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 focuses fresh attention on making a Penn education affordable for all outstanding students of talent and high potential, while reaffirming the importance of providing a rich and welcoming educational environment for all students.

Low- and middle-income students are underrepresented in enrollment at most of the nation’s highly selective colleges and universities, including Penn. President Gutmann is at the forefront of the national debate to urge that private colleges and universities pay more attention to the need to attract a student body as diverse in class background as it is 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 is committed to enabling talented, high-achieving students to chart their educational and career paths without regard to their financial resources. In September 2008, all undergraduate students with calculated family incomes under $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.

Penn is one of fewer than 50 private institutions across the nation that have “need-blind” admissions policies, which means that students are accepted based on academic achievement, without regard to their ability to pay. Penn guarantees that any accepted student who matriculates with demonstrated financial need will receive a financial-aid package that meets the full extent of the student’s need for a full four years.

Since 2003, Penn’s undergraduate financial aid endowment has more than doubled and generous donors have created more than 400 new aid scholarships. Endowment income, however, can fund only 17 percent of the cost of the current aid program. The balance of financial aid funding comes from the University’s unrestricted operating budget. The University’s 5-year, $3.5 billion Making History campaign, launched in October 2007, includes a $350 million goal for undergraduate financial aid. A $14 million gift from Trustee George Weiss gave Penn's financial aid effort a dramatic boost in anticipation of the campaign. Trustees and other donors also have established challenge funds to encourage new scholarships.

Penn’s new financial aid programs and aggressive fundraising campaign are the latest steps in Penn’s efforts to widen access for students from all economic backgrounds. For example, Penn’s policies also allow outside scholarships to supplement rather than replace Penn-funded aid and the University has increased incidental expense allowances and reduced expected summer earnings requirements for students with the greatest need.

Further, Penn also has recently launched a new outreach program targeting hundreds of schools and thousands of students from low and middle-income families – who might never have considered applying to Penn – to let them know that if they are accepted to Penn, they will receive a financial aid package with no loans. Penn is already seeing success in its efforts to improve access for lower income families, with a doubling of admitted high-need students with loan-free packages in the last year.

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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 is a sound investment in the future of higher education.

In the past year Penn raised the minimum annual stipends for doctoral students by 11% to $17,500. Penn also funded a set of summer stipends of approximately $3,900 each to entering Ph.D. students in the humanities and social sciences. New “prize” fellowships will provide additional funding for our very top recruits—which strengthens Penn’s ability to compete for the best students.

Many graduate students find themselves preparing for careers in academe at the same time that they are starting families. Penn is helping graduate and professional students successfully navigate these waters and is exploring ways to make Penn more family-friendly.

Penn is committed to recruiting more men and women of color into the pipeline 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, enables graduate students from diverse backgrounds to receive full five-year fellowships.

 

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 because it is an end in itself, but rather because diversity is 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 the proportion of international students rose from 9.3% in 2003 to 11% for the freshman class that entered in 2005, with students hailing from 75 other countries. Nearly 38% of these students are people of color.

Penn recognizes that a diverse and open campus invites dialogue, encourages understanding, inspires creative thinking, and fully prepares all members of society for leadership in the global marketplace.

Seven campus resource centers offer community support to our diverse student body: 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. Together with various service and governmental organizations, these centers coordinate a plethora of mentoring, cultural, and issues-based programs that help all Penn students learn valuable lessons about diversity outside the classroom.

Since becoming Penn’s President, Amy Gutmann has visited several urban high schools to remind talented students, particularly those from underrepresented minorities that a Penn education is accessible to them. Reaching out to Philadelphia area students, a pre-college Young Scholars program enables academically exceptional Philadelphia public school juniors and seniors to take courses with Penn students at no cost. The entering class of 2009 includes a record number of students from the Philadelphia region, up almost 4% over the previous year.

 

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 gifted writer who is the daughter of a New Hampshire auto mechanic and the first in her family to attend college; the son of a truck driver from Texas who has become a standout at the Wharton School and a campus leader; and the son of a grocery clerk who wants to pursue both a doctorate in philosophy and a law degree.

As President Gutmann stated in her October 2005 address to the Association of American University Presidents and Chancellors, “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.”

To promote greater access worldwide, Penn is establishing a World Scholars program that will recruit outstanding scholars with strong leadership potential from around the globe. Penn will offer these students financial assistance throughout their studies and valuable mentoring from Penn alumni from their home countries.

 

The Future of Access at Penn

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

Along with our students, Penn’s exceptional faculty form the heart and soul of our great University. Our capacity to shape the future will rise with our increasing ability to attract and retain eminent faculty and outstanding students from all backgrounds across all 12 schools. We also aspire to furnish our students and faculty with an even more welcoming and rewarding educational environment that includes quality housing options and state-of-the-art research and teaching facilities.

Penn especially is committed to providing access to campus housing options, amenities, and extracurricular opportunities that enrich the undergraduate experience. The establishment of the College House system and creation of student hubs for writing, technology, undergraduate research, and community service have contributed to Penn's 2006 ranking as "Hottest Ivy for Happy to Be There" by the 2006 Newsweek Kaplan Guide to Colleges—surely an encouraging indicator of the vitality of undergraduate life at Penn. A high priority for fundraising is to strengthen the College House system by building the first residence specifically designed to realize the College House vision.

Recently renovated facilities that have enlivened the Penn campus include the beautifully modernized Fisher-Bennett Hall, home for our English, Music, and Cinema Studies departments, and a gloriously renovated Nursing Education Building, which has been renamed for the eminent scholar, former nursing dean, and former interim president Claire Fagin. The University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology also is undergoing major renovations.

A host of new buildings and facilities scheduled to open in 2006 will support the creative and innovative talents of our faculty and students. They include: Skirkanich Hall, a state-of-the-art bioengineering building; the Carolyn Hoff Lynch Biology Laboratory, representing the first phase of a new Life Sciences Complex; the David B. Weigle Information Commons in Van Pelt Library; the Vernon and Shirley Hill Pavilion, a gleaming new research facility for Penn Veterinary Medicine; and the Platt Student Performing Arts House.

Download Penn Increasing Access Brochure (PDF format)