That is fascinating. I didn’t know the RD yield was so low.
However, apparently only 10 Cornelius Vanderbilt scholarships are given to each entering class. If that’s correct, this number is far too small to make any difference, except at the very top of the margins. I may be missing something, and, if so , that would not be a first.
I am very interested in merit scholarships at “top schools” for our kids, and this is actually an intriguing discussion about “good” schools that give sizable merit awards. If it’s to a very small number of kids, does it really make that much difference except to those students who get the award and matriculate?
This is way too low. What I have heard is that that roughly 1% of all applicants get offered one of Vanderbilt’s three full-tuition scholarships. As scholarship recipients turn down Vanderbilt, these scholarships are not offered to anyone else, so the number of actual scholarships funded is below 1% of applicants.
However, the 10 number is roughly right for Duke, which offers an AB Duke full-ride scholarship to a very small number of students. You can see the most recent scholarship winners here:
I don’t think Vanderbilt is “buying stats” with its CV scholarship, any more than Rice or Duke or even Boston College (with its Gabelli Scholars program) are buying stats. First, they don’t need to. Second, and more importantly, the programs are way too small to have any sort of school-wide effect on stats.
What these small programs are doing is trying to poach extraordinary students, the kind who receive likely letters from HYPS. Students who they hope will have a major impact on the school, either immediately or as alumni down the road. The Ivies don’t offer merit aid.
I’m sure these programs work. People close to the math competition world might have come across the name Melanie Wood. I’m pretty sure she is only the second or third female to ever be a Putnam fellow, and as a high schooler I think the first female ever on the US IMO team (about 20 years ago). I’m pretty sure I read that she picked Duke over Harvard because Duke gave her a full ride, but Harvard won in the end I guess - she’s a professor there now.
Ok, from Vanderbilt’s page, 1% of all students get offered a Merit scholarship, and the ones they talk about are the Cornelius Vanderbilt, Chancellor, and Ingram so that’s where I got the belief that they offer a lot of them, but perhaps there are others that are not named. Plus that I know some students that were offered a CV scholarship and turned it down.
Roughly 1% of the entire freshman applicant pool will be offered a merit-based scholarship award. The number of merit scholarships is limited, as the majority of Vanderbilt’s student financial assistance is provided in the form of need-based financial aid.
I got that number from the Vandy link on the scholarship. If their RD yield is less than 1/4, they may offer more than that. At the end of the day, it’s a monetary enticement to students that they think will be offered spots at more “prestigious” schools.
On your second point, the numbers seem to be way too small. If I had been given the option of getting a CSV scholarship to attend Vandy at full-ride or paying the full cost of attending an Ivy League (which I wasn’t), I would most assuredly have considered Vandy.
But that’s the point the other poster is making. We’re talking about the top of the top students who get these opportunities. It’s too small of a difference to change the stats.
I only suggested that they were paying to entice students who were high enough stats to likely have been accepted at zero merit schools. Schools are businesses and pay for a reason. Benevolence, beyond financial need, is not one of them.
I actually don’t see anything at all wrong with that. If my child got one of these merit scholarships to a “top school” and also got into an Ivy (meaning ANY Ivy), I would be surprised if they went to the Ivy.
The HUGE cost of going to an Ivy where you might have to go into serious debt vis-a-vis getting a full-ride scholarship to a “top school” is a no-brainer.
I only hope we are lucky enough to even have this option! Until then, it’s fun debating fantasies.
I don’t disagree that they are in effect “buying” something they want, but I take issue a bit with the term “stats.” I think of stats as GPA plus test scores. That’s not what is going on with these scholarships. The primary goal is to attract students who have some other extraordinary qualities that the schools are looking for (could be leadership, creativity, perseverance, etc.). There will even be some students in these cohort scholarships whose stats are not very impressive in the context of the top students in their non-scholarship admit group.
And for those scholarship recipients who are chosen primarily for their extraordinary academic ability, GPA and test scores are really pretty easy metrics to max out, and there will already be at least a few dozen of those types in each of these school’s admit pools.
If “stats” is broad enough to embrace “accomplishments and aptitude,” well then yes I agree with you.
I’m using it in the sense that they are buying something other schools don’t have to. I see nothing wrong with it. I also don’t believe that a student needs to attend a school that’s remotely as selective as even Vandy, Rice or Wash U, all three aspiring to be the next Tufts, an Ivy adjacent, that doesn’t have to offer merit, to get a great, maybe even superior education.
In my culture, which is neither American nor Asian, bragging is considered bad form. I bond with my friends by commiserating over the messiness of my kids’ rooms rather than bragging over which elite school they will be attending. You want people to like you, don’t you? So, no, nobody is ready to spend $300k for bragging rights.
I believe that my daughter would not have been hired by a top consultancy in London, had she not attended Oxbridge. We have zero connections in economics, especially in the UK. IMO, outside the world of engineering and CS, the schools you go to open very different doors.
On another topic, another thing that is done better elsewhere is the school rankings. The UK school rankings, for instance, the so-called league tables give you measures like student satisfaction, entry standards, and graduate prospects based on real data (not some phony “prestige” factors). They publish a wealth of information on salaries by quartiles, major and institution 1, 3, and 5 yrs after graduation, percentage of people going into work or graduate school and so on. The Brits have legislation called Freedom of information act that allows you to ask for any information such as the results of the applicants/accepted students on their entrance aptitude tests (for Oxbridge), A-levels, and interviews. You don’t need to file a lawsuit to understand how they select their students, you just need to ask anything you want, and the uni has to answer within a couple of months.
You seem to be quite up on Tufts. Just looking at USNWR, it’s ranked 30th. Schools like Vandy, Rice, and Wash U have been ranked far higher for decades than Tufts. Of course, that’s FWIW.
Why would any of those schools aspire to be like Tufts? Tufts is a good school, but so are the others. And likely better, again, FWIW.
When you use the term “Ivy adjacent”, surely you don’t mean physical proximity?
They may be ranked higher, FWIW, but all three offer monetary enticement to fill their classes with the students they desire. Tufts does not have to. I’m not saying anyone is better than the next. They’re all fine schools in their own right.
Ivy adjacent meaning “prestigious” schools that aspire to fill their classes without having to entice students with money. Those would include Stanford, Caltech, MIT, and Tufts.
But again, we’re talking about a tiny number of admittees that get these benefits. The real test is whether a Tufts admittee who gets no merit aid would pick Tufts oven an Ivy where they also get no merit aid. Is there any evidence that this happens?
If not, Tufts probably needs to do what these other schools are doing, which, as you point out, is offering the very top students huge merit-based awards to convince them to leave the Ivies behind.
No Tufts “admittee” gets merit aid. That’s the point. They can fill their class with the students they want at full price without merit enticements. Merit enticements are not rare at Vandy, Rice or Wash U.
I think we have conjectured, but not established conclusively, that these other schools offering merit-based awards do it to a very small percentage. I would be virtually certain that without these awards they too could fill their class allotments and more just on the basis of being significantly higher ranked than Tufts.
We are talking about merit-based awards to a very small number of applicants. That seems like a smart move to attract the very top candidates. It is CLEARLY not offered to the “rank-and-file” admittee…not even remotely close.
According to the Vanderbilt 2019-2020 Common Data Set, they gave out $25,000,000 in non-need based scholarships and grants. That is not a very small number of applicants.
All schools give some non-needs based aid. Things like NMF might trigger a scholarship for students that otherwise wouldn’t get aid. Yale as an example gave $700,000 in non-need based scholarship that year. Tufts, $1,600,000.
We’re pretty far off of the original topic, so I’ll rest this sidebar there.
They are paying students to choose them over schools considered, rightly or wrongly, more “prestigious.”