Recent national media has criticized Washington University for its controversial “need-aware” admissions policies and low percentage of Pell Grant recipients, but administrators say that though they hope to increase that percentage, they are not able to do so immediately.

Washington University trails far behind its peers in terms of socioeconomic diversity and admissions processes, as a September New York Times blog post detailed. The post highlighted the fact that the University had one of the highest endowments of the colleges it evaluated yet also ranked below all other schools in the percentage of Pell Grant-eligible students it enrolled.

However, administrators say that after years of prioritizing improving the University’s status over its socioeconomic diversity, they cannot allocate the funds necessary to make the University’s admissions process need-blind without sacrificing other aspects of the student experience.

While most schools at about the same academic level as Washington University have about 15 percent of their student body eligible for Pell Grants, which are offered only to lower-income students—typically those with family incomes less than $60,000—less than 8 percent of students at Washington University are currently eligible for Pell Grants.

Under the University’s current need-aware policy, the Office of Admissions proposes a list of incoming first-year students to Student Financial Services, which considers those students’ demonstrated financial need. If the University has not allocated enough funds necessary to meet each student’s need, SFS sends the list back for reevaluation considering budgetary restrictions.

Vice Chancellor for Admissions John Berg noted that the outcome of SFS’s reevaluation process varies yearly by applicant pool and funding available.

“It could be dozens of students,” Berg said. “Sometimes it’s a tiny number. I don’t remember the last year when we had to make a lot of adjustments.”

Reevaluation does not occur during the early-decision round, when SFS’s budget has not been exhausted and the Office of Admissions declares its decisions final.

However, no matter how many students are impacted by SFS’s decision, sophomore Lauren Chase, president of Washington University for Undergraduate Socioeconomic Diversity (WU/FUSED), feels that the lack of socioeconomic diversity at the University is just as important to discuss as racial or cultural diversity.

“Admissions literally has to pick out students they were going to accept and not accept them because of them being low-income,” Chase said. “That is discrimination by a different name.”

Despite other competing institutions being need-blind, University administration argues that the University’s current enrollment of Pell Grant-eligible students is merely the consequence of a harsh fiscal reality.

The University’s operating budget of $2.3 billion includes contributions from the graduate and professional schools. In the 2012-13 academic year, undergraduate tuition brought in $325 million in revenue for the University, over half of the undergraduate schools’ approximate $500-600 million operating budget. According to the 2012-13 annual report, Wash. U. awarded $75 million in undergraduate scholarships, a number that Director of Student Financial Services Mike Runiewicz said grows yearly.

Provost Holden Thorp noted that $25 million would need to be added to the current financial aid budget for Washington University to reach the middle range of competitor universities’ Pell Grant-eligible numbers.

Over the past 30 to 40 years, the University’s fiscal choices were primarily devoted to increasing its prestige and academic success. According to Thorp, these choices allowed the University to rise from the status of a local commuter school to the position of national recognition it holds today, but its focus neglected socioeconomic diversity. However, he said the University did not regret its previous priorities.

“If they hadn’t done that, nobody in this room would be sitting here right now. We’re not going to apologize for that,” Thorp said at a panel on tuition use hosted by Alpha Delta Phi and WU/FUSED last week.

Thorp said that the University plans to allocate funding for financial aid without impacting the quality of service that it provides.

“The central administration, and I think some of the schools, probably, will have to reduce expenditures in different places so that they can contribute more financial aid,” he said. “This is a priority that has emerged for the people, and so we have to figure out how to do that without losing all the things that are important to students at Wash. U. That’s a challenging task.”

In a recent change of course, Thorp said the University has amplified its efforts to enroll more lower-income students. Pell Grant recipient percentages have grown from 5 percent in the freshman class in 2012 to 6 percent in 2013 and 8 percent in 2014.

University administrators said they prioritize not just the enrollment, however, of lower-income students but also their retention and success. The University states that it meets 100 percent of the financial need of all students. In his State of the University Address last month, Chancellor Mark Wrighton highlighted the graduation rate, 94 percent, as uniformly high across every segment of the student body.

Washington University’s stance on financial aid differs from that of other colleges across the country, but not all need-blind schools are able to offer full financial support to all admitted students.

Carnegie Mellon University, which follows a “need-blind” admissions policy, cannot meet the full need of all admitted students. Unlike at Washington University, all initially chosen students receive letters of admission, but some find out the school lacks the funding to fully support their studies.

Some schools, such as Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are both need-blind and meet the full needs of their applicants. Other schools, such as Wesleyan University in Connecticut, have backed off their need-blind policies after recent economic problems.

However, Thorp defended the University’s need-aware policy as more fair in the long run to low-income students.

“It’s irresponsible to admit folks and not give everybody a fair chance to succeed,” Thorp said.

In addition, Berg questioned the ability of any school to truly be need-blind.

“We know where you live, what high school you go to…family information…parents or guardians…their jobs, their titles, their college degrees. That’s a lot of information…if you were truly need-blind, you would remove all that stuff from the application,” Berg said. “It’s conceivable you could end up with fewer Pell students doing that.”

“In a perfect world, we’d have unlimited scholarship money,” he added. “If the funds were there today, we could be there today.”