Emma Willard and Groton are known as very fine, highly respected schools. Emma Willard is currently searching for a new Head of School. In the overview for prospective candidates, it is mentioned, as a highlight, that the school has tripled the number of full pay domestic students and reduced the percentage of students receiving aid. Here is the link to the document:
In contrast, here is a document from Groton, which has an opposing view of financial aid. Groton is evidently proud to make its education more accessible to kids with families in all income brackets.
http://www.groton.org/Page/About/GRAIN
I have always known Emma Willard as a school that was generous with FA and was proud of having 50% or more of its students receiving aid that made it possible for them to attend. To highlight this purposeful reduction in aid seems a bit out of character.
I’m interested to hear what others think about this issue, whether or not you are familiar with these schools.
I suppose the “full pay, domestic” market is the most difficult to crack, so the increase of the share in this market is presented as an achievement. For some schools, just maybe, providing a lot of FA is not a choice but a must draw sufficient number of qualified students. It sounds like Emma is less reliant on FA to attract qualified students.
Groton’s endowment is almost 4x the size of Emma Willard’s. The size of the student body is comparable.
For Emma Willard, increasing the number of full tuition students means the school appeals to parents who can choose nearly any school. That matters, because it’s like canaries in the coal mine for the strength of the overall program.
As it is, Emma Willard awards financial aid to a larger share of the student body–46%, than Groton does–39%. Groton is able to offer larger awards, according to what I find on the web. More Groton students are full-pay domestic students than Emma Willard students.
I don’t compare my choices in housing to Bill Gates. I don’t think we should fault a very good school for not having the resources of one of the wealthiest schools in the nation.
I’m not making excuses for EW, but I think the context of the sources matters a lot.
The EW doc is basically a prospectus for their next head of school. So I can see why they’d want to highlight the increase in full pay students and decrease in FA students. And note that the % of FA students is still quite high/generous in comparison to other schools. Andover, considered to be among the MOST generous of schools with regard to FA, cites a 47% stat. So EW’s 46% puts it in good company.
The Groton doc is a public-facing webpage. If we were to have visibility into their head search materials, I’m confident we’d find a similar spin.
I don’t read it as a purposeful reduction in aid. The context of the information is critical. This document, while of course public and general, relates specifically to the search of a head of school. Understanding the current student body and the financial condition to begin with yields and important context for this discussion.
If you look at the Emma Willard’s website, the language and discussion of Financial Aid is pretty consistent with historical themes–46% on some form of aid. It’s also possible that the aid-per-student has increased even though the overall % has gone down slightly. The percentage receiving aid is still higher than Groton on a % basis (39% of Groton has FA, although it’s higher per student).
Wow, @SevenDad we really did. Great minds…or something like that…
I think from the perspective of potential applicants, the relevant consideration is broad percentage on student body on aid (the difference between 39% and 46% isn’t that much–less than 15 students per year per class) and the amount of overall aid given out. Groton gives out nearly $2mm more, although has fewer students on aid–therefore overall aid is higher. But EW has lower overall fees and more day students.
In the world of aid, unless you are truly need blind (SAS and Andover for sure–maybe a couple of others–but very rare), most of these schools are relatively similar at an aggregate basis and formula-driven. But because of the “need aware” admission policy, individual mileage will vary tremendously.
The final frontier for elite colleges and universities is economic diversity. Achieving gender, (unless they have made the conscious choice to stay single-sex), racial, religious, and geographic diversity has been goals for many years at most of these places. Economic diversity and access to opportunity is the key remaining goal, and I believe that will be universal for quite a while, or at least as the economic position of schools like EW and Groton can support it.
I don’t know Emma Willard enough to draw a conclusion, so don’t think this is my “verdict” of the school. I just wanted to point out that the percentage of student body on FA alone is not a reliable indicator of how committed a school is to draw students from different socioeconomic background, or accept students on merits with less concern of their ability to pay the tuition. For example, Sarah Lawrence College offers FA to almost 75% of their students, higher than the most generous need blind colleges. Sarah Lawrence is not considered the most generous college however. Why? Because in the FA world, there are other factors to consider in addition to percentages of students on FA. For example, is the school using FA as a way to provide a discount to a large portion of students off an inflated sticker price, is the school “gapping” or estimating a family’s ability to pay inaccurately, is the school using FA as merit scholarships to attract students of high stats, etc.
Wow, @twinsmama … What a lovely legacy the retiring head of school leaves behind. What do we know about the new head of school (aside from the fact that she spent most of her career at St. George’s?)
I know little about her, but I trust that the people who hired her understand Mercersburg, know what it needs in a head, and are skilled at assessing people. The current president of the Board of Regents was involved in hiring Doug Hale 19 years ago, proof that he knows what he’s doing.
Our DD is starting at Mercersburg in the fall and I loved seeing that article. We do not require FA, which I am very thankful for, but I have always been very involved in FA raising efforts at her private schools because I think that providing opportunity to all is so very important. @twinsmama thank you for all your positive insights on Mercersburg. We are not experienced with boardings schools - DD found and chose it on her own - and it is a relief to hear from so many students and parents that love Mercersburg.
I think it’s worth mentioning that when I went to the Emma Willard open house and interviewed way back when, I was told that they did not offer application fee waivers. The man who interviewed me – who works in development – did not know this. I was then told by someone else that they do offer fee waivers, and they sort of denied that anyone had said otherwise.
I know that Emma is a wonderful school, and I would’ve been thrilled to attend, but since they were hesitant to waive a $50 fee I didn’t see it likely that I would get a full ride from them. For anyone who hasn’t been around since the dinosaur ages of CC, I was flat-out rejected.
It looks to me like their focus is smaller grants to upper-middle class families rather than those of us from the bottom quarter. Which is fine, if that’s what they’re doing, but I wish they had said it up front before we spent time and money going out to Troy.
George School has done this effectively for some time as well (and used a similar mega-gift received roughly a decade ago to the same end), and it really makes for a much richer environment for everyone. It seems to me that one of the biggest benefits of going to BS is that the world is brought to you – few of us live in communities that offer such diversity – national, racial, religious, SES. When the school backs up these initiatives with efforts to celebrate what each individual brings (and with faculty and administrators of diverse backgrounds as well), it’s incredible what can happen! Mercersberg has long had a reputation for creating “family” on its campus through the people who work there; having the resources to do the outreach and to fund its goals is key. This gift got a lot of media attention – as it should have. There is so much news about all that’s wrong in the world. It’s nice to hear about what’s right!
