<p>Some publics (ex. UVA) actually require students to graduate in four years. </p>
<p>As for U of Washington, I think I find the Robin Hood/socialist rationale behind the increase to be the most troublesome:</p>
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<p>I agree with the following argument presented in the article:</p>
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<p>IMO part of the problem may be students who are not at college level in basic classwork despite good grades in high school classes.
If you cant take college level chem until you pass college level algebra or calc it may throw you off a couple years.
[Cliff</a> Mass Weather Blog: How Good Are UW Students in Math?](<a href=“http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2010/01/how-good-are-uw-students-in-math.html]Cliff”>Cliff Mass Weather Blog: How Good Are UW Students in Math?)</p>
<p>(this is a problem for students coming out of Seattle public schools)</p>
<p>Does FA end after 4 years? If not, I wonder if there is graduation rate data for full pay versus largely FA? Would this fall along SES lines?</p>
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<p>I would not expect most freshmen to know “college level algebra” which would either be a sophomore level linear algebra course, or a junior level abstract algebra course that normally only math majors take.</p>
<p>However, I would expect them to know the algebra, geometry, and trigonometry that they should have learned in high school, which is apparently what the referenced blog post is about.</p>
<p>^ because you have to take a placement test at state universities instead of going by transcript many students do not place into college level math.</p>
<p>Unless you had very strong math instruction in middle school, parents who can tutor you, and teachers who are willing and able to supplement the district curriculum you are SOL.</p>
<p>I expect my daughter will take longer than 4 years to graduate because of this. She is a science major.</p>
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<p>I don’t know about the University of Washington in particular, but I believe many public universities don’t cut off FA after 4 years. Many privates do, which creates a powerful incentive to finish in 4 years if you’re on FA because going beyond 4 years is going to be extremely costly.</p>
<p>But FA may play into this in another way. Like most publics—and for that matter, like most universities, public and private—UW doesn’t meet 100% of need. In 2009, they met full need for only 33% of their students, and on average met only 79% of need. And a very large part of that is work/study and loans; the university spends only $18 million a year of institutional resources on undergraduate grants and scholarships. In contrast the University of Michigan, with a roughly comparably-sized undergraduate student body, invests $112 million/year of institutional resources in undergrad grants and scholarships. The FA gap at UW creates a lot of pressure on students with financial need to work part-time and attend school part-time, and/or to take off entire semesters or entire years to earn money. This isn’t even possible at many elite private schools; at my daughter’s LAC, for example, there’s no such thing as part-time status, either you’re enrolled or not, and if you are you pay full tuition. At UW about 10% of the undergrads at any given time are part-timers, many of them students who started full-time but then switched to part-time for financial reasons. And the number who are part-timers at some point furing their undergraduate years is probably much higher. (At Michigan, in contrast, with better FA, only 2.8% of the undergrads are part-time). Needless to say, part-timers and those who interrupt their studies for a semester or more aren’t going to graduate in 4 years. But this is by no means unique to UW; it’s fairly common not only in public higher education, but among the vast majority of private colleges and universities that don’t meet 100% of need.</p>
<p>I would guess UW takes in half the tuition of UM or about $400 Million vs $800+ Million. So one could say UW IS giving $400 Million in aid by not charging the sky-high tuition of UM. Much easier to discount tuition when you have a lot of it.</p>
<p>because you have to take a placement test at state universities instead of going by transcript many students do not place into college level math.>></p>
<p>Both of my kids had no trouble placing into college math in WA, but they did not move there until 10th and 12th grades. Is that a common issue because I don’t remember it affecting any of their friends? Those who went to UW all graduated in four years with no issues.</p>
<p>* that a common issue because I don’t remember it affecting any of their friends? Those who went to UW all graduated in four years with no issues.*</p>
<p>No doubt they were in the population that either had teachers who were able & willing to supplement curriculum or they had parents who could do the same.</p>
<p>My daughter also had friends who were in the APP program in Seattle public schools (advanced learning cohort), they are attending Ivy & Ivy like universities.</p>
<p>But for students like my kids, both whom took a year off before college, they had much more difficulty placing into an appropriate math class- it’s the sort of thing you need to keep working on unfortunately.</p>
<p>^^^^ Well, we were talking about taking longer to graduate because schools might not be making all the courses available due to budget problems. The need for remedial high school coursework could also push out the time to graduate for some students, but we can’t really fault the universities for that.</p>
<p>I went to a smaller flagship state u (10,000-11,000 undergrads, 2,000-3,000 grads) that has a somewhat cringe-worthy 4 year graduation rate of around 20%. Why did students take more than 4 years? They switched majors. Failed pre-reqs. Had financial issues or to work full-time to pay for their education. Had family members get serious illnesses or die. Had to go to Iraq (National Guard). Got illnesses themselves. Etc. Etc. However, I never knew anyone who couldn’t graduate on time because they got “locked out” of required courses. </p>
<p>I will say, though, that I think a lot of people in general–regardless of college–suffer from failure to plan with regards to their course scheduled–for example, to note that course X is only offered every other Fall or courses Y and Z are both offered in the Spring but have been offered at the same time for the past 5 years, so you better not plan to take them in the same semester, or failed to come up with Plans B, C, etc., if, for whatever reason, their Plan A schedule didn’t work out. I was probably a bit excessive with my planning, but every semester before registration opened, I copied down lists of what my majors, minor, gen eds, and honors program required, wrote down everything I had taken each semester, and wrote down what I still needed to take. I then worked through the upcoming and past course schedules and planned out a few hypothetical course schedules, semester-by-semester, for all remaining semesters. If I was thinking about adding or switching majors or minors, I did the same thing with the new major or minor requirements. It really kept me on track, and I’d recommend it for anyone (I graduated with 2 majors and a minor in four years and also met the requirements of the honors program. I came in with a lot of AP credits but also switched majors after freshman year).</p>
<p>All of these things are true.</p>
<p>None of them account for the changes happening at UW in the past five years.</p>
<p>(UW admits, for example, right in their publicity materials that, in the past five years, science studnets who want to have been unable to take 1st or 2nd year classes when they’ve wanted/needed to in their majors because of lack of instructors.)</p>
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<p>But mini, a recent shortage of science instructors wouldn’t explain why the graduation rate at UW has been increasing (see post #12), would it?</p>
<p>I think the FA gap shouldn’t be underestimated as a cause of low graduation rates. Not a straight line and some obvious outliers, but it seems to me there’s a definite correlation between FA and 4-year graduate rates, both among publics and among privates.</p>
<p>Top-50 public / ave % of need met / 4-yr grad rate"</p>
<p>UVA / 100% / 84%
UNC Chapel Hill / 100% / 74%
Michigan / 90% / 73%
UC Berkeley / 90% / 66%
UCSD / 89% / 56%
U Texas / 85% / 51%
UCSB / 84% / 66%
UC Irvine / 84% / 58%
UC Davis / 82% / 51%
UCLA / 81% / 67%
U Washington / 80% / 54%
William & Mary / 76% / 83%
Wisconsin / 75% / 50%
Georgia Tech / 74% / 31%
Penn State / 53% / 62%</p>
<p>Selected privates / ave % of need met / 4-year grad rate:</p>
<p>Columbia / 100% / 87%
Dartmouth / 100% / 85%
WUSTL / 100% / 84%
MIT / 100% / 83%
Caltech / 100% / 73%
USC / 100% / 72%
Lehigh / 97% / 76%
Johns Hopkins / 94% / 83%
Case Western / 90% / 63%
RPI / 88% / 64%
U Miami / 83% / 67%
Brandeis / 82% / 84%
Carnegie Mellon / 82% / 67%
NYU / 71% / 78%</p>
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<p>I think your ballpark estimates of gross undergrad tuition revenue are off base for both schools, but you’re probably about right as to the proportion.</p>
<p>But it seems to me that since UW falls so much shorter of meeting financial need, those extra millions UW is “giving in aid” in the form of lower tuition are just a subsidy to full-pay/low need students, at the expense of students with need who are getting gapped on FA. A pretty short-sighted policy if you ask me, and one that probably contributes to UW’s low graduation rate.</p>
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<p>oh boy, so now if full pays who aren’t paying “extra” to be used as FA for need-based it’s considered a subsidy for full pays at expense of need based students. When does it end? how much subsidy do you feel full pays should pay extra for? Until all need based FA is 100% covered?</p>
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<p>I think your question is based on a false premise. Full-pays at public universities aren’t paying the full cost of their education. Legislative appropriations, endowment payouts, money siphoned off research grants in the form of “indirect cost recovery,” annual giving by alumni and other benefactors, intellectual property licensing fees, and other sources of revenue are paying a significant part of the cost. So the question isn’t how much “extra” should we charge full-pays over and above the cost of educating them; the question is, how much of a subsidy are they receiving, and what’s the appropriate way to divide up those subsidies between those with no need and those with need.</p>
<p>Elite privates have almost universally decided to concentrate the biggest subsidies on those with the most need, i.e., to meet 100% of need even if it means charging a steep tariff to the more affluent. Very few publics are there yet: UVA and UNC Chapel Hill meet 100% of need, while UC Berkeley and Michigan are close, meeting 90% of need. Three of these schools (UVA, UC Berkeley, and Michigan) charge higher-than-average tuition for both in-state and OOS students, but they’re still subsidizing in-state students
heavily, with tuition at roughly 1/3 to 1/4 of the level charged by elite privates.</p>
<p>Schools like UW, on the other hand, offer even cheaper tuition but skimp on FA, thereby allocating a larger fractional share of subsidies to those with the greatest capacity to pay, to the detriment of those less able to pay. I submit that lower graduation rates are a fairly predictable consequence of this policy. And it may prove a false economy in the long run, as such schools may be pouring millions into half-educating a lot of high-need students who end up not getting their degrees.</p>
<p>These are definitely troubling times in Washington. I was very upset to see this kind of tuition hike in one year and the news of more money being offered for financial aid didn’t change my upset. I don’t think the UW is making a commitment to financial aid, I think they just wanted some good press to go along with the news of the tuition hike. But it’s not like I have any good ideas on how they can operate within their budget without increasing tuition.</p>