<p>Unfortunately, where Chicago loses out is in merit aid. Many who do not qualify for much FA rely on merit aid. This is where schools such as Grinnell College typically steals Chicago cross admits. I saw a survey a couple years ago that asked students who went elsewhere why they did not choose Chicago. The #1 reason was money. Other schools simply provided more. These were not simply the top Ivies. Also, it appears that Chicago's FA calculation often requires more parental contributions than others, though I have not seen any hard numbers on this. S1 received merit offers from other schools, but he was fortunate and able to choose Chicago. Others may have to choose the money (from very good colleges).</p>
<p>Maybe I am mistaken, but the Ivies do not provide merit aid, correct? It's all just need based financial aid? Wouldn't Chicago's need-based aid still be comparable to Cornell, Penn, Brown, etc? (i.e. the schools with lesser financial resources than Chicago?)</p>
<p>If Chicago's need based aid is not in line with the middle-to-lower ivies, why is this the case? It isn't unusual for a "lesser" college to steal some admits from a better college with merit aid. What I would be most concerned about, however, is Chicago's inability to match the level of need-based assistance with peer schools that do not even have Chicago's financial clout. Why would a poorer school (such as Brown) do better for need-based aid than a wealthier school such as Chicago?</p>
<p>All good and somewhat mysterious questions. </p>
<p>While the Ivy's do not provide merit aid, they do change their FA offers to win students. A good friend of S1 was accepted to both Chicago and Yale. Chicago awarded its top merit scholarship, but it counted against the FA award, so it still fell short of a full ride by about $12,000. The parents would have to come up with about $8000, and the student would have to take out loans. Yale at first offered the same. When the student asked both if they could do better, Chicago said their formula was their formula, Yale came back with $12,000 more. The student, quite reluctantly, chose Yale (still wishes it could have been Chicago).</p>
<p>If Chicago wants to put the C next to HYPC, they need to pay up! Seriously.</p>
<p>Perhaps I'm being too conservative here, but Chicago does not have the resources to compete head-to-head with Harvard, Yale, and Princeton in the cross-admit battle. These schools have what, 5 TIMES the financial resources of Chicago? All Chicago can do is offer as competitive financial aid and merit aid as possible (i.e. certainly enough to counter the offerings at a Cornell or Brown), and go with that. </p>
<p>Again, if Penn, Brown, Cornell, etc. all offered significantly better financial aid packages than Chicago, then there is cause for concern. This should not be the case. If Chicago loses students to Yale, Harvard, and Princeton, however, I don't know what else to do but shrug. With vastly inferior resources, this is just a hard game for Chicago to play.</p>
<p>Maybe I'm wrong here, but even as an alum, I don't really hope for Chicago to put the the "C" next to HYPC. I want to make sure Chicago maintains its position (along with perhaps Columbia) as being the very best in the next set of superb liberal arts colleges. I think if Chicago can cement its place in the top half dozen or so, that will be a great position for the school. Remember, not all that long ago, the administration was consider jettisoning the college altogether. To come from that to a position of prominence just behind HYP etc. is not bad at all.</p>
<p>Yes, Chicago does have to do something about financial support for students. I don't know how one would compare Chicago's endowment to the small LACs, like Amherst, Williams, Pomona, Swarthmore, etc. because the institutions (LAC vs research university) & the resources they support are so different. But, I'm pretty certain those LACs are willing to provide better aid than Chicago. For some of them it comes from no loan policies. I believe the LACs that might be concerned with "losing students" to the Ivies are making an effort to be financially competitive.</p>
<p>I agree entirely with Cue7 there (though by some measures Chicago already is in the top six, and it's almost universally seen as top ten).</p>
<p>Chicago got an anonymous (at least the name of the donor wasn't announced) gift of $100 million a couple of years ago that's been used to fund the Oddyssey program (reduce loans, increase grants) and $300 million last year for the School of Economics that should free other moneys, hopefully, for the undergraduates. I haven't seen any numbers on how this is working out.</p>
<p>Williams, Pomona, Swarthmore, and Amherst all have a significantly higher endowment per student than Chicago. For more info, see here:</p>
<p>I don't know exactly what "Chicago can do" when its resources are more limited than these sorts of schools. </p>
<p>Out of its peers, Chicago comes up ahead of Cornell, Brown, Duke, Penn, Northwestern, and Columbia. Chicago is just a bit behind Dartmouth, and everyone is well behind Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.</p>
<p>The flexibility in resources provided by an endowment are becoming increasingly constrained. It looks like both Harvard and Yale could be in serious trouble re: their endowments. This was discussed in some detail in the Parents Forum not long ago. For example:
[quote]
Yale had $8.7 billion in outstanding cash call commitments on June 30th. That's about half of what Yale claims their endowment to be worth at the end of the year.</p>
<p>Anticipating the next question, Yale said that, if they had liquidated every dime of cash, bonds, and marketable asset on June 30th, they could have raised between $4 and $5 billion cash. That was before the market crash.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>While that situation is undoubtedly troublesome, I would note that every other investor with cash call commitments in the same private equity funds with Yale is in the same, or worse, position. Also, as the layoffs across my profession attest, there has been an almost complete dearth of new deals from those funds for the past nine months. And the fund sponsors no doubt hope to remain in the industry and to sponsor additional funds in the future; their ability to do that depends on their ongoing good relationship with major institutional investors like Yale. </p>
<p>No one is going to be making any cash calls for those funds anytime soon.</p>
<p>Yale and others are having to take some extreme measures as well to offset severe budget shortfalls.</p>
<p>
[quote]
As for fiscal year 2010, the University-ordered 7.5 percent cuts in staff and non-personnel costs will save an additional $37 million on top of the cost-cutting measures announced in December. Still, Yale still has not balanced the entirety of its $100 million budget deficit for fiscal year 2010.
[/quote]
Yale</a> Daily News - Yale will fire up to 300 staff</p>
<p>Chicago, which is also making cuts, about 5%, appears to be in somewhat better shape:
From the Maroon:
[quote]
Rosenbaum’s letter identified the endowment as the most pressing reason for the budget cuts. At the end of June 2008, the endowment was valued at $6.63 billion. As of last month, it had lost approximately 30 percent of its value, or more than $1.5 billion.</p>
<p>The endowment is conservatively structured so that gains and losses are spread out, Kloehn said. The University’s trustees are allowed to invest 4.5 to 5.5 percent of the value of the endowment averaged over a three-year period, lagged a year.</p>
<p>Kloehn said that, due to this system, “The recession will be felt in 2010, and that downturn will be spread over three years, as will the following returns. This is so we don’t have to absorb a sudden loss all once.”</p>
<p>It is because of this insulation from the endowment that the U of C has not had to implement what Kloehn called “across the board cuts.” Instead, the 35 units that make up the University were asked to find ways to reduce spending. They were given “individual targets, avoiding one-size-fits-all solutions such as campus-wide hiring or salary freezes,” according to the provost’s letter, distancing itself from policies adopted by some peer institutions that have been hit harder by the economic crisis.</p>
<p>Many other schools are much more reliant on their endowments than is the U of C; for example, Harvard’s endowment represents around 35 percent of its operating budget, while the U of C’s represents 8.6 percent. Harvard, Yale, Duke, and others have instituted salary freezes for professors above a certain pay grade, and Harvard, Cornell, and Stanford have each instated hiring freezes.</p>
<p>Kloehn said the University did not pursue such broad actions because it saw a less centralized plan as a better way to “maintain momentum in the University’s core academic mission and some of its key initiatives.”
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Cue7 @ 29- Thanks for the link to use to compare endowment per student.</p>
<p>Here's an example of what I was thinking about in terms of Chicago's Fin Aid in relation to highly regarded LACs. It comes from a newly started thread, "UChicago or Williams?"</p>
<p>"I love the intellectual feel of the school [Chicago] and the life of the mind. The bad part of Chicago is also that their financial aid package has me and my family paying 23k while Williams has us at around 10k."</p>
<p>Tuppence - yup, all I can say is, Williams just has more money in the pot. Chicago might be able to adjust somewhat to the Williams offer, but when one school has a vastly higher endowment per student than Chicago, what can the U of C do?</p>