What's a good FA package from WPI (Class of 2022)?

It is 46.7% of MATRICULATED students who had their need met, not students who were accepted. Many accepted students will find that they can’t afford the school because not enough aid is given.

UW 3.95 W 4.76 SAT 1480 Rank 9/497 Offered 10 K merit aid. No way can I afford that. It is clear from the offer that WPI does not want this student. Y’all with higher merit, celebrate! WPI WANTS YOU!

@moosiechica88

Most universities and colleges cannot afford to meet the financial needs of all deserving and admitted students. This leaves the admission committee one of two options when looking at a deserving student with a low EFC. They can reject the student because they do not have funding left for them, or they can accept the student and award what they have available in their budget. It seems better to me to accept the student with an insufficient award than to reject the student and send the message that he/she is somehow not qualified after all of his/her efforts. In the case of most schools, a larger endowment and/or a more effective federal aid program would be helpful. The choice is not an easy one!

In one case I am familiar with, a farmer sold the only asset he had (farmland) so he could send his son to college. Sadly, this is a true story. The son was qualified, but their was no funding left in the jar. The following paragraph is lifted from an earlier posting made today. It may help highlight the nature and depth of the problem.

Both WPI and RPI give some merit, but neither school meets the demonstrated financial need of ALL admitted students. According to last years data from the US NEWS the percent of need met by matriculating students are:
MIT meets 100%,
Smith College meets 100%,
Lehigh meets 97%
CMU meets 85%,
WPI meets 81%,
RPI meets 80%,
Stevens meets 68%

The listed schools happened to meet the context of a discussion. The only STEM school listed there that met need at the 100% level was MIT with an endowment of over $10,000,000,000. Not even Mr Carnegie Mellon’s namesake could manage 100% coverage.

“Merit” aid is another discussion. Once a students is toward the top of her/his class in a good school, shows a diverse and high activity level and demonstrates a serious desire to pursue a program of studies, the small difference in RIC and even test scores do not predict a significant difference in performance. All these merit awards do for schools with a quality applicant pool, is to take money away from students who cannot afford the high cost. It is not a good trend.

Unfortunately, none of this is comforting, but your son is likely to do very well wherever he goes because of his hard work!

:frowning:

@ccprofandmomof2 I am a mother of two boys. I know there’s income disparity in the workplace but i also know the salaries those so-called studies are based on are due to overall salaries for women and men. I.e. An engineer and a pre-school teacher don’t make the same salary and most pre-school teachers are not male. Also, if 80% of applicants are male (that is what I have heard is historically the case for WPI) it stands to reason the acceptance rate favors women, including women who might not have the same level of achievement as some of the males. I don’t want my son to be resentful since the school is generating the demographic balance and obviously many women applicants are benefiting. I am in a STEM field and I fully support women interested in those careers and providing ample opportunities…but I have to wonder what merit aid and acceptances would look like if the process was gender blind.

At my daughter’s STEM school, the merit is based on gpa and stats. Gender doesn’t matter. The STEM school that is less than an hour away does give scholarships to women. Our school is 28% women, the other is only 20% women so it doesn’t always help attract more women by giving them more money.

Now my daughter did get a lot more in athletic aid than her boyfriend (same sport) The boys team is twice as big, so the coach has to divide the money among more players. They should learn to play with fewer kids and they’d each get more money.

The following data was taken from the latest available WPI “Common Data Set” which is available from most schools. The data reflects students admitted in the Fall of 2016 when women represented just 34% of the entering class. The complete Fall '17 data is not available at this time. They have announced that 44% of that entering class are female.

The yield among accepted female students in the fall of 2016 was actually 3% higher than the yield on male students, but the FA information is not broken down by sex. If they did give higher awards, this MIGHT indicate a positive impact on the yield.

The acceptance rate for males was 44.7% while the acceptance rate for females was 59% in Fall '16.

The Fall '17 data will be interesting.

STEM programs attract a highly “self-selecting” pool of applicants. The science/math nerd set are a highly focused lot when compared to the general college preparatory population. When a school has a very high quality applicant pool, the difference between a 700 and a 750 math board is not critical for predicting graduation success four years later or when predicting professional success ten years later. There are many other factors that come into play when selecting a class.

There are many other factors in addition to the “stats” which are so often referred to as “objective” because they carry a number which is assigned by a process assumed to be scientifically objective. If these were all that was needed there would be no need to:
write essays on applications;
present evidence of creative scholarship;
show independent evidence of genuine curiosity about the world around you;
show sign’s of “grit” to thrive
in a given university/college’s, possibly unexpected experience;
OR
attempt to match your perspective with a university/college’s educational goals.

There is evidence out their that a woman’s perspective brings something to the table when people are working in teams. Teamwork is increasingly important in today’s interdisciplinary project development.

WPI, class of '67 (male)

:bz

@Sirius10 I am the mother of a male student at WPI. If you look at the stats of applicants on various sites, including Cappex, it appears that the female applicants my be more, not less, qualified. And the data on income disparity doesn’t compare preschool teachers to engineers; that’s just not how it’s done.

That being said, I can understand how some people would object to the allocation of discretionary scholarship funds to an effort to increase female enrollment. Conversely, others (and I am among them) see real value in having a more gender-balanced student body. It clearly is an objective of WPI to increase the percentage of women in the student body, and one method for doing so is to direct some discretionary scholarships to women. (BTW, these funds were used in past years to increase scholarships for students without financial need who requested additional scholarship awards.) For those who find this goal/method objectionable, WPI may not be a good fit.

@hopeyhippie I agree that there is real benefit to a balanced student body. The post above reflects a key point where project based work involving a cross section/ diverse group of individuals as one SHOULD find in the workplace. My point is that qualifications should be assessed equitably regardless of gender. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t…but regardless it does seem that WPI entices female applicants with funds well beyond which they offer to the male applicants. They have succeeded at pricing out of our reach so, yeah, not a good fit for us and probably many other men who otherwise would have been model student citizens on campus…
Lastly, income disparity is measured by several different methods… disparity is much less apparent in high tech at least on the Atlantic seaboard states and in the industry in which I work where my employer makes a visible and public effort to demonstrate equality in opportunity and pay.

Found this article in Alumni Magazine. Thought it might be of interest. See https://www.wpi.edu/news/wpi-weighs-backlash-against-women-tech-movement

Looks to me like a " no win" situation for the university’s perspective. If they don’t act on the problem, the problem lingers and if they do act on it they anger some applicants. Some truth lies in the problem of FA for all deserving students. Universities cannot be automated as a factory production line. The labor intensive nature of a good mentoring system pushes their costs way ahead of the general rate of inflation.

I got in early action to WPI w 25k a year, but I haven’t gotten my aid because I had to change things in my css and fasfa after submitting (one of my siblings decided to leave their university). The school was very nice about my situation and it has been resubmitted, but I haven’t heard back yet. What did most people get in aid? For context I’m a middle income girl from New Orleans.

Also I hope that everyone else here on the thread is able to get aid or any other form of money for colleges. I’ve been freaking out too. I just submitted my RPI application last week, and I hear they give a lot of money, but WPI is my top choice.

@spacegirly

The information used by me is public and available on the internet through the WPI website. The FA information is not broken down by gender so no one can give a reliable answer to your question. That is why we see so many individual reports on this website as people try to determine what their package may be.

From the information available I can tell you that the prior year’s acceptance rate by accepted female applicants indicates a significantly higher return (24.29%) than male applicants (21.07 %) at WPI. In the same year (Fall of 2016) the reported RPI data indicates a female return rate of 19.25% and a male return rate of 21.26%. This data on women gives evidence (but not proof) that they, on average, are likely receiving better packages unless women just like WPI more.

Being from New Orleans probably pulls better than being from Massachusetts. I wish I could tell you more, but we would just be jumping deeper into speculation. Let us stick with an educated guess based on grouped data and remember than this available data is not very good at giving a reliable answer in the case of one applicant.

Hang in there! WPI and RPI could both use some more of that New Orleans culture! :bz

Thank you!

@retiredfarmer Thanks for the article reference… so it would seem that WPI merit Award policy ensures that the majority of males who choose to attend are wealthy unless they are eligible for extensive FA. Once again the middle class is squeezed out.

@Sirius10

Gave up a higher income by working in education for the first ten years out of college. That was a lot like missing the income bus. Those in education are not paid nearly the money of their industrial counterparts, particularly in the STEM fields. Updated labs are very expensive and show no signs of letting up. Teaching PhDs in science/engineering do not come cheaply. This is a classic economics problem. Meanwhile we saw Federal FA programs jump the interest rates years ago. No one pays attention to these issues unless they are directly impacted. This appears to be classic politics. Education is defined as a “merit” good as the better educated citizen helps the entire country and not just the parents of the participating student.

Our country needs the best education money and creativity can supply. The competition is just getting tougher as we look at challenges from China and the rest of the world. Meanwhile Europe seems to believe it should be free to their citizens!

Just gave a few more dollars to WPI over the phone and I do wish your son could attend, but please don’t blame this problem on WPI. These girls also need help and, I would argue, the US position in the competitive world economy needs all the help it can get! Women cannot bring their valuable perspectives to the table if they are not sitting there. WPI feels there is evidence that their contribution adds to a better project solution and we want the best problem solutions we can find. We are not trying to give women the entire table… just half of it!

If this cannot work for you, what are your other choices?

@retiredfarmer fortunately he has other options…but WPI was his first choice and it’s been sort of hard for him to move on. I absolutely agree that women should be at the table and let me make it clear that I have no expectations for a "free ride ". Quite frankly, I am shocked that some on here are complaining about their $40k merit awards saying that it isn’t enough. If we got anything greater than $20k, the deposit would have been sent. Sadly, I cannot afford the $55k per year that seems to be my efc. That’s more than half our income. I won’t have us or my son finance a six figure college debt. It’s just a very unfortunate situation for my son.

@Sirius10
" I won’t have us or my son finance a six figure college debt."

Understood! This is a value judgement. When I finished school it was on the GI bill and the benefits exactly met the tuition charges. We were on our own for food and shelter which were mostly paid for by working 16 hour weekends at a gas station close to Boston. Dad paid the incurred debt. My trip abroad was paid for by Uncle Sam. I was lucky enough to graduate debt free and jumped right into a low paying job.

With the new WPI program, every student receives an automatic $5,000 credit on their tuition to cover the overseas program. As I understand it they receive that credit to cover what would have been an additional cost. That part of the deal sounds better to me! Any student who does not participate is missing the boat because they are paying for it anyway! This is an intense, overseas experience and not the usual exchange of classes. They actually work with the local people and mentoring faculty to produce solutions to real problems.

(FYI) Some majors pay very well! Top of the list is CS at $85,456 (avg. starting) from latest ‘15’-16 data. Way down the list are BS level biology majors at $46,884, but a lot went to great graduate schools. For some reason the women overwhelmingly select biology and avoid CS, but women are favoring biomedical engineering which pays better at $60,691.

Given the high caliber of your son’s profile, the salary figures should be much the same in their programs. His hard work will payoff!

@Sirius10 first let me say I feel your disappointment and I am sorry your son can’t afford to attend WPI. I will say though people are putting way too much emphasis on specific schools. Your son will be able to get WPI levels of education at other schools and in the grand scheme of things the actual school is not that important. Going to an institution that still has a good reputation, but where he is wanted more will certainly mean that he will be a lot more likely to be in the top academically. That will translate into a lot more long term advantages for him. He will be a lot more likely to get good grades, good opportunities for internships - which for STEM are by far the most important factors. I agonized a lot about my older daughter not getting into glamour schools, but now that she will graduate from CalPoly (very similar to WPI in many respects) with a great full job lined up 10 months prior graduation and a great college experience is way more valuable than going to a school where she would have struggled. Good luck.

Women in engineering: I was very disappointed with the FA my daughter got from my alma mater, RPI; after all she had great scores, grades, ECs, leadership . I also thought STEM girls had it easy. MIT rejected her. Maybe I overestimate her, proud ma that I am. No I didn’t overestimate. Harvard admitted her.

Once and for all ;-), women have to have the same abilities as men. It’s a competitive world

@mamalion
Hard to figure! Go Harvard!! :-t

We are in the same boat, son has 1500 SAT, 4.0 GPA, 11 APs and won Science Olympiad State level medals. But was only granted $10,000.

We never expect the “need-based” money because both parents work, but we also don’t expect to pay $55k per year for my son since I still have a daughter going in college in 2 years.

We applied WPI because the EFC estimates WPI provides gave us an estimate of $25k merit $, if gender really cause us to only get $10k, maybe the WPI EFC sheet should revise to accommodate that.

We have some other options like Case and Rose Hulman. I guess we will have to look at those instead because they give more merit money.

Still happy for everyone else get the merit money they want, it is just $55k is not something we expected per the EFC estimates.