Education Conservancy: Colleges Should Collude to Cut Merit Aid

Paying for College
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<p>I don’t think Hamilton has a need to increase their apps as their acceptance rate is already fairly low. They’re just one example, like Colgate, of a LAC that has chosen to embrace the concept of equal access to education regardless of financial status. Because they have a healthy endowment, they were able to take it one step further by joining the ranks of the very generous schools who promise to meet need with no/low loans. There are great LAC’s, public and private, who don’t offer merit aid to incoming freshmen (ie SUNY Geneseo, although they’re more affordable than most) on the premise that all of their students are merit-worthy. While this is also the case for Hamilton/Colgate, etc. students, it’s a different philosophy than the schools who are attempting to remove the financial barriers to education at their institution.</p>

<p>Btw, Eric, I’m local to Hamilton, Colgate, SU, and about 5 other colleges here in “college central”…Hamilton and Colgate are the only ones who don’t do TV ads or send unsolicited mail, though idk what they’re sending to kids across the country! I think that targeted advertising to achieve geographic diversity can be a good thing though, much like admissions events in other areas.</p>

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<p>Hamilton, Colgate and many other selective LACs in that area have a ready market of prep school kids that tend to hone into these schools. I know that the info sessions at my sons’ private school were packed when those school reps came to visit and the Naviance/info pages for those colleges were filled with dots. Most of those kids don’t need financial aid. </p>

<p>The timing of this is unusual, however, in my opinion. The same school has just recently contracted out financial aid services because so many families were asking about that. And about merit money. Also the last two years have had a sharp rise in kids applying to and going to Binghamton and Geneseo along with some OOS schools. I also saw that a number of kids were going to Fairfield and Fordham, definitely a spike in applications there. I had spoken to moms with kids going to those two schools, and the merit money offered played a large role in the decisions to go there. Those kids would have Union or Trinity Colleges bound, but for some hefty merit awards from those Catholic colleges. A few years ago, they would likely not have even been on the kids’ lists, and the scholarship would not have played a role in the decision. </p>

<p>There was also talk about compiling merit offer data for future applicants. This is a school that did very little in terms of fin aid or merit aid because it was not relevant to most of the families involved. I can see where $10K in merit money would make a difference to some of these families. As I said before, it did make a difference to us. Hamilton is a school that was on my son’s preliminary list, and could just as easily as HC been one of the ones that got an app from him. With no merit award, it would have been discarded immediately as an option just as HC was. Only the ones with merit money that brought the cost down to the low $40K range which S could then whittle to the low to mid $30K range were even considered.</p>

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<p>If colluding in merit aid is going to work out fairly, might as well collude on the admissions so that each school gets its “fair” share of able to pay and needy students.</p>

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<p>Hamilton was one of the first schools D and I visited and an early favorite of hers. She applied to a few “need only” schools, and while Hamilton didn’t offer the smallest amount of these, it did offer so little fin aid to us that it took itself out of the running. It was a shame really. She ended up considering Kenyon and WUSTL much more strongly because of their aid packages. </p>

<p>Last year, a boy at D’s school also applied and got accepted to Hamilton. They offered him more than the COA in aid. His stats were not as good as D’s but they saw something in him that they wanted more. I say that because he also turned down their offer in favor of a different school that is notoriously skimpy with fin aid. The different schools found different amounts of need and what can we infer from that? That they have different abilities to pay? That they’re offering preferential packaging and considering merit that way?</p>

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<p>greenwitch, some clarifying questions:</p>

<p>Did Hamilton offer your D their full calculation of your EFC?
Did you get enough details about Hamilton’s offer to the boy to know if their offer was more than the standard way of calculating COA (whatever that is)? Or, e.g., was it hearsay?
Did the “different school” offer him more than Hamilton did, and was it more than his EFC at that school?</p>

<p>Schools do indeed have different abilities to pay, and that can affect how they calculate EFC (e.g., PROFILE has various options). Only the schools know if they apply the same calculation to all students.</p>

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<p>^^^sorry, I can’t answer all of these!</p>

<p>Hamilton did offer D their full calculation of our EFC, which to them was about 50K (so they offered her 3K, which I call “financial suicide”).</p>

<p>I don’t know all the specifics about the other questions, except that offered the boy more than the COA, and that was the best offer he received from any school.</p>

<p>A different school offered D nothing, and since they have a no-loan policy their letter included a sentence saying that while they couldn’t offer us a loan, we could probably find one somewhere! Nooooo thank you! </p>

<p>What bugs me is that financial aid seems to be more chaotic and less predictable than merit aid. How can people reliably plan for future years that way? Why do some schools send you an aid package, in April, and not include the tuition, fees, and room and board numbers for the following school year? How much are we supposed to just guess? Schools colluding in this process is not going to clear the waters!</p>

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<p>I think I should leave the boy out of it. Who knows what the little details were?</p>

<p>For the details I know about for my D, the aid packages from the “no merit” schools differed by more than 10K with the no-loan school being the low end. Sigh…</p>

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<p>Greenwitch, our GC and what I personally saw while looking at schools with my 3 boys, is that LACs and Catholic schools tend to be lean on male applicants. So they are more generous with them. It hurts a school terribly for its M/F ration to fall beyond 40/60 is what I have heard, and a number of schools are close to that. So just being a male often gives a student preferential packainging and an increased chance in admissions.</p>

<p>We particularly see this here with a number of Catholic schools in the area that are very popular with Catholic high school kids. Many a mom of a girl has been upset in seeing some male kid, including sometimes their own, getting a better deal for lower stats. Happened to some friends of mine. Their daughter was an excellent student, motivated student, wonderful person, a catch for any college. The son, well, his test scores were as good as his sister’s. Guess who got into BC and who did not? </p>

<p>And because each school can define need really on an individual basis with the professional latitude given when it comes to school funds, there is no way anyone can put together a list without a lot of guesswork going into it. That’s why if you need or want money, you should put together a varied list. You just never know where you’ll hit the jackpot and where you are put on the surplus list. </p>

<p>My son was an athletic recruit that should and did make a difference in admissions to some of the schools on his list. But there were schools where the coach was just not interested. He had what he wanted on his team in terms of what S could give and he was looking for something else. Wouldn’t always say it right out, because he wanted to hedge his bets as long as he could. So it works with admissions. One of the more bitter disappointments that a friend of mine had this year was a LAC who is well known for its caliber in music programs who really seemed so interested in the D, waitlisted her Another student without such an outstanding profile from the same high school was accepted, and she had shown little interest in that school as it was an add on to her list whereas it was a top choice for my friend’s D, Who the heck knows what happened? It just did. </p>

<p>Even need blind schools practice preferential packaging even without merit awards. </p>

<p>Merit aid is unpredictable as well and can be more selective than getting into the most selective colleges when you are talking about some of the more generous packages. The only time you can pretty much count on merit money is if the school has set standards such as a gpa and SAT cut off for the awards. Even then, some schools are changing the language ever so slightly to say that those standards are “for consideration for merit awards” which no longer has that guarantee. </p>

<p>What’s crazy is that the least generous school according to stats available, could be the one giving your kid the most amount of money, merit OR fin aid You’re right, it’s crazy, and it’s like playing th lottery.</p>

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<p>The results might have easily been different if the daughter had applied to the biz school. :)</p>

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<p>*We particularly see this here with a number of Catholic schools in the area that are very popular with Catholic high school kids. Many a mom of a girl has been upset in seeing some male kid, including sometimes their own, getting a better deal for lower stats. Happened to some friends of mine. Their daughter was an excellent student, motivated student, wonderful person, a catch for any college. The son, well, his test scores were as good as his sister’s. Guess who got into BC and who did not? *</p>

<p>Very true… Many schools have to use money as a way to keep their male/female ratio from becoming noticeably different because then the problem worsens and can reach the point of no return.</p>

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<p>The boy got a number of merit awards along with acceptances where his sister was waitlisted. She was not downright denied at any of those places. </p>

<p>The business school might be a good idea. Don’t know about that. I know that the schools are not so worried about the realities of the imbalance as they are about the perception which occurs when kids and parents look at the stats. BC has been statistically tracked by my sons’ high school whose GC’s are very comfortable telling anyone that males have preference. Especially males who don’t live in the North East. Being non Catholic would be a draw too. They have enough Catholics school kids in the North East applying to fill every seat.</p>

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<p>*Being non Catholic would be a draw too. They have enough Catholics school kids in the North East applying to fill every seat. *</p>

<p>Would that really help at BC? I realize that they get enough NE students, but don’t they give a priority to Catholic students (or at least those who went to Catholic high schools?)</p>

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<p>Mom2collegekids, my apologies. I’m blathering when I say that. I really don’t know about the non Catholic kids, though I am sure about the geographics and the sex of the students. It’s just that having my feet in the Catholic school system here in the NYC suburbs, I can tell you that every student in the Catholic highschools with a decent GPA and test scores applies to BC. It is one hot college here. So the kids who get denied are often Ivy caliber. </p>

<p>I have friends in the midwest who have gotten into BC, which often is not even a top school on their list; Notre Dame is the Catholic draw there, over kids with much superior stats and profiles. As for getting their big scholarship award, you have to be truly out there to get it from NY or NE. I doubt that they give priority to Catholic students or to kids who went to Catholic high schools. They are lined up around the block to get there. They need to eliminate them to a reasonable number to even begin assessing them more closely. That I do know.</p>