The less-frills colleges and universities already exist in the form of regional public universities serving mainly commuter students.
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But they’ll never be confused with the Sorbonne.
ETA: I guess the service academies are the nearest thing to a national university. Funny how they are all heavily patterned on private liberal arts colleges in terms of living arrangements and emphasis on sports.
And they have invested in the legally mandated services- rehabbed buildings to be ADA compliant, provide readers/notetakers for the visually handicapped, etc. But they don’t invest in the non-required enhancements- the lazy river/fancy salad bar in the cafeteria, the deluxe workout rooms in the gym, etc.
And yet parents still post here that the Public U “is a dump compared to …”
You want a country club along with your accounting degree? Great. You want a solid education with no frills? Yup, we got that too.
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The schools that are need blind but do not meet need (seems to be a lot from the above discussion) presumably have a decent idea of how many students won’t enrol (whether for financial or other reasons) and base their yields on that. So as I see it, the question really should be: are these schools going to increase their admits expecting their yield to fall as budget cuts feed into lower aid (and/or because international enrollment may fall)? The alternative presumably is to go to waitlist - maybe the more prudent option while trying to figure out the new landscape - will waitlists be longer than before in that case or will they just be more heavily drawn on than before?
It is common in the military generally for service members to live in communal situations and do things to maintain their physical fitness.
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If a given school reduces FA and scholarships, but its main competitors reduce FA and scholarships more, than the school that reduced FA and scholarships less may see an increased yield that would otherwise have gone to its main competitors.
Yes, I think in many states, for many kids, the US does a perfectly fine job providing an affordable college education.
I also think there are gaps in that system, bigger in some states than others, and these days sometimes growing. That’s a real issue, and I am generally much more concerned on a policy level about possible cutbacks, consolidations, and closures, on both the program level and the entire campus level, in various public systems than about admissions policies at selective privates.
But there is always some connection. Like, I do think even if they don’t formally go need aware, a private experiencing a budget crunch may find a way to reduce the number of higher need students it enrolls. If that happens in a widespread way–and it is early yet–then more higher need prospective students may have to turn to their state systems.
Which is fine if those state systems actually want the increased enrollment, and they might. But if they have already been cutting and consolidating and closing, then more kids might fall into those gaps.
So I am definitely not completely unconcerned about the private side of things, but mostly because I think it could affect that sort of kid specifically, the kind who may not have practical access to affordable in-state colleges as an alternative.
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Some examples in post #9 of how this can be done.
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This is an “interesting” economics problem that ends up depending on different sorts of price elasticities, including cross-price elasticities.
Without getting overly technical, the basic issue is some consumers may choose to leave a submarket like that entirely. Some may in fact have no choice about doing so, because they really can’t afford to stay in it.
Of course if all these submarkets are connected, you could see a waterfall effect where some kids drop out of submarkets that got too expensive for them, but then they show up as new consumers in a less expensive submarket for them–even if that submarket itself got more expensive than it used to be, as long as it was still affordable for these waterfall kids.
But all this is part of why I worry less about the top of the waterfall, meaning the most expensive submarkets, and much more about the kids who might well drop out of the four-year college market entirely, the kind of kids who really need the least expensive submarkets to stay that inexpensive to keep college affordable at all.
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Financial considerations on the part of the student will always affect yield. If colleges cost more for a student, that student is more likely to say no to an offer of admission. It happened in the late 2000’s … not only did I see it at the large public university where I worked, but my D had quite a few friends who transferred to a local college because their parents’ changing financial situation made it impossible for them to pay room & board.
I knew exactly what my yield would be when I was a financial aid director. I had data from the past, demographic data, surveys from students who refused admissions offers, and current information gleaned from online forums where students and parents discussed financial concerns. If I were trying to determine yield for next year, though, I would be at a loss. The changes to parent and grad Plus loans, the situation with international students, federal intervention into academic institutions, loss of federal grants, general economic worries for the average family … it’s a lot all at once. My gut is that the near future will be difficult for colleges, and I anticipate that they will act carefully as they try to enroll a class and operate within budget.
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Will more schools be need aware because of budget cuts?
In my opinion, no. Even the need-blind, meets full-need (and generously defined versions of need) always managed to keep about the same percentage of full pay students, year after year after year. I don’t think that was a coincidence. Maybe they weren’t basing their decisions on an individual’s financial aid forms, but they were likely using other proxies to guesstimate what the financial need was likely to be (at least, high vs. low).
So I think that schools will be as need-aware as they ever were. Because of budget cuts and the climate for international students, schools may expect lower yields and/or need to increase their pool of full-pay students somehow (i.e. accepting more domestic full-pay students), but I don’t think that the percentages of need-aware schools will shift.
For schools that only recently became “need-blind and meets full need,” I suspect they’ll try one year of seeing how good their guessing is, and if it’s too far off, they will stop being need-blind and move back to need-aware. Alternatively, as others have mentioned, they’ll define need less generously.
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So, maybe it’s the other way around; that somehow the Ivies and little ivies took it upon themselves to adapt military-style, physical fitness programs in the late 19th century which tended to lead into intercollegiate competition. I know a lot of the earliest gymnasiums were built in the 1890s.
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Even if they are not trying to guess an individual applicant’s financial need, they do know that, over the entire admission class, a given level of emphasis on such attributes as legacy, first generation, specific types of ECs, etc. for admission will have a resulting effect on the financial aid need of the entire admission class.
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I know the schools my kids attended were need blind, because they were admitted before we submitted any financial info. The admissions office didn’t know if they were going to be able to afford to attend, and I’m sure that info went into the yield calculations in a way that it doesn’t at Harvard or Amherst. The admissions office was on one side of the admin building, the FA and bursar’s office on the other.
My daughter’s private school did give out its own money as both merit aid and need based financial aid, they just didn’t promise to meet everyone’s need. They doled it out as best they could and I’m sure there were applicants who couldn’t afford to go.
I don’t know what NYU’s current policy is, but when I first came on CC there were tons of kids wanting to go there who were accepted but just couldn’t afford it. By like $40k they couldn’t afford it.
I think we’ve seen some of this ‘we’re need blind’ adjustments even in the last few years. Some schools are need blind for RD, but need aware off the wait list. How to manage this? Put a lot more kids on the wait list and then start accepting them long before May 1, but only offering the FA the school can afford, not the full amount they would have receive if accepted ED or RD.
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They’ve changed to meets need now, and have reduced the number of admits to be able to fund that. (I don’t know if they announced that specifically, but the number of admits/targeted freshman year class size dropped when they implemented it.)
“ Beginning in the 2024-25 academic year, President Linda G. Mills expanded NYU’s commitment to affordability through The NYU Promise, guaranteeing that every undergraduate–domestic and international–who start as a first-year student admitted to our New York campus will have 100% of their demonstrated need met through a combination of scholarships and grants. In addition, families with income less than $100,000 and who hold typical assets will not have to pay tuition. Scholarships will be adjusted to meet tuition increases each year.”
As I understand it, basically there was a sort of common ancestor in the British upper-class schools. These schools were typically on what you might call a semi-military model themselves, including because the expectation was many of those students would in fact serve in the military.
And in general, the idea of a “gymnasium” dates back to Ancient Greece, and the first “academies” were integrated with gymnasiums. They thought scholarship and physical development were intertwined, and their notions of what aristocratic/military leaders should be like (see the notion of a “philosopher king,” and of course Alexander the Great was famously a student of Aristotle) were eventually very influential on “enlightenment” thinkers in the UK, US, and other places.
So British aristocrats incorporated these “classical” ideas into their schools, and US elites followed. And that helps explain why West Point and Annapolis at their inception had so many similarities to the contemporaneous colleges for US elites. The gentleman-scholar-athlete-leader model that you could trace through the UK and ultimately back to Ancient Greece was influencing them all.
Then a challenge to this model rose in the form of the “modern” university movement that started in Prussia, and spread in the form of new universities in the UK and eventually the US. The modern movement included more of a focus on practical arts, and also was supposed to be more broadly accessible, not just for elites. Most land grant universities in the US were on this model, and fairly quickly a number of older US colleges started transforming themselves in that direction.
Some, though, stayed relatively close to the older “classical” model, and those became what we call LACs today. Some became a sort of hybrid, and that is the model of most of the Ivies (except for Cornell, which was a land grant university founded on the modern model).
The military academies in this context can be seen as an interesting variation on the hybrid model in the sense they recognized modern military leaders often benefit from a strong technical education, so they modernized in that way. And of course they (eventually) also took measures to open themselves up to a broader range of applicants. But they did not entirely abandon some of those old ideals of what a military leader should be like. And in fact you will still see people arguing that when done well, such an education does in fact contribute to the US having an advantage in military leadership.
Anyway, that’s my understanding of the history, at least in broad strokes.
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Hence the quote “The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton”.
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This was one of the main points I had considered when I wrote this question. I think that non-international, full pay will matter in the next few years more than it has in the past.
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Undoubtedly. 
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