By the Way . . .
Caltech Replaces Loans with Gift Aid. Effective for undergraduates entering in the fall of 2008, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) is replacing its loan program with gift aid options such as scholarships and grants. Domestic students with family incomes of $60,000 per year or less can be considered for the program.
Already more than half of Caltech’s 913 undergraduate students attending in the fall of 2007 are receiving sufficient financial aid to meet their needs—a combination of grants, scholarships, loans, and employment. This adds up to $28,580, or about 61% of the cost of attending the institution. Caltech’s students remain among the lowest in the nation in terms of average indebtedness of its students when they graduate. In the most recent year for which this data is available—2005-06—the average indebtedness of the 34 graduating students who had student loans was $5,156. This compares to $19,146 for undergraduate students who graduated from four-year colleges nationwide.