Reply to Do you think our graduating seniors will have a normal college experience?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Spouse works at a top private college with a large endowment.  They are just waiting to see what the next fed budget looks like to start making cuts.  Expect some of the following:

--Cancellation/"Pauses" of all Phd programs
-- Getting rid entirely of less popular departments that can be deemed non-essential to the mission.  I think any ethnicity or women's studies likely on the chopping block, but also some humanities departments with low enrollment
--End of anything DEI
--End of merit aid
--End of any non-essential spending on student services

Again this is a well funded school, so expect the same or worse elsewhere.  
[/quote]

My DC is in at a mid-sized private schools with a decent merit aid package that is for 4 years assuming DC keeps up the grades.  Would those be in danger?[/quote]

My guess is that, unless they are on the brink of bankruptcy, schools will not rescind merit awards for current students.  In addition, because schools depend on partial-pay families middle income families (i.e., those who get merit), they will not want to scare off the next few years of applicants.

The real victims will be poor kids, who depend on full or almost full FA to attend. They will be SOL, I worry.  [/quote]

spend some time away from here and on r/academia or r/professors or r/askacademia or r/highereducation.
so many people inside universities commenting right now.[/quote]

Lots of people commenting lots of things. . . .

But the fact is, most schools are tuition dependent; they use 'merit' awards as a differential pricing mechanism. Rescinding merit would result in fewer (partial) tuition-paying students and a loss of income. Most schools outside of the T20 won't be able to afford that.  They need those families who are chasing merit.

Income-based financial aid, much of which goes to students from families with very limited ability to pay, will suffer.[/quote]I think most of the T75, maybe T100 can fill their class without merit, keeping in mind that many of those schools are nit need blind.[/quote]Not without accepting large numbers of far less competitive applicants.[/quote]

Which schools do you think are giving lots of merit?  We aren’t talking about financial aid, but merit.  I think you need to go outside T100 to fin schools that are giving everyone a discounted price.[/quote]

No, that is incorrect. My kids got merit offers from every school that accepted them, and none were out of the top 100. Also there are many excellent colleges out of the top 100. Ranking colleges is silly.[/quote]

same, so many "merit" discounts and we are full pay, at many schools! most of my D's private girls school senior class has gotten merit discounts at OOS publics and privates in the top 75. These are not top kids they are just above average, 1300-1400, 4.1 "weighted" which is not top 20%. I am not talking about the real, rare merit that schools like Vandy and Wake and UNC who give full or almost full rides to less than 5% of the admitted class. I mean schools like SMU, Fordham, and dozens of out of state publics that do it to lure Virginia kids. These girls all got defer/WL or rejected from UVA and VT and yet are getting "merit" elsewhere. All are full pay quite rich families. That is not real merit, it is discounts to lure full pay families and it will start happening even more as these non-elite schools struggle more than the elite ones. Every one of these girls would go to UVA in state or a similarly ranked school if they could get in, including mine who is still hopeful for a WL miracle.[/quote]

What's wrong with using merit to lure VA kids to other schools?  Mine has stats above those you are belittling. The merit makes the idea of experiencing a new area more enticing, even with in-state admissions offers in your pile.  [/quote]With Trump’s proposed cuts, universities will be losing tens to hundreds of millions per year.  They won’t be able to afford merit, and it isn’t a necessity,[/quote] You either don't understand what "merit aid" is or don't understand how markets work. "Merit aid" isn't a gift or a prize that the college can just decide not to grant with no adverse consequences, it's a targeted price cut designed to maximize revenue, consistent with the school's other constraints (primarily, the size of the class and its academic profile). For schools that are doing it right/well today, cutting merit aid (without loosening other constraints) would lead to a loss of revenue, as losses from the incremental kids declining their offers would outweigh the incremental gains from kids paying higher prices. If a college wants to cut merit aid while maintaining (or increasing) class size, it needs to loosen its acceptance standards and make more offers. [/quote]

Or it can stop trying to recruit middle class kids from Indiana and take some more rich kids from NYC.  Your assumption that current admissions are a meritocracy is kind of funny.[/quote]

DP: You are phenomenally ill informed.  Do you really think AOs at these schools are shunning large numbers of full-pay applicants from NYC? They are not.

Schools outside of the T20 or perhaps the T50, along with *maybe* the T10 SLACs, are attractive to uber-wealthy people.  They will be even less attractive if they begin to accept every Ben and Sarah from all the NY privates.

The discounts (called 'merit') outside the top tier have largely been used to get butts in the seats, not to augment geographical or social diversity.   There may be an odd applicant or two who would have gone to Mills and is unexpectly accepted at Sarah Lawrence, but not nearly enough to fill the class at most mid-range schools.[/quote]

Ma’am, what do you not understanding about cuts to universities that will numbers in tens and hundreds of millions of dollars, depending on the school.  Paying $5,000 to get a kid who scores 50 more points on the SAT or plays the tuba or is the best applicant from North Dakota isn’t going to be a priority when they are already cancelling Phd programs. There are going to be lots of cuts to non essential proehrams and merit aid is not essential to keep the school running.[/quote]

You are wrong.  These schools are not paying $5k to get a slighter-higher scoring kid.  They are paying to get ANY kid willing to pay tuition -$5K.  Merit is a business decision for colleges, and used to lure families that will pay some fraction of the full price.  It is not used to lure more attractive students. Just look at all the examples in this thread of mediocre, full-pay DC students who are offered merit at T50-100 schools.

Why you are so resistant to understanding pricing strategy, I do not know. [/quote]

Why are you so resistant to the fact that pricing strategy will be changing due to extreme budget cuts?

By the way, there were two (not a myriad) examples of schools that give merit to nearly everyone, they are both ranked 91.[/quote]

Certainly, many things will change.

However, I don't know how producers (i.e., colleges) can expect to find success while raising prices (i.e., average tuition) in the middle of recession/ much lowered consumer confidence, while offering a lower quality product. Contrary to what you seem to believe, non-elite schools are just not turning away that many full-pay students.

For all but the top schools, cutting merit would lead to LOWER total revenue.  To do so expecting an influx of full-pay students would be wishful thinking, not strategy. [/quote]

U guess we will see, you seem to be talking 　[/quote]
About schools that relied on marit to fill a class.  I submit that there are actually many more schools than you think that are currently giving merit to only 10 to 15 percent of the class.

Look at Maryland.  They could fill their class no problem without merit. [/quote]

Ok, I have been talking mostly about privates (which, last year, had on average something like 56% discount rate).

For state schools, some give merit to OOS candidates bc even with the merit discount, the OOS tuition is higher than what they'd get from an in state student.  That is certainly true of the best bargains.

Schools like University of Alabama, which gives full ride scholarships to all NMSF -- I will conceded that they could cut that and in the short-to-medium term increase revenue.

That said, I still maintain that most colleges that give "merit" to any more than 2% of the incoming students are calculating on how to maximize revenue, not trying to bring in marginally more attractive students. I think enrollment management algorithms are pretty sophisticated, and that dropping merit at these schools would hurt their bottom lines immediately.[/quote]

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