OOS financial aid. Is it really as bad as some say?

CautiousOptimist
Sun, 07 Feb 2016 18:46:14 +0000

@umcoe16 For lesser-equipped colleges I would agree with you, but Michigan isn’t just some public university. Their endowment, at nearly ten billion dollars, is the 10th largest in the US, larger than four Ivy League endowments (Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, and Brown) and many more. Granted, Michigan is a far larger school than those, so the funds are stretched a little thinner. The endowment still fares well in endowment per-student (228 million). For reference, Columbia University, which offers no-loan financial aid packages, is only a few places above Michigan at slightly over 300 million per student. It’s a far cry from Princeton’s 2 billion per student, but it’s nothing to scoff at.

In-state students already (without aid) pay 30k less per year than OOS, and still get plenty of aid. If aid to OOS is making it unreasonable for in-state students to attend that’s one thing, but if you really want to attract the “best and brightest” pushing away all OOS students even though you can afford to take them in just doesn’t make sense.

Also, Michigan gets only 4.4% of its funding from the state, 300 million from an operating budget of $6.8 billion. The state of Michigan’s contribution doesn’t even cover the $30,000-per-student differential in tuition multiplied by the 16,000 in-state undergraduates, which weighs in at about 500 million, so if the argument is that the taxpayers shouldn’t be supporting out-of-staters who don’t pay Michigan taxes, the taxpayers don’t even pay enough to pay for in-state students.

That’s straight from a presentation on the FY2015 budget, with some of the data extrapolated. Source http://vpcomm.umich.edu/budget/fundingsnapshot/2.html