<p>The schools do have motivation to improve the “quality” (academic stats) of their students as well as get the most tuition revenue from them; improving the “quality” tends to raise prestige and desirability, so that future students of similar academic stats may be willing to matriculate at higher net prices. So bringing in a bright student from a poor family with financial aid and scholarships may be a better long term investment for the school than bringing in a marginal student paying list price.</p>
<p>The “social justice” stuff is, of course, marketing to whomever the college feels it needs to market itself to (potential applicants, alumni, others).</p>
<p>Sorry for splitting hairs on these facts, but a poster on another thread accused me of posting “untruths” as a result of your response to my post. I guess she considers you to be a more credible poster than I am, even though at least one of your links didn’t work. That is what I get for not posting authority for everything I write.</p>
<p>It is true that California is in the bottom three with respect to HS graduation rates, but nowhere close to the bottom with respect to bachelor’s degree and advanced degree completion rates. How one considers each of these in determining “least educated workforce” is a matter of interpretation, but California is not the absolute worst in any one, and not likely if some blend of the three is used.</p>
<p>In any case, that is not really as relevant as this question, and how it relates to states’ public university financial aid policies: how do the various states compare in class mobility across generations?</p>
<p>As far as scholarships benefiting the wealthy, there were some angry posters on the U of Rochester forum this spring when they realized their merit awards would decrease their need-based aid. At many places, scholarships would only be beneficial to those with higher EFC’s who qualify for less need-based aid.</p>
<p>Yes, the method of giving the higher of merit scholarships or need-based aid basically means that the students with higher need-based aid benefit less from merit scholarships, since the merit scholarship that is less than the need-based aid does not benefit the student at all in this case.</p>
<p>It may seem more sensible to many people to apply merit scholarships first to reducing ESC (expected student contribution of Stafford loan and/or work earnings). But do very many colleges do that in general?</p>
<p>Thank you for posting the links, Bay. When huge numbers like 40% and 23% and words like “most” and “least” are used without attribution, it makes me twitch. Apparently these numbers and terms are up for interpretation according to another poster, though, so I will need to dig into this a little further.</p>
<p>"No because after all, they are academia. Schools still want to report high stats to USNews and other ranking agencies, still want their students to go to good graduate schools, get Fulbrights and Rhodes, get good jobs after graduation.</p>
<p>Also, I take that faculty do prefer to teach interested/intelligent kids over the completely disengaged kids."</p>
<p>Certainly they do, but I wouldn’t generalize that lower stat wealthier kids are completely disengaged as opposed to higher stat poorer kids being more interested/intelligent. Definitely when it comes to GPAs, not all are the same. You can have kids with perfect GPAs looking like high stat students, yet they attended inadequate high schools that practice grade inflation, leaving them completely unprepared for college. And you can have kids coming out of top schools that practice serious grade deflation, making their stats look low (or that they are lazy if they have high SATs), who are far more engaged than their GPAs might reflect. I really don’t know how the schools can paint an accurate picture of most students.</p>
<p>It’s been said that Harvard is a hedge fund with a school attached for tax preferences. Hedge funds tend to make high-risk/high-reward investments, much like venture capital funds. Maybe 7 in 10 start-up ventures will fail, but the other 3 will make up for it manyfold.</p>
<p>The kids who get massive subsidies in tuition will also get alumni requests for donations for many decades to come. A few will eventually be in a position to donate millions. One would think someone has crunched the long-term data and found this subsidy to ultimately not be so much a gift as a long-term investment.</p>
<p>The data does not support this. Alumnae who received need based aid as students donate at much lower rates compared with full pay students, even though their salaries may be the same years later. The greatest indicator of charitable giving is a family tradition of giving. Many wealthy graduates grow up watching their parents donate to education, so they in turn do the same thing. Many lower income folks who end up economically successful don’t have this tradition - this has been a tough nut to crack for development folks.</p>
<p>And many lower income folks who end up economically successful have giving patterns that reflect their early years, not their college years, i.e. community centers, after school social service programs, church programs that provided mentors, chess clubs, etc. To me- this demonstrates the success of the “massive subsidies in tuition” (not massive in every case, by the way). These kids become successful and rather than pull up the bootstraps that got them where they are, they direct their giving to the underfunded and often under the radar local charities which helped get them to college in the first place.</p>
<p>True Busdriver. But I was replying to your statement that “many schools would be accepting predominantly full pay students with lower stats.”</p>
<p>So either this “lower stats” in your original point is significant to be a problem or not. If it isn’t then I do not see why the original post. If it is significant, then what I said applies. I.e., schools will still have an interest to foster good academics. An example is USC, which used to be the “University for Spoiled Children” but more recently is investing quite a lot to increase its academic reputation.</p>
<p>I think there’s a piece that you’re missing. The kids who are standing to inherit the family business don’t really need elite schools in the first place. I can’t count the number of families I know in small, privately held but wildly successful family businesses – the kids go wherever they want to. If they’re academically inclined they may go to elite schools; if not, they go where the football team and the frats are the most fun, or where they can ski easily on the weekends, or whatever floats their boat. There’s simply no need for them to send their kids to elite schools unless the kids themselves tend to be more intellectual in nature. And you certainly don’t need to be intellectual in nature to continue to run a family business spinning off a few million dollars a year for the family.</p>
<p>“And you certainly don’t need to be intellectual in nature to continue to run a family business spinning off a few million dollars a year for the family.”</p>
<p>As always, nothing beats good (or in this case wealthy) genes.</p>
That is what I get for not posting authority for everything I write.</p>