Columbia grad schools strive to stay affordable

On Friday, the country’s unemployment rate hit 10.2 percent—all the more reason to stay in school.

As the recession takes its toll on the job market, the number of students looking to attend graduate schools and earn professional degrees continues to increase.

But with professional degrees come immense expenses. In order to alleviate the money-related stress, Columbia’s graduate schools are taking measures to ensure that students can pursue their degrees and their dreams.

The general trend is that economic stressors are not preventing students from applying to professional schools, although many of these students rely on external sources to pay for tuition. The School of International and Public Affairs has consistently sought to partner with outside organizations such as Peace Corps and AmeriCorps for fellowship programs.

According to Matthew Clemons, the director of admissions and financial aid at SIPA, “the school has been honest in making it clear that students would have to borrow money.” Most people applying to professional schools such as SIPA are aware of the fact that they might have to get loans to attend.

But international students who have always found it more difficult to attain financial aid in the United States are having increasingly difficult experiences. “Many banks have been stricter in terms of loaning to international students and so students had to be more creative to seek a co-signer for their loans,” said Clemons.

According to Marilena Botoulas, the director of financial aid at Columbia Business School, “there has been a little bit of an increase [in applications] but nothing substantial.” In order to accommodate students’ financial needs, the Business School will open up their need-based financial aid to international students starting in the 2010-2011 school year. This is a new change that the school will implement in order to diversify the population of students attending the school.

At the Journalism School, in addition to making Columbia-funded scholarships available to students, the office of financial aid has been encouraging students to seek outside scholarships. According to Christine Souders, the associate dean of admissions and financial aid at the Journalism School, “Many of our students are applying for third-party funding, so they’re getting their funding from a variety of different sources.” A majority of financial assistance at the Journalism School is need-based, but some is merit-based.

The School of Nursing has also been striving arduously to implement changes in the financial aid system to better accommodate its students. According to Julie Wolfe, the director of financial aid at the School of Nursing, “Last year, we began to exclude parental financial data when awarding our institutional scholarship for dependent students. This year, we awarded over $5.1 million in institutional scholarships.”

Prospective graduate school students often voice an array of concerns stemming from the current harsh economic situation. Their worries pertain not only to the accessibility of grants and loans, but also to how they will pay off their loans after graduating. “The scary thing about law school is that you go into so much debt, so it necessitates practicing a certain kind of law to pay off the debt,” said Emma Dorsey, BC ’10.