@ucbalumnus Those are fine statistics but at the same time as University of California has effected banned all financial aid for OOS students, University of Michigan has earmarked over $40 million for it. It has even established and endowed a major scholarship–the Provosts Award–for high need OOS students.
Both Michigan and UVA are need blind, so it is more a case of self selection by candidates. As Michigan states in its literature, students with family includes under $90k will have their full need met regardless of residence.
This discussion does appear to have strayed quite a bit. I’ll stop so not to contribute to that.
Not so ridiculous. It’s a common misconception that an endowment is just a pile of spare cash. It’s not. It’s a set of investments that produce an annual revenue stream to support ongoing operational expenses. At a standard 4% to 5% annual payout, an endowment of $1 billion would produce an average annual revenue stream of $40 to $50 million. Not peanuts, to be sure, but a major research university typically has an annual budget measured in the billions. And the endowment does more than subsidize undergraduate tuition. Some of it is earmarked for the support of endowed professorships. Some supports research. At most schools, most endowment funds are restricted to specific purposes designated by the donors. At my undergraduate alma mater, for example, about 20% of the endowment is designated for support of the university’s medical school and health systems; there’s just no way those funds could be used to support undergraduate financial aid, but it counts toward the university’s total endowment.
But like many schools, my alma mater makes it easy to designate contributions for support of undergraduate financial aid. It’s as simple as checking off a box on the online donation form. So if you want to support undergrad FA, bingo, it’s done. What other donors choose to do with their money is their business.
Or admission policies and practices that favor less financially needy applicants (even though the admissions reading may be need blind to an individual applicant’s financial aid application), so that relatively few financially needier applicants will be admitted and enroll (since their financial aid budgets are not unlimited). For example, both Michigan and Virginia consider “relation with alumnus” (legacy; Virginia considers it “very important”). Since alumni families mean college graduate parents, that correlates well to advantaged and less financially needy applicants, so their limited financial aid budgets can be generous to fewer financially needy students.
^ Michigan’s OOS students skew affluent mainly because the university doesn’t meet full need for OOS students. OOS admissions is highly selective, so most OOS admits have choices among multiple high-quality schools, including, usually, some schools that can make more attractive FA offers to students with demonstrated need… As a result, most of the OOS students are full-pays. Michigan does meet full need for in-state students, and about 70% of the in-state students receive FA. The situation is changing pretty rapidly for OOS students, however, as Michigan nears completion of its current $4 billion capital campaign (largest ever for a public university), one of the principal aims of which is to increase need-based FA for OOS students, with the ultimate goal to meet full need for all. They’re not there yet; I believe in the current admissions cycle they’re promising to meet full need for OOS students with family incomes up to $70K. But even that should start to move the needle pretty dramatically in the socioeconomic composition of the OOS students (who now constitute nearly half of the undergraduate student body), especially if that policy holds or is improved over several admissions cycles…