<p>MommaJ–maybe the student isn’t paying the “list price” but the college is getting paid out of the endowment or through various donations. Nationally, there are not a lot of people that make enough money to pay full freight at any school, let alone a private school. Without these donations to their scholarship funds, many of theses schools would shut their doors, including all of the so called “top tier” schools. Harvard does the same thing, you do realize that, it’s just FA vs merit aid.</p>
<p>Of course this model convinces kids not to apply, that is the point. They get high caliber students to apply and protect their yield rate in the process. It’s no different then what they do at Harvard, etc. Those schools have long discovered that the best students aren’t always the rich students :D.</p>
<p>Looking at our S, Harvard would be a worse choice for him than pretty much every school he applied to, why, they don’t have his program :D. The real problem is that people get WAY, WAY too caught up in these “rankings” and think that if they don’t go to Harvard they might as well flip burgers. The more rational people in the world, however, realize that it’s just not the case and why not take advantage of a low cost education with a very high job placement rate–in many cases higher than Ivy placement rates…</p>
<p>As for Kohl’s, yes, all of their things are on sale at different times, but not everything is on sale and some things are sold at full price. Take a look at what happened at JC Penney when they discontinued sales…didn’t work out so well did it.</p>