Financial Aid

We must ensure that we have the resources to build the best financial aid program in the country. A. Felix duPont founded St. Andrew's at a time when prep schools were places truly reserved for the nation's elite, and he rejected this model explicitly—envisioning instead a school where young boys of privileged backgrounds would study and learn alongside of children of more modest means. Of course, diversity at St. Andrew's has broadened considerably since its founding, and today includes women, students of color and students from a great many backgrounds. Unfortunately, however, disparities in wealth are even greater in the United States today than in 1929; St. Andrew's, along with many top colleges and universities, has recognized that an even more robust financial aid program is essential to achieving diversity in our student body.

We have good reason to be proud of our current financial aid program. Forty-two percent of our students receive financial aid, and the average grant is $25,022. We are able to accept not only full-grant and full-pay students, but a large number of students whose families fall in the middle-income range, thereby avoiding the "barbell effect" faced by many of our peer schools. We believe that true socioeconomic diversity requires us to enroll not only low-income and high-income students, but also students from middle-class families.

Chair and Pond

We do not factor a family's ability to pay tuition into decisions about a student's admission to St. Andrew's. In that regard, we are "need-blind." We meet a family's full "need" based on their financial resources. At the same time, we have finite financial aid resources; we are not "need-blind" in that we could not accept students from a great number of families with significant need, were that situation to arise. In short, due to constraints on our financial aid dollars, we are able to enroll about the same number of students each year who need help paying tuition.

In the last few years, several top colleges and universities have renewed their commitment to greater socioeconomic diversity. The presidents of Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Smith and Amherst are calling attention to the glaring disparities between rich and poor in the U.S. generally and on their campuses specifically. Along with these prestigious academic institutions, St. Andrew's must reassert our commitment to a financial aid program that can keep pace with tendencies in American society, making sure we are able to remain a school "open to all, regardless of means."

We must emphasize that the financial aid program is not only part of St. Andrew's historical identity, but is crucial to the School's future as well. As educators, we believe that socioeconomic diversity makes possible a kind of learning that would be absent in a more homogenous environment. Our students come to this campus and live with young people with entirely different experiences — they learn from each other and teach each other more in their daily interactions than we could hope to teach them in the most ideal classroom. Financial aid is the core component of St. Andrew's identity as a different kind of boarding school.

To that end, we plan to:

  • Study the financial structure that makes our financial aid program possible as well as create a model that will help us estimate future demand for financial aid at St. Andrew's. At current levels of financial aid, we know that it takes at least $60 million of endowment each year to fund our financial aid program. We also know that over the past 10 years, the amount of financial aid required by our students has risen from just over $1.5 million to about $3.0 million today.

  • To go beyond funding for the program we now maintain, to create a truly need-blind School, we will use our model to create a goal to fully fund a need-blind St. Andrew's, through gifts to the endowment and planned giving.