with merit aid. So we’re looking very hard here at those packages and we’re making adjustments for next year to increase grant aid for people making three times the median family income.
Another student asked, “What do you see as the American university’s responsibility to promote public service and civic engagement? How can universities better prepare students to succeed in a globalized, multicultural world?”
Two very separate questions. The first one is we’re held in the public trust, and we don’t pay capital gains taxes on our endowment growth. So we have to make sure that we’re serving the public trust and that’s why we’re held in the public trust. So we started last year a center for civic engagement.
And the students are great here, as I’m sure you know. Everybody seems to have a cause and they do extraordinary things for that.
In terms of globalization, I’m glad that [he's] abroad. We’re only at about 35 per cent for our students who are studying abroad against some of the eastern schools where it’s 50 per cent.
I’d like that 35 per cent number to go up more. Unfortunately a number of people go abroad, they don’t have a great academic experience. I’ve had countless students over the years take off a semester at Williams and go to New Zealand and Australia and they come back with a greatly enhanced sophistication about beer. Whether they learn anything else I don’t know.
We’re going to try to make it even easier and encourage people even more to take the fall off. I mean it makes it a certain unevenness in terms of dorms and in terms of class enrollments but it just seems if you’re here, and you can possibly do it, and you can just take off one quarter versus one half, you’re kind of crazy not to do it.
And what opportunities can Northwestern offer on campus for students preparing to enter a globalized workforce?
If you want to take a course on economics of the far east, you can do it. If you want to take a course on religion, philosophy, history, political science, you can do it because you have a lot more openings than a typical school on the semester. So I think if you’re not going abroad, you’re wasting an opportunity here at Northwestern if you’re not taking courses on different areas of the world.