<p>The</a> Best Class Money Can Buy - Magazine - The Atlantic</p>
<p>Interesting article about how many colleges use "enrollment management" to attract students who will pay close to full pay and the students with the highest scores they need to do well in US News rankings. There are consulting firms working for many colleges that specialize in developing these policies.</p>
<p>Excerpts:</p>
<p>"To decide how to parcel out financial aid, the enrollment manager puts admitted students onto a grid with need on one axis and academic ability on the other. This is called "segmenting the class" or "table analysis." The school then adjusts financial aid for students by group, with the goal of increasing the "yield rate" for the most desirable prospectstypically academic stars and those willing to pay most or all of the tuition ("full-pays"). A school with a revenue problem puts its money toward rich students; a school that's going after prestige pushes it toward students with high SAT scores. Where the school might be paying more than is necessary to attract a candidate (for a wealthy student with low grades, for instance, or an in-state student with few other options), aid is cut accordingly. ... more-advanced enrollment managers, and all the major consulting companies, use a statistical method called logistical regression to determine how each group will respond to a different award, based on how students have behaved in the past. </p>
<p>...Schools and consultants combine test scores, grades, and class rankings from the testing services and students' high schools with demographic and financial data purchased from a credit-reporting agency such as Equifax. All this information is eventually reduced to the seven or eight variables that best predict a student's responsiveness to price. </p>
<p>In the least desirable categories (usually poor students with lower test scores) accepted students are often "gapped"given a fraction of what they would need to attend, even after the maximum possible contribution from their families. (A school interested mainly in revenue might even give more money to a wealthy student with lousy scores than to a better-qualified poor student.) Some schools leave gaps as high as $34,000 a year. From 1995 to 1999 the average unmet need for families earning over $60,000 either stayed constant or narrowed slightly; for families earning $40,000 to $60,000 it grew by three percent; and for families earning under $40,000 it grew by 27 percent. Some schools have no choice but to gap students once they've exhausted their aid budgets. Others will intentionally gap poor students so severely that they decide not to attend in the first placeor, if they enroll, the long hours of work-study and mounting debts eventually force them to drop out. Called "admit-deny," this practice allows a college to keep poor students out while publicly claiming that it doesn't consider a student's finances when making admissions decisions."</p>
<p>The article also says enrollment management is based upon airfare pricing strategies. The article also says some kids who clearly express a strong first choice for a college could actually be harming their chances for merit aid.</p>