How Fairfield ended up with few low- income students

FAIRFIELD, CONN.>> The first basketball game at Fairfield University’s brandnew, 85,000- square- foot Leo D. Mahoney Arena took place this month. The building, which cost $ 51 million, takes pride of place in the center of campus.

Across Loyola Drive, in the suite of admission and financial aid offices in the Aloysius P. Kelley Center, the school has hit a different kind of milestone: The class of first- year students that entered in 2020 had the lowest percentage of Pell Grant recipients of any college in the United States — 7.5% — according to the most recent federal data.

The federal government makes Pell Grants available to students from families with the lowest incomes in the country. So the figure has become a proxy for a higher education institution’s commitment to pulling students up from the lowest rungs of the socialclass ladder.

Is the Pell Grant the best metric to judge this commitment? Fairfield, a Jesuit institution whose mission includes fostering “ethical and religious values and a sense of social responsibility,” believes the measurement is “not particularly useful” or “modern.” The school refused to let administrators have an on- the- record conversation with me about it, but I did communicate by email with one vice president.

“Built upon the bedrock of a sustainable academic and economic model, we continue to work to make Fairfield more accessible to as many students as possible,” Corry Unis, who has been the school’s vice president for strategic enrollment management since 2018, said in an email.

The words “sustainable” and “economic” do offer some clues as to how the school ended up with such a low Pell figure — and to how difficult and expensive it can be to reverse this at a university with 4,757 undergraduates.

The first class of students was admitted to Fairfield in 1947. In university years, that’s fairly young. It is too young, in this instance at least, to have enough graduates who have made and donated sufficient money to the school’s endowment to meet the full financial need of every student the school accepts.

Federal data tells some of that story. In the 2020- 21 school year, first- year, fulltime Fairfield undergraduates whose families had incomes of $ 30,000 or less paid an average “net price” of $ 31,018. Up the road at Trinity College in Hartford, a school with a much higher endowment per student, that figure is $ 8,252. At Providence College in Rhode Island, it’s $ 19,531.

How can families pay $ 31,038 to Fairfield when they earn no more than $ 30,000? The government defines “net price” in this instance as what families are responsible for after Pell Grants are subtracted from a school’s list price ( about $ 70,000 at Fairfield this year, including room and board). Pell Grants amount to no more than $ 6,895 per student for the 202223 school year and go most often to families with incomes under $ 60,000. Any state or local government scholarships are also subtracted from the list price, as are whatever additional grants an individual school offers. A family or student covers the remaining net price with savings, income and loans.

James Murphy, a senior policy analyst at the advocacy group Education Reform Now, generates the Pell rankings each year and publishes the results on the organization’s website. He dove a little deeper into Fairfield’s first- year student numbers and found that its percentage of Pell recipients had dropped 44% over four years, to 7.5% in 2020- 21 from 13.3% in 2016- 17.

“How does that happen?” he asked. “Choices are being made. You have to assume it’s someone pretty high up the ladder.”

At the beginning of a speech in September, Fairfield President Mark Nemec practically beat his chest with pride. “We are now the seventh- most- selective Catholic university,” he said. “To put this in historical perspective, with the students who arrived in the fall of 2017, we placed 50th ( five zero) amongst our Catholic peers.”

Schools such as Fairfield often need to offer discounts to above- average students in the form of socalled merit aid to persuade them to matriculate. These discounts may have nothing to do with financial need. According to Fairfield’s most recent data, from the 2020- 21 school year, it offered 89% of first- year, fulltime students without financial need an average of $ 17,881 for their freshman year.

Fairfield’s biggest challenge may be financial. It could spend more to recruit higher numbers of lower- income students and then discount tuition enough for the education to be affordable.

That could require budget cuts elsewhere, though, say from the dining hall or dorm remodeling.