Ivy League Cuts: What $50K in Tuition Buys

The Ivy League. They're among America's most competitive colleges — and some of the wealthiest, too. In good times, that's a huge advantage. But now the drastic reductions in their endowments mean making some unaccustomed cutbacks — while in some cases, tuition plus room and board heads north of $48,000 a year.

After Tuesday, hopeful high school seniors will begin logging onto their computers to learn whether they made the cut at an Ivy League school, but what they may not realize is that once they arrive on campus, things won't be exactly the same as when they embarked on their college tours last year.

At Harvard, cleaning services have been cut back. Princeton is reducing the number of visiting professors it hosts — and the classes they teach. Cornell and Columbia are admitting more freshmen — a move that will increase tuition revenue — but aren’t adding new classes to accommodate them.

And while most Ivy League schools are increasing the amount of financial aid that's available, students are competing against a bigger pool of aid applicants, most of whose families have been hit by the economic downturn, says Rod Bugarin, a former financial aid officer at Brown and Columbia, and currently a financial aid and admissions counselor at New York-based IvyWise, an independent college-counseling company. For example, some 75% of Princeton’s freshmen applicants applied for financial aid, up 5% from the previous year.

To be sure, many other schools are facing far worse financial problems and would be happy with a multibillion-dollar endowment — even if it fell by double-digit percentages like the Ivies' (hit by the stock market, their endowments decreased by as much as 30% between June and December). But the cutbacks at the Ivies suggest how the recession is cutting into what parents and students receive for their tuition dollars at even the wealthiest schools — let alone those with weaker finances.

For a look at how all this is playing out, SmartMoney.com took an Ivy-by-Ivy look at where cutbacks are happening. While we focused on university funding and programs, students attending schools in urban settings, such as Yale in New Haven, Columbia in New York and Penn in Philadelphia, are also likely to see effects of cuts in city budgets as well. We also discussed all these cuts with representatives from each university (except Dartmouth, which did not return our calls seeking comment), most of whom said some of the cuts are unavoidable in this environment and they’re looking to minimize the impact on students.

Here’s a look at how each member of the Ivy League is coping with the economy, with schools listed in order of their endowment size.

(Note: The 2008 Ivy League endowment figures come from the National Association of College and University Business Officers, or NACUBO, which tracks university endowments on an annual basis.)