Wanna go to Columbia? The university just revised their financial aid policy. And now you can probably get out without dragging around a student loan for a decade after graduation - if your family income is less than $60,000 a year, according to the College Admissions Counseling Blog.

Columbia's move is part of a much larger trend to revamp financial aid. America's top tier college's and universities want to attract a larger part of the cream of the crop, and in order to do that they're removing money from the formula by making it less and less expensive for middle and working class families to send their kids to an Ivy League school. The only question becomes, "Can you get in?" After they look at your SAT scores, your high school GPA, your references, the essay you wrote, the clubs you were in, etc., did you make the cut?

According the the College Admissions Counseling Blog, six colleges this month have joined the trend away from student loans and toward better financial aid packages for lower income applicants.


by _Gene_



Besides Columbia, those schools are Lafayette College, Claremont McKenna College, Lehigh University, Vassar College, and MIT.

These school join the likes of Stanford, Cornell, Duke, Harvard (just to name a few) in revising their financial aid philosophies to benefit lower income students.