You can link it if you like - your call @Ro0shan It made me angrier than I already was about this.
That Chronicle of Higher Ed article was shared way back in post #9, and I actually speculated about the OP in post #15 as a possible explanation for why he had not returned to the thread. I personally don’t think it’s anything to worry about, although @Ro0shan, I think you should delete your surname as that may be a violation of CC’s terms of service.
Another article from Inside Higher Ed today:
OP, it’s a delight to read your posts, see the strength in your attitude. I don’t know if anyone on CC will have connections or influence to help the others. But I wish you all well. And as time passes, you graduate, and go on to your career, I hope you will find ways to help other kids from Nepal. You are an impressive group.
xx
@Ro0shan did UTT refund the money you sent them? I sure hope they have!
What a crazy story. UTT says:
“We want to compete for top-performing students, and that means recruiting international students,” Roebuck says. “We want to be part of the international community.”
Good luck with that now.
What a shame. Good luck at SUNY Korea OP. Glad NY could step up.
While inexcusable, UT-Tyler did offer a significantly reduced scholarship of $5,000 plus in-state tuition (worth about $12,500 per year) instead of the original offer. This was the first year that these full ride scholarships were offered by UT-Tyler.
UT-Tyler is honoring the full ride scholarships to 184 US students & to 35 internationals.
P.S. The unfunded gap appears to be at least $10,000 per year per student.
The problem is that these students from Nepal are in no position to pay $10K for room and board – and of course as international students would not be eligible for federal loans or federally-funded work-study.
Essentially these students were lured in by a false promise – maybe most wouldn’t have better options in any case, given that there isn’t all that much scholarship or need-based aid available for internationals at US colleges overall. But at least some would have cast a wider net.
And it makes no sense that any college wouldn’t be tracking its financial aid offers at the time they were being made. UT Tyler could have projected out how many international scholarships it wanted to award. They didn’t have to offer a single scholarship beyond their budget in the first place.
@calmom: Yes, I understand. Nevertheless, I thought that UT-Tyler’s response was worth sharing.
I get that – but I think it was too little, too late.
Bottom line they made a legal agreement with these students, secured by deposits. It’s a basic US legal concept that drives all contracts – offer & acceptance. The univerity offered each student $X contintent on the student accepting and securing the acceptance with $Y and $Z deposits on a specific date. So the deal was done at the time each student accepted and submitted deposit money.
I think if these had been US students with the ability to hire US lawyers and take the university to court… then the university would have been held accountable to its promise, at least for the first year. (It’s unclear whether there were further contingencies such as a minimum GPA requirement that could have justified discontinuance of the scholarships in subsequent years). Not because universities can’t ever change the terms of scholarship offers, but because in this instance there is the clear sequence of offer + acceptance – meaning the university either had to honor the agreement or make the students whole again by paying out the agreed amount.
Of course they screwed up in a way that would have been a big budget shortfall for the state of Texas… but that stuff happens. And given the time frame outlined by Roshan in his initial post (January offer/ immediate acceptance & deposit / April notification that the University wouldn’t honor its commitment) – it is a much bigger problem legally than it might have been if the university had notified the students earlier.
It looks to me that like the University administrators may have been aware they were offering more than they could afford to pay out, but underestimating yield. So they were waiting out to see how many responses they got by the March 1 deadline they had set, perhaps because they didn’t understand the economic and cultural factors at play when they offered this level of aid to the students from Nepal. So rather than get out in front of their self-created problem early on… they sat on their hands hoping it would go away on its own, in the misguided belief that a smaller fraction of the international students would accept the offer.
Note that all US students kept their scholarships - UT Tyler knew they’d be sued by US citizens but calculated international students couldn’t.
Just because they are international doesn’t mean they can’t sue.
UT could have offered alternatives, like deferring for a year, or doing online courses for a year.
Not legally, sure. But imagine you’re from a country where average wages are perhaps $150 a month. How do you sue a university 14,000miles away? Also the litigation cukteebs very American. Most people in other cultures don’t sue.
They can sue but it is probably cost prohibitive on an individual basis. Hard to find a lawyer they can afford to take it on. Though given the fact that the students have organized and assembled records to track the students, plus the high level of publicity — perhaps there is a Texas lawyer who would be willing to take on the case on pro bono or reduced fee basis.
The problem is that attorneys generally do not take on contract law suits on a contingency basis — and generally in a lawsuit on a contract, there is no right for the prevailing party to collect attorney fees absent a specific written contract clause allowing that claim. No punitive damages unless the attorneys can prove a cause of action for fraud as well as breach of contract.
The other problem is that lawsuits take time-- and these are young adults who want to be starting their educations now. So a lawsuit is unlikely to fix the problem. But yes, especially for the 40+ students still left without a viable alternative – a lawsuit might be the best option. Not because it would solve their problems now, but the funds from a settlement paid out later might be very helpful to the students and their families.
Any lawsuit wouldn’t be resolved by the start of fall semester, even if you’re a US kid, with access to US lawyers.
What Tyler or the UTsystem could have done is assign a few high staff to try to resolve this by contacting other colleges. Or funded some legit group working toward the goal of settling these kids successfully at other schools. I don’t see whether they did this.
The other things they could have done was back the scholarships off in the order they were accepted, rather than targeting everyone from Nepal. Yield is an entirely different concept from scholarships. You offer admission, and only offer scholarships up to the amount available. You then let other students know they are on a waiting list for the scholarship if it becomes available as others decline the offer. I would have thought that’s how the systems works, given their insistence on committing by March 1st. In an age when other colleges are scaling back their merit scholarships, I have to wonder what they were thinking. They wanted to entice more applicants, but their plan worked a bit too well, and they didn’t think to track the number of offers being made. Head should roll!
Actually, I think that colleges do typically offer more merit money than they expect to actually pay out, precisely becaue for US students merit money is used as an enticement to attract high performing student who are likely to be cross admitted to more prestigious, higher ranked colleges — so every year we see threads in April from students/parents weighing the choice of full pay at an Ivy vs. full ride scholarship at Less Impressive U. And American students who have no money for colleges but have the stats to qualify for generous scholarship money also would be eligible for generous need based aid from other schools – so the US student offered the Presidential scholarship will either have enough financial resources to be able to also consider more desirable schools, or alternatively may be weighing the merit award against generous need based aid from other colleges.
But obviously the situation changes when the aid is offered to international students unlikely to have other competitive options to consider. So I agree, for that pool of student, they should have tracked offers and once their limit was reached, admitted other students but waitlisted them for the scholarships money. Then the March 1 deadline would have made sense as a way of freeing up funds that could have then been offered to other students.
An excellent option. Disappointing still, but better than the basically nothing they did offer. And it seems workable - they did honor some 100 of these, why not defer the 65 or whatever to next year?
According to everything I’ve read these kids are being helped by volunteer counselors NOT from UT-T, and misc people who read about it and reached out, and each other. UT-T hasn’t done anything but offer the much lower scholarships.
Looks like the UT system as a whole just wants it to go away and has offered ho help at all to Tyler or to the students.
Logical, and totally workable given that they’re already engaging in the ethically dubious (I’m being generous) practice of requiring acceptance and deposit before May 1.
Another article -
https://www.texastribune.org/2018/05/12/university-texas-system-ut-campus-and-17-million-broken-promise-admitt/ which recaps the lame excuses from the UT system (whose chancellor is retiring at the end of this month and had ho higher ed experience prior to coming on).
And https://www.texastribune.org/2017/08/21/ut-system-oil-money-gusher-its-administration-and-trickle-students/ is about the 20 billion in oil money the system has, and how little it spends on financial aid.