Facing a notoriously low endowment, Georgetown has struggled to keep pace with universities with larger endowments in offering increased financial aid to middle-income students. “Schools like Harvard, Yale and Princeton, who have much larger endowments – most of their aid comes from their endowments,” said Scott Fleming, assistant to the president for federal relations. Charles Deacon, dean of undergraduate admissions, said that Harvard and schools with comparable endowments have made financial aid offers more lucrative because they have the means to do so. Comparatively, he said, with an endowment of a little more than $1 billion, Georgetown has much less freedom to apply its endowed funds to financial aid. Last month, Harvard University made an unprecedented move in financial aid when it guaranteed that families earning between $120,000 and $180,000 would pay only 10 percent of their income for a year’s tuition, room and board, which is about $45,000. Harvard’s ability to offer this increased financial aid is in large part a result of its top-ranked endowment, which now surpasses $35 billion, Fleming said. The goal of their financial aid programs, he said, is to eliminate the loan component of financial aid, and, in doing so, accommodate a greater number of low and middle income students. However, Fleming said that Georgetown still finds creative ways to offer financial aid. “In the ideal world, if you had such a large endowment that you could fund all sorts of things, that would enable an institution to do many things and hold down tuition,” he said. “On a much smaller endowment . Georgetown does a tremendous job of putting together packages for low income and middle income families to afford a Georgetown education.” In a letter sent by two U.S. senators to 136 universities, including Georgetown, last Thursday, the universities were requested to answer questions about their endowment spending, including how much of it goes toward financial aid offers. The proposed five percent endowment spending program by the Senate, which Georgetown already surpasses, comes at a time when progressive financial aid programs have already spread to other colleges, including the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth University, Swarthmore College and Haverford College, all of which have begun efforts to reduce or eliminate student loans. Deacon said that some of these schools may have prematurely acted in order to stay on equal footing with universities offering the most financial aid. “They’re trying to give more generous packages, which is costing them more of their own money,” he said. Without endowments in excess of $10 billion, many of these universities have to dip into other areas of their operating budgets, a practice that Deacon believes many institutions will not be able to maintain indefinitely. Georgetown’s endowment was recently ranked 73rd in the 2007 National Association of College and University Business Officers Endowment Survey, well below Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton, which ranked among the top four. Deacon said that, at the moment, Georgetown does not have any definitive plans to resolve the student loan issue. However, he said that he feels content with the university’s position and does not want to rush into any programs that would ultimately take money away from other necessary programs. Deacon suggested one way that Georgetown can address the student loan dilemma is in a broadening of the Georgetown Scholarship Program. GSP scholarships reduce the loan component of selected students’ financial aid packages. According to Deacon, GSP began with the Class of 2009, when alumni and parents gave $750,000 to support 50 freshmen. In its third year, with the Class of 2011, GSP raised about $2.6 million and sponsored 70 students while continuing to fund the 125 current GSP scholarship students from previous years. Deacon said the program hopes to sponsor 75 students in the Class of 2012 and believes that donations could reach $4 million to help fund financial aid for this year’s record-setting number of applicants. Although uncertain of the exact steps that need to be taken, Deacon said that the overarching idea would be to extend this program to all students, or at least a much larger share of applicants. “This would be a fiscally responsible way of addressing the problem – to ultimately take loans away,” he said. Deacon said that one result of reducing the student loan component would be its impact on alumni. “Instead of Georgetown alumni having to pay off their loans, they could directly contribute to the endowment instead,” he said.