Reply to Can Oberlin ever change its image as a failed school?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Okay, so don't send your kid there. It's a fine school for the right kind of student. [/quote]

This is a good point.

From a marketplace perspective, the challenge the school faces is whether the school can continue to attract sufficient numbers of the “right kind of students”. The school is near the bottom in social mobility scores, an uncomfortable fact with a school with a huge emphasis on social justice. The school has very few Pell Grant recipients, maybe not so surprising for a private school in rural Ohio with a conservatory. Not sure what the school’s strategic plans are, but it is not in a secure place. Relying on the “right” full pay students is a fragile business model. And the rankings don’t help. [/quote]

RIGHT. Insider continues ranting. I meant to add something on class issues. Oberlin has always, or at least for the last 60 years, been far more middle-class than e.g. the WASP schools. Alumni going into academia, teaching, writing, social work etc. rather than Wall Street means they don't have as much money to give; the eternal radicalism has meant fewer of them want to. Lower endowment, lower alumni donation rate used to hit our US News ranking quite hard.

But lower endowment and fewer full-pay students have also meant that we are unable to support the same fraction of full-ride-equivalent financial aid students. So when everyone starts looking at Pell grant numbers as the prime indicator of economic diversity on campuses (hint: it's easy to look up), we were going to be screwed in the rankings again. Fewer poor students, but also fewer rich students. Amherst, e.g., is like 25% Pell and tons and tons of 1% or 0.1% families: hoo boy that's gonna be quite a social environment to navigate... for both sides. And leaves out a lot of families in prime DCUM ranges. [/quote]
Most WASP Alum have no interest in Wall Street. There's many other careers that can set you up for fulfilling pay. The issue is that going to a school like Oberlin teaches you that you can only have Wall Street or poverty.[/quote]

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