Jenny Zhan | The upper-middle class squeeze

Parents: Beware.

Another tuition hike strikes colleges across the nation this academic year and our beloved Penn is no exception.

While many of us who disregard e-mail reminders from Penn.Pay may not be aware, Penn parents are surely not oblivious to the change - in my case, the parentals obsessive-compulsively refreshed my "Statement of Account" page, hoping the system had experienced an error.

Nope.

Total Penn tuition and fees alone rose from $34,146 to $35,916, a whopping 5.15 percent increase. That's, like, at least 5 pairs of Seven Jeans.

For the 2006-2007 academic year, College-

Board.com reported that the average costs for a private four-year college totaled $22,218, up 5.9 percent from the previous year.

I'm afraid that inflation is not the sole culprit to blame for this phenomenon. In 2005, a sampling of 15 schools by CNN/Money found that tuition increases ranged between 4.5 percent to 11 percent, far exceeding the 2.3 percent national inflation rate.

Escalating maintenance expenses, astronomically growing health insurance costs, and a loss of funding from other revenue sources are all contributing to the upward trend in tuition prices, according to William Schilling, Penn's director of Student Financial Services.

Meanwhile, despite increases in the past ten years, Penn still struggles with a low per-capita endowment. Translation: that annually budgeted $90 million university grant for financial aid becomes a pretty scant amount when distributed among Penn's large undergraduate population.

This, despite the fact that the first prong of Amy Gutmann's oft-praised Penn Compact was accessibility to higher education.

So with a less-than-ideal budget, how is it determined who gets how much?

According to Schilling, though Penn is free to allocate its own money within federal guidelines, it nevertheless conforms to "industry standards" like its peer institutions.

Each financial aid applicant is given a comprehensive review, based on verifiable information from tax returns and profiles, as well as factors beyond income. Currently, 40 percent of all undergraduate Penn students are receiving need-based grant aid from Penn.

"Our philosophy is that we do not want affordability to be a block for any student or parent," Schilling said. "We use differential price setting to make sure those who are admitted will not have to say no for financial reasons."

Sounds promising?

Indeed.

But appearances can be deceiving. True story: last spring, I stepped into the Franklin Building as an admitted student hoping to appeal my financial aid package. Yet upon hearing my sob story, the financial-aid officer's response was, "If UCLA is offering you such a wonderful scholarship, why don't you just go there instead?"

And to top it off, "Kids with parents like yours should not be coming in here and wasting our time."

Nice try, Jenny.

But it's exactly kids like me whose college dreams could be threatened by rising tuition costs coupled with financial aid that lags behind.

This hurts kids from families with incomes on the cusp - high enough to be ineligible for need-based award, yet low enough that a $50,000 yearly check is certainly not pocket change.

In making the final college decision, price consideration is beginning to play a major role for upper-middle class students. Though notorious for their overpopulated dorm rooms, overcrowded lecture halls and lack of personal attention, state colleges with their relatively low costs appear much more favorable to parents, especially those with multiple tuitions to pay.

To help those stuck in the middle, Penn should cultivate better alumni relations and raise additional financial-aid endowments.

At some peer institutions, incomes from financial-aid endowments are able to provide almost 100 percent of the annual aid budget; according to Schilling, at Penn, the figure is a mere 15 percent.

With the money donated, Penn can increase its number of loans and grants that do not exclusively target families in the low-income bracket.

At the same time, we as students should seek outside scholarships to further help funding our education.

But if we're too lazy to write an essay on how we've changed the world and hence deserve that coveted $1,000 scholarship, well, there is always the 25-year student loan with low monthly payments.

Jenny Zhan is a Wharton sophomore from Pleasanton, Calif. Her e-mail address is zhan@dailypennsylvanian.com. Jenny from the 'Burbs appears on Fridays.

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