<p>
[quote]
This would make sense if the financial aid money came out of admissions' pocket, but it doesn't. They're not in charge of the budget. It's not their problem if the fin aid costs a lot. They have no incentive to be a little bit need-aware.
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The very basics of their survival are in question. There will be a cut in admissions' budget if they won't react by taking in more full paying students.</p>
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Bottom Line: Will this help full paying student getting acceptances from the Ivies or not?
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</p>
<p>Somehow, I'm not surprised that is your question. :D</p>
<p>"The very basics of their survival are in question."</p>
<p>Survival? Harvard has $25 billion and is 372 years old. It's not going anywhere, and it can't function without an undergraduate admissions office. There's no survival issue.</p>
<p>Harvard, or any other college, can easily change their expenditures on financial aid without formally considering need merely by tweaking their admissions criteria. For example, want more wealthy students? Just give more weight to ECs that are most common among folks with money, tennis for example. </p>
<p>Want more prep school kids, who are often full pay? Just emphasize sports common at prep schools that are rare at less wealthy public schools, such as crew, lacrosse or squash.</p>
<p>Ha, now I feel righteous that my sophomore D's full pay OOS tuition dollar is going to an underfunded state flagship. Just a BRWK, Bowdoin? Only middling, Middlebury? Waitlisted by Wesleyan? Bet not if she applied this year. Adcom passion will be about getting paid.</p>
<p>Bwahahahahahaha.</p>
<p>One thing I think that is being missed is that the Universities that are going to be the most affected by this are the ones that are the richest who because of this wealth have become most dependent on endowment income for their operations. Over a third of Harvard's and Princeton's costs are covered by endowments. With a certain percentage of their costs being fixed these Universities are looking at cuts far greater that 10 or 15% to bring income in line with expenses.</p>
<p>I agree with Interesteddad that the real value of these endowments have declined far more than 30%. If you look at the list of assets these Private Equity firms (Cerberus, Lubert-Adler, Sun Capital) own that Universities have invested in its not pretty.</p>
<p>It's funny how Harvard's estimate of endowment losses quietly went from the headline grabbing 22% last week to 30% on Monday. I guess the investment office worked all weekend counting private equity beans!</p>
<p>
[quote]
One thing I think that is being missed is that the Universities that are going to be the most affected by this are the ones that are the richest who because of this wealth have become most dependent on endowment income for their operations.
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</p>
<p>Yes and no. It's not like the big endowment schools aren't getting the same tuition revenues as the small endowment schools. They are.</p>
<p>The big endowment payouts simply allow them to spend more each year on things the small endowment schools would consider unaffordable luxuries (like racial diversity, for example). So, the big endowment schools can find a lot of cutting to do before they hit bone. The small endowment schools are into bone and muscle right away.</p>
<p>Plus, let's not overlook one obvious fact: a big endowment is still bigger than a small endowment, even if both are smaller than they were last year.</p>
<p>The schools that will have the most breathing room are schools with big per student endowments who had relatively low percentage payouts over the last couple of years of bull markets. These schools have room for their percentage payouts to increase, thus partially offsetting the market value declines. For example, if you paid out 4% of your endowment last year, you can go the top of your range at 5% and offset 20% declines in the market while maintaining level dollar spending.</p>
<p>The Ivy's have said they are still going to be need blind and I can't imagine them giving up on their diversity initiatives. I think the endowment has allowed Harvard and Princeton to spend huge sums on teachers(variable cost) and my guess is that it is also paying for mortgages on their billion dollar dorms(fixed cost). Poorer schools haven't had this luxury and it isn't built into their cost structure.
Leaves only 2 things to do-massive cuts in teacher pay or teachers(sorry professors) and huge tuition increase to those that can pay.</p>
<p>Hanna: The survival of the admission officers and not Harvard in question if there will be cuts then it will first affect the admission office before professors. So admission officers will try to accept as many full paying as possible.</p>
<p>sm74,</p>
<p>Let's dispell a few myths:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>That being need blind means one does not pay attention to the mix of full pay versus subsidized. You can be need blind and still do things to affect how much financial aid is payed out. Colleges do this all the time. For example, Princeton stopped actively recruiting at urban HS back in the late 1990s, with a curious impact on Jewish student enrollment. </p></li>
<li><p>That diversity costs a lot of money. Harvard, to use one example, heavily recruits among wealthy black families outside the US (Carribean, mostly, to my knowledge). It enrolls a very small number of poor, urban african americans. Wealthy Latinos? Look to kids of Cuban emigres, which these colleges do. </p></li>
</ol>
<p>Perhaps the biggest myth of all is that admissions is the meritocratic noble activity that it is presented to be in newsbites and statements at meetings. If that were so, the head of Harvard admissions would not be having meetings with the parents of Park School students (a prestigious pre-k through 8 private school in Brookline, MA, and a feeder for the HS that are in turn feeders for Harvard). I can guarantee you that no public elementary school in the Boston area has ever had such a meeting. </p>
<p>These schools do a lot of things aimed at maintaining image, and making sure the "right" students apply. We should not forget that.</p>
<p>
[quote]
2. That diversity costs a lot of money. Harvard, to use one example, heavily recruits among wealthy black families outside the US (Carribean, mostly, to my knowledge). It enrolls a very small number of poor, urban african americans. Wealthy Latinos? Look to kids of Cuban emigres, which these colleges do.
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</p>
<p>Careful not to substitute individiual cases for the big picture. It's no myth that diversity costs money. </p>
<p>a) Find me a school where any minority group (African American, Latino/a, Asian American) qualifies for financial aid at a lower rate than white students. I don't know of such a school.</p>
<p>b) It takes a very concerted recruiting effort (and/or paying the Questbridge recruiting bounty) to increase the enrollment of minority students at elite colleges. Just to give an example, Swarthmore requires that x percentage of their high school recruiting visits are to minority prevalent schools. They fly hundreds of minority students to a multi-day fall visit event at the colleges expense. They pay airfare for accepted minority students to attend the spring multiday campus visit event. They host a weeklong orientation in the summer which, until two years ago when the Supreme Court decisions forced a change, were limited to minority freshmen. I stand by the statement that diversity costs money. I think if you plot the diversity at elite colleges (or among any tier of similar colleges), you will see a strong correlation between diversity and per student endowment.</p>
<p>ID, I said "a lot of money" you said "diversity costs money". </p>
<p>Perhaps you see a difference? </p>
<p>Perhaps you could note that your perceptions on this issue have been molded by the PR of the universities doing the activities? </p>
<p>Perhaps you know that no university publishes the detailed financial aid (or detailed admissions information) that would allow us to draw the conclusions you ask?</p>
<p>Perhaps you know that some of the same recruiting efforts go to athletes? (not to mention a two for one opportunity)?</p>
<p>Perhaps you know that asians don't belong in this list, because the proper term is under represented minority (URM)?</p>
<p>ID, please just face the facts. Some colleges do indeed engage in noble efforts to attract and enroll URM. But even more get a lot of press for engaging in activities to recruit URM. Even more recruit URM that are not poor, and perhaps don't even get financial aid. Or have we forgotten that not every latin american, not every latino comes from a poor family? In fact, a careful reading of recent admissions results and initiative that Harvard and others have published tells us that a poor (which in Harvard's view, is anyone with a family income below the national median, one half the country!) URM that is academically good enough to be enrolled is a rare thing indeed. If you disagree, please show me your data.</p>
<p>newmass, I don't think tweaking policies on diversity or needs blind are going to have a meaningful impact on the problem Harvard is facing. Recent articles state that private equity focused internationally is not even getting bids in the secondary market at 25 cents on the dollar. Given the endowments focus on alternative investments, I think the endowment could easily go below $10 billion which will translate into a $1 billion a year reduction in income from the endowment.. </p>
<p>I think the first thing you are going to see is every applicant is going to have to pay more regardless of income level. But even if everyone pays $10,000 more thats still only $60million a year. </p>
<p>Translated another way if you assume $1million gets you 3 teachers with benefits you would have to eliminate 3,000 teachers to make up the $1 billion.</p>
<p>As way of understanding how much total undergrad aid the well-endowed Ivies are giving I looked for some data. Found this page on Princeton's website:</p>
<p>Princeton</a> - Financial Aid Information and Application Instructions - How to Pay for College</p>
<p>Princeton's total aid to the admitted (not the matriculated) class of 2011 alone appears to be about $28.67 million. Perhaps the financial wizards who have been posting here can put that amount in context for us and give us some idea of how much of this aid actually ends up being paid for matriculants. Note that Princeton is giving some aid to almost any student who family income is $150k or less.</p>
<p>There is an almost perfect U-shaped curve in the distribution of admittants applying for aid, with clear spikes at the extremes, even though Princeton is giving aid to 100% of the second lowest income group and the grants for that group are almost as large as for the poorest group. We can't be certain, but given other research I saw that suggests that higher income students are less likely to apply for aid in the first place, this data suggests that Princeton is already admitting a surprisingly high proportion of applicants with family incomes of $200k or more and is doing something that dramatically favors the lowest income group in admissions.</p>
<p>Princeton is offering 29% of its aid to the 17% of its admittants who apply for aid from the lowest income group (presumably every one of those admitted), with the equilibrium point at the $100-120k income bracket, where 9% of those who apply for aid receive 9% of the aid funds.</p>
<p>Anybody care to speculate about what this data tells us about Princeton's finances and admissions policies?</p>
<p>newmass:</p>
<p>You've got too many items for me to address in one sitting, so I reserve the right to extend and revise my remarks:</p>
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ID, I said "a lot of money" you said "diversity costs money".
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<p>Diversity costs money. How much diversity do you want? How much money do you have to spend? It's no coincidence that the 3 universities with the biggest endowments are the three most diverse universities on the east coast and that the 3 LACs with the most diversity have the three biggest endowments on the east coast. </p>
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Perhaps you could note that your perceptions on this issue have been molded by the PR of the universities doing the activities?
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</p>
<p>No. They are molded by paying fairly close attention to diversity numbers for quite a few years.</p>
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Perhaps you know that no university publishes the detailed financial aid (or detailed admissions information) that would allow us to draw the conclusions you ask?
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</p>
<p>I don't pay a lot of attention to university institutional research, but the data I'm talking about is published. Here, for example, is Swarthmore's minority percentages for this fall (Oct 2008) and - in parenthesis) the percentage of financial aid recepients at the school:</p>
<p>African American 9% (15% of aid students)
Asian American 17% (20% of aid students)
Latino/A 11% (15% of aid students)
Native American (inc in Unknown/Other)
White 44% (32% of aid students)
Unknown/Other 12% (10% of aid students)
International 7% (8% of aid students)</p>
<p><a href="http://www.swarthmore.edu/Documents/administration/ir/RaceSex.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.swarthmore.edu/Documents/administration/ir/RaceSex.pdf</a>
<a href="http://www.swarthmore.edu/Documents/administration/ir/FAStats.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.swarthmore.edu/Documents/administration/ir/FAStats.pdf</a></p>
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Perhaps you know that some of the same recruiting efforts go to athletes? (not to mention a two for one opportunity)?
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</p>
<p>For Division III and Ivy League Div I, athletics is very heavily titlted towards white students. The fact that athletics undermines diversity recruiting is mentioned in just about every college's report on athletic recruiting. It's a well-established fact.</p>
<p>Here's some data from Williams. The percentage of the student body and the percentage of varsity athletes from the combined classes of 2004-2007:</p>
<p>**African American 9% (5% of athletes)
Asian American 9% (3% of athletes)
Latino/A 8% (3% of athletes)
White 70% (86% of athletes)
International 5% (2% of athletes)</p>
<p>Low income soc-ec tag 14% (8% of athletes)**</p>
<p>I can't give you a link. It's from a non-public Williams Diversity Self-Study that was posted to the web by mistake and removed the following day. </p>
<p>Swarthmore faces exactly the same issues with diversity and athletic recruiting. It's one of the major reasons they dropped football -- they could not provide enough admissions slots for football and diversity. From their 2006 athletic progress report:</p>
<p>
[quote]
The percentage of athletic recruits who self-identify as Asian American, African American, Hispanic, or Native American is below the percentage applying to the class as a whole, 19 percent as opposed to 27 percent. The same pattern holds for matriculated students; students of color represent 18 percent of athletic matriculants and 36 percent of the entire Class of 2009... the athletic recruiting and admissions program is not currently contributing significantly to Swarthmore Colleges diversity goals with respect to those racial and ethnic groups it has the most difficult time attracting.
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</p>
<p>Furthermore, the authors of the progress report contacted three peer schools to see if they were also finding low diversity among athletic recruits:</p>
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[quote]
A year ago, we polled admissions offices of similar colleges to ascertain their ability to attract and matriculate student-athletes of color. For the three peer institutions contacted, students of color represented an average of 10 percent of student-athletes in the Class of 2008 (38 students of color in a total of 374 athletics matriculants). While Swarthmores figure of 20 percent (14 students of color of 71 total athletics matriculants in the Class of 2008) compared favorably to that of its peer institutions, the difference might have been the result of random variation; we cannot be confident that our percentage would be higher, or even equal, when collecting data from other schools or in other time periods. All of the schools observed that attracting student-athletes of color is a challenge.
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</p>
<p>I'll have to see if I have a link to this report. It was on Swarthmore's website for a year or so, which is when I snagged a copy. I think it was lost in the shuffle of the new website design last year.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Perhaps you know that asians don't belong in this list, because the proper term is under represented minority (URM)?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I believe that Asian Americans contribute in a signficant and positive way to the diversity of a college campus. I believe that the best thing colleges have ever done in their diversity efforts is broadening their outreach to include Latino/a and Asian American students instead of just African Americans. In fact, most of the diversity gains in the last 20 years have come from Latino/a and Asian American students.</p>
<p>That's enough for now.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Princeton's total aid to the admitted (not the matriculated) class of 2011 alone appears to be about $28.67 million. Perhaps the financial wizards who have been posting here can put that amount in context for us and give us some idea of how much of this aid actually ends up being paid for matriculants.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Those numbers are available in the Common Data Set filings and the USNEWS online database. The best way to compare institutions is to divide total aid dollars by total undergrad enrollement to get an "average financial aid price discount" per undergrad student.</p>
<p>I'd have to look up Princeton's number. Swarthmore's number for 2007-08 was $18.8 million or $12,838 per student. The nice thing about the per student number is that it factors both the percentage of students receiving aid and the size of the aid grants.</p>
<p>Swarthmore's numbers are towards the high end. You'll find a few schools high (probably Harvard, Yale, and Princeton), but not by very much. $12,000 to $15,000 per student is at the very top of the range.</p>
<p>ID:</p>
<p>After a quick check I came with the following top 10 as far as total grants (excluding loans) divided by enrolled students for 2007-2008 based on their CDS. (Factbook for Harvard). </p>
<p>1.MIT 18,253
2.AMHERST 17,093
3.SMITH 16,883
4.HARVARD 16,385
5.PRINCETON 14,905
6.WILLIAMS 13,936
7.DARTMOUTH 13,620
8.YALE 13,286
9.SWARTHMORE 13,060
10.STANFORD 12,981 (2008-2009)</p>
<p>Some find, interesteddad, on athletes at Williams. Helps confirm what Golden maintained in "The Price of Admission", that recruited athletes at elite schools are overwhelmingly white, well-to-do kids. It should be apparent just from the sports played, mostly found at Northeastern boarding schools.
This particularly prevails among women.
My daughter's first year roommate at an elite hated all her classes and just wished she could be rowing all the time. Great rower, vapid roommate.</p>
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[quote]
The nice thing about the per student number is that it factors both the percentage of students receiving aid and the size of the aid grants.
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Huh? If you don't know the fraction of enrolled students receiving aid, how do you know whether this reflects few students receiving lots of aid vs. alot of students getting some aid?</p>