the Ivy schools belong to the Ivy Conference. Athletic conferences set up all kinds of rules for their members and the members agree to follow those rules. If Dartmouth decided to give merit awards, the NCAA would not care as long as the merit scholarships followed the NCAA rules for merit scholarships to athletes. The Ivy Conference might throw Dartmouth out of the league but that would be up to the conference.
“So they’d have to prohibit academic scholarship recipients from walking on?”
That would make sense. I don’t know of any occasion when an Ivy school has tested the borders of the agreement, so this is all hypothetical.
No, they wouldn’t prohibit merit scholarship recipients from being ‘walk on’ athletes. As it is now, ALL Ivy athletes are walk ons. They have no commitment to play and no guarantee of making the team from the school.
If the schools start giving out merit to athletes only, THAT would be a problem with the NCAA.
@twoinanddone: Actually, it wouldn’t be a problem with the NCAA because the Ivies are DivI, but it would contravene their own rules about not providing merit money to student-athletes. And we are discussing the hypothetical of Ivies giving merit aid, not the current situation.
I don’t know what you mean by that. There are restrictions on D1 athletes receiving merit with their athletic money.
If the Ivies gave merit only to athletes, the NCAA would classify that as athletic money. If the Ivies gave merit to all students including some athletes, the NCAA would have to look at it to decide if it was really athletic money disguised as merit.
But the Ivies are very happy to do it as they do, only need based aid and no athletic and no merit.
Enough about the Ivy sidebar.
Ivy League rules only apply to athletes at those 8 schools who are conference members. Only need based aid per conference rules.
Any aid that goes to Ivy athletes now or in the future would have to comply with separate NCAA rules. Those 8 schools currently comply with NCAA rules.
Outside of athletes, those schools are completely free to give merit aid or need aid or whatever kind of aid they wish. The reason those schools don’t do merit aid has nothing to do with the NCAA or Ivy League rules.
They don’t do merit aid because, “hey, we don’t need to bribe smart kids to come here.”
31, #34, #35 - understand that you may not see value, but thread stated that private colleges are seeing record discounting and while true as you move down the list, it won't happen at the top 25
How realistic is it that families at this income level have ZERO assets though?
@northwesty , what family with parents in their late 40’s or 50’s has zero assets? When homes are considered assets, and especially for those who live on the coasts, it is not uncommon to have $500-$750K in home equity alone. Add a small portfolio and suddenly you are full pay everywhere even with a $150K ($90K take home) income
“How realistic is it that families at this income level have ZERO assets though?”
It shouldn’t happen, but it does. If they were living beyond their means for all the years that they were working toward that income level, yeah, some end up with negative net worth.
@TooOld4School I hear you about the assets. If I hear one more person say that “only” 3% of the parents’ assets are considered for EFC, I’m going to lose it. We have saved for college in 529s but we’ve also saved for retirement over and above our retirement accounts and that savings causes us to be full pay. Now, like many parents, we are forced to leave many, many schools off of our kids’ college lists if we don’t want to spend $70K per year.
We still aren’t sure if we will only seek schools with merit or allow our kids to look at some schools that will be full pay. I know we have to make that decision in advance, though, and we need to set up parameters soon for S19.
@homerdog , Unfortunately there is so much randomness in upper tier college admissions that it is hard to exclude full pay schools. Your child still needs to have some choices. Sometimes the value proposition comes in too. Would we have paid full price for Stanford if our child was admitted? Maybe. But comparing our in-state flagship (Michigan) with full pay privates is a very high bar. The big merit schools like Alabama are much, much nicer than I had expected. Both our kids are planning to go to grad school, so I’d rather save them money to help them out there.
@TooOld4School I guess that’s what I mean. For what schools are we willing to pay full price? Some big name schools don’t really fit the bill for him so uber-competitive schools or schools where the vibe is a bunch of rich kids aren’t his thing. I don’t think he would like a place like Duke or Vandy or Ivies even though those seem to be popular with the best students at our high school.
For us, it will be more like paying full price at a place like Carleton or Bowdoin instead of maybe getting a little merit at some place like Grinnell. If he likes bigger schools (which I doubt but we aren’t 100% sure yet), that means Wisconsin instead of Michigan or Virginia. Of course, he would have to be accepted to these schools before I worry too much…all of these schools are within his range according to our Naviance but one never knows.
@homerdog – so happy when I see that parents are trying to figure out the parameters in advance. I’ve read far too many sad stories on this site (and heard in person) about parents back tracking after setting unreasonable standards for their kids. If you will indulge me, I will add my personal situation. My son wanted a small LAC and got a great merit package from Grinnell. We have friends who were absolutely incredulous that we wouldn’t consider Carleton…wouldn’t visit, apply, etc. The advice was basically, if you like Grinnell then you would really like Carleton. (Their kid went to Carleton. Without getting into personal financial discussions I found myself looking for ways to deflect the entire conversation.)
@homerdog: If it comes down to Grinnell vs. Carleton or Bowdoin, honestly, I don’t see the big difference.
If US News rankings did not exist, how would anyone say one was better than the other?
And note that schools move up and down due to various reasons in that ranking as well. Didn’t someone note that at one point in time, Grinnell ranked higher than Middlebury? Who is to know whether Grinnell would rank higher than Carleton in the future or not?
@PurpleTitan: Grinnell fell from the US News Top 10 when US News decided to shift emphasis from “subjective” measures (expert panels) to “objective” measures such as faculty salary and graduation/retention rates. Here’s a link to the current US News Methodology:
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/how-us-news-calculated-the-rankings
I’ve seen posts on CC that indicate some families are willing to pay an extra hundred thousand over four years to send their child to a school not based on fit but rather based on a few spots in the US News rankings. These families should ask themselves:
- What substantive impact will a few US News ranking spots have on the student's life?
- Are the rankings likely to remain as they are today? Remember, it is in US News' interest to make sure the rankings change. The easiest way to do that is to change up the methodology every few years. If the rankings don't change, people will stop paying attention to them. Change is a matter of survival. It's interesting to see the journey Reed College took from #9 in the rankings to #93! This article is a must read for anyone focusing on the US News rankings: https://www.reed.edu/apply/college-rankings.html
- Are the "objective" measures US News uses important to you? Do you believe that one year retention rates and overall graduation rates differentiate good schools from bad schools? Is it important to you that your college admit fewer risk takers and admit fewer students with potential financial uncertainties? For example, if a college like Reed admits a student like Steve Jobs (as it did) and Steve Jobs drops out after one year (as he did), is that college worse than College X, which denied entry to a student like Steve Jobs in favor of Steady Susie, who is not the kind of person who would ever drop out of school?
“If US News rankings did not exist, how would anyone say one was better than the other?”
That’s exactly the point; one school can be better than another for a given student, not for the non-existent vanilla statistic.
“If US News rankings did not exist, how would anyone say one was better than the other?”
We did it all the time before there were US News rankings. HYP was at the top of the Ivy pecking order in the '50s, too.
^Yes, but without rankings, how many people outside the NE would even know Williams or Middlebury exists?
There have been reports that in the Boston area Northeastern, BU and BC are all overenrolled by 200+ students each for this coming fall semester. Not all non-elite privates are struggling.