How good is the financial aid at Duke?

objobs
Tue, 15 Jun 2010 13:32:29 +0000

SBR:

Quote:
Originally Posted by objobs
Duke has a $4.4B endowment; Brown’s is only $2B. So percentage-wise, Brown is spending about twice as much of its endowment on FA as Duke. Which school do you think demonstrates a higher commitment to affordability and socioeconomic diversity?

Percentage-wise then Duke spends a lot more of its endowment than harvard what does that say about Harvard’s commitment? In fact, given Harvard’s endowment, they should just make tuition free for all students period. In the end, the truth is that Duke spends more on FA than Brown, so from a quantitative point of view, Duke’s FA gives more aid than Brown’s FA.



Yes, but Brown offers comparable FA to Duke whereas Duke does not offer comparable FA to Harvard. I brought up the differences in percentage to highlight that endowment size may not necessarily be the deciding mitigating factor, as you seem to suggest:



SBR:

It’s important to note the difference in endowment size between Duke and HYPSM



In other words, Brown can offer fairly equivalent FA to Duke despite having less than 1/2 of the latter’s endowment.



SBR:

Also, the fact that Brown has such a commitment yet spends less than Duke for a similar student body size is actually indicative of the realities of the “socioeconomic diversity” at Brown.



This is another data point to support that Brown (as well as many of Duke’s other peers) have a greater commitment to socioeconomic diversity than Duke:

[QuestBridge: Students: Partners](http://www.questbridge.org/students/partners.html)