Merit Aid at Santa Clara

[turtlerock]

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@SoCalDad2

SCU absolutely uses merit money to persuade students to attend that might otherwise choose a different or more prestigious school. Isn’t that the purpose of merit aid? They don’t seem to use a GPA/SAT formula for determining the amount of the scholarship as some schools do. Students offered presidential scholarships tend to be leaders with excellent academic records (the types of students offered admission by the Ivies or Stanford.)

This post seems to have two contradictory ideas. One is that most SCU applicants are not getting merit aid because it is going to those who are accepted at Stanford, and the other is that those accepted at Stanford don’t go to SCU (and thus don’t get any SCU merit money).</p>

<p>It seems to me that either SCU is successfully luring Stanford acceptees, or the merit money is going to those not accepted at Stanford.

Merit aid isn’t given retroactively. If SCU offers a Stanford applicant merit aid, and thus doesn’t offer it to a different student, and the Stanford applicant ends up attending Stanford, then SCU doesn’t come back and say “Oh, hello student that we didn’t offer a merit award to initially. You see, we offered aid to this student hoping s/he would come here instead of Stanford, but s/he chose Stanford anyway. That’s good news for you because that means we have this extra money we planned to get rid of and now we’re offing it to you!” Once the Stanford applicant chooses not to go to SCU, then no one gets the money - not the Stanford applicant (obviously) and not the student who didn’t apply to Stanford who would have otherwise qualified for the merit aid. Just because some merit aid goes unclaimed doesn’t mean SCU (or any school for that matter) goes back through and offers it back out to other qualified students.</p>

<p>I’ve never heard of a school going back to other appicants and changing their merit aid awards after the fact like that, but if you have heard of such a situation, then I’d love to hear about it.</p>

[Bigdaddy88]

<p>Seems like I’ve heard of situations where a group of students compete for scholarships and some are given the award and some are designated alternates. I believe Elon runs their Honors Fellow award this way. This ensures that 40 incoming freshman are awarded this designation. So if 5 of the winners turn down the offer they move to the alternate list.</p>

<p>I have no knowledge of this, just feel like this is what I’ve heard…</p>

[a_mom]

<p>SCU has EA and RA. The money EA round doesn’t use up can go into RA round. In the financial aid board, I’ve seen comments before that if one wants to appeal the package do it early before the funds run out.</p>

[TRT]

<p>I don’t think that they necessarily find out whether students accepted in the EA round will or won’t be attending until mid to late April, which is too late to ‘roll over’ funds to RA students. </p>

<p>Although it’s not published anywhere, I think that they must have a good idea of the historical yield rate for EA/Presidential acceptances, and plan accordingly.</p>

[a_mom]

<p>^ you are right. </p>

<p>I also believe they use historical data and have a plan. Check out enrollment management. [Enrollment</a> management - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrollment_management]Enrollment”>Enrollment management - Wikipedia).</p>

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Enrollment Management is a term coined by Dr. Jack Maguire [Home</a> » Maguire Associates](<a href=“http://www.MaguireAssoc.com%5DHome”>http://www.MaguireAssoc.com) that is used frequently in higher education to describe well-planned strategies and tactics to shape the enrollment of an institution and meet established goals. Plainly stated, enrollment management is an organizational concept and a systematic set of activities designed to enable educational institutions to exert more influence over their student enrollments. [1]</p>

<p>Such practices often include marketing, admission policies, retention programs, and financial aid awarding. Strategies and tactics are informed by collection, analysis, and use of data to project successful outcomes. Activities that produce measurable improvements in yields are continued and/or expanded, while those activities that do not are discontinued or restructured. Competitive efforts to recruit students is a common emphasis of enrollment managers.</p>

<p>The numbers of universities and colleges instituting offices of “enrollment management” have increased in recent years. These offices serve to provide direction and coordination of efforts of multiple offices such as admissions, financial aid, registration, and other student services. Often these offices are part of an enrollment management division.</p>

<p>Some of the typical aims of enrollment management include:</p>

<pre><code>Improving yields at inquiry, application, and enrollment stages. [2]
Increasing net revenue, usually by improving the proportion of entering students capable of paying most or all of unsubsidized tuition (“full-pays”) [3]
Increasing demographic diversity [4]
Improving retention rates
Increasing applicant pools
</code></pre>

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[warriordaughter]

<p>Poking around on the College Navigator and found the following net price data for SCU in the year 2011-12. The “net price” is calculated as total cost of attendance minus grants/aid. I was surprised at how much SCU expected families to pay, especially the lowest income bracket:</p>

<p>Income - average net price
0-30k - $27,218
30-48k - $24,232
48-75k - $26,932
75-110k - $37,745
110k+ - $42,464</p>

<p>Source: <a href=“College Navigator - Santa Clara University”>College Navigator - Santa Clara University;

<p>This includes need-based aid, of course, but I thought it was an interesting element.</p>