Last month officials at Davidson College, a liberal arts school outside of Charlotte, NC, decided to eliminate loans from the college’s need-based financial aid packages. The school will provide these students with grants and work-study programs to help them pay for college starting with the upcoming academic school years. The administration believes that this decision will allow its students to graduate without having to worry about the debt they have accumulated with four years worth of loans.

If a school like Davidson can eliminate student loans, why can’t Dartmouth do the same? In fact, in 2005 the Dartmouth Financial Aid Office rolled out a program that resembled the financial aid rewards offered by Harvard and Yale. Beginning with the class of 2009, Dartmouth students whose family incomes are less than $30,000 a year will receive financial aid packages without student loans. The share of the package that would have been covered by loans will now be covered by additional scholarship funds. Students who have this no-loan financial aid package have it renewed for their entire four years on campus. However, this differs from the Davidson program because Dartmouth students who families earn more than $30,000 a year and want need-based financial aid packages are still required to take out loans. Dartmouth students of the classes of 2007 and 2008 whose family incomes were less than $45,000 a year received financial aid packages without student loans for their freshman year. And for their three following years of study, these students were only allowed to take out modest loans (between $500 and $1500) a year. Supposedly, Dartmouth students can graduate among students with the lowest financial aid debt burdens in the country.

But is this enough? Davidson also offered a reduced loan package for their students before they decided that no student applying for need based financial aid should be burdened with loans after college. Between forty and fifty percent of the students at Dartmouth are receiving some form of financial aid. Even if a student only takes out $1500 a year in loans, $4500 is a rather large debt for a 22 year-old college graduate to possess if you estimate that they will accumulate more debt while starting out on their own. Because I was unable to speak with a representative from the financial aid office because they are preparing for the ‘11s, I decided to enlist other undergraduate perspectives.

Most students feel that Dartmouth should eliminate all loans from all need-based financial aid packages. Harmony Gbe ’10 thinks that because of Dartmouth’s national prestige, getting rid of loans would “set a positive precedent for all the other Ivy League schools and small liberal arts colleges.” Fellow freshman Allen Odeniyi agrees with that sentiment. “Financial aid and loans can definitely be the deciding factor as to which college or university you will attend,” he claims. Removing loans from need-based aid packages would also create more diversity at Dartmouth. “Not just students from low-income families,” adds Harmony, but “also students from middle class backgrounds whose parents make over $30,000 or $40,000 a year.” These students will also get better financial aid packages because they are not currently offered the no-loan incentive and may be forced into taking loans to cover the costs of a Dartmouth education.

There is a bigger difference of opinion as to whether Dartmouth should have a loan cap on the amount of tuition a student can pay using loans. Many students have chosen to combine their student and parental contributions to their financial aid package into one comprehensive loan. While a loan cap would prevent students from having to deal with an enormous debt after college, some families may not have the student and parental contribution amount saved up when it is time to pay for college, making a big loan the only option for a student to attend Dartmouth. Although Dartmouth continues to encourage low and middle-class students to apply in spite of the price of tuition, “students can get into immense amounts of debt when at college and be confronted with more debt while attending graduate school. It’s a vicious system,” says Dartmouth ‘08 Jessica Long. However, Sheila Miller ’08 believes that it is the responsibility of “the student who is taking out the loan to decide how much they can realistically manage to avoid an excessive amount of debt.”

Davidson’s decision is unique, says Professor Sara Chaney of the Writing Department, because “colleges benefit from their relationships with lenders, as the recent news scandal involving NYU, UPenn, and Syracuse and the lender Citibank indicates. Also, elite colleges have been in the business of selling prestige for a long time. The assumption is that the prestige of an Ivy League institution comes at a cost, and the people selling it are not necessarily under any obligation to make it available to everybody.” Patena Key ’08 agrees that “The college is unwilling to pay that extra money that the loan will eventually pay for.”

Other students agree that some schools may not be able to afford to eliminate loans from their financial aid packages. However, that may not be such a bad thing. As a student with a substantial loan debt that will continue to grow throughout the next three years, I believe that loans give students the incentive to perform well and not slack off. All the hard work and studying may not necessarily be fun, but this is an Ivy League college, not a Hawaiian vacation. And, if nothing else, you know that your money—or should I say future debt—is going towards a great investment. Clearly, a Dartmouth tuition is a terrible thing to waste.