Jeff Selingo on people skipping "target schools"

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01/25/2024 11:23

Subject: Jeff Selingo on people skipping "target schools"

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Anonymous

Selingo notes that people are increasingly disinclined to pay for "second tier" schools that don't give merit - if they don't get into "Ivy Plus" then they go straight to state public flagship. He thinks this will become very common for people in the $160-220k HHI range (donut holes). I agree. If you don't get top-drawer prestige, why pay the top-drawer price?

Today, let me start with the idea of “skip-over schools.”

This is a trend I’m finding among those families who start the college search with an “Ivy Plus or bust” mentality. When that acceptance doesn’t come in as expected, then they skip over what most of us would consider the “next ring” of selective colleges—especially if they care more about money than prestige.

I’m reluctant to name names yet of these skip-over schools without fully absorbing the quantitative data, but think of privates just outside of the top 40 or 50 in the national rankings, outside the top 20 or 25 among liberal arts colleges, and publics in those tiers that don’t give out boatloads of merit aid, which makes their net price too high for some families.

Many of the schools in what I’ll call the “second ring” have been able to maintain a healthy proportion of full-pay or close to full-pay families after they are rejected from Ivy Plus institutions. That is, until now.

“Only about thirty private colleges in this country can feel assured that the vastly disrupted ‘college choice’ paradigm does not spell trouble for them,” a former vice president of enrollment at one of these second ring schools told me. “For everyone else on the survival spectrum, the next ten years will not be pretty.”

You might recall this graphic below from an issue of Next last July that shows the rapid deterioration of full payers at institutions in the middle—those ranked 51-100. Even the Top 50 group has seen some decline, which likely is only going to get worse for those campuses that are just inside that group.

What I’m finding in my book research is that some families are increasingly skipping over this next ring of institutions from the very top because they don’t get good offers of merit aid. So, instead, the families chase dollars from a set of institutions deeper in the rankings or the kid heads off to an honors college at a flagship public with a low net price (sometimes zero) and lots of perks, like early access to course registration and sponsored research projects with faculty.

This idea of let’s try for Ivy U., and then if not, State U. has been common in some places like Georgia and Florida for decades, ever since they put in place their lottery scholarships in the late 1990s. I remember reporting a story in Athens, Ga. for The Chronicle of Higher Education where faculty members noted to me all the new cars students were driving. When those students didn’t get into Harvard or Penn, then a top-ranked Georgia student would stay in-state, take the Hope scholarship, and head off to UGA or Georgia Tech with a new car and their family savings intact.

This trend of skip over-schools might accelerate in the coming years, especially among families in the top 5-10% of income ($158,200 to $222,400 a year).

Why?

As Gail Cornwell recently reported in New York magazine, data released last year that compared parents’ tax filings and applicants’ test scores with admission and enrollment records showed “that chances of admission are lowest for children of the top 5 to 10 percent” at Ivy-Plus colleges. So instead of applying to the next ring of institutions, will they simply skip over them and say “show me the money”?

Bottom line: As families put together their college lists, it seems they have “reaches” and “safeties,” but they’re almost skipping over target schools in their quest for merit.

There is another reason they might be skipping over target schools: they don’t even know what the term means these days. The rising number of deferrals and outright rejections we’re seeing right now at campuses that would have been a target school two or three years ago—places like Florida State, Clemson, Furman, U. of South Carolina, for instance—illustrates “there’s no such thing as a target school anymore,” Allison Slater Tate, a college counselor in Florida told me.