I have a slight bone to pick with Purdue

Colleges and Universities A-Z Purdue University
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Brief background: My DD wants to major in atmospheric sciences. Our state doesn’t have one single school that offers that program. So we began checking out some of the Midwest area schools that offered it. We have visited Oklahoma, Kansas, Mizzou, Nebraska, Iowa St., Wisconsin, Northern Illinois, Illinois, Texas A & M and Purdue. We decided to apply to Northern Illinois (free, why not?), Mizzou, Nebraska, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa State and Purdue. Many of these schools had very straight forward admission procedures and took the regular ACT score. We were aware that Wisconsin and Texas A & M required ACT plus writing as well as NC state that we chose not to visit. During our visits, the admissions people made it very clear at Wisconsin and A & M that the writing score was a big deal, register for it yada, yada, yada. Purdue was our last visit of the previous summer, right before school started. Never once mentioned it on the tour, visit with admissions, etc. It was in the fine print on the website, and ultimately it is our fault, won’t deny that, but ultimately we only took the regular ACT previously and the first offering in the fall. We knew if we decided on Wisconsin, we would need to take the plus writing and were prepared to do so, but Wisconsin’s deadline was at the end of December.

Decided to apply to Purdue, went through the common ap, paid the fee, sent all sorts of information including a special counselor’s report that no other big public school required, and did it all by the VERY early deadline of Nov. 1st. Never got an e-mail, letter or anything saying that the regular ACT would not cut it. Eventually we went back in to check our status mid-December and realized what had happened. We took the plus writing test in early December which we needed for Wisconsin anyway and had it sent on to Purdue. Several colleges made statements to us that if you got the application and most supporting documentation in by the deadline, they would continue to consider new test scores while evaluating, etc. Well we kept waiting, until it got in to March, just after all the scholarship deadlines had passed. Being out of state, the COA for us is around $41K, and merit is much needed to make a school affordable. My DD’s ACT was a 32 with a subscore of 35 on the English and many AP’s under her belt. The writing plus was a 31, with a good writing result. Which was probably to be expected with a previous English score of 35. But Purdue seemed to think that that test was the bee’s knees. Long story short, no merit aid, admitted with tons of e-mails and post cards etc. but with a cost of 41K with no merit aid whatsoever. Iowa State has offered 14.5K, Mizzou 10K, Nebraska 15.5K, Illinois 12K, N. Illinois 13K and all with lower COA amounts to boot.

And this long diatribe was to set up this conversation I had with a financial aid officer. I called and explained the situation that my DD would very much like to attend Purdue. That we were at fault and had been admitted eventually, but with no aspect of merit aid at all, we were unlikely to be able to attend. Was there any high up person we could appeal to in case admitted students that had been offered scholarships declined to take them, could we somehow be considered for something since we had everything in including a good ACT score, but just not the writing portion by the early deadline. I didn’t expect anything, but since Purdue was her most favorite campus and she really like the people she met at the department, we figured we would give it a shot. Didn’t happen. Didn’t really expect it to, but tried anyway.

And this is where the conversation turned and led me to write this about a month later. I thanked the lady for her time and asked her if I could give her some feedback. She said sure, so I told her that on their tours and on all of their admissions applications they should emphasize very strongly that they had a unique requirement of the extra test and to stress it to the point of overkill so that other families like ours wouldn’t make the same mistake we had. The very nice lady chuckled a little bit and then said to me, “We won’t have to worry about that next year. We are dropping that requirement for the next and future classes.”

She immediately went quiet, realizing the ramification of what she had just told me after me relating our sob story about being shut out of merit aid because of this requirement that seemed to be oh so important to Purdue for this year. I guess if my daughter was willing to work for a year and reapply with all her highest rank in class, 32 on the ACT, 4.2 GPA, she could get a significant award next year. And I basically said as much, in a polite fashion. But that nice lady realized her mistake and couldn’t get off the phone with me fast enough. “Is there anything else I can help you with sir?”. Not unless you have a time machine, I said back.

So good news for the future class of 2020. You don’t have to take the extra writing test. But we won’t be going to Purdue, and I am frustrated primarily because it is a situation of my own doing and at the end of the day I can’t really blame anyone but myself. My daughter is disappointed because we screwed up getting aid at her first choice and is now deciding among some very fine public institutions but not what she wanted.

I hope some will read this early in the application process and learns from our mistakes. If you are applying to multiple colleges and even if you have a spreadsheet with all of the requirements, please double check everything and make sure you take care of every deadline because most admission and financial aid offices are about as flexible as an octogenarian.

Rant over

2

Wow. That is quite a story – thanks for sharing it. You did seem to do quite a bit of due diligence here, and I don’t feel you should condemn yourself for it. While it probably should not be used as a wholesale condemnation of Purdue, something like this ought to have some kind of appeal process within Purdue’s administration (and probably won’t), given the requirement will cease soon. Their only valid defense, a timeline-based one that is upheld by many state institutions, was kind of shot in the foot by her revelation.

Purdue’s policy comes off as inflexible and even a bit shameful in your specific case, and I have a hunch their upcoming change may have more to do with an increased solicitation of full-pay international students – maintaining a stringent English writing credential would negatively affect their (and by default, the state of Indiana’s) bottom line. Thus your daughter may represent a type of very unfortunate fallout, for a structural change that she technically may not qualify under.

I’d take one of your other very good offers, for which she worked hard, and not look back.

3

That’s so interesting. I don’t recall ever being told at any campus visit that the writing part was or was not required. I do know that Purdue had over 44,000 applications for the 2015 freshman class, an increase of over 14% from the previous year, so I’m not surprised that no one noticed that your daughter’s ACT was lacking. Doesn’t make it any easier, though.

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That’s the plan. I just thought I would share. She was our first to go to college and it has been one thing after another. We are still waiting on a financial packet from Wisconsin because of a mixup on our IRS transcript that Wisconsin demanded while everyone else was good with a preliminary award from the FAFSA without the IRS link.

The whole thing will be funny eventually, but as Jeff Ross would say, “Too Soon?”

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Wisconsin has some of the top atmospheric science program(s) in the country. I can attest to the quality of oceanic and earth sciences, both of which I have taken there. Wisconsin isn’t a place for great merit aid, as it already attracts many high-achieving students. But for need-based, the fact that they asked for more documentation could lead to a better package; it’s worth the wait.

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“But that nice lady realized her mistake and couldn’t get off the phone with me fast enough. “Is there anything else I can help you with sir?”. Not unless you have a time machine, I said back.”

HAHAHHAHAHA

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@ArkansasDad, not sure if this will make you feel better or not but my son got no merit aid with a 33 ACT (10 writing) and 11 AP’s. They don’t seem to be very generous with merit aid.

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@BSM1987 Did your son make the Feb 28th scholarship deadline? Unlike some schools, but like Wisconsin, Purdue has you get admitted early and then you have to apply for scholarships internally. Sure they’ll continue to take people as the spring goes on, but all of them are not going to get any merit aid at all. If he made the deadline and still didn’t get any of their scholarships, then I actually do feel better. We wouldn’t have gotten anything anyway.

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@ArkansasDad, he applied on October 31st, definitely early enough. Oh well, I understand there are scholarships available to engineering students once they’re on campus.

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Too bad. It is possible that your earlier comments to the financial aid officer is what helped lead to a change in the policy. So there is that.

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@BSM1987 Ahh, I think I understand now. Purdue is top 5 Engineering school. In the pool of Engineering students, both of our children’s stats and scores would’ve been in the middle to low end. Purdue’s engineering pool probably made applying for engineering scholarships pretty tough. I guess if they make it the first couple of years, they reward those survivors pretty well. Good luck if that is where your son ends up and Purdue is truly a very nice school and we would’ve enjoyed going there very much. Maybe she will end up there in grad school.

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Cheddar, I don’t think anything I said had anything to do with the change. Maybe hundreds of others complaining, or as the earlier poster stated, it had to do with trying to go after the international crowd. Or it could be the fact that the writing portions have been being graded by automatic programs that have logic factors and are run by computers and there have been several attacks by professors and others on the validity of the tests. As Shaq said in Blue Chips, those tests are culturally biased. :slight_smile:

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Appeals for merit aid (or additional merit aid) should start with a phone call to the admissions officer for your region, with whom, presumably, your child already has a relationship. It is that person’s responsibility to meet numbers (high yield for admitted students in his/her region). That admissions officer will tell you how to request a review of merit aid (sometimes the admissions officer makes the appeal on your student’s behalf, sometimes they tell you to write a letter to someone else - like the dean of admissions), but it’s not usually the financial aid office making this decision.

People often think there is an actual pool of money that is doled out for aid, but it’s really a budget transfer within the financial system of the university. The revenue from the freshman class has to reach a certain number each year. If there are more full pay students in the pool in a given year, then there is more room to discount tuition for other students. That discount is achieved through the aid process.

If you spoke to the admissions officer and he or she told you to approach the financial aid office, then you are probably done. But if you didn’t speak to the admissions officer for your region, it can’t hurt to reach out (assuming your child still wants to attend Purdue and hasn’t committed elsewhere). Tell the admissions officer that Purdue is your first choice but…and then give the exact amounts of aid you’ve received elsewhere, along with a comparison of the costs to attend the second and thirs choice schools.

Good luck!

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Talked to both. And the problem is in how Purdue does scholarships. You have to be admitted before the Feb 28th deadline (applied by Nov. 1st) to have the university account, id, etc. It’s not like we didn’t get admitted, we just got admitted a week after the deadline to apply for any scholarships. We only qualify for merit aid and the minimum 5500 in subsidized loans. And I am pretty sure we are done. I just wanted to put a PSA out there for anyone to pay extreme close attention to all admission requirements. But thanks for the advice, it is good information for everyone who may read this.

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@ArkansasDad: There’s actually two scholarship deadlines at Purdue. The big merit ones (i.e. Trustees and Presidential, respectively $16k and $10k max per year for OOS) require a completed application to be on file by Nov. 1 (i.e. the early action deadline).

The second deadline was, as I recall, on Feb. 1. Those scholarships are awarded at the discretion of each individual college. There’s a separate application for those scholarships (which was extremely short; no more than 5 questions with no short answers nor essays).

I assume the reason Purdue’s dropping the writing requirement is because the SAT is going essay-optional beginning with the HS Class of 2016 (College Class of 2020).

The reason Purdue’s not being flexible is because they have plenty of qualified students. Your daughter is a fine student (a la 32 ACT), but she’s not fine enough to merit an exception (36 ACT, nationally recognized awards, etc.). Purdue has plenty of students with scores at or above her level. They’re not exactly starving for gifted students.

All that being said, Purdue is awful at communicating whether or not you have a “complete” application on file. A friend of mine didn’t get his application evaluated during the early action round because his guidance counselor never submitted his fee waiver form. He never got notified and was very confused when he didn’t receive a decision in December. Another one of my friends didn’t realize that Purdue didn’t have her SAT scores on file by the Nov. 1 deadline too. She also didn’t get a decision in December.

In regards to federal loans, during a student’s first year, only a maximum of $3,500 is subsidized. The remaining $2,000 must be unsubsidized. If your daughter qualifies for the maximum amount in subsidized loans, she should also receive a substantial amount in Pell Grants (max of ~$5,775/year).

Please note that in order for a user to receive a notification that they’ve been replied to, you have to @ them. To the best of my knowledge, CC doesn’t have a feature where someone (aside from the original poster) can ask for notifications whenever someone posts on a thread.

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Snapple, thanks for your input. I mixed up two different deadlines from the many schools, and I knew yesterday that what I was calling Feb 28th was actually Feb 1st, but didn’t feel like going back to fix it. And I am well aware of Purdue’s pool of excellent students and understand that a 32 doesn’t stand out in any way. Wisconsin is very much the same way. In some programs, both schools are turning away students with better stats than my daughter has because of the quality of applicants. And in regards to the subsidized loans, you are correct again. I meant to convey that she was offered the 5,500 that all freshman can get, as opposed to private loans or parent’s plus.

But as you pointed out, Purdue IS awful at communicating during the admissions process and that was the point of my diatribe. And I am sure that they really don’t care, because as we just established, they don’t really need her. If she had a 36 or was a National Merit Finalist, my phone call might have been received in a more friendly light.

But I stand by my point of it being unfortunate that she was delayed in admission which resulted in no consideration for merit awards, on an admission requirement that is “so important”, that it will no longer be in place for future admissions classes. Purdue has to realize that there is no chance for most out of state students to attend their institution unless they are independently wealthy, or at least get some sort of merit aid to make the COA reasonable. At least Wisconsin is about 6K cheaper. And Illinois, while maybe not being quite as selective as Purdue, was a much more streamlined process and at least offered around 12K in automatic scholarships upon admission.

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In case anyone was interested, ultimately our daughter decided on the University of Nebraska. Wisconsin ultimately did not come through with any significant aid either. Lincoln, here we come.

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That is a smart choice. Congratulations, and thanks for sharing your experience with Purdue’s financial aid office. It may have saved some headaches for others down the road.