<p>Mom2, yes, if she was interested in engineering, she would be with a bunch of other smart kids like yours. But, she has no idea what she wants. She loves science, calculus, english, and history. So, she would be a liberal arts kid. The one thing she absolutely knows she doesn’t want is engineering. There are not a great number of scholarships out there for liberal arts kids.</p>
<p>Yes, there aren’t many scholarships exclusively for lib arts kids - unless they accept a university-wide one for stats.</p>
<p>But, if you read my post #116, I didn’t just mention engineering…</p>
<p>*Also, those students who get those big scholarships, tend to cluster in a handful of majors…eng’g, bio, chem, math, physics, etc, so there is even a great concentration of smart kids in those majors and in the prereqs for those majors. *</p>
<p>So, yes, there may not be a huge concentration of big scholarship winners majoring in English or History, unless maybe they are law school bound. I’m not saying that they’re aren’t any, just that the larger concentrations will be in Bio, Chem, Physics, math, and engineering…and business, too. </p>
<p>I should look up the actual distribution and post that.</p>
<p>Ok…didn’t find breakdown by majors who are the scholarship recipients, but I did find this breakdown info about Honors Freshman (who are score at least in the 91st percentile…ACT 28 - ACT 36) So, it’s safe to guess that most of these students are recipients of some kind of scholarship.</p>
<p>(Since the below numbers only represent freshmen, quadruple the numbers to get a rough idea of how many smart kids are in each college division. And, there are some qualified kids who don’t apply to the Honors College, so their numbers won’t be included.`)</p>
<p>Arts and Sciences … 564
Commerce and Business Administration … 175
Communication and Information Sciences … 50
Education … 43
Engineering … 323
Human Environmental Sciences… 29
Nursing … 33
Social Work … 2
Undecided -… about 100</p>
<p>Total …about 1300 freshmen times 4 = about 5,000 students.</p>
<p>So, about 5,000 “smart” kids - kind of concentrated in a few areas…as I suspected. But, definitely a good number in Liberal Arts. 
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<p>Now some might say that an ACT 34 kid isn’t going to be impressed being around an ACT 28 student, but when you’re talking about kids who are in the 90th+ percentile…everyone can learn something from someone. Just because a student got an ACT 28, doesn’t mean that he didn’t score higher in Math, but may not be the best in English or whatever. I know many smart kids that get tripped up with Science Reasoning.</p>
<p>I chuckle when I read the posts about being one of a few smart kids. Kids choose colleges for all sorts of reasons. If a student chooses something in let’s say the top one hundred schools (and you could probably go much higher than that) in the country, there will be plenty of other smart kids. And different kids are good at different things. Education is what you put in to it, so I would argue that the very brightest among us will get a good education wherever they choose to attend college.</p>
<p>Good point. I know when I’ve taken a course or two at a local CC, there are a mix of smart kids who are there for financial reasons and some kids who are there cuz they haven’t grown up yet. Yet, I still learned as much from those classes as I did at the UC I graduated from.</p>
<p>mom2, I’m not sure what college you’re referencing, but out of her class of around 500, several kids were admitted to honors colleges that weren’t in the top 10% of her class and not all of them received merit aid. I’m not saying these kids aren’t smart. Nor am I saying that D wouldn’t have a lot to learn from them. I also don’t think how well you do on a standardized test has much to do with intelligence. But, she wants something different than being with the top 10% from her high school. Although that group has plenty to offer, she wants to be academically challenged on a different level and be with other kids at the top 1% of their classes. That being said, the state flagship honors college with merit aid was her financial back-up (she was determined not to take out loans) of which I was grateful for.</p>
<p>Let me give you an example of how merit aid is used to attract only upper income students. One top 15 LAC offered D 20K in merit (their highest reward) plus a research position. The total financial aid package added about 5K in grant money (COA approx 53K). Without the merit scholarship, she would have received 25K in grants. It seems that the only students who can use that scholarship are upper income students, not even middle class students like ourselves (EFC is as low as it is since I have another in college).
If this school was only interested in attracting highly qualified students, it would have determined need first, then applied the scholarship on top of the need-based grant.</p>
<p>“It seems that the only students who can use that scholarship are upper income students”
No, it doesn’t seem that way at all.</p>
<p>Why not Eric? A family with an EFC of 27K (100% need met school) for the second child in college, suggests a middle-class income. Of course, on other threads there has been quite a disagreement on what is “middle class.” But, I’m suggesting that an income between 100-150K belongs in that category.</p>
<p>GT - I’m feeling a little sensitive with your summary of smart students. Your daughter is an exceptionally intelligent young woman and I respect that she prefers a college environment with equally intelligent students. I just need to say that there are smart students outside of the top 10 in a class. My son will be attending the state flagship that was your daughter’s financial safety. He attended a very rigorous school and was not one of the top ten in his class. He was still an A/A- student, an athlete, took a lot of APs, and had great ECs. He received a merit scholarship and I was happy for him. In fact, he received a merit scholarship from the state flagship and others from his class who were in the top ten did not. I don’t know exactly how they pick kids for scholarships, but they picked him out of the thousands of freshman that will be attending and, according to their website, they only give out around 200 merit scholarships. They were obviously impressed. He’s smart, and it’s likely your daughter would find that he could academically challenge her, despite not ranking in the top ten. </p>
<p>Now, to return to the thread topic - should he have gotten the scholarship considering we are full pay? I hadn’t thought about it much until I started reading all these threads on CC. We have money saved for his undergrad. He picked the state school to save money for med school, which is currently his goal for the future. He sees the merit money as less he needs to spend from our savings and more he’ll have available for med school.</p>
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<p>We can probably have a fun debate over that, mentioning things such as cost of living by area and luxury spending.</p>
<p>But, yeah, for many people making over $100,000 a year would be considered fairly well-off, actually. Not to say that someone with that income can’t be considered middle-class, but $100,000 is about twice the real median income as over last year.</p>
<p>I suppose it all depends on how you define middle-class though.</p>
<p>BU- I consider everyone that goes to our state flagship smart (my son goes there) and was a financial safety only because she didn’t want a large school or large classes. They do pick the well-rounded kid who shows intellectual rigor for scholarships and you should be proud as truly only the best of the best get merit aid. I was thrilled when both kids where admitted (I just wish D was thrilled as well). </p>
<p>As to the other schools that she was offered full-rides to just due to stats (NMF), she would have been around plenty of smart kids, she is mostly concerned about class size and access to professors. I suspect I’m sticking my foot in my mouth because I’m trying to justify why she wouldn’t take a full-ride (I don’t think I understand it myself)</p>
<p>As to the original topic, I found that merit aid 1) was offered at schools D wasn’t interested in (mostly because too big) or 2) wasn’t as generous as the need-based grants so that only the very well off could benefit. So, eliminating merit aid in favor of more grand money is not as absurd as it seems at first, but what is absurd, is dictating to the schools how to run their business. If eliminating merit was better for their business, they would, like many of the elites, have done it by now.</p>
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<p>Bingo. Personally, when I see what it costs to train in certain sports, it’s so very evident that it’s only those with tremendous disposable incomes can engage in this. So families who can well afford to pay full-freight spend in the five and six figures so their kids can win athletic scholarships. It’s ridiculous. Until that madness is cleaned up, it’s ridiculous to suggest that merit aid is bad. Uh, the purpose of college is at least supposed to be academic merit and promise, not athletic merit and promise.</p>
<p>You do understand that athletic scholarships are rarely full pay and that merit and need scholarships are in much larger abundance at universities, don’t you? </p>
<p>While some sports are extremely costly for families, it’s rare that a student will win one that even recoups the cost of that high price training.</p>
<p>Athletic merit is just like any other kind of merit. And the athlete that takes the full four (or five) years of tuition, room, and board oftentimes has contributed more to the university and will continue to contribute for decades to come. There is a correlation between athletic achievement and academic achievement.</p>
<p>Take a look at Fortune 500 CEO’s both male and female and read their bios. You’ll learn that many of them were college athletes.</p>
<p>Too often when people talk about college scholarships being wasted on people they’re talking about the basketball or football player that leaves early for a lucrative professional career. In reality, that’s the minority. As the NCAA commercial says, most athletes are “going pro” in something other than their college sport.</p>
<p>GTalum wrote:</p>
<p>**…but what is absurd, is dictating to the schools how to run their business. If eliminating merit was better for their business, they would, like many of the elites, have done it by now.
**
I agree with this. Why should the government dictate to private colleges how to run their business? No one in this country is forced to attend a particular college. If you don’t like a specific college’s policy on how it hands out aid, then don’t apply there.</p>
<p>I totally agree, spelhei. I have one of those students who works hard academically and athletically, and who wants to play in college. Her sport isn’t one that gets loads of cash for scholarships, and if she plays she will have to work hard in both studies and her academics in order to be successful. </p>
<p>The work ethic of a typical college athlete has to be outstanding to cope with travelling each week during the season, training multiple hours each day on and off season and keeping ones’ grades up during the process. </p>
<p>Most NCAA athletes will not see the dollars either in college or after they graduate. They often do it because they love their sport.</p>
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<p>I agree completely. If a college wants to hand out merit aid to attract top scholars and up the caliber of student there, what concern is that of the government’s?</p>
<p>…who’s talking about the government? The first post in this thread was about how individual colleges might consider teaming up to reduce merit aid.</p>
<p>"Why not Eric? A family with an EFC of 27K (100% need met school) for the second child in college, suggests a middle-class income. Of course, on other threads there has been quite a disagreement on what is “middle class.” But, I’m suggesting that an income between 100-150K belongs in that category. "</p>
<p>The simple answer to refute your hypothesis written earlier that ‘only upper class’ can take advantage of the scholarship, is that nothing prevents said middle-class from giving up income until need+merit allow attendance.</p>
<p>So what you are actually saying is that the status-quo middle-class lifestyle is affected by a decision to take the scholarship – typically in the form of loans that impact future disposable income.</p>
<p>See the difference ? Not an economic impossibility, just an economic choice.</p>
<p>speihei,
Thank you for the kind words and good wishes. I must admit, though, that I still cannot accept the idea that colleges that agree to exclusively offer need-based financial aid are guilty of price-fixing and anticompetitive “collusion.” While all of the universities in the Ivy League, for example, have agreed to only offer need-based aid, they cannot be guilty of price-fixing since they do not offer the same prices for tuition. The same applicant who gets into Dartmouth and Yale, for example, will find that their family will be asked to pay far more at the former than the latter. Although both institutions ostensibly guarantee “100% of need,” they define need very differently, and therefore charge different prices for tuition. </p>
<p>Of course, if the applicant’s family makes under $60,000/year, then they will be able to attend either institution for free. Is this evidence of anticompetitive collusion? I doubt it. Would you consider it anticompetitive for two merit-pay institutions to offer the same top student full scholarships? Of course not; if anything, they would be explicitly competing, by each offering the student as low a price as possible to get him to attend. How is this an different for those institutions that exclusively offer need-based aid?</p>
<p>The upshot is that the Ivies are still competitive with one another, even though they do not offer merit-based scholarships. They have chosen to adopt exclusively need-based financial aid not because they do not want to compete with one another, but because they want to attract students who have traditionally been unable to attend elite institutions and therefore exorcise their shameful histories as bastions of the rich, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment. Moreover, if the Ivy League was an anticompetitive cartel, they would only allow applicants to apply to one of the schools. The very fact that applicants can be accepted to multiple Ivy League universities and each university will do all it can to get these cross-admits to matriculate is evidence that the Ivy League is not as anticompetitive as you believe.</p>
<p>A bit of a rant –
Unwillingness to shoulder the burden of a full-freight Ivy league education, while ignoring the plethora of much less expensive opportunities available to ambitious, hard-working, and talented individuals is just whining. It sometimes seems that the middle-class in the US has made a job of it.</p>
<p>I am OK with not wearing armani suits, owning a rolex, or enjoying the cachet derived from seeking college prestige. More than ok, actually. I refuse to wear a watch, wear scrubs at work, and am secure in the knowledge that my kids will do as well in college as their talents and ambition will take them, college name-prestige notwithstanding.</p>
<p>I am very fortunate. The difference seems to be that I know it.</p>