The Provost of Temple University was removed. One of the apparent reasons for his removal was because too many applicants accepted Temple’s offer of automatic merit aid.
“The announcement came on the same day that the university acknowledged that it had exceeded its financial aid budget for its merit scholarship program for 2016-17 by $22 million and had already taken steps to balance the budget.”
I haven’t researched the matter closely, but it looks like the Temple merit scholarships are no longer listed as automatic, but instead are based upon a review of credentials.
I’m guessing the automatic scholarships will be greatly reduced or will be different - even though they attracted lots of excellent students to the University.
Seems likely we will see other schools reining in auto merit scholarships moving forward. You can already see some schools who are either reducing auto scholarships or making them competitive.
Some other schools already have reduced the availability of big automatic merit:
Alabama - Huntsville: a few years ago, upped the GPA and test score thresholds for full tuition or better scholarships.
Alabama - Tuscaloosa: will eliminate the engineering top-up to full tuition for 3.5 HS GPA and 30-31 ACT; may make other changes.
Howard: no longer has full tuition scholarships for 3.0-3.4 HS GPA and 26-31 ACT.
Sometimes schools change their admission policies after a surprise like this. I received a letter from my law school a few years after I graduated that basically explained that although they’d accepted the same number of students as they had in the past anticipating the same yield, 33% more than anticipated said 'Yes, I’m coming!" The school did what they could to accommodate for that year (added a section, offered deferred admission), but said that for following years, they wouldn’t accept more than they had space for and would waitlist many until they had responses from the first wave of acceptances.
I think Temple may resort to that method, only accepting the number of scholarship applicants they can grant, then accepting more students off a preferred waitlist.
It’s shocking that a university president might not get along with the provost he inherited when he was appointed.
Just kidding. No, it isn’t. If it weren’t for the peremptory firing, this probably wouldn’t be big news.
On the other hand, its total undergraduate financial aid budget line for the current year was $92 million, and that would include administrative costs and need-based aid. So a $22 million variance in one line item is a huge miss.
Looking at the CDS info, last year Temple spent $36 million on non-need based/institutional scholarships. If that $22 million is based on automatic-for-stats scholarships, that a $#*$ of big miss.
I’m sure we’re “missing” something, as the school is spinning this story. For example, maybe that’s a projected $22 million over 4 years. That would make more sense.
Wow, we had Temple on our academic/merit safety list. As mentioned above, all the information about automatic scholarships that was there last time I looked (about a month ago) has now been deleted.
Instead it now says: “Academic merit scholarships for entering freshmen and transfer students awarded by the Undergraduate Admissions office. For students with a strong GPA and strong standardized test scores.”
Unless we get a better idea of what that means, I suspect we will not be the only ones taking it off our list.
That (#12) would make more sense, but it’s contrary to what the university statement pretty clearly said: $22 million more in expense for 2016-2017 than budgeted. It may well be that the budget treats the projected cost of all scholarship awards for students entering that year as a current-year expense (and does not recognize expense from this year’s payments to people admitted last year).
The article talks about meaningful increases in the number of people with GPAs > 3.6 or SATs > 1300. But even if those two groups were completely separate – and they can’t possibly be – the total increase in aid recipients would only be 600 people. $22 million divided by 600 is $36,600. That’s a lot for one year, but not such a lot for four. I believe the merit scholarships available to people in those categories ranged from $9,000/yr to $20,000 (for in-state students) or $29,000 (out of state) per year. But there were also automatic awards for people with lower stats, too.
They say they will post more information “by mid-July.” It looks like, in the past, the Board has approved the budget for the academic year at its July meeting a couple of weeks into the year (which would ordinarily follow adoption of the Commonwealth’s budget by June 30, if the Commonwealth could get that done). It’s reasonable to believe that the adjustments necessary to deal with this year’s overage are under discussion, but should be resolved long before anyone applies. (Which of course is not to say that the adjustments may not change some people’s minds about applying.)
I looked at the university’s audited financial statements, which only go through the 2014-2015 year at this point (because the 2015-2016 year isn’t even over until tomorrow). Unless the footnotes are completely misleading, the financial statement numbers are based on that year’s tuition and scholarships, not a multi-year scholarship commitment. Total university-funded tuition discounts for the 2015 year were $97 million, and that included all students/all schools. They didn’t break it down by school or undergraduate/graduate. That’s pretty comparable to the number in this year’s budget. But that doesn’t mean they don’t get to similar numbers in different ways. It really does seem awfully unlikely that they missed the annual expense number by 25% because they had a ~20% increase in high-stat entering freshmen and transfers.