With respect to financial aid offered, which is more critical for each state flagship to prioritize?
Assume the following two groups of students.
Group A. The “top” (let’s say 3.6 UW GPA, 31 ACT or better) students, most but not all from upper income families.
Group B. The good-but-not-“top” (3.3 UW GPA, 26 or better) students from lower and middle income families.
Further assumptions:
Group A will probably graduate from some college, whether or not in Kentucky.
The COA at the state flagship isn’t affordable for Group B and therefore they are at higher risk of dropping out due to financial reasons.
The in-state public directionals are potentially more affordable options for Group B, at 70% of the COA of the flagship and with merit awards for 26 and above ACT.
Question for discussion:
From a state policy standpoint, should the state flagship spend limited resources on giving merit aid for group A, or would need-based aid for group B at the state flagship be more helpful to increase the state’s future level of educational attainment and its economic prospects and tax revenues?
It depends on the goals of the state. My state flagship is notorious for not providing enough merit money for your “Group A” students to be a full ride. As a result, the best-and-brightest tend to leave the state to pastures where they can get that full ride. However, the state flagship does provide enough merit money to thinly spread around the “Group B” students. While there is that higher risk of dropping out due to financial reasons, it does increase the percentage of students who have at least SOME college, making them at least somewhat more likely to have more economic opportunities. But while the best-and-brightest leave, some of them do come back. And, some of them do end up going to the flagship as full-pay students without need. To add to the equation, we have a top-notch LAC that meets full need that will snag up all of your Group A students as well as a few in the Group B category who wish to attend that college in-state. My state has decided that the better payoff is to provide more aid to include the Group B students at the flagship. From a policy standpoint, I don’t disagree with them, but my child will go where the money is, in-state or out-of-state.
Group B. Group A will likely get merit awards elsewhere if the parents don’t want to pay for them to stay in state, so they’ll get an education somewhere. They may not settle in state after graduation because upper income families can afford to help their kids get established in other states, so while the awards might benefit the families they won’t necessarily benefit the state.
The lower income kids from Group B are less likely to have the resources to move OOS. If we’re choosing only one group, I’d rather our state spend the money on the one that will be more likely to be contributing to our economy.
Although your question makes it very clear which answer you want, it sounds like your state needs to increase funding for Group B at your flagship so they can afford to finish all 4 years. Since Group A will likely graduate from some college, according to your assumptions, the question becomes do we want more college grads at a higher per diploma cost to upper income families or fewer college grads at a lower per diploma cost to upper income families? I prefer an educated populace.
@austinmshauri I really tried to state the issue in the most neutral way possible, but sounds like you think I failed at that. :)>-
Just to clarify a point or two. It sounds like you think there would be significant “leakage” in any attempt to keep the A group in the state after graduation then, correct? That while an incentive to keep them in-state could be a good thing, it doesn’t work well?
Also, when you say you prefer an educated populace, how would the directional option factor into your thinking? Obviously direction U graduates are educated too, right?
If we assume that the flagship offers better academic opportunities than the non-flagship presumably-commuter-based universities, then it makes sense to offer the opportunity to attend the flagship based on having sufficient academic merit to be flagship-admissible, which means that group B (assuming that is within the flagship-admissible range) is more important (from a policy standpoint, if the goal is to offer educational opportunities to all academically qualified state residents) to offer discounts to than group A, since group B would otherwise be financially denied the opportunity to make use of the better academic opportunities that it is academically qualified for.
I think it depends on the goals of the state. Are they trying to up the flagship’s ranking by attracting high stats students? Do they think that once the rankings improve they’ll be able to attract more full pay students who would otherwise have gone elsewhere? Are they trying to retain talented in-state students and attract OOS students in the hopes that they’ll remain and start their careers in the state? There can be a lot of reasons to offer merit aid, and they can be very good reasons. Or do they consider educating all state students to be their primary goal? And how much money is the state actually providing to the school? These days a lot of state schools aren’t getting all that much from their states, and that might impact whether the school feels the need to provide financial aid to lower income state students.
I don’t think either is the right answer for every state.
Note that, in practice, even flagships that strongly favor the “need-based aid to group B” choice often do have some merit scholarships for top-end (in-state and out-of-state) students. However, their definition of “top-end” students whom they give substantial merit scholarships to tends to have a very high threshold, since their merit scholarship budget is limited and they want to use it on only the most desirable (to the school) applicants to try to get them to attend.
I’ll avoid the state wide economic policy questions and answer on what’s best for the university. If the state ever wants to have at least one university, which competes with UCB, UCLA, and UMich caliber state colleges, they have to focus on group A. Group A is the group most likely to be large donors in the future, which grows the endowment, allowing them to add more merit scholarships in the future, and have the cycle repeat. If a state wants to increase its undergrad prestige at its flagship, it first has to stop the “brain drain” of its best and brightest to other states for college. This adds to the prestige of the college, encouraging even more of their best and brightest to stay in the future in a virtuous cycle.
Interesting since none of those offer merit aid at all, or in very tiny amounts. The most prestigious schools have all moved away from merit aid if they ever offered it.
You cannot make a blanket statement that one approach is better than the other. It really depends on the population characteristics of the state and demographics of in-state students.
Some examples:
1 - Illinois and Pennsylvania are states with large concentrations of wealth and large populations of high stats kids. UIUC and PSU can easily get a core of high stat students without having to offer merit, so they don’t.
2 - States like Arizona, Oklahoma and Alabama are relatively poor with weak public school systems that do not produce many strong high school graduates. These states have aggressive OOS merit aid because without this aid, it would be difficult to get enough qualified kids to fill out their professional schools.
3 - In some states without a clear flagship, schools will compete with merit to try to out-recruit their competition. Not wanting to be #2 to an in-state rival is one of the reasons why schools like Alabama/Auburn and Arizona/ASU offer such strong merit.
Kentucky probably fits in with plains states like Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, etc. that offer some OOS merit but are not as aggressive as some others.
You can’t just look at what they do today. You have to look at what they did 40, 30, 20 years ago to get to the point of being prestigious enough that you can attract 30+ ACT students at full pay.
OP is proposing a very good question. I think states and state universities ought to think hard about what is the purpose of public higher education. For this, I do not think there is a definite answer, although I would wish states and state universities could focus more on need-based aids.
Did they offer merit to get there? I don’t think so, not most of them anyway.
Michigan and California have a lot of strong instate students so I’m not sure they ever did need to offer it.
Pretty sure the top tier privates like HYPSM didn’t offer it either, though some have used it to climb rankings…I’m thinking of maybe Emory or Vandy’s top scholarships, or Tulane which still uses them, or NEU which has also cut way back on merit.
UCB and UCLA do not offer a lot of merit scholarships (they offer some, but anything significant should be viewed as a super-reach); their primary discounting is need-based financial aid for in-state students. Their high selectivity and resulting student strength and related prestige is mainly the result of the large population of the state of California relative to the size of each school. In terms of seats per population, a more comparable ratio to other states would probably need to consider the entire UC system as the “flagship”, although even UCM and UCR are more selective than the actual flagships in some other states, despite being seen as “less desirable” schools by most.
Arizona is unusual in that it has only three state universities for its relatively large population, so the “flagship-level” schools (ASU and UA) admit the full range of students who are considered college ready (note also that ASU is in what it by far the biggest metro area, putting a substantial part of the state population in commuting range). ASU also recruits out-of-state students as well, perhaps seeing a market opportunity to get California students (with just-ok academic credentials but wealthy parents willing to pay out-of-state tuition) who would rather go to a flagship type school (ASU) rather than a commuter-based CSU.
HYPSM historically admitted some mix of the wealthy and powerful and the very top students. Going back the OP’s question, HYPSM never admitted any group B students(unless they’re recruited athletes or possibly URMs or better yet both).
NYS is considering offering free tuition at the SUNYs to any student whose family earns less than ~$125k. I don’t know if it will be tiered like our current system (I suspect so), but it will be entirely need, not stats driven. I think that’s a good thing. Some of our colleges do offer merit to students with stellar stats, and there’s a state STEM tuition grant available to high stats NYS grads who are pursuing STEM degrees, so we have a combination of programs. I think all serve an important purpose.
This is only a partial explanation. Being a large state does give them a larger pool of potential applicants, but UCB received almost 37000 in OOS and international applications last year. Today, they can cash in on their prestige with OOS and international applicants. As to how they got there, you have to look back over multiple decades.