<p>"Some posters have stated that they feel that NEU is careful in the distribution of their merit aid to those that they feel will attend."</p>
<p>This would include me and I do continue to believe this although still pretty clueless about how it all works. But the more I learn about enrollment management the more convinced I am that each financial aid package, including merit aid, is individually tailored depending on the applicant and the assumptions that can be made about that individual during the application process (even though I can't specifically identify how this is done). Colleges, like any other business that uses marketing research, can make many assumptions about people that I cannot even imagine but certainly they have methods to determine income level of the applicant, the likelihood of their attending (and I suspect, also the likelihood of attending if accepted in Honors), etc., just from their application and without looking at actual financial aid applications, and they can very effectively use this information to their benefit, to get the best pool they can, at the least cost.</p>
<p>I was told by the financial aid office that my S's overall package was basically the top amount they could offer and he is not in the Honors program (aren't financial aid packages somewhere in the upper 60% percentile of cost?); this includes $11,000 merit, $6000 grant, plus Perkins and Stafford loans. Obviously, they looked at many factors to come up with their initial offer, SATs, geography, high school and hs record, other schools he applied to (I am pretty sure he had listed them--I hadn't discovered CC at that point in time and was still pretty naive about all of this! And at that time he wasn't even looking outside our state (Minn) so NEU would not have known for sure if he was applying to any of their competitors). </p>
<p>When I think about it, how many times have I filled out a market survey which lists my income level? I expect schools can get their hands on that info fairly easily...so, if they made certain assumptions about what income level we were at by where we lived, hs school attended etc, they can then predict what grant/loan amounts we would probably be offered, and then come up with a merit award that together would attract an applicant like him who would also help them increase their rankings since SATs were above the engineering school average. </p>
<p>Had he made it into Honors, would he have been offered less merit aid, and if less would we still have accepted? And would Honors housing have made a difference? Not really sure what we would have done...and not really sure that Honors v non-Honors is even a factor for the school, but obviously someone with an income a few thousand higher than me would look at a package a few thousand less than S's a lot differently (I know I would), so a school could realistically offer lesser amounts to SOME Honors applicants and the same assumptions about probability of acceptance would still hold true. It could even be that decisions about merit aid are made without considering Honors program status... </p>
<p>Also, NEU probably has very realistic expectations as far as their strategic plan goes and how they want to go about luring in top students. I think many still use NEU as a safety but perhaps unrealistically, based on its reputation in the past (eg 1990s) when it was a commuter/safety school, and so applicants may be overlooking their rapid increase in rankings over just the past 5 yrs (partner in my firm went to NEU years ago for undergrad and when I asked him his opinion about the school he laughed and advised against it). In order to increase your rankings wouldn't it be more effective to try to draw more matches so increased rankings are real/across the board, rather than focusing only on Honors students unless they were also willing to offer something like at Ariz State Univ, for example which has a very strong and large Honors College (as opposed to program) and can offer full-rides for NMFs etc but overall stats for the rest of the school are still quite low, although on par with similar state schools.) NEU being a smaller private school would need to use a very different strategy to improve overall and unfortunately I don't think that is necessarily the most to the brightest.</p>
<p>Schools often use housing as a tuition discount device although I'm not really sure that Honors housing makes a big difference in NEU's merit aid offers, I think that is more a draw (same as having an Honors program is a draw in and of itself) to compete with similar schools - esp since similar housing is available after the first year (another draw). But then again, for many people it may be a big enough perk, all other things being equal.</p>
<p>JMO, of course and would love to hear from others on this topic.</p>