This is an interesting piece from Higher Ed Data Stories.
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Interesting stuff…
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That whole blog is fascinating!
So, basically, it helps to have a large endowment that presumably pays for large discounts in the amount of tuition you charge. Or am I missing something?
The highly rejectives aren’t discounting though. Generally they only offer need based aid, a select few also offer minimal large merit awards.
How do you define “discount”? I define it as charging less money for the same goods or services (i.e., grant money, whether need-based or merit-based.)
nvm
Cite please.
nvm
Let’s try it a different way:
“So basically, it helps to have a large endowment that allows you to charge less money for tuition.” Or am I missing something?
Those with the largest endowments are not charging any less for tuition-see Harvard and Princeton
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Last I looked, less than half the students at HYP are full-pay.
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If you count financial aid as a form of discount, then you should also count state subsidies to all public schools as a form of discount as well. It costs UT more than the $10k/year tuition to educate its student, but it is politically limited in what it is allowed to charge
I think you raise a good point. But you should take it up with Akil Bello. I didn’t design his study.
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I still need to read the original blog post that started this thread. But I saw the debate about what constitutes tuition discounting. Although I believed as @Mwfan1921 does that aid based on financial need was not the same as discounting, the College Board agrees with @circuitrider about financial need as part of discounting, and with @roycroftmom about governmental aid for public institutions. (Source)
(Image description: Defining Tuition Discounting
Tuition discounts have several components. The
largest component is general institutional grant aid,
which may be allocated either on the basis of financial
circumstances or according to other criteria. Some
of this aid is funded through restricted endowment
income or restricted gifts. However, much of the aid is
unfunded and is derived from the general revenues of
the college, which are composed primarily of student
tuition and fees, unrestricted endowment income or
gifts, and in the case of public institutions, state and
local funds.]
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I’d say it’s more that high endowment per student colleges tend to have low acceptance rates. With a high endowment per student, the tuition tends to be a relatively small portion of revenue. And high endowment per students tend to be among the lowest acceptance rate colleges. For example, HYPSMC are among the top ~7 highest endowment per student colleges.
The outliers often have strong additional contributing factors. For example, College of the Ozarks has a low acceptance rate primarily due to fulling crediting tuition via work/grants, so net charge to students is $0 for tuition, rather than the usual things associated with high endowment per student HYPSM… type colleges.
Think about the implications of those variables, and think about how much the April admissions press releases mean to the reputation of these institutions, and then ask yourself if this makes sense.
Very little. The reputation of theses schools come mainly from their graduate/professional programs.
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I take it you are saying that “high endowment per student” is only tangentially correlated with a college’s low acceptance rate. I say, take out all the stops: high endowment per student is a direct cause of lower revenues from tuition. And, the low acceptance rates follow from that.
The author included research funding in the revenue calculation. Most of the schools under question have massive research budgets.
They do have massive research budgets. And the interesting thing is that for the universities in the lower left-hand quadrant, both tuition and research money together added up to less than half their annual revenues. The rest, presumably came from endowment income.