Students from middle- and working-class families have been forced to borrow huge sums of money in recent years to pay for college, often saddling them with hefty loan payments long after graduation.
But this month, Williams College announced it was eliminating loans from its financial aid packages for all students beginning next fall. The college will instead award larger grants at an estimated annual cost of $1.8 million.
Williams is the fourth college in the country to abolish loans, part of a growing movement in higher education to defray college costs for less wealthy families. In July, Amherst College announced a similar change, following Davidson College. In 2001, Princeton University became the first school to eliminate loans from student-aid packages.
In a Nov. 1 letter to the Williams community, President Morton Owen Schapiro said the move is "based on our growing sense that loans, even small ones, affect a range of student decisions, from which colleges they consider attending to which post-college careers they pursue."
The college had previously taken steps to eliminate loans for low-income families, but other students were required to borrow as much as $13,800 over four years. Williams costs $45,000 a year without assistance. More than half of freshmen now receive financial aid.
In a phone interview, Schapiro said recent studies had suggested that rising debt burdens were discouraging some students from pursuing less lucrative careers after graduation. At the school's graduation last spring, he said, he felt that in handing students their diplomas he was also handing them promissory notes.
"I didn't like that feeling," he said. "At a school as rich as Williams College, we can afford it, and I'm glad we got rid of it."
Williams sophomore Andrew Triska, from Estacada, Ore., said he was thrilled by the news. Coming from a blue-collar family, he was only able to attend Williams because of a generous financial aid package. But he still has had to borrow an additional $2,000 to pay his way, and assumed that he would leave college well in the red. As a Russian literature major not likely bound for Wall Street, that was an unnerving thought.
"I was assuming I'd have a sizable debt, so this is amazing. Everyone is really excited here. And my parents are jumping up and down."
FIRE REPRIEVE: Wildfires ripping through your neighborhood will get you an application extension, even on early admission deadlines this month.
Several colleges across the nation are posting notices on their websites addressed to those affected by the wildfires in Southern California last month. The colleges, which have early action or decision deadlines of Nov. 1 or Nov. 15, say they will extend deadlines for students who request it. The group in the Northeast includes Boston College, Smith College, Boston University, Northeastern, and MIT.
Colleges were also flexible with victims of Hurricane Katrina, said Deborah Shaver, director of admissions at Smith, which has a Nov. 15 early deadline. But she and others said California in particular is a huge, and often the number one, supplier of applicants to their schools.
"We're talking about kids' lives," Shaver said. "This is really a stressful time anyway, this whole college search process. We need to make sure it's the appropriate amount of stress when there are other bigger stressors."
GREETINGS, EARTHLINGS: Only three people were in the know about the mysterious calls that kept interrupting a recent trustees meeting at Wellesley College.
The first two times the phone rang, board chairwoman Alecia DeCoudreaux answered, and only static came in over the loudspeaker in the board room. As the other trustees stared at DeCoudreaux, a third call came in and they heard a voice on the other line: It was an absent trustee, Pamela Melroy, calling from the Space Shuttle Discovery during its docking at the International Space Station.
"We all looked up and burst into applause," recalled DeCoudreaux, a 1976 alumna from Indianapolis who was expecting the call.
Melroy, the shuttle commander and a 1983 Wellesley alumna, greeted the board and the college's new president, H. Kim Bottomly, and apologized for missing the meeting. "We told her we thought she was on a much higher calling," said DeCoudreaux, the vice president and general counsel of Lilly USA.
Melroy, who returned to Earth on Wednesday with her crew, chatted about her work on the space station for a few minutes, then bid farewell.
It was a little difficult to focus after the call, DeCoudreaux said.
Campus Insider runs on alternate Sundays with Ask the Teacher, an advice column. To submit tips to Campus Insider, e-mail Linda Wertheimer at wertheimer@ globe.com and Peter Schworm at schworm@globe.com.
