For many students, the administration’s new off-campus tuition policy, which will lower merit-based financial aid by 25 percent for students choosing to live off-campus, is a catch 22 situation. Many students, including myself, move off campus because it is simply not affordable to live on campus. But if the administration wants more students to live on campus, according to junior Julie Sloane who organized a student meeting to discuss the policy, “they’re going to need to make living on campus more affordable and more pleasant.”

Randy Doss, Vice President of Enrollment and Student Life, said that students were well warned about the budget change. The college, he said, conducted three open forums, advertised the change in the Guilford Buzz, and distributed posters announcing the change starting last Fall.

Regardless of the warning, the aid cut will hit students hard and fast; a fourth of many student’s merit-based aid is a sizable chunk. And as sophomore Leah Vandenbelt said in last week’s Guilfordian article, “it’s the only aid you can control.”

The issue is being debated by some students but is already being implemented to “fund new faculty and improve and expand student services.” The next step, then, is to ask ourselves whether the 25 percent loss of aid to the greater cause of school improvement is, in fact, yielding improvement.

If you must live on campus now so that you won’t lose financial aid, and you are “forced” to live in one of the spiffy new apartments and spend your time in the meditation room of the new community center, then you might say that you got your money’s worth. But if you are holed up in a moldy Binford room and your last three visits to the caf left you bedridden, then you might look at that 25 percent loss in a different light.

The most controversial issue is the fact that administration is cutting merit-based aid, as opposed to looking for other areas in the budget that could be cut so that Guilford’s top students do not feel alienated by the college. Students will feel punished for making good grades. How will students be motivated to perform well academically, when they can now live on campus with bad grades but be awarded the same amount of aid they would have received had they chosen to live off campus?

I view the cut in merit-based financial aid as the college lowering its standards. The last thing any institution should want is to antagonize their brightest students-it should cater to them.

According to Doss, the college offers a financial aid discount rate of 44 percent, which exceeds the national average of 42.4 percent. Implementing the new off-campus aid policy will bring Guilford’s rate down to the national average. Doss said that cutting merit-based aid to boost the budget “is a common policy among Guilford’s peer and competitor institutions.” One might then ask Doss, if our peer and competitor institutions jumped off a bridge, would Guilford?