<p>originaloog, congratulations on a relaxed, enjoyable college admissions experience with wonderful results. Your son is a lucky young man. (I think I'd disagree that Oberlin isn't among the big names, but perhaps that's mostly a music lover's bias because of the Conservatory.) My D had a similar senior year (madrigals, her first love, took up 2 and sometimes 3 periods a day, and she loved playing in youth symphony), she took the SATs just once without prep and called it done, and her apps were pretty low-key (photocopying graded lit papers was a little inconvenient). We agreed that her time would be better spent reading and learning the things that interested her, and in the end she had a 4.5 (weighted) GPA and was accepted at her best-fit college with full need-based aid.</p>
<p>So my point about merit aid wasn't about a personal concern, but a global philosophy.</p>
<p>In your post to me, I wonder if you're focusing on the "frenzy" in the book title rather than the philosophy behind it. Thacker's Education Conservancy is an attempt to calm the waters in college admissions; he's garnering support from elite college presidents on the theory (justified I think) that if Yale, Amherst, and Williams get behind him, as they have, it will be easier for others to follow. Offering merit aid as a strategy for pumping up ratings is just one target for reform, but it's the one we were discussing on this thread, and it's well discussed in Thacker's book: "Once a mechanism for meeting student need, financial aid has become a tool serving institutional self-interest, as exhibited by the threefold increase in scholarship money awarded during the past five years and the corresponding decline in need-based aid. "It used to be that providing aid was a charitable operation," said Michael McPherson, president of the Spencer Foundation and a higher-education economist. "Now it's an investment, like brand management" (New York Times, as quoted in The American Prospect, October 7, 2002). There is growing concern that the increasing use of financial aid for strategic purposes -- that is, to increase rank and maximize revenue -- is violating equity principles traditionally associated with education ... An Educational Testing Service study of students at the 146 most selective colleges concluded that 3 percent came from the nation's bottom economic quartile whereas 74 percent hailed from the top quartile (The Nation, October 13, 2003)." [edited to insert closed quote]</p>
<p>And so on.</p>
<p>I'll also mention that Reed College, with one of the smallest endowments among top colleges, offers only need-based aid (unless we factor in curmudgeon's observation of the universal hidden tuition break inherent in the difference between full tuition and colleges' actual cost per student). Reed is at the forefront of the "unranking" revolt, having refused to provide U.S. News & World Report with data for the past ten years. This year Reed's apps topped 3,000 for 350 slots, and average enrolled GPA is 3.9, so apparently they're not suffering brain drain. But I agree with you (and other posters) that merit aid is an effective tool for increasing revenue, and that's a serious trade-off. The colleges with multibillion dollar endowments BELONG at the forefront.</p>