Increasing Access

The Penn Compact, launched at the inauguration of President Amy Gutmann in October 2004, expresses the Penn community’s aspiration to move “From Excellence to Eminence.” The Compact has galvanized the University’s resolve to make a Penn education affordable to all outstanding students of high potential, while also providing a rich and welcoming educational environment in which all of our students can flourish.

Low- and middle-income students are underrepresented in enrollment at most of the nation’s highly selective colleges and universities, including Penn. A leading national advocate for socio-economic equity, President Gutmann has urged private colleges and universities to devote more attention and resources to enroll student bodies that are diverse in class background as well as in geography, gender, race, and religion.

 

• Penn Boosting Undergraduate Financial Aid

• Penn Enhancing the Graduate and Professional Student Experience

• Creating a More Diverse Penn Community

• Penn Broadening the Scope of Equal Opportunity

• The Future of Access at Penn

 

Penn Boosting Undergraduate Financial Aid

• Relieving the loan burden on students
• Adding new scholarships
• Raising $350 million for undergraduate financial aid endowment

Penn has moved forward aggressively to empower talented, high-achieving students to chart their educational and career paths without regard to their financial resources. As one of the few private “need-blind” American universities, Penn accepts students based on academic achievement regardless of financial means.  Penn offers aid packages that meet the full demonstrated financial need of all eligible students for a full four years.

In September 2008, all undergraduate students with calculated family incomes less than $100,000 will receive loan-free aid packages, while other students will receive a 10 percent reduction in need-based loans. By fall 2009, all undergraduate students eligible for financial aid will receive loan-free aid packages, regardless of family income. These initiatives build on previous initiatives to replace loans with grants for economically disadvantaged students whose families earn $60,000 or less.

Since 2003, generous donors have established and expanded hundreds of new aid scholarships at Penn, while our undergraduate financial aid endowment has more than doubled.  Endowment income, however, currently covers only 19 percent of the costs of our financial aid program with the remaining funds coming from the University’s operating budget. That is why Penn’s five-year, $3.5 billion Making History campaign includes a $350 million goal for undergraduate financial aid. Paced by a $14 million gift from Trustee George Weiss, Penn’s alumni and friends have donated nearly $165 million for undergraduate financial aid since the beginning of the Campaign.

Penn also has launched a new outreach program to let hundreds of schools and thousands of students from low- and middle-income families know if they are accepted to Penn, they will receive a financial aid package with no loans. As a result of these efforts to improve access for lower-income families, Penn has already doubled the number of admitted high-need students who will receive loan-free packages.

Penn Enhancing the Graduate and Professional Student Experience

• Raising graduate student stipends
• Increasing support for students with dependents
• Encouraging greater diversity

Penn’s outstanding graduate and professional students collaborate with Penn faculty at the highest levels of research and teaching. Supporting the next generation of scholars and professionals is a sound investment in the future of higher education that also allows us to compete for the best faculty and students at all levels. That is why the Making History campaign seeks to raise $323 million for graduate and professional student aid.

Penn recently raised the minimum base stipends for doctoral students with nine-month fellowships to $19,200, while encouraging each school to establish even higher levels when possible. The School of Arts and Sciences, for example, has increased its minimum annual stipend for doctoral students by 14.7 percent to $21,000, with three summers of support.  “Prize” fellowships that provide additional funding for our very top recruits strengthen Penn’s ability to compete for the best students.

Many graduate students find themselves preparing for careers in academe whilesimultaneouslystarting families. The University is helping graduate and professional students successfully navigate these waters while exploring ways to make Penn more family-friendly.

Penn also is committed to helping preparemore men and women of color to become tomorrow’s scholars. Two programs actively encourage diversity within Penn’s graduate student body. The McNair Scholars Program, funded by the U.S. Department of Education, is designed for graduate school-bound first-generation college/income-eligible students, as well as for students from groups that have traditionally been underrepresented at the doctoral level.

The Fontaine Society, named for Penn’s first African-American professor, Dr. William Fontaine, provides graduate students from diverse backgrounds with a stipend, tuition, general fees and student health insurance for at least four years.

 

Creating a More Diverse Penn Community

• Boosting racial, ethnic, and socio-economic diversity
• Welcoming and supporting minority students
• Recruiting students from urban public high schools

In a democracy and at great universities, diversity and excellence go together. Penn values diversity not only as an end in itself, but also as a means to three important ends of higher education: equalizing opportunity, enriching the educational experience of all students, and educating leaders for all sectors of society.

We are proud that 13.6 percent of the freshmen entering Penn in 2008 are international students hailing from more than 60 countries. Forty-two percent of these students are people of color.

Penn recognizes that a diverse and open campus encourages dialogue, fosters greater cross-cultural understanding, inspires creative thinking, and fully prepares our graduates to meet the challenges of our global economy and to become great leaders and citizens in a diverse world.

Thriving campus resource centers offer community support to our diverse student body. These centers—which include the Greenfield Intercultural Center, La Casa Latina, the Pan Asian American Community House, the Makuu Black Cultural Center, Penn Women’s Center, and the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Center—coordinate mentoring, cultural, and issues-based programs that help all Penn students learn valuable lessons about diversity outside the classroom.

Penn President Amy Gutmann and senior admissions officers regularly visit urban high schools both to encourage talented students, particularly those from underrepresented populations, to apply to Penn, and to remind them that a Penn education is well within their financial reach. The University’s Young Scholars program enables exceptional Philadelphia high school students to earn full college credit by taking college courses with Penn students at no cost.

 

Penn Broadening the Scope of Equal Opportunity

• Expanding aid to middle-income and low-income students
• Excellence and equity go hand in hand
• Creating the Penn World Scholars program

Concerns about equal opportunity in higher education have focused primarily on the widening gap between low-income and high-income students. Recent studies have shown, however, that middle-income families—who represent the vast majority of American households—cannot afford the sticker price of most of our universities and also are strikingly underrepresented on our campuses.

Colleges and universities that are truly committed to achieving the goals of diversity and equal opportunity must focus their efforts on middle-income as well as low-income students.

At Penn these students include a native of Appalachia who is the first in his family—and one of the very few in his entire community—to attend college; a Wharton student whose father, a Kuwaiti immigrant, struggled for years to find work; and the son of a local janitor who has made his father’s dream come true by being accepted at Penn.

As President Gutmann stated in her October 2005 address at the Association of American Universities Fall Meeting, “These are the sons and daughters of middle-income America. Excellence as well as equity demands that we not let them fall on the losing side of an arbitrary line dividing those deemed deserving of preferences from those who are not.”

Penn is recruiting outstanding scholars with strong leadership potential from around the globe through its new World Scholars program. Penn offers these students financial assistance throughout their studies and valuable mentoring from Penn alumni from their home countries. The first class of Penn World Scholars,including students from Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Israel, Latvia, Pakistan and South Africa, arrived at Penn in the fall of 2007. The second Penn World Scholars group entering Penn in 2008 hail from Turkey, Romania, El Salvador, Australia, Vietnam, India, and Egypt.

 

The Future of Access at Penn

• Attracting extraordinary faculty and students from all backgrounds
• Fostering living-learning communities
• Furnishing state-of-the-art facilities

To attract and retain eminent faculty and outstanding students from all backgrounds, Penn is creating an even more welcoming and rewarding educational environment that includes more housing options, new amenities and extracurricular opportunities, and a raft of new state-of-the-art research and teaching facilities.

Penn’s College House system, along with student hubs for writing, technology, undergraduate research, performing arts, and community service, have contributed to Penn's ranking as "Hottest Ivy for Happy to Be There" by the 2006 Newsweek Kaplan Guide to Colleges. Ahigh priority for our Making History campaign is to create a second quadrangle on Hill Square with the first student residence complex that is specifically designed to realize the College House vision of a 24/7 living and learning community.

Recently completed and renovated buildings that have enlivened the Penn campus include Skirkanich Hall, a state-of-the-art bioengineering building; the Vernon and Shirley Hill Pavilion, a gleaming new teaching and discovery facility for Penn Veterinary Medicine; the Lynch Biology Laboratory, home to Penn Genome Frontiers Institute (PGFI); and Fisher-Bennett Hall, which features modernized classrooms and teaching and rehearsal space for the Music Department.

Meanwhile, the campus is undergoing a dramatic transformation. The new Annenberg Public Policy Center and the cutting-edge Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine will open in the fall of 2008. Over the next several years, the Perelman Center will be joined by the Roberts Proton Therapy Center and the 10-story Fisher Translational Research Center. During the same period, the beautiful 24-acre Penn Park will replace a massive parking lot near the banks of the Schuylkill River, while the northern arcade of Franklin Field will be converted into a new fitness center and athletic training facility.

Download Impact of the Penn Compact brochure (PDF format)