My daughter sent me an article about Michigan and its efforts to attract lower income students. It also touches on the issue of many flagships having to have a lot of out of state students in order to bring in the $.
“…Like many other flagship state universities that were founded to provide a leg up for the common man, Michigan has become a school largely for students with means. A full 10 percent of its student body comes from families in the top 1 percent of earners, according to data from the Equality of Opportunity Project. Just 16 percent come from families in the bottom 60 percent of earners combined. The median income of parents of students at the university is $156,000, roughly three times the median income of Michigan families…”
The article states that students from families making $65,000 or less receive free tuition which is great. However if room and board charges are an estimated $12,000, that to me is still cost prohibitive.
University of Michigan seems to be like some highly selective private universities – admits relatively few students from low income families, but gives them (at least the in-state ones) good financial aid.
According to https://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg02_tmpl.jhtml?schoolId=379 , University of Michigan does consider “relation with alumnus” (which tips the admission class away from first generation and low income students) and “level of applicant’s interest” (which tips the admission class toward those in more advantaged high schools with better college counseling to play the “interest” game better).
Also, the article mentions a University of Michigan marketing campaign that emphasizes that FAFSA has no fee, and fee waivers are available for CSS Profile. But @juillet mentioned that, as a student growing up in a low income family, she was suspicious of CSS Profile because of the fee in the first place and did not apply to any schools that required it – see http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/20940674#Comment_20940674 . In addition, it requires the non-custodial parent information when the parents are divorced, so financially-needy students with uncooperative divorced parents are shut out.
I agree. They (the university) talk the talk but don’t walk the walk.
Over the summer I was talking to a Pell eligible bright student about colleges. He has been part of a very good college readiness program. He was going to apply to the nearby directional with no full rides and it sounded like no where else. I questioned why he wasn’t applying to a nearby LAC that meets 100% need. He kind of waffled in his answer. I said it would probably end up costing less. I do know he has since interviewed there. I don’t know if it made a difference hearing it from someone outside of his usual contacts.
The initial sticker shock is a barrier to reading further and running the NPC.
I have to disagree with you. They do walk the walk. I met a number of low income students from Benton Harbor, Flint, Detroit etc. who had PA to Ross at UM. These were high academic achievers in bad/mediocre in-state public schools and good kids in general. They started school a semester early to prepare them for normal classes. I can’t comment about the CSS, etc., but there were about 30 kids in the group. There are a number of outreach programs and have been for many years (such as the older Focus Hope to Michigan engineering program)
Undeniably there are a lot of well off families who attend/attended UM, but that is typical and expected in higher tier universities in general.
For comparison, Pell grant percentages of frosh and all undergraduates for a number of more selective state flagships and “second flagships”:
12/12 University of Virginia
12/14 University of Wisconsin - Madison
14/16 Virginia Polytechnic and State University
15/15 University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
17/20 The Ohio State University
19/19 University of Minnesota - Twin Cities
19/21 North Carolina State University
19/22 University of Washington - Seattle
21/22 University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill
22/21 University of Illinois - Urbana Champaign
23/23 Michigan State University
23/30 University of California - Berkeley
24/22 Texas A&M University - College Station
24/24 University of Texas - Austin
25/28 University of Florida
26/31 Florida State University
30/35 University of California - Los Angeles
The data would be MUCH less biased and instructive if it were only for instate students. Of course OOS at UM come from some $$$$–just look at the costs.
My daughter is at Michigan and they definitely have made a push for more economic diversity. My daughter is in a sorority and there the amount of money many kids have is astounding. Then in her small program there are many kids who are receiving full tuition aid. What there seem to be relatively few of are true middle income kids ( which my daughter thought we were and I had to explain that we were most definitely not and that she was getting a very skewed view…
I agree with @maya54. I sat with some UofM '15s last month and the school they describe feels very different than the school I attended in the 1980s. They could talk about wealthy and upper middle class students as well as very low income students. What they couldn’t describe is the kids whose parents earn $50K or so. This left them flummoxed.
I am from Michigan. UM accepts qualified students from area schools, but there are a lot of schools in lower income areas in Michigan where the students are not necessarily prepared to thrive given the academic level expected of students at UM.
In addition, it’s hard for lower income kids (and middle income kids) who are accepted to afford the school. For lower income kids, aid is good in terms of helping with tuition … but living expenses are not covered. For middle income kids, there is little or no “free” aid. While it’s relatively expensive, UM is still a state school & therefore “relatively” affordable for those with higher incomes. Back in the dinosaur days, I did not apply because I knew I couldn’t afford it. When D was in college, we paid less at an expensive private college than we would have at UM.
By the way, UM does not provide free tuition to families earning $80,000/year. Grant aid is based on EFC right now, and they do use Profile. They will kick it up a notch mid-year: “Starting in January 2018, any current or future in-state student whose family earns $65,000 or less will be eligible for free tuition for four years.”
All top schools, including Michigan, are looking hard for poor, smart kids. The unfortunate reality is there is not a large pool of poor kids that are academically qualified (Grades, AP classes, SAT scores, etc). Even among the small pool , a chunk of them don’t apply to top schools because of a cultural disconnect…they don’t feel comfortable in places like Ann Arbor. My daughter is an OOS student at UM, but her friends from Michigan report that in high school, few outside the top 10% of the class applied to Michigan…more to the point, many didn’t even want to go to Michigan…they preferred Michigan St or other state schools. Michigan is making a serious effort to increase socio-economic diversity, but there is no easy solution to this growing problem at Michigan and most other highly selective schools.
@dtrain1027 , it’s not just urban kids, UM is making efforts in rural areas of Michigan (where incomes are a lot lower). It’s very uncommon for kids from the UP and northern LP to attend ; many prefer Northern, M Tech, MSU or schools on the western side of the state. I attended both in the 80’s and 00’s and the student body is a lot different and significantly upgraded. The stats of students in engineering is absolutely remarkable. Even the professors are amazed that the ‘typical’ engineering student arrives with a STEM heavy curriculum, 3.9+ GPA and a 34-36 ACT, and is in the top 0.5% of all students. Our local paper publishes the college intentions of the top performing students ; 70-80% of the go to UM engineering. So I don’t think UM could do much better in terms of the student body.
One interesting point is the stats of students in Michigan no longer resembles a bell curve ; the tail of kids with 33+ ACT scores has grown remarkably in the past decade while the average has dropped a bit. So we are seeing a lot of competition among highly motivated students, and less from others. That isn’t surprising considering the amount of first and second generation talent whose parents immigrated to work in the engineering, medical and tech centers of Detroit and GR, many of whom are Asian.
For Michigan resident student in LS&A with married parents with income of $50,000 and minimal assets, it suggests a net price of $8,708, after subtracting a $2,570 Pell grant and an $18,250 University of Michigan grant from the list price of $29,528 (which includes $14,826 tuition and $11,198 room and board in the dorm, plus books and misc.). It also suggests covering the $8,708 net price with $4,328 student loan, $3,000 student work, leaving $1,380 remaining cost (presumably money from parents).
I.e. University of Michigan is within financial range for a student from a low to middle income family, if s/he can get admitted and is not blocked by an uncooperative divorced parent situation or some such.
I don’t think it’s any secret that there is a larger than normal population of very wealthy kids at UofM. It’s been that way for a decade almost two. Wealthy Michiganders haul their kids back from their east coast boarding schools and send them to UofM. Who couldn’t do that? The uni does have initiatives to try and increase increase diversity. But it’s probably hard to turn your back on those coastal families with big bucks and the wealthy internationals and they don’t seem to be increasing in-state rates of kids to add economic diversity. Michigan State has it’s share of wealthy internationals and others, too, but their frat life is low key by miles from AA where the frat/sorority thing is big with the wealthy kids and, the MSU campus is low key in general, and the wealth (other than the internationals who drive Maserati) are less noticeable than in AA. There are plenty of kids in AA that come from the burbs around the Ann Arbor/Detroit corridor that are firmly middle class, it’s just for some reason the wealthy seem more abundant and the suburb kids that are at UofM are probably not $50 grand a year kids.
Michigan Tech also has an excellent engineering program, great recruiting and I know 4 or 5 kids that are friends of my kids’ who chose it over UofM because they don’t like the campus in AA, they weren’t interested in frat stuff, the cost of living is lower and the “love” for engineering students of MTech is great and the profs really teach at MTech. So engineering is probably an anomaly at UofM for representation. The really wealthy kids aren’t probably concentrated in engineering - they are all gunning for Ross or LSA. It’s expensive to get a kid to the UP if you don’t live there so that doesn’t help low income kids who want to be engineers… I think UofM balances as best they can…hard to be so majorly selective and balance income diversity.
The Pell grant percentage (frosh/all-undergraduates) comparison chart, with additional highly selective private(italicized) and public universities added.
09/11 College of WIlliam and Mary
10/10 University of Notre Dame
10/10 Wake Forest University
10/11 Tufts University
11/12 Carnegie Mellon University
11/16 Georgia Institute of Technology
12/11 University of Chicago
12/12 University of Virginia
12/13 Duke University
12/14 University of Wisconsin - Madison
12/15 Pennsylvania State University - Main
13/12 Georgetown University
13/12 Johns Hopkins University
13/15 Stanford University
13/15 Brown University
13/16 University of Pittsburgh
14/13 University of Pennsylvania
14/14 Vanderbilt University
14/16 Virginia Polytechnic and State University
14/19 University of Maryland - College Park
15/14 Dartmouth College
15/14 Northwestern University
15/15 Rice University
15/15 University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
15/15 Cornell University
15/17 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
16/11 Harvard University
16/17 Clemson University
17/14 Yale University
17/15 Princeton University
17/18 Purdue University
17/20 The Ohio State University
17/22 University of Southern California
18/21 University of Connecticut
18/22 Columbia University
19/19 University of Minnesota - Twin Cities
19/20 Emory University
19/21 North Carolina State University
19/22 University of Georgia
19/22 University of Washington - Seattle
19/22 University of Massachusetts - Amherst
21/21 New York University
21/22 University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill
22/21 University of Illinois - Urbana Champaign
23/23 Michigan State University
23/30 University of California - Berkeley
24/22 Texas A&M University - College Station
24/24 University of Texas - Austin
25/28 University of Florida
26/31 Florida State University
26/35 University of California - San Diego
28/31 Rutgers University - New Brunswick
30/35 University of California - Los Angeles
34/40 University of California - Davis
39/39 University of California - Santa Barbara
41/45 University of California - Irvine
Note that University of Michigan clusters with mostly private universities. Note also that a similar article could be written for flagships in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Maryland.
This story is not just about Michigan and not just about the high cost of supposedly public institutions.
From one of the last paragraphs, which I found very telling:
Universities like Michigan are finally waking up, but their reputations have already suffered. According to recent Gallup polling, very few working-class Americans have faith in higher education. Just 49 percent of households making less than $75,000 a year and identified as Democrats had confidence in higher education. The figure was 34 percent for Republicans.
Since intelligence and income are highly correlated I don’t see this as a solvable problem, if it is a problem at all. We know lots of parents in skilled trades who send their kids to Michigan too. They aren’t making $50K/yr either, mostly well north of $100K.
There are plenty of smart kids who come from typical income and lower income families, and the reasons they do not attend UM are often not the ones you imply. For example, the study at https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2013a_hoxby.pdf found that 39% of high achieving students (as defined by high GPA + high SAT/ACT) were in the lower half income. Sure 39% is lower than 50% that wold occur in a random distribution, but there are still plenty of good students who do not come from wealthy families. The study also found that a large portion of these high achieving low income students did not apply to any selective colleges. Compared to higher income students, they were instead far more likely to instead apply to a 2-year college and/or college located within 10 miles from home…