How competitive is the Emory Scholars program? What percent of students receive it? How important are EC activities in the selection process?
It’s very competitive. You need both high stats and superb and unique ECs to have good shot. Most people who get it usually also get admitted to several top 10 schools (or could if they applied).
@juju96 I was selected as an Emory scholar this year but decided to go elsewhere. From what I know, about 30 kids receive the scholarship out of almost 8,000 applicants. It’s really a crap shoot.
I wouldn’t say “most”…maybe Duke?, because those admissions are such crapshoots that I would not necessarily say that most would get into those even if selected for the scholarship though the point of it is to get students who did or may get into one of those to take a second look.
It is very competitive. My daughter is valedictorian ( at a high school that is very well known to Emory) with high test scores and very strong leadership positions etc both inside and outside of school, excellent letters of rec etc and she did not get it. A few years ago kids from our HS like her did get it. My guess is that Emory is looking for other things that bring different types of diversity to the school ( geographic, choice of major, unique ECs, etc). My daughter, despite being a very strong student, brings nothing new to the table. She got accepted to Emory but will be attending another school that gave her much better aid.
@twogirls : I honestly feel like Emory is getting up there in endowment (approaching 7 billion, maybe surpassed by now). It should re-evaluate financial policy/find a way to raise or redistribute funds to it or even consider being slick by just giving very top admits a better fin. aid package (no one will know and some of the schools that have seen sharp increases in scores have done something). Again, we’re losing too many of the good ones.
^^Agreed with this. The way Emory’s financial has been structured makes it only generous to lower incoming families (mostly those making <$50k). The result is that you get mostly students from families making $250k+ who can afford to pay full COA, or the ones at the low end that have nearly their entire COA covered. Those in the middle usually get a pretty crappy deal and it’s students in these middle income families that usually have to turn Emory down unless they can get Emory Scholars or one of their parents is an Emory employee and they get the Courtesy Scholarship.
My COA was about 80k, including 24k in student loans including interest that I’ll pay off by March.
My family income was 90k.
Just wanted to chime in my anecdote.
I think Emory could do a much better job with financial aid, though. At the same time, college is a business. If people are paying for it, there’s little reason for them to offer aid to everyone who wants to attend.
@aluminum_boat : I would agree with your cynicism of the business model of highered in the general sense, but the fact is: Emory is or at least pretends to be a part of elite highered and thus has to compete (with other elite schools) if it wants to constantly say in state of the university reviews that it wants to enhance specific measures of student body quality including scores/NM finalists and thus call itself a peer to the other schools. Admittedly, Emory is somewhat more egalitarian than other elite institutions in the sense that it appears to be focusing on things like questbridge scholars and indeed uses Emory Advantage to get students in my income bracket, but then how can it reconcile this with the fact that it wants to improve the aforementioned metrics? I am personally comfortable with either model, but one has to admit that the “try to give more low/middle income access than peers” is kind of at odds with the others as we know that the very high scorers are biased towards those who are solidly middle class (not by the median household definition, but above I guess), upper middle class, or just flat out wealthy. That’s just a fact. It is really difficult to have it both ways. The only way to do so is to do like many of our competitors/peers have done and start to offer better financing to at least those in the middle class (I would say 100k-200k without, but without a significant amount of other assets I guess).
I would say avoid the Vanderbilt model (because faculty are apparently starting to bitch about how it and construction may be coming out academic/departmental budgets), but at the same time, our endowment is a bit larger so we could honestly handle it (although the same bitching happens at Emory…perhaps because Emory is a little to bloated administratively and thus a huge chunk of money also pays the unneeded bureaucrats, such as the millions of deans and assistant deans we have for even some trivial things). But regardless, they can’t expect to see student quality enhancements (by the metrics they set forth) that they envision without a change somewhere. Hell we’re lucky we had the chain of events that led to an increase in apps this year (perhaps the only school to drop in rank and continue to get more apps)…can we hold on to such gains? I mean, why should more people apply when a) odds aren’t great(though better than elsewhere) and b) even if they get in, even the best get screwed by fin. aid and will ultimately get a better package from another good school (top 45 or something).
The current policy basically says: “We don’t necessarily want the best among those who are middle class and higher”
My daughter loved Emory and I thought it was a great fit, but UNC-CH gave us a better price and my daughter loves it as well ( she loves their school of Public Health, which provides half of the classes in the medical school). UNC only uses the FAFSA EFC ( despite being a profile school) and meets full need based on fafsa- which works out better for us. Additionally, UNC-CH counts grad school as having 2 in college, so our FAFSA EFC will be cut in half for 3 out of the 4 years. Emory only counts undergrad ( not grad school) as having 2 in college and uses the profile to calculate EFC- which looks at home equity. If my daughter attended Emory we would only get FA for 1 year; at UNC we get FA for 3 years. I can’t afford 3 years of full pay at Emory, unfortunately. We fall into that lovely category of being too poor to pay $60,000 a year but too rich for Emory to give us FA beyond the first year when I have a freshman and a senior in college. It stinks to be in the FA donut hole.
Gee, I wonder if Emory is a school that assumes that students in grad school are those who got into more elite ones where they give a significant portion of funding, and what about professional school? Where most parents who can remotely afford to, end up paying a solid portion (because you know, prof. schools rarely give scholarships or the amazing fin. aid needed to students. Usually a huge loan is required even after the top ones give aid).
UNC and Vanderbilt count grad school as two in college. Emory and UVA do not. Princeton told us " it depends" but she did not apply to Princeton. And UNC is one of the few ( maybe the only) that meets full need based on FAFSA, which tends to have a much lower EFC than those that recalculate using the profile. Who knows- maybe schools do not realize that there are a lot of grad schools that are not funded? There are many grad programs and professional schools that are being funded, at least partially, by parents- but Emory does not take that into consideration. Maybe that will change but I could not risk it.