Marquis Fellowship

LucieTheLakie
Fri, 21 Mar 2014 15:08:57 +0000

I don’t personally feel any injustice on behalf of my son (or his 1500 CR/M score, etc.), just disappointment, because without a Marquis scholarship, the school will, in all likelihood, be beyond our budget.

Lafayette is one of those schools that “meets need” by offering loans in addition to grants, which frees up money that allows them to award targeted merit dollars to students it might lose to its competitors. I still don’t even know if my son will be accepted, but it’s not that hard to imagine that had he applied to Lafayette from an underrepresented state with exactly the same stats, he might have not only been admitted, he might have gotten a scholarship too.

These awards are driven by institutional needs, the primary ones being raising the school’s profile and rankings. Lafayette’s 75th percentile for CR/M scores is 1390–that’s 130 points below Haverford’s (where Lafayette’s last president now presides) and 90 points below Middlebury’s, where Lafayette’s new president was recruited from. These high-prestige, large-dollar Marquis awards are designed to both raise the student body’s stats and to attract students who would have chosen more elite schools over Lafayette (schools like Haverford, Middlebury and Colgate) or chosen one of Lafayette’s wealthier and higher-ranked direct-competitors (like Bucknell and Lehigh).

But they also keep Lafayette firmly entrenched in a category of schools seen by colleges “above” them as having to “buy” their best students. And they also result in a lot of hurt feelings among students who weren’t selected and believe (rightly or not) they were just as “deserving.”

It’s a difficult balancing act, but as Taylor demonstrates quite vividly, it’s clearly working for Lafayette in the long run. Whether it works for the rest of us, whose kids didn’t receive a scholarship, is something we have to decide as we sit down and weigh our various options.

But, let’s not kid ourselves: These awards are BUSINESS DECISIONS, nothing more, nothing less.

quotehen Lafayette really wants to land a student, it has one especially powerful tool: money.

Of course, they’re a bit more classy about it than that. They don’t just call it money. They call it a merit scholarship.

“Families think their sons and daughters are awarded a merit scholarship because of the fact that they are wonderfully smart and talented,” says Robert Massa, a vice president at Lafayette. “[T]he primary reason for awarding a non-need-based merit scholarship is to change a student’s enrollment decision from another institution to our institution. That’s why colleges do it.”




How Colleges Fight For Top Students : Planet Money : NPR;

Lafayette’s “institutional model” (as estimated by their Net Price Calculator) determined that we can afford to pay $43,000 a year for our son to attend the school. Other schools (the higher-ranked ones that only award need-based aid) have deemed our ability to pay to be ~$27,000 a year–which just so happens to line up with what WE actually believe we can afford. Hence, our need for the Marquis Scholarship, which we thought our son would be competitive for, since his stats were well above the 75th percentile. We wouldn’t even have allowed him to apply if we didn’t believe he had a decent shot at one.

We bet wrong. But nobody forced us to apply either.