<p>Giterdone, I should clarify that 50% of the students who actually matriculate at those elite universities come from wealthy families. Universities may claim to be “need blind”, but they aren’t.</p>
<p>
So what do you think of the following schools?</p>
<p>School Yield
Chicago … 38.1%
Duke … 41.7%
Northwestern … 33.4%
Johns Hopkins … 32.7%
WUSTL … 30.9%
Rice … 36.0%
Vanderbilt … 40.9%
Emory … 30.9%
UC-Berkeley … 37.9%
Georgetown … 43.1%
Carnegie Mellon … 28.8%
USC … 34.1%
UCLA … 35.4%
Virginia … 45.0%
Wake Forest … 28.8%
Tufts … 35.0%</p>
<p>Let us not forget Caltech: 36%</p>
<p>What’s your point? there are other crappy matriculation rates too? so nobody should aspire to do better? And not many “publics” on your list.</p>
<p>I never said UMich was alone. Higher education is financially challenged all over the country.</p>
<p>What would be a curious exercise, is to take your list and see what the percentage of IS vs OOS is? UMich attracts 60+% of its class from instate. You take that IS advantage away? and I suspect it would suffer mightily.</p>
<p>giterdone, the IS/OOS yield rates is roughly 60%/30%. But that is as much a function of affordability as it is a function of regional preference. Either way, Michigan is a very popular choice for gifted OOS/international students. </p>
<p>This said, I agree that all universities should strive to be affordable to all students they admit. Unfortunately, that would entail giving out more money than those universities can afford without impacting operations, such as faculty and facilities. Only Harvad, Princeton, Yale, Stanford and MIT are wealthy enough to be blindly generous with aid. Michigan and most of its peers (cal, Columbia, Cornell, Northwestern and Penn to name a few) simply do not have the means to meet aid blindly while maintaining the quality of their faculty and facilities.</p>
<p>
These are 17 of the 27 schools ranked above Michigan on USNWR. So Michigan is competitve with its peers in this aspect. The school has to choose where to place its limited financial resources.</p>
<p>
Per your request…</p>
<p>[School] … [Yield] … [%OOS]
UCB … 37.9% … 8%
UCLA … 35.4% … 5%
Virginia … 45.0% … 25%
Michigan … 40.6% … 36%
UNC … 52.4% … 18%
W&M … 35.1% … 32%
GeorgiaTech… 38.9% … 26%
UCSD … 39.5% … 3%
UC-Davis … 23.1% … na
UCSB … 17.6% … 3%
Washington … 42.4% … 12%
Wisconsin … 41.1% … 32%
Penn State … 31.9% … 27%
UIUC … 37.9% … 7%
Texas … 49.9% … 5%</p>
<p>The only schools with significantly better yields are UNC and Texas, both with significantly lower %OOS.</p>
<p>Let’s not feel too sorry for UMich and its 6 BILLION dollar endowment! It’s hardly poor, and their “limited financial resources” dwarfs most others on this list.</p>
<p>UMich could lower tuition, or be more generous with merit and need based aid. It chooses not to. You hit the nail on the head. It sets its price and matriculation targets based on its “peers” and not actual costs of service or ability to pay. Which again, is not unlike most schools.</p>
<p>The endowment currently is closer to 8 billion than 6 billion. </p>
<p>[$7.8B</a> University of Michigan endowment at highest level ever](<a href=“http://www.annarbor.com/news/university-of-michigan-endowment-at-highest-level-ever/]$7.8B”>$7.8B University of Michigan endowment at highest level ever)</p>
<p>I stand corrected.</p>
<p>Just imagine - they could offer FREE tuition for the entire undergraduate school, for a year! And it wouldn’t cost them 10% of their endowment. You can’t be irresponsible, but a public university, hoarding cash like that while charging the highest tuition in the country? doesn’t smell right.</p>
<p>giterdone, one should remember that universities can only spend 4%-6% of their endowment annually. Spending more will exhaust the endowment over time. As such, with an endowment of ~$8 billion, Michigan can only use ~$400 million annually. Obviously, that is still a lot of cash, but much of it is spend on faculty and facilities maintenance.</p>
<p>Michigan does not aspire to be merely a “public university”. It apsires to be a great university. Think about it giterdone, would you be interested in Michigan if it were merely a public university? In this, I do not see why Michigan should act differently than a private university. The aim in either case is one and the same…to be the best it can be.</p>
<p>Don’t not get me wrong. I would love to see Michigan reduce tuition and meet 100% of all demonstrated need for both in-state, out-of-state and international students. But at this time, given the Universty’s limited, albeit formidable, resources, Michigan cannot afford being more generous to students without negatively impacting the quality of its faculty and facilities. </p>
<p>On a more positive note, should the university’s endowment continue to grow at the pace it has the last 25 years, sometime in the not-to-distant future (10-20 years), I can see Michigan adopt a far more generous approach to financial aid. In 1985, there were more than 25 universities with larger endowments than Michigan. Today, only 5 universities have larger endowments than Michigan. The university is certainly positioning itself well for the future. Unfortunately, that does not help students currently attending, or applying to, Michigan.</p>
<p>^except of couse, alexander, it does help students presently attending insofar as it offsets the bloodletting of eroding state funding in order to maintain first class amenities, instructors, r&d etc. which attract those same students in the first place 
It’s prudent to maintain your reserves if the quality of your institution hangs in the balance, and so-doing gives you greater autonomy, particularly when there’s no shortage of well-qualified candidates from which to choose.</p>
<p>I think the problem is that many people have issues around the definition of need – eg everyone refers to themselves as having unmet need, but could likely afford their in-state options. From Michigan’s viewpoint, the desire to attend an OOS public can’t be defined as “need” per se, but falls into choice. I think the perspective of some of the more generous privates is different – by their metric, you have “need” if the EFC doesn’t match their COA. It’s a nuance I’ve noticed that, institutionally makes a certain amount of sense. Which is why I believe most packaging at most prestigious schools is to some degree preferential in the end, which makes the outcomes unpredictable for families faced with shouldering the cost.</p>
<p>kmcmom, I agree with you post. Michigan and most public universities adopt fiscally responsible (almost conservative) approach to their budgets. Michigan has actually reduced its operating expenses by tens of millions of dollars in the last 5 years and looks to continue that trend for the foreseeable future. This will help the University take care of its students both now and in the future. Thanks to its fiscally prudent approach, the University has not cut any of its critical operating costs (faculty, financial aid or facilities). In fact, since the global financial meltdown started, Michigan has hired additional faculty, purchased Pfizer’s research headquarters for $100 million, increased its financial aid budget and continues to build/maintain worldclass facilities. In that same period, many private universities have had to scale back, releasing faculty and reducing financial aid budgets to adjust for current realities.</p>
<p>Again, I hope Michigan’s wealth continues to grow so that it can afford being more generous to deserving undergraduate students, but not at the expense of the university maintaining its position as one of the world’s elite universities.</p>
<p>It seems like there is some fundamental misunderstanding on what an endowment is. It is not a rainy day cash fund. The endowment was created by donors with the stipulation that the principal remain untouched and that it be invested to produce a never-ending source of support for the purposes specified by the donors. Not only would the direct withdrawal of money from the endowment break that stipulation but it would also be extremely irresponsible when considering the future fiscal health of the university.</p>
<p>Approximately 20% of the endowment income is directly spent on lowering tuition through financial aid. The income from the remainder of endowed funds is used to pay for faculty, academic support, research and building maintenance so that tuition increases are not required to cover the full cost.</p>
<p>Whether you do or don’t agree with the spending of the endowment, it is one of the reasons why the University of Michigan is such an exemplary school.</p>
<p>We all agree UMich is exemplary. My observation was, its endowment size in relation to the 27+ higher yielding schools, whose endowments are, in most cases 1/3rd or a quarter (if at all!) the size of UMich’s. And that doesn’t seem to affect their ability to provide enviable, quality education and in a lot of those instances, for less $</p>
<p>^Don’t forget that many of the schools you’re referring to are privates with one is/oos tuition price in the $37,000-and up range. By comparison, approximately 60% of Michigan’s population receives in-state tuition rates in the $12,000 to 14,000 range. So in the case of a private school, the “rack” rate is at least three times as much as what more than half of the Umich population pays. Then add the fact that in terms of sheer volume, Michigan has an undergrad population at least four times that of a typical private or ivy. Add the fact that as a state institution, the school is obliged to keep instate rates somewhat even with regional schools, and that there is an onus of sorts to meet need in state. Now take the proceeds of that sizable endowment and compare apples to apples. I suspect you’ll find that umich spends as much “discounting” the cost of attendance, but that it spends it differently, because it faces the twin demons of remaining competitive but also serving the public of the state of it’s founding.</p>
<p>All that math will bring you to the oft cited OOS argument that Michigan should privatize, which of course, is to some degree opposed by those who benefit from the current arrangement of having affordable access to a state flagship that’s world class, in part because it does not rely entirely on state funding (and in part because it is able to attract almost 40 % of it’s population OOS and internationally.)</p>
<p>So it’s not that Michigan isn’t generous; it’s very generous to those instate (even though full pay parents locally don’t think so…but they’re already getting 2/3rds off!) and those instate with need. It’s that it is not uniformly generous that fuels OOS complaints at this
time of year.</p>
<p>@Kmcmom13 - the entire list at post #708 (and the point of my post) are PUBLIC schools. Your point is valid in an IS/OOS PRIVATE school conversation, but not this one.</p>
<p>^oops, my bad. I was assuming you were still referring to other more generous institutions, aka privates, in your subsequent post (I get updates to threads by email and must have missed that post.)</p>
<p>I agree with go blue that in terms of THAT list, Michigan does not seem to singularly suffer in terms of yield. The publics seem quite comparable, likely for the reasons I outlined in the case of umich, particularly at schools with more than 30% OOS. </p>
<p>There’s a saying in my industry that if you close more than 30% of your proposals, your quotes are too low I wonder if rightly or wrongly there isn’t a similar sentiment toward yield from a business standpoint.</p>
<p>You could look at the list another way - UMich HAS to drive for more OOS participation to pay higher $$ (which is pushing up OOS acceptance rates and pushing IS kids to the fall back position) than the other schools with equal yield but lower OOS %'age. Because of cost??? UNC OOS is 30% less the UMich and IS tuition is LESS THAN HALF.</p>
<p>
Michigan takes in a higher % of OOS for diversity. Michigan has been admitting 30+% of OOS for decades.</p>
<p>I’m sure it has nothing to do with the $ ;)</p>