Princeton: Federal Financial Aid Minimalism

Princeton's approach to federal financial aid is really surprising, in a good way

This chart fascinates me! Notice:

• For 2023, the Pell Grant is 75% of the bar. Princeton mostly uses the federal financial aid system to issue Pell grants.
• Princeton issued only $80,047 of GradPLUS debt across its entire pool of 3,256 graduate students. That’s $25 per grad student… meaning GradPLUS at Princeton rounds to essentially zero.
• Princeton issued only $1,113,961 of PLUS debt across its entire pool of 5,690 undergrads.

This is financial aid minimalism!! Princeton barely interacts with the federal financial aid system, and when it does, it is mostly to issue Pell Grants.

1. There is basically no graduate school debt being created at Princeton (I feel like this doesn’t get advertised, but how cool). Graduate students from across the world can study across 45 departments and programs without worrying about graduate school debt.
2. There is basically no undergraduate debt being created at Princeton (this feels better-known, with its no-loan policy having received lots of attention in 2001).
3. Pell Grants are now the main way Princeton uses the federal financial aid system.

Observations:

1. Princeton has done a lot of neat things in terms of expanding Pell-recipient enrollment. It’s nice to see that.
2. It would also be neat to see Princeton expand veteran enrollment. The GI Bill bars are too small, so it is nice to see them expand their efforts at vetern enrollment with some great Admissions blog posts.
3. Also coool would be for Princeton to develop courses for the Department of Defense’s Tuition Assistance Program, which supports servicemembers pursuing education during their military service. Harvard, Columbia, and Brown are active in DoD Tuition Assistance, and Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs has lots of neat courses on domestic and international policy.

Of course, powering this chart is Princeton’s endowment ($34.1 Bn as of 06/30/24). That said, other universities have endowments approaching this size, or project them to approach this size over the next 10-20 years. At that point, once more endowments hit a certain threshold, will lots of graduate and undergraduate student debt simply go away?