Given that some quality schools like WashU, Vanderbilt, and Rice use merit aid, some top 20 schools would not get the student body profile they desire if they gave no merit. The top LAC’s can get away with not offering merit because of the small class sizes, but many of the top national universities can’t do that.
BTW, who else thinks that if Dartmouth were not in the Ivy league and was prohibited from giving merit, they would be making a merit play to bolster their lagging applications and ranking?
^ The only non-Ivy research U’s (that I know of) who don’t give out any merit money are Stanford, MIT, Georgetown, and Tufts . . . and neither Georgetown or Tufts have endowments comparable to most other Ivies/equivalents.
So if it wasn’t for the Ivy prohibition against merit scholarships, I daresay almost half the Ivy League would offer them.
True, some quality schools are pursuing top test scores/GPAs with merit offers but it is not a substantial percentage of the incoming class. According to their Common Data Sets, 15% (or less) at a couple of top schools receive merit awards (CDS H2A). Most elite colleges do not have to offer carrots to get students with top stats to enroll.
FYI, Lynn O’Shaugnessy of the College Solutions blog had a recent blog posting about this topic:
"Should You Pay More Than $66,000 for Northeastern University?
Universities That Provide Little or No Merit Scholarships
Affluent parents will kill themselves financially if their kids get into institutions such as those below.
Next to each university is the percentage of students who receive merit scholarships:
Ivy League schools 0%
Georgetown University 0%
Massachusetts Institute of Technology 0%
Stanford University and CalTech 0% (As far as I know, these are the only research universities on the West Coast that don’t provide merit scholarships.)
Johns Hopkins University 1.3%
Boston College 1.7% (This is a research university despite it’s name.)
Tufts University 2.1%
Carnegie Mellon University 4.9%
New York University 4.9%
Boston University 5.6%"
“Given that some quality schools like WashU, Vanderbilt, and Rice use merit aid, some top 20 schools would not get the student body profile they desire if they gave no merit. The top LAC’s can get away with not offering merit because of the small class sizes, but many of the top national universities can’t do that.”
Exactly. Vandy, Rice, ND, Emory, WashU, USC all do merit to some limited extent. Duke too (although extremely limited). Very hard to get those merit scholarships – only 1-10% of students get them. But an effective tool for those schools to poach away kids who would otherwise by full payors at an Ivy.
Saying that the Ivy Leagues give 0% merit is a bit misleading, as for many income levels their much superior FA is better than any merit offered elsewhere. Our personal experience at our higher income level was that the Ivy FA was better than the best merit offered at top 50 privates. Unless you have income >180k Ivy FA is effectively fantastic merit aid dressed up as FA - the merit being determined simply by getting in!
@PurpleTitan, the tops schools you mention offer very limited merit aid…somewhere between 1%-5% of students, and for most of those lucky few, we are talking about a fraction of the tuition. Vandy, Duke, Notre Dame offer a very small number of merit scholarships…we are talking about the top 5-10% of the very high achieving pool of accepted students. Duke or Northwestern or WashU or Tufts or Notre Dame could fill the freshman class with full pay students without any drop in the academic quality of the enrolled students.
@northwesty: JHU has a few big merit scholarships that something like 1% of their entering class get.
NU offers a relatively bigger number of small merit scholarships.
UChicago use to be more generous with merit money but as they have zoomed up the rankings, they may not be now.
“if Dartmouth were not in the Ivy league and was prohibited from giving merit”
It’s not prohibited. The Ivy League only bans athletic scholarships. They don’t give merit because they don’t have to. If Dartmouth wants to discount to try to steal kids from Princeton, they can.
“Once you start getting to the lower half of the top 50 privates (both unis and LACs, so top 100 total), you’ll find schools who would not get the student body profile they desire if they gave no aid/money.”
I think we can agree that NU, WashU, Vandy, Duke, ND, and Tufts are not in the lower half of the top 50 private research U’s, yes?
At my kid’s school this year, two families turned down Harvard. One for Emory (full tuition) and another for W&L (full ride). Happens all the time.
The sweet spot for merit money is for incomes $175k and up. Which is hardly plutocrat territory.
$150k income, zero assets, one kid in college pays $20k a year for Harvard. $100k income pays $10k a year. Those are good deals.
$185k income, zero assets, one kid in school, pays $38k a year. That’s not cheap, and that kid/family can very likely score a full tuition scholarship (or better) at another very strong school.
Agreed. As you move down the list from 50-100 the amount of merit $ and the percentage of students receiving merit $ goes up quickly. The article referenced by the OP speaks to the 2d and 3d tier privates, not the top group that get a lot of attention on CC.
Yep, and many people obsess with the very tippy top, but the fact of the matter is that all 30 of what I consider to be Ivies/equivalents
(http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1893105-ivy-equivalents-ranking-based-on-alumni-outcomes-take-2-1.html) have less than 1% of all college students in the US. Maybe roughly 0.75%. The Near-Ivies have roughly the same number of slots. Then you have another bunch of schools I consider “good schools” that have another 2% or so of total slots. Once you’re below that, you’re in roughly the 35-50 range (on both the RU and LAC sides, so 70-100 total). Even if you are not in a state with a public in that range or better, in that range, it’s not too difficult for a top 1 percentile kid to get enough merit money to bring total costs in to the $120K-$150K range (or lower). And you would still be in the top 5-6% by total slots. Or you can go overseas to a uni that takes in the top 5% kids in that country for about the same price.
Now would it absolutely kill a top 1 percentile kid to have to go to a top 5 percentile school instead?
Once you look at it that way, all this obsessing over the tippy-tops seems a bit ridiculous.
“All the Ivy institutions follow the common policy that any financial aid for student-athletes will be awarded and renewed on the sole basis of economic need”
For STUDENT-ATHLETES. They can give all the academic/music/whatever scholarships they want.