<p>Not necessarily--they may cancel each other out. </p>
<p>Pomona only provides aid to an extremely limited number of internationals.</p>
<p>"If the incremental (Pomona) students are weighted more towards low-income and internationals than the current student body, their financial aid costs will be considerably higher than the current average."</p>
<p>So true, especially since the financial aid category (average $13,340) is the single biggest student "cost" line item.</p>
<p>Interesteddad, help me out - my reading is that the amortized "dormitory bed" line item represent only the costs of housing maintenance and upkeep. Therefore the cost of actually building a new dorm to house the new students must come from some other category not accounted for in the pie chart (i.e. endowment or gifts). If money is (instead) borrowed to build a new dorm, it would necessarily follow that a debt-service line-item would have to be included in the incremental costs.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Pomona only provides aid to an extremely limited number of internationals.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Which is probably why Pomona doesn't have any signficant international enrollment. In 2004/05, they had just 38 internationals (2% of the student body). Of those, 31 were full-fare customers, receiving no grant aid from Pomona at all. Pomona's peer schools with much higher international enrollment (6% is typical Williams, Amherst, and Swarthmore) give grant aid to 50% - 80% of their internationals and the average grants are huge ($25,000+).</p>
<p>If Pomona can figure out how to increase full-pay international enrollment without compromising their academic standards, they will have figured out something no other similar LAC has figured out.</p>
<p>The same math applies to their stated goal of increasing ethnic and socio-economic diversity.</p>
<p>Justaparent: It looks to me that the cost of the dorm beds Pomona is using is an average cost of construction of $102,000 per bed amortized over 20 years to get the "dormitory bed" line they are using.</p>
<p>I don't really understand Pomona's desire to grow. It seems to me that, with the unique consortium, they should feel the least pressure to grow. They are in an eviable position to expand offerings into trendy areas (Middle Eastern Studies, etc.) as joint ventures with the other consortium schools. </p>
<p>I think LACs need to understand that their strength is not in matching the breadth and depth of university course offerings, but in offering something universities can't: small scale highly personalized teaching environments with an unusual degree of professor/student interaction and cross-disciplinary connections. The educational process is the key. Studies have consistently shown that small-scale teaching is highly effective.</p>
<p>Of course, a lot would depend on how much growth Pomona is envisioning. As a general observation, the dilution of their per student endowment spending would likely wipe out any incremental revenue gains from growth and be a net financial drain. That's why you see colleges like Oberlin trying to address financial equilibrium issues by shrinking the student body. Even in the ultra-endowment neighborhood where Pomona resides, Williams has quietly reduced the size of its student body a little bit since Morty Schapiro took over as President. It is difficult to "make it up on volume" when student fees make up less than half of the per student expenditures.</p>
<p>
[quote]
If Pomona can figure out how to increase full-pay international enrollment without compromising their academic standards, they will have figured out something no other similar LAC has figured out.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Come on now. I think you're being pretty presumptive. You say:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>East coast peer schools havent been able to increase their full-pay internationals</p></li>
<li><p>Surely, then, Pomona can't recruit them, either!</p></li>
<li><p>Ergo, to increase its international enrollment as suggested, Pomona will have to change its aid policy to support more than 16 students. </p></li>
<li><p>Therefore Pomona can't do math; their report has a glaring inconsistency (and justaparent should think less highly of the report).</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Perhaps they deserve a little more credit than you extended them when you read their report? Maybe they know more about the potential of their international applicant pool than you do. Maybe their west-coast location (different weather, closer to Asia) and their unique Claremont arrangement means they could, shocking though it is, attract self-funding applicants from abroad that the Williams/ Amhersts/ Swarthmores havent snapped up. </p>
<p>I think your assessment of their report was too hasty and unfairly dismissive. </p>
<p>I have to confess, it seems to me at times that you have it in for any school that isnt Swarthmore. But why? No sane person on this board who would deny Swarthmore is an extraordinarily fine school. No need to try to diminish other schoolsSwat, as you know, doesnt need that kind of support. I say this because at times I fear your authoritative tone on such matters may mislead people who would better benefit from a more neutral assessment. You were wrong, I think, to tell justaparent that Pomonas report was inconsistent. If I had to guess? I think you were underinformed (not knowing about their 4-per-year aid policy). But then, when it was pointed out, instead of apologizing to justaparent for the error, you stated that Pomona is still shortsighted because it cant recruit internationals-- and by the way, they shouldnt grow anyhow!</p>
<p>You have so many contributions to make. You know a lot. So this sort of thing disappoints me. I see a lot of students on here who cannot resist making jabs at schools. Its also poor form, but after all theyre still gaining confidence in their decision-making processes. I think we can set a better example.</p>
<p>Off soapbox now.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Maybe they know more about the potential of their international applicant pool than you do. Maybe their west-coast location (different weather, closer to Asia) and their unique Claremont arrangement means they could, shocking though it is, attract self-funding applicants from abroad that the Williams/ Amhersts/ Swarthmores havent snapped up.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Maybe. But, if they could attract more self-funding applicants from abroad, why are they currently at 2% international enrollment? </p>
<p>Williams, Amherst, and Swarthmore are all in the 6% to 7% range. Amherst and Swarthmore are each spending roughly 10 times more than Pomona on international financial aid. Williams is spending roughly 20 times more. Hence my skepticism about Pomona miraculously increasing international enrollment without an increase in the percentage of aid recepients.</p>
<p>Here's what Pomona's report says about the additional 100 acceptances each year under their growth scenario:</p>
<p>
[quote]
The next 100 students who would be admitted from the existing applicant pool under this scenario would not be identical in every respect to the 950 or so we are currently admitting. They would all be academically stellar and more than capable of succeeding at Pomona, but would not mirror the rest of the admitted pool in terms of other demographics (geography, ethnicity, athletics and other special talents, etc.). Fortunately, a number of efforts to increase the representation of some strategically important groups in the applicant pool (the Keller initiative, the Posse program, the Questbridge program, etc.) are beginning to generate more applications from underrepresented and low income students, and we have been discussing strategies for increasing applications from international students. With these efforts, we believe that an additional 100 admits could ultimately bring more diversity of various kinds to the freshman class.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>So, if the incremental 100 do not mirror the existing students, which group is going to provide lower than average financial aid costs? The Keller initiative or Posse program or Questbridge program which target low-income students? International students that aren't currently inclined to enroll as full-pay students?</p>
<p>I'm not knockin' Pomona or its ability to attract full-fare customers. If I were college hunting today, Pomona would be easily in the first five schools I'd go visit. I'm just saying that the paragraph above does not match the financial assumption that the incremental students would have the same average financial aid cost as the current student body.</p>
<p>By the way, here's an interesting white paper by Gordon C. Winston, one of Morty Schapiro's cohorts at the Williams College Economics Department's Project on the Economics of Higher Education. </p>
<p>The paper is called: "Grow the College? Why Bigger May Be Far From Better"</p>
<p><a href="http://www.williams.edu/wpehe/DPs/DP-60.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.williams.edu/wpehe/DPs/DP-60.pdf</a></p>
<p>BTW, I think the three schools with growth strategies he refers to in the white paper are (in order of appearance) Middlebury, Princeton, and UChicago.</p>
<p>The whole series of white papers from this group of higher education financing researchers is available here. Lot of fascinating reading:</p>
<p>Thanks for the resources--those are great links to pass on to people, especially people with a keen interest in higher ed finance.</p>
<p>But, as it happens, they're on my bookmarks already. I haven't been clear about my perspectives on these things--I work in the higher ed budget and admin areas (and my current and former bosses are econ guys). I've got a fat higher-ed library here and a big pile of resources from my grad work....I just regret I don't have more time to dig in and help provide data on more threads. </p>
<p>The "smaller might be better" issue is near and dear to my heart--my institution is growing and no one is terribly happy about it. Yet it's hard to get individual units to sign on to the idea of less tuition revenue, and at this highly decentralized place it's hard to force them. It's been the subject of internal study here (but even if we shrank we'd still be a behemoth compared to Swat and others).</p>
<p>The curious thing about the widespread urge to grow colleges and universities is that all the demographic trends show a leveling off in demand starting just a few years down the road. I'm afraid that the people are letting a period of rapidly increasing echo-boomer demand color their thinking about the long haul. Colleges that undertake a growth spurt at this point in time run a real risk of getting caught with their financial pants down when demand slackens. </p>
<p>It doesn't help that the whole PhD/professor process has become so oriented towards more and more highly specialized research that there is a natural tendency in academia to believe that every college has offer every microscopically-defined specialty, with more students and more money being the only possibly way to rationalize it.</p>
<p>BTW, from what little I can glean, Pomona is contemplating 10% growth, which is not enough to really undermine their rock-solid financial foundations. I can't tell for sure because they don't post their financial reports, but I think their endowment spending must be extremely conservative. They may fall into the Princeton category where per-student endowment is so high that growth makes sense and can be matched by corresponding increases in faculty and facility to maintain the existing level of quality.</p>
<p>More interesting cases to watch will be the UChicago which has grown significantly over the past decade or so -- from 2700 undergrads to above 4,000 -- and Rice, which is embarking on a similar growth spurt.</p>
<p>I think they are aware of the coming pool shrinkage, but assume that they will be one of the lucky ones that will continue to get the same slice (or more) of the diminishing pie. They assume its the "other guy" who will be hit by the demographic changes.</p>
<p>A similar trend is the remarkable number of research universities who have publicly stated a strategic effort to increase their research funding and be a "top 20" school (or some other cutoff, by research dollars). They cannot ALL get more research money; they can't ALL reach the goals they are setting. But each of them, apparently, believes it has the resources to be the one who does make it and won't be effected by the increasing competition (or any future declines in research funding dollars to be grabbed). I don't know if it's optimism or magical thinking.</p>
<p>I do not have enough time to get involved in this discussion. One quick item is noteworthy: </p>
<p>The Board of Trustees of CMC gave final approval on Nov. 1 to grow to 1,100 on-campus students. Also, the Board has asked President Gann to look into the possibilities (facilities, funds, faculty, etc.) to grow to 1,400. Despite vocal opposition from students and alumni, this growth seems to be a critical part of the strategic plan of President Gann for CMC.</p>