“It’s bad enough that so many colleges premise their merit money decisions on a test score”
Believe me, I’m no fan of this practice…but schools do it in response to market demand. You have to get your reported scores higher if you want to raise your school’s academic reputation and attract better students. This is how paying customers judge the school. If families didn’t use ACT ranges to judge school quality, schools wouldn’t be so incentivized to discount high-scoring students. The only way to change this would be for schools (or state governments that run university systems) to switch to need-only aid systems. I know that NCAA scholarships aren’t going away, but schools can choose to operate like Northwestern and make all non-athlete aid need-only.
I, for one, hope that merit scholarships continue to exist. I am not a believer in standardized testing, but if that is how merit $$ is going to be determined, my kids will jump through that hoop.
If colleges moved to a holistic review for merit aid (low scoring kid but hey, look how many hours of community service he’s done. sub-par grades but wow- she’s published a novel) there would be a hue and cry.
I get that there is a lot of anger over college pricing, admissions, etc. but do any of you stop and consider the consequences (beyond your own kid) of any of the “fixes” you suggest?
I am not a fan of merit aid in general; I suspect that there will be a study coming out soon which shows that it serves to subsidize the people who need the money the least (certainly the case among the kids I know who have chosen the merit aid… children of doctors/partners in big law firms/corporate exec’s) but who prefer the bragging rights of modest merit awards at a private college vs. a lower sticker price at big state U.
But honestly- and apart from your own kid- what is actually wrong with something called “merit aid” which is awarded based on grades and scores? It’s not a community service award; it’s not a “who is the kindest kid in our county” award. It’s based on academic merit as measured by two highly flawed but easy to understand metrics.
I get it that the kid with a 4.0 GPA from wildly grade-inflated HS isn’t as “meritorious” as a kid with a 3.6 from “intensely academic/highly rigorous/no grade inflation” HS. But do you really think that a holistic review on merit aid is going to solve the problems you’ve articulated???
As a parent, I am delighted that there are test optional LACs out there which give significant merit awards and do not require test scores.
My younger one is a sweet kid, most rigorous curriculum, varsity captain, serious musician, blah blah – plenty of bells and whistles. But he stinks at standardized testing, whether because he panics or he needs more time just to process than the test allows. He’s more like me, slow and steady, than he is like my husband, who has a lightening quick mind (which the other son inherited). We need merit money because we do not qualify for financial aid, but cannot, like so many families, write a $60,000 check each year. Although my older one is flourishing in a public (and more affordable) flagship, this one clearly is a LAC kid, practically hyperventilates when he visits his brother at the 30,000+ sized campus. So we are grateful to schools like Knox, Lawrence, Beloit, Kalamazoo, Earlham – all of which award substantial merit (50% tuition or more) for kids like him, who contribute to campus life but whose test scores do not tell the whole picture. Those schools seem to do a pretty good job of identifying serious candidates for merit awards, without relying on test scores alone or in isolation.
Of course, a whole swath of schools don’t award merit aid at all, such as the NESCACs as well as Franklin & Marshall, Bard (complicated, but apparently linked to financial need) and some others. That meant those schools had to come off his list. The arms race that is college application season at his high school means that he loses credibility because he is not applying to uber schools, but we have all been practicing a variation of smile and nod for months.
Actually, lots of colleges do have holistically reviewed merit scholarships, or embedded merit within nominally need-based financial aid (“preferential packaging”). Of course, holistic review for merit scholarships often means needing high grades, high test scores, and other (often subjectively determined) aspects that the college likes (similar to holistic review for admission to highly selective colleges).
I understand the preferential packaging in need based aid.
I’m talking about the 5 or 10K discount off sticker price. A needy kid still can’t afford these merit schools; the children of the 1% get bragging rights, and the college gets a modest uptick in its mean reported metrics.
If the colleges didn’t get any bang for their buck, why offer merit at all?
If merit money “goes away,” then there will be a large section of highly capable students who cannot afford to attend college bc their families cannot afford to pay their familial portion. They are the students who are actively seeking the large awards at lower ranked schools in order to afford college.
Fwiw, there are plenty of scholarships out there based on community service, character, and/or leadership on top of academic achievement. NCSU’s Park Scholarship is just one example. It is the lower ranked publics which tend to use the narrow metric of GPA and test scores for their large merit awards.
What you say may be true, but I think it misses the point. At many schools merit aid disproportionately helps affluent families, but this “isn’t a bug, it’s a feature”. It’s a component of the budgeting process at many colleges.
Their goal is to enroll as many “nearly” full-pay, affluent families as their budget planning calls for. Remember, four-year private colleges offer nearly a 50% discount off of full tuition on average. Every affluent family who enrolls and gets less than a 50% discount helps their bottom line. Their marketing people have calculated that if they give a 5K or 10K discount off of full tuition to a good student from an affluent family and call it “merit aid”, then that will make the student and their parents happy and they’ll be likely to enroll. The parents often still pay (say) 75% of full tuition. To the school, enrolling this student generates a net profit and improves their average test scores. It’s a win-win for the school. By tethering these discounts to test scores they are able to target students who are (on average) smart and/or affluent. They’re aiming for both types of students.
So any study that reveals this fact is just telling the schools what they already know and are already consciously exploiting. It’s not going to “shame” these schools into stopping this practice because they need to do it - or something economically equivalent - in order to balance their budgets.
In fact, the schools have already taken it to the next level. They’ve figured out the following. If they raise their tuition to 40K and offer a 10K “merit” scholarship to everyone, then they get better yields and enroll better students than if they just made tuition 30K to begin with. This is because people want to be able to brag that their kid got a merit scholarship and they want to be able to feel like they got a “deal”. It might be a little cynical for the schools to exploit this, but it’s human nature. This is part of the reason why private school tuition has increased as rapidly as it has over the last couple decades but net prices haven’t increased as fast. The highly visible tuition price has increased much more rapidly than the hidden actual price.
Not to pick on the person who posted this, but I always sigh when I see statements like this. You need to think like an economist, not like a consumer. By and large, the way it works is very simple. The schools have a certain number of beds and there are certain number of students who have a certain amount of money to spend. Tuition prices, scholarships, and admissions standards will adjust up or down so that all the beds are filled and the schools get the money they need. If merit money “goes away”, then almost certainly these highly capable students won’t be left on the streets. The schools will find another way to enroll them, and their families will pay (more or less) what they’re currently paying, at least on average. (What can change this is if a chunk of money is exogenously injected into the system, like from the government, or if there are a lot of affluent international students who want to attend schools in the US).
That’s probably an over-generalization. If merit money is not offered, those students won’t be able to attend the schools that they currently at, but that doesn’t mean that a “lesser” school would not be affordable.
It may be an over-generalization, but there are a lot of top students who are following full-tuition/full-ride scholarships out of necessity. The number of schools costing the equivalent of R&B at full-tuition scholarship schools is a short list.
Getting rid of required living on campus and meal plans would help reduce costs a lot.
“Getting rid of required living on campus and meal plans would help reduce costs a lot.”
Getting rid of the over abundant over paid administrators would do more than anything else to bring down costs! I know one state system where the universities have so many administrators that they need a separate administration of administrators structure! And at least a couple of the universities in this system are over enrolled, busting at the seams, have an absurd student to faculty ratio which adds angst to the fact that students are routinely closed out of classes and the administration is too pre-occupied with trying to reduce expenditures on teaching to do much else.
When people stop suing the university every time their kid gets drunk and falls off a balcony, then that university can eliminate its department of risk management. When PETA stops protesting the bio and psych departments use of experimental lab animals, then that university can eliminate the administrators who oversee animal management.
Do you really think we are going back to the 1970’s when a university’s behavioral health department consisted of a psychiatrist and a nurse? (That was my college back in the 1970’s. Colleges now have an entire staff to provide referrals, counseling, med management, and coordination with the referring shrink back home). Colleges had one dietitian on staff- now it’s a department of nutritional management with an entire infrastructure of gluten-free/vegan/athlete/allergy management etc. The dining halls closed at 6:30 (athletes had one cafeteria they could use if practice kept them away from dinner) and the “snack bar” was a couple of vending machines and a dollar bill changer.
When we all stop demanding more and better and more targeted and more specialized in terms of student life and student services, then colleges can retreat to an earlier staffing model for non-instructional personnel. But until that happens…
Most the selective private colleges we focus on in this forum require unmarried freshman to live on campus, many for unmarried sophomores too. However, such on campus living requirements are much less common at public colleges where a large potion of students live in the nearby area.
Would you be willing to share the list of schools where COA is less than ~$10,000/yr? (Or is your premise that all students live within commuting distance of a 4 yr university and they will live at home? Even so, a lot of IL students are attending Bama b/c their tuition rates are high, higher than $10,000/yr.)
When universities offer merit $$ to in-state students, does it have a positive impact on the state? I don’t know the answer, and honestly, I am too lazy to google it. But I wonder if keeping their top students in-state vs. having them attend elsewhere influences students to stay in-state after graduation and benefits the state. (I am not sure that OOS students are likely to stay, but I have no idea about that either.) I do believe that if the options are paying full-pay in-state or paying fairly equivalent cost at privates across the country, more top students would leave their state schools. Would that impact the state institutions?
Based on the posts in this thread, I am assuming that the belief is that merit scholarships should not exist and that only those qualifying for need-based aid should receive financial support, regardless of academic performance? If you hold that view, do you think that scholarships like the Jefferson, Park, and Morehead should be abolished?
I don’t hold that view. Schools can spend their money how they see fit, as far as I’m concerned.
However, to claim that “top students” would not be able to attend a college if merit money went away is ridiculous. Moreover, to stipulate that “middle” class kids – who make too much $ to qualify for need-based aid – can only afford to attend a college for $10k/yr is equally ludicrous.
You posted that students could “choose a different–generally a public–college. Simple.” in response to my stating that the top students chasing merit $$ money often need full-tuition/full-ride scholarships. Room and board is around $10,000. It is not “simple” to find schools to replace those scholarships. Those students choose those schools, typically lower ranked publics, specifically for their merit awards.
While you might find it ludicrous, we know a lot of kids who fit that profile. Fwiw, categorize us in the “ludicrous” category, as well. Our kids’ budget for college pretty much falls into that range.
Our kids’ budget for college pretty much falls into that range.