This article is part of “The Fight for Pell: The History of Socioeconomic Diversity at WashU,” a Student Life series that documents the long struggle for increased awareness and support for Pell-eligible students. Read the letter from the author here. 

Over one year ago, Washington University adopted a need-blind system in its admission process with a $1 billion investment in financial aid. For the first time in the school’s history, the University stopped considering an applicant’s ability to pay in admissions decisions and will still meet 100% of the demonstrated financial need if that student enrolls. WashU Class of 2026 was the first class in WashU history to be admitted through this system.

But like most historical moments, the move to adopt a need-blind system and improve WashU’s socioeconomic diversity numbers didn’t happen overnight.

When Fernando Cutz, class of 2010, was a student on the Danforth Campus, conversations concerning economic diversity were nonexistent. At the time, he said, nobody was talking about socioeconomic diversity. When people talked about variety, it was primarily a racial conversation and was also starting to become more focused on sex and sexual orientation. 

But as senior class president and a John B. Ervin Scholar, Cutz was determined to change that. According to him, while many WashU students enjoyed the freedom of grabbing a bite by Delmar Loop multiple times a week, for other students — especially those who were Pell-eligible — that wasn’t the case. But it wasn’t just the difficulty of affording dinner out; for many students, the problem was also affording academic tools such as textbooks. 

“A lot of times, the list of books that [professors] had us buying back then [cost] between two to $4,000 a semester,” Cutz said. “And that was just insane. A lot of people on campus, not just Pell-eligible, found this astronomical.”

At one of the country’s most prestigious and wealthy institutions, Cutz and his friend Chase Sackett decided to create Washington University for Undergraduate Socioeconomic Diversity (WU/FUSED) in the spring of 2009.

“We felt like it was a topic that most students at the University weren’t thinking about or considering and the administration at the time certainly didn’t seem to be thinking too much about it or considering it,” Cutz said. “The vast majority of campus at the time was students that had good financial needs, came from upper-middle-class or sometimes just upper-class families,” said Cutz. 

Cutz and Sackett wanted to go beyond just raising awareness around socioeconomic diversity on campus. More than anything, WU/FUSED was founded on the belief that if you are an academically talented student, your family’s inability to pay for higher education shouldn’t get in the way of you attending WashU. 

“Our ultimate goal was to create a situation where WashU would agree to be need-blind — which I know recently, it has finally been something the university has committed [to],” Cutz said. “[But] at the time, it was a hard no [from the University]. It wasn’t even under consideration.”

Cutz and Sackett weren’t the first students to propose a need-blind admissions system. In the early 2000s, Student Life published multiple staff editorials and columns criticizing WashU’s lack of socioeconomic diversity and pushing them to adopt a need-blind system in their admissions process.

In a 2003 staff editorial titled “The buck stops here”, Student Life called out WashU for buying several plasma TVs and other technologies in what became known as the “Olin Library Arc Technology Center”. In the editorial, StudLife wrote, “the costly TVs may seem like a trivial point, but they serve as daily reminders that Washington University is spending what seems to be an excess of money — from Olin Library’s copious cherry wood paneling to the decorative glass dome that will sit atop the building upon completion. No student on campus has not seen an example of money being wasted somehow.” 

The editorial would go on to argue that “although the University seems need-blind in terms of buying things it does not need, WU, ironically, is not a need-blind institution where admissions are concerned.”

At the time of the publication of the 2003 editorial, several peer institutions — all Ivy League schools plus Tufts University and the University of Chicago — were need-blind.

While it was only Cutz and Sackett when the movement began, the pair wasted no time. In the fall of 2009, the seniors assembled various student leaders for their first-ever meeting. The goal: present their mission statement and overall objectives and goals, including creating a program for RAs to promote consciousness of socioeconomic diversity, and decrease textbook and dining costs. Perhaps most importantly, Cutz and Sackett wanted to add admissions counselors to attract students from socioeconomically diverse backgrounds. 

Cutz and Sackett wanted to go even bigger. Specifically, the two wanted to make WU/FUSED and its work national. Instead of having a “WU/FUSED” organization at WashU, it would be a national organization with chapters across multiple campuses nationwide. Thanks to the support of federal officials at the Department of Education, the two seniors got to work. 

They wanted to transform WU/FUSED into the United for Undergraduate Socioeconomic Diversity (U/FUSED).

“Some federal person in the Department of Education [came to campus],” said Lauren Chase, a member of the WashU Class of 2017 and former President of WU/FUSED. “[Sackett and Crutz] told them about this idea of ‘UFUSED’; that it was not just Washington University, but it was like universities across the country. And the person said, ‘Yeah, I want to learn more.’”

On March 17, 2010, SU Senate passed a resolution in support of founding United for Undergraduate Socioeconomic Diversity (U/FUSED), a group that would aim to increase socioeconomic diversity on a national level at undergraduate schools. 

In the early stages of the fight to diversify WashU by increasing its Pell-eligible students, this was a huge win for WU/FUSED as it meant they now had the monetary means to run their events. Cutz credited this victory to Suckett, and another friend, Nihal Gehrig, who served as the SU Speaker of the Treasury.

A month after the SU Senate resolution, Saint Louis University (SLU) passed legislation forming its chapter of U/FUSED called “SLU/FUSED”. By forming the chapter, SLU joined co-founders WashU — led by Cutz and Sackett — and Duke University. Cutz, Sackett, and Duke senior Spencer Eldred would go on to lead U/FUSED national operations as co-executive directors.

In the wake of the establishment of SLU/FUSED, Sackett was quoted in Student Life saying “Part of the point of it is to gain a critical mass with this organization to bring more attention to the issue and, hopefully, improve socioeconomic diversity at the undergraduate level nationwide.”

With a structural organization in place both on campus and nationally, everything was set to go. The mission was on.

According to Cutz, while it wasn’t hard for WU/FUSED to generate campus-wide awareness, the reality was that due to WashU’s socioeconomic makeup, money wasn’t something that was on a lot of students’ minds. But more critically, while University administrators welcomed the information sessions and meetings, they didn’t share anywhere near the same level of passion regarding the issue of socioeconomic diversity as Cutz and Sackett did.

“I was able to get us meetings with the Vice Chancellor for Students Affairs at the time, the Vice Chancellor for Admissions, and the Chancellor himself.  So [people] were certainly willing to talk,” Cutz said. “I never sensed that there was like a closed door or lack of desire to try to do something to get us to be better. People just weren’t talking about this at all yet.”

But again, despite the accessibility to high-ranking university administrators and the movement gaining steam on campus, the problem was essentially the same: WashU just didn’t shake on socioeconomic diversity. 

“At the time, the argument wasn’t even financial,” said Cutz. “It was like “Oh, you know, we don’t need to go need-blind; we’re actually quite good the way we are. [They argued that if the] University went need-blind, then [it’d] have to potentially lose some top students. So they almost [spun] it like . . . need-blind was actually a distraction that some other universities use.”

But as WU/FUSED continued to gain steam, administrators began switching up their arguments.

“One of the reasons that they said was that…‘our resources were tied up’ in ways that we wouldn’t understand,” said Cutz. Administrators told Cutz that a lot of money was earmarked for certain things — and not for financial aid or scholarships. 

“Maybe the message was being truthful, or they were arguing correctly. [But to me] the actual issue was: how can we drastically improve our social diversity on campus?” Cutz said. 

Fast-forward years later, while WashU administrators’ arguments against socioeconomic diversity switched on and off, need-blind admissions became a reality in 2021, thanks largely to donations. In March of 2021, Arnold Zetcher and his wife, Ellen Zetcher, made an 8 million dollar commitment to WashU for need-based aid, an investment that propelled the institution on its path to need-blind admissions. 

After the news broke, Chancellor Andrew Martin was quoted by Student Life saying, “I’m deeply grateful for the Zetchers for making this commitment. For them, the ability to support students with need and for us ultimately to become a need-blind institution.”

As a result of their donation, South 40 House over the Bear Den dining hall was renamed to Arnold and Ellen Zetcher House. 

As WU/FUSED was founded during both Cutz and Chase’s senior year at WashU, the two were worried the organization was going to die after they graduated. That wasn’t the case at all.

A few years after Cutz and Sackett graduated, they came back to campus and were shocked by the size of the club. 

“It was like the club was maybe four times larger than it had been when we left,” Cutz said. “We were legitimately worried that was gonna be a one-year thing that you know ‘hey, we’re gonna graduate.’ But fortunately, that’s not at all what happened. Future generations of students increased and improved the work we did. They made the awareness piece even bigger and an even more important component of student activism.”

Letter from the author  of “The Fight for Pell: The History of Socioeconomic Diversity at WashU Series”