<p>How is it that Tulane can offer so much merit money? Is it just a conscious decision on their part to attract good students? What percentage of accepted students are offered these high value scholarships? </p>
<p>My son was given a really nice merit scholarship at Tulane, but no where else he was accepted. Even though the other schools are 'higher ranked' (whatever that may mean), it is really hard to turn down the money. </p>
<p>Thanks for any insight you may have.</p>
<p>In essence, yes Tulane is certainly trying to attract even higher quality students by making Tulane more affordable for them. I do not know exact percentage, but I can estimate that about 10% of the incoming class has a Presidential ($25,000) or DHS (full tuition, separate application and competition for that) scholarship, and then maybe 15-20% in total for the remaining scholarship levels of $22,00 $20,000 and $15,000. I feel pretty sure about the 10-12% for the top awards because that is about how many get into the Honors Program and they track pretty much 1-1. the others I am just guessing.</p>
<p>The very highest ranked schools (Ivies, Stanford, some others) don’t give any merit money because they don’t have to I suppose. Duke, Chicago and some others in the next group give some , but it is not a lot.</p>
<p>Congrats on your son’s merit scholarship. I hope he chooses Tulane.</p>
<p>When we met yesterday with the Director of the Honors Program we were told that around 25% of enrolled freshmen (class of 2013) were in the Honors program although the actual target is 20%. It seems an increasing number of high stat students are finding it hard to turn down a $20K+ scholarship. Not all scholarships come with an automatic offer for the Honors program. I believe that only those for more than $20,000 actually do. Any student can get into the Honors program after freshman year as long as they have a greater than 3.4 GPA, but it is not clear how many actually do. The Director said only about 10% of students end up graduating with high honors (3.6+ GPA +thesis). The extra requirement from writing a thesis seems to discourage some honors students.</p>
<p>Hi cellardweller. Thanks for the post. Last year at Honors weekend, Dr. Luongo said the freshman percentage was about 12%, so if it has shot up that much things have really changed! You are right that not all scholarships come with automatic offers to the HP, only the Presidential is automatic and for the Distinguished Scholar Award ($22,000) the offers are on an individual basis. From what I have seen on here and been told by private message, I get the impression that less than half of these get invited, but I cannot be sure of course.</p>
<p>Also, to stay in the program after freshman year requires a 3.4+, but to get in takes a 3.6+. Then for everyone, to stay in or get in the program after sophomore year requires a 3.6+. Just a minor correction.</p>
<p>I suspect that Tulane doesn’t spend that much more than their peers, they just give it out earlier in the process. </p>
<p>I think it’s brilliant. I know in our case we wound-up with three acceptances after the early decision round-- a school ranked higher than Tulane with little or no financial aid, Tulane with an excellent offer, and a State School with a free ride. Not only did Tulane position itself perfectly in the center (“maybe not quite as highly ranked, but look at the money . . . and Tulane is certainly worth $XXX more than the State School”), their acceptance made him abandon a couple of other applications. It became a 3 school decision, and limiting the competition is probably an important thing in today’s world of internet applications.</p>
<p>I’m done with all this now, but I’ll admit I’ve really become fascinated by the whole college admissions field. I would love to sit down with Earl Retif and hear him do a 30 minute presentation on the calculations involved in building a freshman class every fall.</p>
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<p>If you manage to get him to agree to that, let me know and I will sit in too, lol. I’ll do the same for you. I completely agree it would be great to get a “peek behind the curtain” and see how they do it, especially in Tulane’s case. The school has completely transformed its admissions strategy over the past 10 years or so with applications literally tripling at least, admission rates dropping from around 60% to 24%, and yet with the exception of the post Katrina year, has managed to enroll just the right number of students. The fact that these students are of higher quality academically is, well not a bonus because that was the whole idea, so I guess the word is amazing. Quite an achievement.</p>
<p>With regard to your first sentence and Tulane’s peers, I guess it depends on who the peers are. I think of the schools Tulane considers peers that are more highly ranked, Tulane definitely gives out more scholarship money, and certainly earlier in the process. For peers that are closely ranked or lower ranked, I think you are right in quite a few of those cases. The totals may tuen out to be similar in the end, but Tulane seems to handle it better. I wonder when the others will catch on?</p>
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<p>Let’s forget what we call it, whether it’s merit-based or need-based, or scholarships, grants, whatever. I think if you look at the net revenue per student, when it’s all said and done Tulane is probably very close to average.</p>
<p>I mean, if you strip it all away, this isn’t much different than the car business. You have the sticker price that no one wants to pay, and then you have 1. the amount the dealer is willing to drop the price of the new car and, 2. the amount the dealer is willing to give on your trade-in and 3. the financing terms they offer. </p>
<p>Tulane is clearly offering extremely generous trade-in allowances for models that meet their requirements. In the car business this would be clean, low mileage, compacts–in Tulane’s case it’s Kids with an ACT of ____ and a GPA higher than ____ . Much more effective than cutting your tuition across the board, or waiting until after the acceptance to deal with it at the financial aid stage.</p>
<p>The other thing that’s smart is that I guarantee you every Guidance Counselor at my son’s school knows he got a “scholarship” and how much it was. That’s something they probably don’t know about the kids who got grants and other incentives from the financial aid side of things. Next year when that bright young person is sitting there talking to the Counselor about how to pay for college, what school is going to have top of mind awareness?</p>
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OK, yes, on that basis I would think you are most likely correct. I was not thinking of it that way at all, but just on merit scholarships. I am sure that while for the 4 years most kids are in there is little difference, potentially there is since the merit scholarships at Tulane are guaranteed for all 4 years (5 for architecture) as long as the student maintains a minimum GPA, stays out of trouble, etc. Obviously need-based money has to be reviewed every year and can diminish or be taken away completely if the family’s financial situation changes. So I didn’t think we were talking about those, but just merit.</p>
<p>Just goes to show how important it is to agree on the definition of the terms up front, lol.</p>
<p>Merit money seems like a great investment for a college, attracting students with higher test scores/higher grades from families who would not qualify for financial aid at other top colleges, many of whom do not give out merit money. While I instructed her not to take $$$ into consideration, my daughter chose Tulane and I’m happy to be getting a nice amount off the sticker price. Whether it’s a “false front-line price”, as we say in my industry, or the real price, Tulane’s $52,000 per year is in line with most other top colleges.
Here’s a question–was Tulane always at the top with list price or did TU raise that front line price and institute merit $$$ when it began its aggressive marketing a few years ago?</p>
<p>That’s a good question. Being a mid-sized private I am sure it has never been too different in price from Vandy, Duke, Emory and others such as that. If I find anything out in the next few days I’ll post it, if no one else does first.</p>
<p>Here’s a good article on Tulane’s tuition history:</p>
<p>[After</a> decade of sharp growth, tuition increaseslows - thehullabaloo.com](<a href=“thehullabaloo.com”>thehullabaloo.com)</p>
<p>Regarding the question as to whether Tulane has had an elevated sticker price, I would submit these data from 1999.
[IAS</a> Reports: Tuition Profiles of Selected Institutions, 1999-00](<a href=“http://www.web.virginia.edu/IAAS/reports/subject/tuitionfees/9899.htm]IAS”>http://www.web.virginia.edu/IAAS/reports/subject/tuitionfees/9899.htm)
Looks to me like Tulane has been in the same ballpark as all these other schools for over a decade tuition-wise.</p>
<p>From the standpoint of merit money, I think Tulane has a brilliant marketing strategy here. After doing the FAFSA at my house, it turns out our EFC is, oh, like a gazillion dollars, so its not like we’re going to get any need grants. (This is not to brag. I do not think we are rich. Just that they expect us to live on bread and water to send kid to college.) So they offer my kid $23K. (Kid has 4.2 GPA, 2250 SAT so will clearly have other choices, but maybe not with money.) Suddenly a school she has never really been serious about comes onto her radar screen. And, (lo and behold!) she visits and really likes it! Now you don’t need everyone to respond to this offer, but if enough do respond you will surely be bringing up the average GPA/SAT or whatever of the incoming class. And in these tough economic times, who wouldn’t take another look at a respected school (yeah, not top 20, but really good) offering that money. And success breeds success. So you keep dragging up the GPA or SAT and dragging down the acceptance rate with each succeeding class and eventually Tulane moves up on the charts. President Cowen (at honors weekend) said one of his first goals upon becoming president was get Tulane OFF the top ten party school list. It took him 5 years but he succeeded. I think the administration had grand designs for Tulane, and I applaud it.</p>
<p>Thanks for the info on this intriguing subject. I have an interest in college recruiting in general and, with daughter #2 having decided to attend Tulane, I am now tuned in to Tulane. I don’t know how Tulane first got on her radar screen–perhaps through the Princeton Review’s Top 367 Schools book she read cover to cover…</p>
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<p>That’s exactly right, and if you fine tune the process you can accomplish even more than that. For example, Tulane is strong in the Northeast, so maybe you target the West Coast with better offers to try to develop that region.</p>
<p>FASFA is a very precise tool, but anyone that does marketing knows that you can target with a high degree of accuracy using zip codes and other readily available data. If an application comes in from a student in a public high school who lives in zip code 60618 you have a pretty good idea what the family income is. And of course they have years of experience showing acceptance and yield rates from high schools all across the country, and I’m sure they take advantage of that data too.</p>
<p>Combine all that with the targeted marketing program they use to send out the applications, and I suspect the fact that we’re sitting here talking about attending Tulane next fall isn’t anywhere near as random as we might like to think it is. Earl Retif spun his spiderweb to catch us months ago, and he’s been patiently sitting in Gibson Hall waiting for us to fly into it.</p>
<p>I believe USC may have used this method to climb the ratings over the last 20 years.</p>
<p>There is some funny stuff in that issue of the Hulabaloo that you linked above, FC.</p>
<p>I agree that Tulane has a brilliant marketing strategy here. When Tulane was mentioned by S’s GC last spring, our reaction was “Tulane…Katrina…not interested”. But the free app was so easy, he went ahead and applied EA. During the several months he was waiting for other decisions, that acceptance with presidential scholarship was a wonderful thing to have, and our opinion of Tulane shot way up. This board contributed a lot to our good impression of Tulane as well–thanks FC and Idad, and others who have posted here!</p>
<p>Eventually, after seriously considering Tulane, S decided to go to UChicago, but his girlfriend had a similar story and she decided on Tulane. A 50% success rate (along with a lot of good will) isn’t bad at all! </p>
<p>(But they do need to restore their computer science department.)</p>
<p>They do indeed.</p>
<p>Losing out to UChicago isn’t bad at all, as I think I might have said already. It is one of my favorite schools, and I have no affiliation at all. Well, an uncle went there, but that hardly counts. I hope he is very happy there.</p>
<p>One piece of advice for him though. If he and his g/f stay friendly or whatever the right term is, he should go visit her. No brainer.</p>