<p>University of Richmond is the poster child for this approach.</p>
<p>Useless article. Wonder if athletic scholarships are included in their numbers?</p>
<p>I was thinking maybe I was missing something. Why are they saying merit aid/scholarship was financial aid? It is not to me. I don’t understand why it is not right to give money to someone who has more than likely worked really hard in high school to get good grades. Should not matter even if they have the money. Most people with money are not taking advantage of the merit money anyway. Why is it ok to give money to those that work hard at athletics but not someone who is actually going to probably do much better in college than the average student? The kid who does well and graduates is going to more than likely be a donor to the college later. It only makes sense to get the better students.</p>
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<p>Envy. Or a different definition of fair.</p>
<p>If you see someone with money and merit aid and you don’t have either, it may seem unfair to you that someone else that already has everything also gets a discount.</p>
<p>Are there really “full pay” people who would choose one college over another because of a $5000 discount? There are demonstrably some whose decisions will be affected by a really significant discount, but I’m not persuaded a relatively small discount would do the trick.</p>
<h1>25 sure, if it means 20K less over four years that the parents might have to borrow at interest to send the kid there.</h1>
<p>Our EFC is right around 60K, which is full pay. We are trying to avoid borrowing any money. If D can go to a good place that costs 50K instead of 55K, then that’s great for us. We are very debt averse, and we are not willing to pay full freight unless we really love the place.</p>
<p>“Really … FORCED?! I don’t think so. Obviously, these schools WANT these students. If these students have multiple options, and if a particular schools wants them, that school CHOOSES to offer merit aid in order to “get” that student.”</p>
<p>Thank you. It’s not HYPS’s fault that lower-ranked schools decide to allocate the fin aid budget toward merit instead of need. If anything, they’re role models in the opposite direction by discounting the cost to virtually nothing for families making the national median. Schools that focus on luring students away from HYPS with merit money are just making one choice out of many.</p>
<p>I thought that the article was going to be about more rich families sending their kids to schools instate, where they often pay no more than middle-class families. In my view, that’s a more interesting problem. If the goal of the public school is to provide an affordable education to state residents, why should a millionaire and a $60k earner get an equal public subsidy and pay $25k at Illinois or Wisconsin? Charging the first $45k and the second $5k would make the school affordable for both. Both families pay taxes, true, but tax-financed subsidies are inherently redistributive; if everybody used the same amount of government services that they paid for, states could just charge fees for everything instead of collecting taxes in the first place.</p>
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<p>We are a full pay family and DD would have attended the University of Chicago had it given her its $10K merit scholarship. Instead, she went to the University of Pittsburgh on its full tuition scholarship plus a little National Merit Scholar money.</p>