I know I’ve seen this somewhere before. Oh right! WVU!
More of this is coming, people.
Taken from the story:
"The UA offers a four-year tuition guarantee, meaning students are promised the same tuition throughout their four years at the institution. In addition, the university spends over $300 million on financial aid and merit scholarships to attract high achieving students, as well.
Despite that investment, the amount of financial aid given out is “not financially sustainable,” Robbins said.
“One of the solutions that I think we need to focus on is to make the tough decision to decrease the amount of financial aid that we’re giving to students,” he said, even though the changes mean “there are some students who won’t decide to come here.”
Robbins told faculty members that the university is losing money on students who in high school had a GPA between a 3.75 and 4.0 because of the amount of merit money and financial aid they are awarded.
“If you look at the band from 3.75 GPA to 4.0, there are a lot of students here that pay nothing,” he said. “We lose money on every one.”
What should parents be looking for to see this sort of thing coming? Common denominators seem to be … (a) lots of $ to attract OOS (for WVU seems that came in the form of amenities, for UA it was $ to students), and (b) states that are cutting higher ed budgets (see the chart posted by @Gatormama). Applying those factor out to other schools … will LSU be next (lazy river and second most reduced state funding behind AZ)?
I don’t know enough about higher ed in all of these states to know … maybe some states fix funding issues by merging or closing smaller state colleges (PA and WI are doing this, I believe). Do those actions help preserve the big state flagship?
D24 has applied to 5 flagships in 5 different states. I would gladly dig in to the school financial records … if I knew what I was looking for!
I would not be surprised if LSU is next as we (well, I did not but the majority in the state did) just elected a far right culture warrior governor who has a Republican super majority in the state legislature. This coupled with the fact that education is one of the very few not constitutionally protected budget items in the state budget, cuts are coming when money gets tight. I predict those cuts would run along the lines of what was just proposed in Mississippi.
We are looking at difficult times/headwinds for many non-stem and non-business majors/departments. Schools have to put their constrained resources where the demand is for classes and majors, and this is leading to some extremely difficult decisions, even if the analysis is done correctly/informed by accurate data.
And as much as people here love the liberal arts - in many cases these will be the ones to go - but often for lack of demand (but also career success relative to others).
Nothing has been put in place in Mississippi yet, but some high ranking state official questioned continued funding for humanities and other non-stem or non pre-professional fields.
Bummer. That is the only reason UofA is on our short list. Without significant merit aid it will end up off our list. And unless they can guarantee that aid they offer will last the full 4 years, it is also a no-go for us.
You have to wait and see - you have no idea how cuts will come.
Every state wants their university to be a leader and I suspect, this won’t impact your daughter much - given her interests are some of their star programs.
Maybe it’s not $32K off - maybe it’s $25K.
It’s a speech - a first step and that’s it at this time.
My S18 had the full tuition offer from AZ which was a great deal, but we wondered at the time how AZ, Bama, etc could afford it. I guess they couldn’t. That’s tough on the kids and families but it was probably never realistic. First West Virginia, now AZ, I think Pennsylvania schools are next. @Gatormama thoughts?
As an aside, my sister sent her three kids to UofAZ in-state. They got big tuition scholarships plus she she went a step farther and kept the room and board cost down by buying a cheap condo. All three kids lived there then she later sold at a profit. So she paid practically nothing.
I like hearing about big scholarships for in-state kids! I thought educating kids from the state was the whole point of a public university. But I get that it can be hard to have all the things you might like in a university if the kids coming in are only from in-state. Not every state has as many college-ready high school graduates as Texas or California. And not every state can be a Michigan or North Carolina where you enroll a lot of your own kids and make it super-presitgious for OOS too (so that OOS kids don’t care about the $).
I guess this flip side is … I live in Illinois. I’m not worried about the financial health of our flagship, but there’s little chance of my kids being admitted. My oldest is computer science (less than 8% admit rate), my middle guy is business (24% admit rate, but pretty clear they are looking for gender balance), and my youngest is trending towards engineering (22% admit rate, and historically the 25-75% range for SAT math has been 700).
There was a great thread on the PASSHE schools – the state directionals – from a few years ago, here:
Pennsylvania has already started the consolidation process, but it’s solely the PASSHE schools bearing the brunt. The state-related schools haven’t done jack. (And yes, I am bitter.)
State-related schools in PA are Pitt, PSU, Temple and Lincoln. They are quasi-private, not true state schools. There are TWENTY-FOUR Penn State campuses in this state, some within walking distance of other colleges. And they claw students who want the PSU pedigree from the true state schools, draining enrollment and weakening the entire system. They are demanding more funding these days, but not even considering closing any campuses.
This is a decent article - it’s paywalled, but you get a few free articles, so hopefully it’ll work:
Both my kids went OOS for college. The costs were not competitive in-state. PA’s students pay an average of $26k here. Which explains why more and more kids are leaving to go elsewhere. Usually, they don’t come back.
Why the state legislature doesn’t see this is beyond me. Actually, I think they might be starting to. After years and years of reducing funding, they just started increasing it. We’ll see if it lasts.
AZ and WV both built their financial assumptions on attracting OOS students (successfully in the case of AZ, unsuccessfully in WV).
As finances become tighter (both state and personal budgets), fewer families will be able to afford to pay a premium to send their kids out of state. So schools cut back on accepting kids with high merit, parents cut back on sending their kids with low merit.
Some schools will be able to find a balance where they get more money per OOS student than they get per instate student. But in most cases, that will mean a lot fewer OOS students than at present. There may be a few exceptions where OOS fees are still cheap for students from other states, for example WUE in the Mountain West (UT, NV, WY, NM) is still affordable if you are from CA and full pay instate.
The schools that will likely suffer least from that change are those with relatively few OOS students (eg TX, NC), though they may just suffer budget cuts anyway if there’s a recession.
I’m not so sure about the math U of Az is using. First, they misplace $240M. Oops. Then in the article it blames some of it on athletics. It says they spend $100M on sports per year, get $40M from the Pac-12 (assume a similar deal with the Big 12ish (really 18), $30M from ticket sales, $30M from donations and other places (assume merchandise, game day parking, concessions) and could probably make more. But, UofA has 23 teams and most of the Big 12 has only 17, so they can probably drop some sports. Why? The sports are paying for themselves. (sports did borrow $55M from the school during covid and has been slow to repay it - so ask for a repayment plan!)
On the same page as the article, another story says they are going to a bowl game. More money.
