UChicago Braces for $220M Deficit

Colleges & Universities University of Chicago
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^ Didn’t someone (Zoom?) report that internationals are 13% this year (class of '24)? I doubt it’ll go to 8%. UChicago was admitting 16% the past two years (classes of '23 and 22) I thought, so 13% is a drop already.

Agree with Zoom that predictive models will be off when there’s a big change of some sort, whether that be a policy change (ED, No Barriers) or some external thing like Covid or Great Recession. When the underlying parameters are more stable, the law of large numbers generally allows prior history to be a decent predictor for the future. The waitlist generally allows Admissions to fine tune the class so some years they may take more (predicted) full pays, other years more Hispanics, other years still more harp players or Art History majors, and so on. Last year they waitlisted some kid but then immediately offered him admission plus merit if he would commit. Clearly he had something they were looking for!

Look, we know that they use sophisticated data analytics. Someone reported that a few months ago (looked for the post recently but unfortunately couldn’t find it). However, I don’t think any of this cynically rejects Marlowe’s points. A need-aware school makes ability to pay a top priority. Chicago does NOT do that. They will always prioritize the more talented FA kid over a less-talented full-pay. But they will also optimize the class selection. Hey - it’s UChicago so how could they NOT do so? The variables they choose will be many and are based what has worked for them in the past. They must know that a lop-sided class functions less successfully overall than a more lop-sided one for both practical and philosophical reasons. So it’s natural to want a diverse class in terms of socio economics, demographics, gender, political thought, academic interest, extra-curricular attractions, and so on.

That doesn’t mean all those characteristics are the PRIMARY criteria for admission. Intellectual curiosity should be the primary criterion and my guess is that the initial round of 2,100 or so (before the tweaking) as well as the final group receiving offers of admission are nearly 100% filled with inquisitive, intellectually curious students. And there is an easy way to check: what is the attrition rate? Freshman retention rate? four-year grad rate? Career/grad school outcome? What are faculty saying about these kids? Those are the obvious metrics. But if you listen in on what the students themselves like to talk about, you notice that their coursework is very important to them. They are engaged and find their studies to be interesting. IMO, this demonstrates more than a mere “ability to adapt.” UChicago is now a first choice for a large portion of the class (and a strong 2nd for a good number of the remaining). Those students are engaged and interested because, by and large, that’s what they were looking for in a school.

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Perhaps we are nearing consensus - a dangerous thing on this board, but we have to take our bitter medicine from time to time. As my contribution to the irenic mood I hereby withdraw my belittling remarks about predictive analytics modeling. I will accept that all those algorithms could be laboring benignly to shape a class in the way a university wants to shape its class. Call it a computational sorting out of hooks or preferences or “institutional priorities”. I will call the moniker an overblown technocratism but nothing worse than that.

There’s nothing in my mind very controversial in principle about a rationalization of preferences and hooks, though Zoom seems to think so when he calls the process one of “intentionally manufacturing outcomes”. A hook is a hook, but use a computer to organize your hooks and, voila, it’s a manufacturing process “happening under the guise of holistic admissions.” Or, as said elsewhere, it’s a disgusting activity like sausage-making from which we would want to avert our eyes.

Such assertions do not inspire confidence in the integrity of the process. However, a metaphor is only a metaphor. I am more interested in what is actually going in to the sausage. Is wealth qua wealth going in? Is being a privileged child of wealth a hook like playing certain sports or having certain achievements or being a URM or child of a firefighter or a genius kid from a small town? That’s the question that matters to me. Zoom has said several times that wealth is and should be viewed in this way, most recently when he asserts that because there will be fewer international students coming to Chicago, most of whom are full pay, the University must necessarily bring in more full-pay domestic students to make up the difference. That could only mean feeding those ZIP codes into the hopper for the purpose of extracting wealthy kids at the other end who would not otherwise have come through the machine. Sausage-making would have become more than a metaphor. “Predictive analytics” would have gone to the dark side. Need-blind would be a sham. The solemn assertions of Deans and Presidents would be lies. Everyone working in Admissions would be complicit in a fraud.

Show me proof, not this endless cynical fantasizing.

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@marlowe1 : Here is proof that this sort of predictive modeling has been going on for a long time, even at need blind institutions. Here is an article from the Duke Chronicle in 2010. The article appears in the top right corner of the front page, and then continues on page 3.

https://issuu.com/dukechronicle/docs/dukechronicle_100329

Its hard to imagine that this process doesn’t occur at other prominent need blind colleges. The modeling has undoubtedly become a lot more sophisticated than in years past. With all of the wonderful math/economics/stats resources at UChicago, I’m almost sure they do the same thing. The need aware colleges like Trinity are just a bit more open about it.

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Another interesting data point – the titles of the deans themselves. To avoid stating the obvious, we should look carefully at how they call themselves. In addition to leading undergraduate admissions, many also are in charge of financial aid. Here are a few that I was able to quickly pull up:

James G. Nondorf
Vice President for Enrollment and Student Advancement and Dean of College Admissions and Financial Aid
University of Chicago

Jessica Marinaccio
Dean of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid
Columbia University

William R. Fitzsimmons
Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid
Harvard University

Jeremiah Quinlan
Dean of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid
Yale University

Richard Shaw
Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid
Stanford University

So if admissions is truly need blind, then why do the admissions deans also need to be in charge of financial aid? If they were truly independent of each other, wouldn’t it make more sense to have a separate dean for financial aid?

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Need-blind schools are facile at keeping admissions and FA separate.

I tend to believe that need-blind schools don’t know whether an applicant applied for FA or how much FA they might require.

I also tend to believe that most need-blind schools take into account the many factors mentioned above that indicate affluence, or lack thereof, in their holistic admissions decisions.

Whether or not that is really need-blind, we could debate forever.

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^^^ @marlowe1 at #61:

Zoom keeps saying what he does about “wealth qua wealth” because he’s assuming the College will have a smaller FA budget come fall. Obviously, Zoom would be correct if the university were not able to offset investment losses and increased payouts to existing students with new contributions or a re-allocation of funds from elsewhere in the university (including the endowment). The question, then, is what actions are being taken to offset these negatives. Right now, we don’t have the full story because the university is still working through it. We know, for instance, that the salary and hiring freezes won’t be enough and that suggests salary cuts and other austerity measures. Whether those are directed toward other operating losses or the smaller endowment, not sure.

From the Zimmer, Lee and College communications, I’m pretty sure that if you are a currently matriculating or returning student your present and future financial aid packages will remain unaltered from what they would have been without the pandemic and additional emergency and tuition funding assistance will be provided as required to meet demonstrated need. Things could always change for the worse as the pandemic plays out, but this seems to be the direction and level of commitment that the university is professing currently.

Apparently, the university is also paying out work-study, even if those employers have shut down, and are paying students who were otherwise employed by the university at the time of the announced shut-downs, including but not limited to RA’s.

Tuition plus Room/Board will not be increasing in 2020/21. Note that this is not the same thing as tuition not increasing, or R/B not increasing. The university has committed to not increasing the total of those amounts, but we don’t know what that means yet, exactly.

All this stuff listed above is for the current matriculated and returning students.

If you are planning to apply beginning in the fall of 2020 for Class of '25 onward, there is going to be increased uncertainty regarding FA availability. That’s just plain common sense, but it’s also consistent with history. The university has altered its FA policies in the past to better-align availability with genuine need, and we know - because Boyer has stated it - that there is cross-subsidization from the well-off to the more needy. The university has lowered avg. costs for the lower ends of the income distribution, but tuition increases in general have been healthy so the more full-pays or near-full-pays making those payments, the better. As a result, financial aid availability, in terms of total dollars, has expanded notably. Now, however, the financial aid budget might shrink due to factors outside the university’s control, and there will be no or little corresponding offsets to the top-line at least for the next year. Zimmer has specifically mentioned Odyssey as a top priority so - best guess - this program won’t change much w/r/t outreach and funding. But it’s possible that need-based funding for family incomes out of the Odyssey range but not quite able to manage full-pay won’t be as available as it had been in the past. As the university is committed to “no loans” that could, all else equal, impact a FA kid’s odds for admission, because his/her predicted income segment would now have fewer spots available (and the full-pay segment would have more).

The above scenario shouldn’t be so shocking. Once upon a time (beginning in mid aughts and ending with the Class of '21), being NMF was a hook and got you $4,000/year guaranteed. Over time, as UChicago become ever more selective, you started hearing of NMF’s with stellar credentials who ended up waitlisted when, perhaps, even a few years earlier they probably would have been admitted with 100% likelihood. That makes sense. As the university became more selective, it wasn’t a big deal to attract NMF’s anymore (as they were getting plenty!) and there were better uses for the funds other than expanding their outreach to the NMF crowd. By the time ED rolled around, they cut out the $4k guarantee altogether and just paid out the college-sponsored amount (at most). It’s still possible that if you are NMF you have a positive hook in the ED1 round where UChicago is a clear first choice and you are almost assured of NMSF funding; by RD decision time, when NMSF funding is less available (and alternative funding from other schools significantly more generous), it may be a negative hook. That’s just speculation but it wouldn’t surprise me if this were the case.

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Usually the departments are called the same (eg Office of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid at many universities). That doesn’t mean the required fire-wall (or whatever it’s called) isn’t there. What it likely DOES mean is that these deans are as involved in constructing financial aid policy as they are admissions policy, especially if colleges and universities truly want to diversify their incoming classes in a meaningful way. The fact of the matter is that colleges do, indeed, compete for top kids using funding, regardless of what it’s called or how it’s applied. And for a whole lot of admits, the funding component is as important as the offer of admission. Even for ED kids.

For instance, is the UChicago $20k guarantee ($5k/year) for first-gens “need-based” or “merit-based?” They don’t say and it doesn’t matter. They want more first gens for the time being, and this is in part how they attract them (see my earlier comment about NMF’s from several years ago). Same, most likely, with Police and Fire, or rural kids, or military vets. Not saying these would all be Full-Pay matrics otherwise because they most likely would not, and UChicago is no doubt bestowing those funds on deserving admits, many of whom applied precisely because those funds were available, and would not have applied had they not been.

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@sgopal2 - the “sculpting the class” article about Duke was also fascinating!

Again, it appears Chicago (or any elite college) is need-blind for a particular applicant, but need-aware for the CLASS as a whole.

Also, @JBStillFlying - as the applicant pool is so talented on academic metrics, there will be no sacrificing academic quality, any way you cut the class. For instance, Chicago could say next year, they want all incoming students to have played a varsity sport. The applicant pool is strong enough that the avg. SATs, intellect, curiosity, would be exactly the same, and we’d have 100% athletes. Or, frankly, Chicago could say they wanted 100% accomplished musicians, or have the class be 100% Asian, or whatever, and there would be no dip or sacrifice in academic talent.

The “sculpting the class” example is the best illustration of what AOs do. They need to have “enough of these” and “enough of those” in any given class. So they run a preliminary model, and then chisel away. Cutting away a few here, adding a few there.

So, in actuality, students compete with one another on multiple dimensions after they make the academic cut. Race, geographic location, proxies for wealth (or lack of wealth), activities, etc. etc.

As we have (rough) consensus about the above, here’s the most interesting (if sad) question: what are Chicago’s institutional targets for an incoming class? Answering this question gets at heart of what Chicago wants to do.

** The Baseline **: As JB would attest, and I agree, academic curiosity and intellectual horsepower are paramount goals. No doubt about that. After that - after any particular applicant has passed this bar - here’s what I think are some others:

** Institutional Targets (beyond intellect/academics) **

Top 2-3 SAT scores: it doesn’t look like Chicago wants to overtake Caltech - but wants to be in the top 3 - it wants to be known as a “high-scoring/smart” school

*Racial Diversity (w\ a bump for URMs) *: moreso than years past, have a mix of ethnicities on campus, especially African American and Latinx populations

*More Athletes *: Under Nondorf, it seems like having more former varsity athletes is a priority - this number has increased of late

*Geographic Diversity (maybe a Texas emphasis) *: Making sure various geographic locations are represented

*More low SES/Pell Grant Recipients *: bump this percentage in the student population

*More wealthy students (?) *: this is hard to prove, but do they want more well-connected boarding school types? The sons and daughters of bankers and financiers? My hunch is yes, but, again, hard to prove.

i D3 Athletic Recruitment *: I think qualified athletes get more of a bump now, than ever before.

What does everyone else think? Beyond the baseline academic curiosity/metrics, what are Chicago’s institutional targets?

Identifying the targets allows us to best understand how they sculpt a class.

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Cue, I think your list is about right and it’s the same list of institutional targets that the Ivy’s use, maybe with the exception that Ivy’s consider legacy as a target more so than Chicago, but even this is changing as the Ivy’s are also trying to balance out all their other targets and something has to give because admissions is a zero-sum game. I also suspect Chicago would like to have a higher percentage of highly qualified legacies (say maybe 10% vs its current 5%, these numbers are hypothetical as I don’t know what they currently are) but its pool of legacy applicants may be smaller than Ivy’s because there are fewer numbers of parent cohorts from a few decades ago when College class was much smaller than Ivy peers. But this will change in the decades to come and a 10% legacy target (of otherwise highly qualified legacies) is a good number to enhance other qualities such as alumni connection, donation, etc.

Right now, the best places to be if you are an applicant without a major hook such as recruited athlete or nationally recognized award such as USAMO or 8 figure donation are the opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum. Kids in lowest 20% and top 1% of wealth are better off than the great majority of kids in the middle or upper middle class because these kids aren’t offering the colleges any significant institutional priority no matter what their grades, test scores, or ECs are because there are thousands of others who have the same credentials like them.

Here’s an interesting article on the future of education being disrupted b technology: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/amp/2020/05/scott-galloway-future-of-college.html

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@Zoom10 - legacies have increased in recent chicago classes, no? I thought it was around 10% of the class nowadays?

Or maybe I was mistaken there? Do you think chicago wants more legacies as a percent of the class?

Again, thinking about the institutional targets is the most interesting part, for me! I still wonder how they want to sculpt the class.

72

It would be interesting to know how many admits at U of C came in primarily on the basis of a hook. A few recruited athletes would be in that category (though I would hope most of those would be closer to the academic average at Chicago than their counterparts at Harvard); and a sizable number of racial minorities, first gens, and similar under-represented demographics. Every single kid in these categories would, I assume, be considered capable of doing Chicago-level work. That would have to be so, because at this school weak admits have a hard time finding places to hide. Nevertheless, I suspect that the preferences are real in these two categories and especially in the latter one.

Perhaps kids of wealthy donors or prospective donors get some extra consideration; likewise children of faculty; and likewise legacies. My hunch is that these categories are not nearly as decisive as the previous ones. Children of faculty and legacies would in any event fit very well with a story of knowing the culture of the University and being a good fit for it. They would need to tell that story also on their own terms, but the story would have enhanced credibility coming from them with their backgrounds.

Children of potential donors are a big deal at Harvard. There they are marked out for special treatment and they get it - in spades. I’m not so unworldly as to think there aren’t some Chicago applicants that fall into that category. I can think of a certain young man now on campus. My hunch would be that these are very rare birds and that any preference they get is a slight one.

What would be the total of all admits in the foregoing categories? Could it be as high as one-third? If so, that leaves two-thirds of the class in combat against all comers without special weapons other than a plethora of accomplishments, geographical origins, and UChicago-specific qualities that are simply unhookedly meritorious in one or more dimensions - the academic one, certainly; perhaps in having an accomplishment or two; perhaps being from an unusual place or having a good personal story; but mainly as having, and being able to demonstrate that they have, the secret sauce: that they are the Chicago type. My thesis here is that the latter dimension is the truly significant one in almost all these jump-ball cases. The feedback we get on this board seems to suggest that.

Much as I would like to see Texas applicants favored, I highly doubt that they are: they too need to show the sauce.

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Anecdotally, I heard of a few legacies who got dinged in the ED rounds this year. I’d be surprised to learn of 10% legacies but yes, they do want more applying for sure because legacies or those with a sibling connection tend to be great candidates, is my understanding. They sort of know what the school’s about, for one, and I suppose there is an increased chance of the family having a long term relationship with the institution.

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Not sure how many students are hooked, but we can make estimates.

26% of the Class of 2023 were Black or Hispanic, per the link below.
Some proportion of the internationals are probably URM too.

There are 512 unduplicated athletes (some students play more than one sport, so one can’t add up all the roster names), so 128 per class on average. Not sure how many of those are hooked, e.g., what proportion of those had coach support thru the admissions process. A typical NESCAC would have 70 or so recruited athletes each year, so that could be a conservative starting point unless someone has better info. So, 70/1,726 Class of 2023 matriculants=4%

Pell Grant (low ses) - 11% from college navigator, data is a year or two old. That 11% will have some overlap with the URMs, though.

Legacies: Who knows, not sure U Chicago has released this in forever, estimate somewhere probably in 5%-15% range. (I’m not sure the definition of legacy either…parents only? Grandparents? Siblings? MBA/Law/Med School?)

VIP/Donors - ?

With this info, it’s easily a third of the class that’s hooked, could be quite a bit more depending on how many legacies, VIP and large donor kids are in.

Just for fun, here is the range of test scores of class of 2023:

ACT: 20-36
SAT: 1020-1600

And mid 50%:
ACT 33-35
1500-1560

The full range values are not typos, I contacted institutional reporting to verify that these were correct when they were made public (JBstillflying and I talked about this last year on another thread).

The students who are on the low end of the range were highly likely to be hooked, maybe in multiple ways. Even though I was directly told those numbers were accurate, I am still left to wonder why someone applied to a test optional school with an ACT of 20. But, it worked for them, so what do I know?!

https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/apply/class-2023-profile

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NearlyDone, that article is spot on.

Marlowe, I admire your idealism but let’s just break down this with some basic math and a tangible example. Princeton, the wealthiest college based its on per capita endowment. had an undergraduate financial aid budget of $187 million in 2019-2020.: https://www.princeton.edu/news/2019/04/25/princeton-trustees-set-2019-20-budget-increasing-financial-aid-72 Note that this number of $187 million was fixed and set by the Board, therefore it is not fluid and subject to upward adjustment just because Princeton was fortunate to have a huge number of super deserving kids needing FA apply.

Assuming each class has 1300 kids X 4 undergrad classes X $80,000 tuition and room/board = $416,000,000, this means that Princeton’s admissions office must deliver $229 million of net revenue in 2019-2020 ($416 - $187 = $229) no matter what. You’ll also note that 229/416 = 55%, meaning that more than 1/2 of Princeton’s undergrad class is full pay assuming that the other 45% is getting 100% FA (of course, not everyone getting aid is getting 100% aid but you get my point).

In the end Marlowe, I think you should just accept the fact that colleges rationalize their “white lie” of need blind admissions in the same wonderfully creative way that former President Clinton explained his relationship with Monica Lewinsky: “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is. If the—if he—if ‘is’ means is and never has been, that is not—that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement. … Now, if someone had asked me on that day, are you having any kind of sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky, that is, asked me a question in the present tense, I would have said no. And it would have been completely true.”

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“Assuming each class has 1300 kids X 4 undergrad classes X $80,000 tuition and room/board = $416,000,000, this means that Princeton’s admissions office must deliver $229 million of net revenue in 2019-2020 ($416 - $187 = $229) no matter what. You’ll also note that 229/416 = 55%, meaning that more than 1/2 of Princeton’s undergrad class is full pay assuming that the other 45% is getting 100% FA (of course, not everyone getting aid is getting 100% aid but you get my point).”

  • Actually, @Zoom10, more than 60% of undergraduates receive need-based aid, per the article. Tuition, fees, room and board were a little over $69,000 (not $80k) in 2019 so your calculation is $69k X 1300 x 4 = $358,800,000 of which $187,400,000 total was covered by financial aid. That means $171,400,000 is the magic net revenue number (48% of total tuition fees room and board). Princeton admissions is concerned most of all at that point with yield and making sure that it's consistent with budget.
  • The FA budget isn't the only thing "set" by the trustees (actually, they more likely "approved" rather than than "initiated"; Dean of Admissions would have had a lot of input or even been responsible for generating the numbers). Trustees obviously have to approve the numbers before they can be released. However, long term diversity goals such as low income and first gen. can very much be trustee initiated. That's certainly true at UChicago, where trustees have been actively devoted to increasing accessibility for under-represented groups. My impression is that Boyer, Zimmer, Nondorf and the trustees have pretty much been on the same page there.
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In comparison to Princeton, UChicago stated that its FA budget was $159 million: https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/cost-aid

Doing the same math (Chicago class size is larger than Princeton, will assume 1750 per class), 1750 x 4 x $80K = $560 million, so 560 - 159 = $401 million of net revenue that must be delivered. And 401/560 = 72% of the total tuition/room/board budget that is basically coming from out-of-pocket pay vs institutional financial aid.

In 2015, Chicago’s FA budget was $117 million so it has grown over time.

Before Covid, Stanford declared its FA budget for 2020-2021 would be $192 million, but I would bet this will likely be revised downward. Stanford’s class size is about same as Chicago’s.

In 2019, Harvard’s FA undergrad budget was about $195 million according to this article: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/03/the-personal-dimension-of-harvard-financial-aid/. Harvard’s class size is also similar to Chicago’s.

Finally, Yale FA undergrad budget in 2019-2020 was $180 million: https://finaid.yale.edu/costs-affordability/understanding-student-share

All these colleges including Chicago state that about 60% of their students receive FA, but this just means that many students are getting some amount of FA, not necessarily 100% aid. A nearly full pay student who is getting $2K counts as getting FA. Nevertheless, all these colleges are getting ~50% or more of their total tuition/room/board budget from students and parents out-of-pocket.

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Forgot the links to some of the statements in above post

Stanford FA budget: https://news.stanford.edu/2019/12/03/trustees-set-2020-21-tuition-expand-financial-aid-middle-income-families/

Chicago FA budget in 2015: https://news.uchicago.edu/story/financial-aid-budget-forecast-grow-5-percent-uchicago-implements-new-aid-initiatives

JBS, yes I used $80K as all in tuition/room/board cost because that is the approximate number in 2021, and this may overstate the actual budget for 2019 like you point out, but even if the true number is $69K in 2019 that doesn’t take into account things like books, supplies, travel costs, and personal expenses and if you add those things up then $80K is not an unreasonable estimate of real cost of attendance even for 2019.

Finally, the fact that 60% of students are getting FA is misleading with respect to how much of the pie is really coming out of pocket from families vs from the institution. A college could give every student $2K of aid and then claim that 100% of its students were receiving aid. Obviously, this is rather meaningless when the cost of attendance is $80K, so the most relevant number to look at is the % of the budget pie that families pay vs what the college provides and families pay >50% of the pie even at the wealthiest colleges.

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^ @Zoom10 - Using the cost of attendance from the website is incorrect, as it doesn’t calculate true incremental costs. For instance, room, board and personal expenses aren’t exactly $0 if one is NOT going to college :slight_smile: But also, your argument is specious. Financial aid that covers at least some of room, board, personal fees and (I think) travel is actually compensatory. Is it necessary to point out that schools probably should NOT be directly compensating too many of their students for attending?

(Pells are a great example. You can use them on tuition, books and fees. If you apply your Pell grant to room, board, travel, or personal, you will need to declare it on your tax return as income.)

Grants increase accessibility, no doubt about it. However, not only are the EFC formulas savvy about nailing down a good estimate of the family budget and affordability, but college itself - particularly elite private college - is a hugely positive net present value endeavor that is well worth at least some “out of pocket” for a good number of families. Even those with grants covering full tuition and room and board understand that there will be out-of-pocket expenses directly associated with college.

I’d be a tad nervous if a major research university focused on underwriting their undergraduates’ non-tuition living expenses to the detriment of providing adequate stipends and compensation for their grad students and faculty. JMO.

Since most grants cover all or part of tuition only, that’s probably the best way to do your calculation:

2019 Tuition = $57,642 (not including the special first year fee that covers O-Week activities).

Number of UChicago College enrollees: 7,000

Total tuition plus books: 57642 x 7000 = $403,494,000
Financial Aid budget = $159,000,000
Difference = $244,494,00 = 61% of total tuition covered by families. That amount is consistent with UChicago’s historical net tuition number relative to its peers. For families receiving financial aid, UChicago is a more expensive school on average.

You are correct that number of students on FA doesn’t tell you much; however, you can at the average grant size as well to see how generous one school is compared to another.

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@zoom10 , who is being the hard-headed one here? Is it really you, who are entertaining as a real possibility that Princeton could be forced to start plucking dumb rich kids from the pack in a given year because “a huge number of superdeserving kids needing FA will have applied”? How probable is that? One assumes that Princeton, like Chicago, employs statisticians and other modelers capable of crunching numbers and arriving at accurate projections. lsn’t that what algorithms are for?

If a school admitted only 300 applicants in a year, then, yes, some non-negligible deviation from projections might be expected. But when 2,500 are admitted, a threshold has surely been passed bringing the law of big numbers into play. The budget for FA isn’t set without knowledge of the actual effects of the admissions and aid profile for the school and its applicants, not to mention the experience of past years. It can’t be the job of the AO’s to torque their procedures in the individual cases that come before them just to make the bean counters in head office look good. Rather, isn’t it the other way round - the budget reflects admissions policy and the experience on the ground at a particular institution long before a single application is ever considered? The bean counters do their job; the AO’s then do their job. If in spite of it all the budget for FA is other than negligibly exceeded - or, on the other hand, if it is not met - the solution isn’t to start torquing individual cases furiously but to fire the incompetents responsible for screwing up the projections.

But, again, how realistic is it to think that that could even happen? We know that every molecule of a gas could in theory crowd into the corner of an enclosed space. But when has that ever happened, says the realist? Once it happens, whether at Princeton or Chicago, will be the time to adjust to that altered reality.

Another confusion seems to be creeping into the present discussion. If all that is being said here is that levels of FA must be adjusted from time to time in accordance with budgetary or other constraints in a world of scarce resources (scarcer for some institutions that for others, admittedly) then that’s simply a truism no one would deny. Chicago attempts to meet the financial needs of all its students of every SES, using all possible sources, including what is in effect redistribution of the surpluses created by full-payers. However, what it and its students consider necessary is not fixed forever and has in fact altered substantially over time. When I attended in the sixties every student receiving FA was expected to supplement his grant by (a) working both part-time during the school year and full-time during summers; and (b) taking out loans. The calculation of one’s FA assigned figures - not insubstantial ones - to both those categories as well as to parental contribution in order to arrive at the level of the grant necessary to make up the difference between the aggregate of these sources and the College’s idea of the cost of an education at Chicago. Thereafter it was up to the student to juggle all the figures other than the FA grant in whatever way he saw fit. None of this was considered at all inconsistent with a needs-blind admission policy.

All that has changed with the advent of the Odyssey Scholarship program, in which, as I understand it, no student is supposed to need to work or to take out a loan. Bravo! That was a good thing and perhaps a necessary one if the brightest kids were not to be penalized for attending Chicago rather than HYSP. Even more generous changes may be on the way, but in the post-covid world is it entirely unthinkable that a Chicago student on FA may again be required to work a part-time job and incur some level of debt? Surely it is not, and, frankly, it is not the worst thing in the world. A first-class education is a thing of infinite value (says the idealist in me), and it is also a thing that must be paid for (says the realist).

Have never been very impressed by the stuff put out by ivycoach. It is essentially advertising. They are trying to sell you their services using a knowing insider cynicism as proof of all the wised-up knowledge they have of all the shenanigans needed to get your kid into a top school. I reckon they take your money for this up front. Would be interesting to know what they deliver on the back end. The beauty of capitalism is that it not infrequently thrives on pitches to the gullible. Of course this stuff may actually work at the ivies.