Around the country, private colleges have been providing better financial support for students in their own areas to improve enrollment rates and also to strengthen ties with the community.

One such example comes from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. With its “Good Neighbor, Great University” program, it offers financial aid to incoming freshmen who have graduated from high schools in Evanston and Chicago. Through this program, student loans and the pressure to take on a summer job or a work-study job are eliminated. Barriers on affordability are eased and students will not have to face the challenge of paying a student loan debt, which is one of the significant hurdles to promoting college education.

By offering its “Good Neighbor, Great University” program, Northwestern University acts on a key recommendation of an all-University task force on diversity and inclusion. It hopes to increase diversity in the student population, making it easier for families of low to middle incomes to afford an education.

Also, by focusing on the immediate area of Northwestern’s campus, the program hopes to reach out to the students there. The school plans to begin providing this improved financial aid to 100 students in the Fall of 2011. And hopefully, in the future, this could be increased to 200.

Aside from Northwestern, other private schools have been reaching out to their own locales. Since 2008, colleges and universities have been making the move to offer a more affordable education to those in their areas. One of these is College of Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, which has been offering free tuition to city residents whose families earn less than $50,000 a year.

This change of attention to local education serves as an answer to merit-based scholarships from comparable and lesser schools which easily plucks away prospective students from institutions such as Northwestern University. But aside from that, I believe that this paradigm shift for colleges and universities is a turn for the better, given the projected dip in high school graduates over the next five years. Changes like these make education worth its salt for the common person.