<p>“I thought students were supposed to COST the university more to educate than the tuition coming in.”</p>
<p>:)</p>
<p>“I thought students were supposed to COST the university more to educate than the tuition coming in.”</p>
<p>:)</p>
<p>AVERAGE cost per student is very high, exceeding the average tuition (net of FA). MARGINAL cost of an additional student is very low, approaching zero—up to the point you need to start adding facilities, faculty, and other personnel. That’s because the fixed costs are so high. Think about it. It would cost Dartmouth almost as much to educate one student, giving that student all the curricular options that the current crop of Dartmouth students now enjoy, as it does to educate the entire student body.</p>
<p>The article that I read (Nashua Telegraph) says that Dartmouth is considering admitting between 50 and 100 more students - I’d guess that they would all be full-pays. There are still lots of families in New England (and New Hampshire) with lots of money for college.</p>
<p>[Harvard</a> to offer first retirement plan for professors - The Boston Globe](<a href=“http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2009/12/03/harvard_to_offer_first_retirement_plan_for_professors/]Harvard”>http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2009/12/03/harvard_to_offer_first_retirement_plan_for_professors/)</p>
<p>This makes alot of sense. I guess 25% of Harvard tenured profs are 65 or older. Wouldn’t hurt to get some youngbloods in there with new ideas. If they are letting Bobby Bowden go maybe its time for some of these old geezers to make way for other folks.</p>
<p>*The article that I read (Nashua Telegraph) says that Dartmouth is considering admitting between 50 and 100 more students - I’d guess that they would all be full-pays. *</p>
<p>If Dartmouth is “need blind” for admissions, how would they do that?</p>
<p>^^Easy. Just be need blind for many or most slots but create these new slots that are need aware. Or alternatively, remain need blind for all in theory but raise the income bar on who qualifies for aid.</p>
<p>As I’ve always said, except for maybe the very richest schools, “need blind” schools are as need blind as they can afford to be.</p>
<p>According to President Kim, even factoring in financial aid, adding more students would be a budget plus. I suppose that would assume that the added students would have a profile that mirrors the rest of the class–50% full pay, 25-30% partial aid, 20-25% full aid. </p>
<p>I agree that Dartmouth won’t have a stated goal of 50 extra full pay slots. But I find it interesting that most of the figures I’ve seen show that the Ivies typically run about 50% full pay, year in and year out. Somehow, the schools craft a class that does what the school needs done on a financial level.</p>
<p>There are lots of ways they can increase the percentage of full-pays without abandoning their need-blind commitment. One way is to increase the number of slots filled in the ED round; I don’t have hard data to back this up, but I’ll bet the ED pool contains a significantly higher percentage of full-pays because lots of kids with need are reluctant to go that route. Some schools don’t promise need-blind admission to internationals or transfer students; if Dartmouth is in that group, they could go deeper into those pools to find full-pays. (Transfers are especially attractive in this regard because they don’t affect the reported entering class statistics). And if they really want to get ruthless about it, they could increase the number of need-blind admits but then lowball their FA offers to some of the admitted students, in the expectation that they’ll drive away some kids with need. This would cut into their yield, but if they did it simultaneously with expanding the number of kids taken in the ED round it would be pretty much a wash. Cynical, I know, but desperate times call for desperate measures. Dartmouth may not need to resort to these tactics, but I’ll bet a lot of schools will.</p>
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<p>Right, but if they made these 50 extra slots need-aware they would be an even bigger budget plus.</p>
<p>uh-oh - about two-thirds of the way down the page there’s also a refrence to faculty “furloughs” which is just a euphemism for lay-offs. :O</p>
<p>^^Not necessarily. I took it as a reference to UC-style furloughs - where all faculty members are currently required to take x-many unpaid days off per month. It results in a net reduction in every professor’s income of say 10 or 15%, but none of them loses their job completely.</p>
<p>In academia, a furlough means professors work for a few weeks for no pay. My household has been through this before, and it appears we are headed for another round next year.</p>
<p>I suppose there are academic fields where professors actually do not work during the furlough period, but anyone engaged in research projects just keeps working. Classes are generally not affected, because the furlough period occurs during breaks. Office staff stay away (don’t blame them) but the profs are in.</p>
<p>^ Absolutely right. In academic newspeak, “furlough” means a temporary faculty paycut. The nominal salary stays the same so you can keep track for purposes of gauging where you stand in the pecking order, but the actual paycheck takes a hit. Teaching obligations remain unchanged. Research and publication expectations remain unchanged. Service obligations like advising students and serving on committees remain unchanged. All that changes is your actual pay. This makes for a very grumpy faculty and in some cases easy pickin’s for better-heeled competitors in the hunt for lateral hires. It’s a desperate move when a school goes this route, not something undertaken lightly—a sure sign of very serious financial trouble.</p>
<p>Need blind admissions does not generally apply to those who are on the wait list. Meaning they can create a waitlist and then pick and choose from that list who gets in (those who don’t need aid) and who doesn’t (those with a of need). You could argue that all fifty additional students simply come from the waitlist. At this point, Dartmouth is one of those no loan schools – we’ll have to see how long that lasts for any of them in this extended economic crunch.</p>
<p>[For</a> Harvard, success isn’t measured in financial returns - The Boston Globe](<a href=“http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2009/12/05/for_harvard_success_isnt_measured_in_financial_returns/]For”>http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2009/12/05/for_harvard_success_isnt_measured_in_financial_returns/)</p>
<p>Globe editorial gets it right</p>
<p>I believe that there is a mechanism at play that goes like this:</p>
<p>a) Shave some dollars off financial aid packages</p>
<p>b) Hope that smaller aid packages discourage some high need sudents from enrolling, thus increasing the percentage of full-pay students.</p>
<p>c) The combination of slightly few aid students and sliightly lower average aid packages is enough to achieve some budget savings.</p>
<p>Thus, the “adjustments” will occur at the yield stage and won’t require changes to need-blind admissions.</p>
<p>This occurred to me as I was reviewing Amherst’s fianncial aid changes, which on the face seem illogical. They are increasing the expected student summer earnings by an average of $1650 per aided student. Obviously, that is a unrealistic number. At the same time, they are budgeting for no increase in the percentage of aided students despite already pencilling in back to back 5% tuition increases. It all makes no sense unless you figure that the $1650 reduction in aid packages will reduce the number of aid students enough to offset the additional students needing aid from back to back price increases.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/03/education/03harvard.html[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/03/education/03harvard.html</a></p>
<p>[Inside</a> the Vault: Risky Business - The Daily Princetonian](<a href=“http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2009/12/08/24676/]Inside”>http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2009/12/08/24676/)</p>
<p>Princeton U paper is doing a nice 5 part series on their endowment. This was particularly well done. I find it interesting that Princeton has borrowed 2.5Billion to pay the bills yet they say they don’t have a liquidity problem.</p>
<p>^^they’re playing Russian roulette with the Fed, betting that it will keep borrowiing costs artificially low long enough for everything to come out evenly in the next 18 months. It’s a valid argument, but since when did university endowments turn into virtual hedge funds?</p>
<p>Rather than borrowing, the more prudent approach would be to simply wean the budget from such hefty reliance on the endowment in the first place. Columbia, Cornell and Penn all rely on their endowments for less than 20% of their operating costs. Someone else in this thread pointed out the correlation between high risk investing and high dependency on endowment – and, now we see why.</p>
<p>johnw, the other option would be if you really wanted to take these aggressive, risky bets with your endowment and thought every 10 years or so it would explode but still it provided a better long term return then what you should do is spend much less of your endowment each year. If you spend 3% and you lose 50% of your endowment one year then you can spend the same amount and it only goes up to 6%- no layoffs. Notre Dame made the same bone-headed investments as these other guys but because they only spent 3% they are not having to make any cuts.</p>