When Maria Repnikova (F’06) arrived in America from Latvia at the age of 14, she knew almost no English. Undaunted, she earned high school honors, became a U.S. citizen, worked part-time jobs and enrolled at a local university.

And it was there, in her first college classes, that her sights rose higher. She felt called upon to study global issues and to really challenge herself, so she transferred to Georgetown.

Her three years on the Hilltop were formative. She studied Russian history – a taboo subject in Latvia – with professor Harley Balzer. The student also spent a semester in China, became fluent in Chinese, and won a Fulbright Scholarship to study labor migration on the China-Russia border. And then, in 2006, she won a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship to study international relations at Oxford University.

Nine years after walking through New York’s JFK airport with no idea what the United States would be like, she has become an extremely accomplished American.

“The real heroes are Maria’s family,” Balzer says. “But Georgetown was a garden for her growth.”

If part of her success includes learned professors and vibrant students, there’s also a less noticed factor – the university’s 30-year-old “need-blind, full-need” commitment to financial aid.

The policy ensures that every undergraduate applicant receives admissions consideration without regard to his or her financial resources. Then, upon acceptance, the university provides financial aid packages that meet all students’ demonstrated need through a combination of scholarships, loans, work-study jobs and expected family contributions.

“No policy at Georgetown has been more responsible for the ability to create a truly remarkable student body, class after class, year after year,” says President John J. DeGioia. “No policy has had a greater impact on our rise in academic quality and competitiveness. Sustaining our need-blind, full need approach is the central academic and strategic priority of the institution.”

This priority is what allowed Shemeko “Amy” Hang (C’09) to enter Georgetown in 2006.

Her family could not afford the full cost of sending her to the Hilltop. But with three scholarships combined with a federal Pell Grant and work-study program, Georgetown is giving her all the financial assistance she needs.

Hang is the youngest of seven children born to Hmong refugees. An ethnic group in Southeast Asia, the Hmong became targets of the Viet Cong in the aftermath of the Vietnam war.

Hang’s parents managed to escape to the United States, where their daughter was born. The family settled in Saint Paul, Minn., and started a restaurant. Her mother also grew and sold vegetables and flowers at a local farmers’ market, with the profits earmarked for her children’s education.

In high school, Hang stood out. She co-founded a diversity awareness group, participated in Amnesty International, edited the student newspaper, played volleyball and earned excellent grades, among other achievements. She applied to 12 colleges – all highly selective – and narrowed her choices to Georgetown, the University of Chicago and Brandeis. Her impressions of Georgetown, along with its financial aid package, are what brought this first-generation American to Washington, D.C.

“Attending a Jesuit institution where pursuing the common good and being men and women for others were central tenets that made me believe my collegiate experience would have meaning,” Hang says.

Last spring Hang was one of two Georgetown students selected for a prestigious Harry S. Truman Scholarship. Along with Caraleigh Holverson (F’08), another financial aid recipient, Hang will represent Georgetown at a national conference of Truman Scholars this summer in Missouri.

“If Georgetown wants the opportunity to educate more superb students like Maria and Amy – and that is our mission – we must ensure that family income is not a barrier to coming here and thriving here,” says Provost James J. O’Donnell. “Such students are the future of our country – and they significantly enhance our campus intellectual life right now.”

O’Donnell believes that financial aid should not be viewed as an act of beneficence, but as a crucial investment in academic quality that the finest universities all make. But it is no small investment. After faculty salaries, financial aid represents the largest portion of the operating budget of Georgetown’s Main Campus. A majority of the 18,700 applicants for the 1,600 undergraduate spots in 2008 – 2009 applied for financial aid. And approximately 55 percent of Georgetown undergraduates receive need-based aid ranging from $1,000 to $50,000.

“The reality,” O’Donnell says, “is that a robust financial aid program is absolutely essential to being a great American university. There’s no substitute if you believe in academic excellence and a society based on opportunity.”

Despite having an endowment that now ranks 73rd in the country, Georgetown has been considered a top 25 university since The U.S. News & World Report began ranking undergraduate programs in the 1980s. While the university does not place too much stock in these rankings, it is clear that the need-blind, full-need financial aid program has helped increase Georgetown’s ranking, particularly its score in categories such as student selectivity and retention.

“The major challenge,” O’Donnell says, “is that Georgetown finances our financial aid commitment very differently than many of the universities with whom we compete for students and faculty. Once you feel that in your bones, you see why I lose sleep at night.”

Georgetown’s endowment and restricted gifts cover only about 15 percent of its scholarship budget, a stark contrast to many highly selective peer institutions, which for historical reasons have much larger endowments. An average of 40 percent of these institutions’ scholarship budgets are funded by endowment and restricted gifts.

So how does Georgetown finance financial aid?

“Largely from our annual operating budget,” says DeGioia, who helped craft this approach earlier in his career at Georgetown. “In the 1970s, Father Tim Healy recognized that we didn’t need a large endowment to start a need-blind, full-need policy. His idea was that we could create an outstanding applicant pool quickly and then build the endowment over time to sustain and secure excellence.”

The bold commitment to financial aid by then-president Timothy S. Healy, S.J., – along with building a research faculty and a residential campus – helped move Georgetown from a regional to a national institution in the late 1970s.

That strategy paid off, DeGioia says. In the last decade alone, approximately 25,000 undergraduates from throughout the country have received financial support from Georgetown to come to the Hilltop.

But the current president says Georgetown still has three current challenges with respect to financial aid.

“First, we need to build a stronger endowment base under our financial aid program, because it is precarious to rest more than 85 percent of a crucial academic priority on annual operating dollars,” DeGioia explains. “Second, we need to strengthen the aid packages we offer students, especially by reducing the size of students’ loans. And third, we need to build scholarship funds for the most talented international students who are not now eligible for financial aid.”

The key to all three goals, O’Donnell says, is philanthropy. He and Vice President for Advancement James Langley are the architects of a strategy to place financial aid at the center of Georgetown’s next capital campaign.

Georgetown’s aid packages already help undergraduates pay for the full cost of attendance – a price tag of more than $50,000 a year. Over the last 10 years Georgetown has increased spending on financial aid (today it represents $57.1 million) at more than twice the pace of tuition. So the university continues to look for ways to reduce the cost of college for students in need.

The Georgetown Scholarship Program (GSP) and the John Carroll Fellows program, for example, are two other efforts that provide aid to help reduce students’ individual loan or work-study burden. Georgetown’s aid packages also cap a student’s loan burden at levels lower than the federally allowed maximums.

Inspiring Students

For Georgetown’s longtime dean of financial aid Patricia McWade, the work of providing more support is about helping people succeed.

“Every day I see students who faced any number of obstacles – poverty, oppression, family problems – you name it – before they were accepted at Georgetown,” she says. “They are so inspiring – they embody Georgetown to me – and I know what they add.”

One such student is Andy Marte (C’11), who grew up in Brooklyn in what he calls the “toughest neighborhood in New York.” His father died when he was 5 and his mother works as a babysitter who “doesn’t make much money.”

Despite all these difficulties, Marte excelled in high school. President of student government, he also earned a leadership rank in the student cadet corps and started a neighborhood organization to get young people motivated about politics. In choosing among colleges, he found that financial aid made the difference.

“Georgetown is one of the most prestigious schools. You just don’t turn down that chance,” explains Marte, who picked Georgetown over Cornell. “It’s amazing to see so many motivated students here no matter what their social or economic status is.

“We all have the same goal, to make the world a better place,” Marte adds, “especially for kids from my neighborhood, where everyone is striving for just the basic necessities – food, water, shelter. It’s good to see Georgetown thinking about the bigger picture. It’s inspiring.”

Priscyla Rios Heras (C’09) and Lukas Swiderski (C’10) also came to Georgetown with the help of scholarship offers.

Born in Mexico, Rios Heras immigrated to California with her mother and sister after her parents divorced 11 years ago. Her mother works as a housekeeper. At high school in Cathedral City, Calif., Rios Heras won national academic awards and served as president of the Key Club and the International Relations Club. She topped off a career playing varsity basketball and volleyball as the class valedictorian.

When it came to college, her choices were Georgetown, USC, UCLA and Berkeley. She chose Georgetown because of its academic profile and financial package.

“There are so many groups on campus supporting human rights, I feel as if the community is here for me,” Rios Heras says.

Swiderski, born in Poland, came to the U.S. at the age of 5. His parents struggled to continue their teaching careers in the United States, and his father started a company that makes and installs gutters.

The young man’s choices were between Georgetown and the University of Chicago, and after visiting Georgetown, he says “it was tough to say no.”

But he called coming to the university “a huge financial commitment” for his parents, and the financial aid he receives helps “a great deal.” In getting an education at Georgetown, Swiderski says he is following his parents’ advice:

“[They say I should] obtain as broad a base of knowledge and skills as I can that will let me do whatever I want to do later,” he recalls. “I feel confident that whatever I wind up doing, Georgetown will have helped me significantly.”

Arthur Woods (B’10) says his support from the GSP Scholarship acted as “a huge influence” on his decision to attend Georgetown over Berkeley, Boston College and USC.
“Georgetown was my dream college, my ‘reach for the stars’ school,” he says. “I’m living my dream.”

Woods says he has wanted to come to Georgetown since he was 9 years old – after meeting a Hoya who worked in the California governor’s office. But he faced financial difficulties, not uncommon in his hometown of Clear Creek, Calif. Most of his high school classmates went to community colleges, if they went to college at all, he says. The financial support from Georgetown helped Woods get to the university of his choice.

Woods is now opening doors to what he hopes will be a career in international business. He already has founded his own company – Mission Three – that arranges for weekly deliveries of fresh fruit from a local farmer to student residence halls.

“Each of these students is a success story in his or her own right,” O’Donnell says. “But we can’t get complacent and assume that some aid is enough aid. I don’t want these students to be so worried about their debt burdens.

"I don’t want them to sprint through college trying to graduate in six semesters or seven just because of money. And I certainly don’t want to lose the brightest and most promising students to other universities simply because those schools can offer full-need packages that have bigger grants and smaller loans.”

O’Donnell is referring to a recent trend in higher education: upwards of 40 schools have announced new policies to reduce or eliminate loans for students whose families fall below various income levels. In recent years, Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, Duke, University of Virginia, Brown, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania and others have announced such steps.

The institutions we have to watch closely, McWade contends, are the “overlap schools” with which Georgetown competes each year for dozens or hundreds of accepted applicants.

Langley says that in some cases, including Columbia and Washington University, “individuals with great personal means have made investments that literally transform the ability of the institution to compete securely for the most talented students. We believe that Georgetown offers a profound value proposition for that kind of investor because, quite simply, no other university brings to the table the constellation of qualities for the undergraduate experience that we do.”

Citing Georgetown’s global reach, Jesuit identity, academic quality and location in Washington, D.C., he adds,

“We believe a Georgetown education is profoundly empowering for all students. The emphasis we will place on financial aid in the campaign is about securing access to Georgetown for more students and for all time.”

Alumni Helping Students

What Georgetown graduates who receive financial aid do with their lives illustrates the type of students the university is seeking, O’Donnell says.

Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), for example, grew up on unpaved roads in Laredo, Texas, as part of a poor migrant community. His financial aid package at Georgetown included work-study, which he used to land jobs in SFS’ language lab and in the cafeteria. Following graduation in 1978, Cuellar went back to Texas and earned a law degree. Then he pursued his doctorate in government while simultaneously serving in Congress.

“Financial aid is extremely important,” Cuellar notes. “I’ve seen it at work. It worked for me and I’m here (in Congress) because I want to make sure all kids have that opportunity.”

Ben Cote (C’05) is another alumnus with a success story.

“As the son of a working single mom, financial aid was a critical factor in my decision to go to college, and Georgetown was very helpful,” says Cote. “I was very fortunate to have been given a Pell Grant, Stafford Loans, a Bellarmine Scholarship and a John Carroll Scholarship. If these scholarships had not been available to me, a Hoyas education may not have been possible.”

Cote worked through college, but says the aid he received allowed him to “concentrate more of my time on my cura personalis experience – in my academics and activities.” During his years at Georgetown, he helped raise funds for the developmentally disabled, served as president of the Knights of Columbus, participated in service projects with local Catholic schools and won a competitive grant from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation.

In his senior year, he earned the prestigious George J. Mitchell Scholarship to study peace and conflict studies in Derry, Northern Ireland. After a stint as a Capital City

Fellow for the mayor of Washington, D.C., he now works to mobilize support for the peace process in Colombo, Sri Lanka, through a local NGO.

Referring to Cote’s work for justice, and to the large numbers of Hoyas who enter the Peace Corps and Teach

For America, Langley says, “Georgetown is not a university that one just gives to – it is a service-oriented institution that one gives through to create a better world. There’s no better investment than sending a student to Georgetown. But don’t ask me – look at the Henry Cuellars and Maria Repnikovas and Ben Cotes of this world.”