<p>gchris, UChicago offers merit aid (including full scholarships), although I grant that competition is fierce and there are few awards available.</p>
<p>I guess the next questions would be, how will those freshman students feel about the affordability of their college at the end of their senior year - when those LOANS start coming due!!! Then they may WISH they’d chosen a lower cost option… :)</p>
<p>Yeah UChicago does offer those scholarships, but the applicant pool for them is insane. I’m not quite that good, lol.</p>
<p>This thread begs the age-old question: Does one pay the full price at a great university or does he/she take a scholarship offer at a good, but albeit less impressive school?</p>
<p>Here is the official press release from the UCLA researchers and a summary of their report:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/heri/PDFs/CIRPPressRelease06.PDF[/url]”>http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/heri/PDFs/CIRPPressRelease06.PDF</a></p>
<p><a href=“http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/heri/norms06.php[/url]”>http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/heri/norms06.php</a></p>
<p>Yeah. I didn’t even apply to private schools. Considering my acceptances to publics I most likely could have gotten into everything outside the top 15.</p>
<p>After reading the study report</p>
<p>“almost half of freshmen attending a second choice institution had also been accepted to their first choice institution but were swayed by offers of financial assistance and the cost of college they chose.”</p>
<p>That’s all that was submitted by the UCLA researchers. The USA Today math just hurts your head. So unless you guys distrust the UCLA researchers background and/or their maths, just assume that half of all kids going to second choice schools did so because of financial reasons.</p>
<p>“Finances Stop Only 4% From Attending First Choice College”…dooley, 4% of what? accepted students? applicants? total pool? etc…your math was just as hard to follow as that in the USA today…</p>
<p>The percentage of students not attending their first choice school has had more ups and downs than a penny-stock IPO! The 4% is the percentage of total college students who are attending something other than their first choice school for financial reasons. You can see the derivation of that number in my post above. </p>
<p>I’m having difficulty in making all the stats match up. How does the “almost half” match up to the “one in five” stat? Perhaps it’s a difference between being influenced by cost (getting a better deal at your second choice school) vs. being unable to afford your first choice school.</p>
<p>This is one confusing set of data!</p>
<p>kami:</p>
<p>Unfortunately, UCLA did not make public the data (at least I couldn’t find it on thier website), so we can draw our own conclusions. However, the data presented by the national news outlets bu UCLA, including NYT and NPR are consistent. </p>
<p>"The numbers come from the latest annual survey by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute, which has tracked freshman trends for 40 years. Its latest report, for release Friday, surveyed more than 271,000 students at 393 baccalaureate colleges and universities.</p>
<p>The survey found 32.7 percent of freshmen were attending college somewhere besides their first choice - the highest percentage since 1988 and the second-highest ever.</p>
<p>This year, for the first time, the UCLA researchers asked those students if they had been accepted at their top choice. The answer: Almost half, 49.8 percent, of those at their second-choice school had been accepted at their first. </p>
<p>Of those students who got into their first-choice school but didn’t enroll, about one-third said they couldn’t afford it. Other reasons they gave included geography and athletics."</p>
<p>From this you can do the math: 270k students times 32.7% = 88k students not attending first choice college. Of those, half were not accepted to first choice college; thus, only 44k students are in the pool to answer the question: did you choose a second (or third or fourth) choice college for financial reasons? Of those 44k students, 1/3rd did not go for financial reasons. Thus, ~15,000 students did not attend their top choice school for financial reasons.</p>
<p>15/270= ~6% (rounding for my simplistic brain). Approximately 5% is not a big number, and not worth headlines, IMO.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, UCLA Dept. of Ed and j-school gurus need to go back and take AP Stats, or remember Mark Twain (and others said about statistics: “Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics”.</p>
<p>I have a question about the “they couldn’t afford it.” </p>
<p>Does that mean that it was “way out of their league” or that they could have but they decided more merit aid was better, and was geography “I can’t afford to visit home many times” etc? It’s very vague. </p>
<p>And the study stated
“almost half of freshmen attending a second choice institution had also been accepted to their first choice institution BUT were swayed by offers of financial assistance and the cost of college they chose.” It didn’t say how many total had been also accepted by first choice institution etc, and since this was from the UCLA press report, I sort of trust that UCLA researchers wouldn’t wish to blacken their name and lose all scientific credibility and made sure that their wording was accurate.</p>
<p>Might be I’m missing some data that you guys have seen, but I believe that the 4-6% you guys are listing is inaccurate. Feel free to prove me wrong. Such as the 1/2 that the researchers listed was solely people that had been accepted by first choice as well and that the second part to their statement had simply been the researchers assumptions/musings.</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=290386[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=290386</a></p>
<p>Right, I think these researchers asked college freshmen if the college THEY WERE CURRENTLY ATTENDING is the college they really chose to go to, and most said yes. I think I read something about this in the SUNY Binghamton / Cornell threads. Everyone at SUNY Binghamtan says they preferred it, and were not there just because they’d been rejected by Cornell. SUNY B was their “first choice.”</p>
<p>ok if you r going to school x for financial reasons, and could not afford school y…if you ask taht student if school x was their first choice, …they will reply yes because they must have somehow convinced themselves that school x is really their first choice…i mean it is simple psychology, you will deny that school y was your first choice because you just won;t be able to live w/ yourself if financial reasons were why you couldn;t attend your first choice college…therefore, you natually convince yourself that school blah is your first choice although it wasn;t when you were in hs</p>
<p>But for most, their “first choice college” is not their absolute dream college, but the one that works best with their current situation (grades, extra curriculars, money). I think that technically, my first choice college would be an Ivy league. However, they don’t offer merit aid (and even if they did, I doubt I’d have gotten any), and my family simply can’t realistically afford it. So I never really consider them at all. Other people might not consider them at all because of their grades and such. So the Ivy Leagues and other top schools may not be considered by people as their “first choice college,” but if they were the perfect student with a ton of money, it would be.</p>
<p>Also, I never really had a “first choice college” in high school. I really had no idea where I wanted to go (that was financially possible). So when I decided (right before the deadline), that college was obviously my “first choice college,” but money etc. was all factored into the reason why it was my “first choice.”</p>
<p>I just think that its difficult to define one’s “first choice college” for many people, though by no means for everyone.</p>
<p>I agree with BookAddict. You eventually convince yourself that you’re going to your first choice. </p>
<p>I’m pretty sure that if eventually I get accepted by Olin, and my financial aid package from Caltech still sucks, I’d convince myself that I loved the feel of Olin more than the nerdiness of Caltech and make Olin my “first choice college” etc…</p>
<p>Things change depending on what happens.</p>
<p>I’m a reporter for The Daily Princetonian covering an interesting story. (Please see last paragraph for info on contacting me about this.)</p>
<p>Two Yale students recently gave speeches at their high school about what they called “financial aid leveraging.” This process involves getting into a school that is known for generous financial aid, like Princeton, and then using that offer to then get the other schools where you were accepted to match the package.</p>
<p>This has evidently worked for several students at Yale, who had taken their Princeton financial aid documentation from their acceptance letter and got an equivalent offer from Yale, often amounting to a savings of $15,000-20,000 over four years.</p>
<p>My question to everyone on College Confidential is, is this something that you would consider doing, and is it the right thing to do to get better financial aid?</p>
<p>Is this unfair to other people applying to financial aid at say, Yale, who don’t have an offer from Princeton and can’t get the Yale financial aid office to lower their amount?</p>
<p>If this causes students who would have loved to attend Princeton to lose out to someone with better stats who is using Princeton solely to get better aid somewhere else, is that right?</p>
<p>If you are interested in giving us responses to appear in an article in tomorrow’s issue of The Daily Princetonian, please e-mail <a href="mailto:news@dailyprincetonian.com">news@dailyprincetonian.com</a> with your contact information and a reporter will get in touch with you shortly.</p>
<p>We look forward to hearing your opinions!</p>
<p>As an economist and statistician, I find lazy headlines and reporting of numbers in the mainstream press both common and annoying. I think the summary document from UCLA does a much better job of explaining what is happening.</p>
<p>First, I agree wholeheartedly with BookAddict that there is probably a substantial population of students who just say ‘Yeah, this was my first choice’ because they really didn’t think that hard about where they wanted to go. A survey of kids on College Confidential would probably be vastly different than one of the general college populace.</p>
<p>The most telling statistics I found in the UCLA report were the following: those who attended their ‘1st choice’, 29.1% listed financial considerations as a ‘Very Important Reason’ vs. 37.4% for 2nd choice students, 40.4% for 3rd choice students, and 41.4% for 4th or lower choice. Assuming any reasonable sample size, that’s a very significant statistical difference between 1st and later choice students. It does suggest that a lot of kids go to schools that weren’t there 1st choice based on financial reasons. I find this at odds with a lot of the ‘propaganda’ about how no student will miss out on attending for financial reasons. Yeah - if you believe the FAFSA formula - if parents could care less about having any money for retirement or having any reasonable expenditures for themselves or their other kids.</p>
<p>Here’s my formula for parental contribution - Parents Average AGI over past 5 Years X 12 percent - That would mean you would have had to average $375,000 per year over the last 5 years to attend schools like Middlebury and Williams with no aid - that seems reasonable to me.</p>
<p>For our part, we pretty much scratched Middlebury off immediately even though I am sure D would love it, because she had no shot at any type of aid (they don’t give merit aid). We targeted schools where she might have a reasonable shot at merit aid and even amongst those she may end up at her 2nd or 3rd choice for financial reasons.</p>
<p>Our experience is, obviously, anecdotal. But I still think $43-45K schools are not generally a good value in terms of return on investment - although I do admit that they tend have lovely architecture. I wonder if every student could attend one of these high price tag/no merit aid schools for free if they would still say that the University of Southern North Dakota at Wombat Park was their 1st choice? I doubt it.</p>
<p>I guess it’s a good thing my biases aren’t in any headlines…</p>
<p>corunnerdad, I agree with you! And I really like your parental contribution formula. Our contribution with your formula would be just about what we told D we could afford. If we made $375,000 per year, we could do the $40k schools without help. A very good friend is in that position — actually spends somewhere in the neighborhood of $60k per year to send her two boys to boarding school, so the expensive colleges don’t cause alarm for her as they do for me. The no-merit schools were quickly discarded as choices at our house, too, even if one of them MIGHT have been a “first choice.” </p>
<p>The plain & simple fact of the matter is, many of us can’t even dream of financing our kids’ dreams — so they just adjust their dreams accordingly. It’s not a big deal, but the statistics don’t take that sort of reality into consideration.</p>
<p>375,000/year??? At that rate, my family could do 6/7 40K schools per year…easily.</p>
<p>6 or 7? Don’t forget … the more you make, the more you spend. Unless you came into that money very suddenly, you would be living according to that wage. I can almost guarantee that you wouldn’t feel that way if you actually earned that.</p>
<p>That said … I sure would love to see how many $40k tuitions I could afford with that income … that is, I’d love to have that income!</p>