Sattler College Turmoil

[Ken]

Better read the fine print really well. I have never heard of an absolute unconditional guarantee. I don’t think any reasonable institution would promise that, when there is always a possibility that a student will go off the rails. I suspect there is an out that someone is simply ignoring. Making a statement that the institution is promising four years of tuition, and essentially guaranteed graduation shows a shocking naïveté.

The mistake people make when it comes to merit scholarships is not understanding that they really have nothing to do with merit. They are simply a pricing mechanism to enable institutions to attract the top students and therefore increase their reputation and prestige. Every university and medical school is acutely aware of its ranking compared to its peers. Rankings are based on things like facilities, grants, prestige of faculty. But they are also based on the qualifications of their student body in terms of test scores. A med school that has students with higher MCAT scores will be higher ranked than one that has students with lower MCAT scores.

So how do universities rise in the rankings? By attracting students with higher test scores. And price is the easiest way for them to do that. Merit scholarships are simply a way that universities use to lower the price for the most qualified applicants to convince them to choose their school over a more prestigious or more highly ranked school that may offer less in the way of merit scholarships. Individual merit really has little to do with it.

This is also why they sometimes make it difficult to keep the merit scholarship through all 4 years. They would rather recycle the money to attract better incoming students than on upper classmen who are already basically committed and stuck there.

[ohio jones]

So how do universities rise in the rankings? By attracting students with higher test scores. And price is the easiest way for them to do that. Merit scholarships are simply a way that universities use to lower the price for the most qualified applicants to convince them to choose their school over a more prestigious or more highly ranked school that may offer less in the way of merit scholarships. Individual merit really has little to do with it.

And test scores are somehow unrelated to individual merit?

If you get tired of teaching, you could have a promising career as a Reformed theologian.

[Ken]

So how do universities rise in the rankings? By attracting students with higher test scores. And price is the easiest way for them to do that. Merit scholarships are simply a way that universities use to lower the price for the most qualified applicants to convince them to choose their school over a more prestigious or more highly ranked school that may offer less in the way of merit scholarships. Individual merit really has little to do with it.

And test scores are somehow unrelated to individual merit?

Not in the way that you think.

Take two universities: Harvard and Trinity University in Texas.

Harvard offers zero merit aid of any kind. Why not? Because they are already at the top of the heap and they do not have to offer merit scholarships to attract the best students. They will flock to Harvard anyway. On the other hand, Trinity University in San Antonio is seeking to raise its profile and rankings and at least get into the conversation of top private universities in Texas if not the south. So they are desperately competing against Rice, Baylor, TCU, and SMU for students as well as other regional universities like Vanderbilt who they are striving to become.

So Trinity happens to offer more merit aid than any other university in the country. Currently 53% of students attending Trinity get merit scholarships based on test scores and grades.

Does that mean that Trinity students are more meritorious than Harvard students? No, it does not. By any measure it is very much the opposite. Most students attending Trinity would not have even gained acceptance to Harvard. And probably none of them turned down acceptance to Harvard to attend Trinity. What it actually means is that Trinity is using pricing to attract the best students away from other peer schools like Baylor, Rice, and TCU by giving them a price discount which they label as a "merit scholarship" because it sounds better than simply saying they are giving a price discount. And what it actually means is that Trinity has to cut its prices more than any of its peer schools in order to attract students. Universities are very sophisticated at adjusting pricing through merit scholarships to attract the students they are seeking.

In addition, merit scholarships are most often used by schools to attract wealthy students because it pencils out better for a school to give a small merit scholarship to entice a wealthy student to attend (who will still pay most of the tuition), compared to a poor student who will qualify for a lot of financial aid and pay less in tuition.

The only thing that really matters if you are a prospective student is the bottom line. How much are you being charged for your education at X school versus Y school. Whether the schools label it as tuition discounts, financial aid, or merit scholarships is nothing more than clever marketing.

Bottom line? YOU CANNOT BE TOO CYNICAL when it comes to higher education. It has become nothing more than a business in the 21st Century and often a racket at that.

[ken_sylvania]

Bottom line? YOU CANNOT BE TOO CYNICAL when it comes to higher education. It has become nothing more than a business in the 21st Century and often a racket at that.

Turns out Ken is a Mennonite after all! Who'da thunk it?

[ken_sylvania]

So how do universities rise in the rankings? By attracting students with higher test scores. And price is the easiest way for them to do that. Merit scholarships are simply a way that universities use to lower the price for the most qualified applicants to convince them to choose their school over a more prestigious or more highly ranked school that may offer less in the way of merit scholarships. Individual merit really has little to do with it.

And test scores are somehow unrelated to individual merit?

Not in the way that you think.

Take two universities: Harvard and Trinity University in Texas.

Harvard offers zero merit aid of any kind. Why not? Because they are already at the top of the heap and they do not have to offer merit scholarships to attract the best students. They will flock to Harvard anyway. On the other hand, Trinity University in San Antonio is seeking to raise its profile and rankings and at least get into the conversation of top private universities in Texas if not the south. So they are desperately competing against Rice, Baylor, TCU, and SMU for students as well as other regional universities like Vanderbilt who they are striving to become.

So Trinity happens to offer more merit aid than any other university in the country. Currently 53% of students attending Trinity get merit scholarships based on test scores and grades.

Does that mean that Trinity students are more meritorious than Harvard students? No, it does not. By any measure it is very much the opposite. Most students attending Trinity would not have even gained acceptance to Harvard. And probably none of them turned down acceptance to Harvard to attend Trinity. What it actually means is that Trinity is using pricing to attract the best students away from other peer schools like Baylor, Rice, and TCU by giving them a price discount which they label as a "merit scholarship" because it sounds better than simply saying they are giving a price discount. And what it actually means is that Trinity has to cut its prices more than any of its peer schools in order to attract students. Universities are very sophisticated at adjusting pricing through merit scholarships to attract the students they are seeking.

In addition, merit scholarships are most often used by schools to attract wealthy students because it pencils out better for a school to give a small merit scholarship to entice a wealthy student to attend (who will still pay most of the tuition), compared to a poor student who will qualify for a lot of financial aid and pay less in tuition.

The only thing that really matters if you are a prospective student is the bottom line. How much are you being charged for your education at X school versus Y school. Whether the schools label it as tuition discounts, financial aid, or merit scholarships is nothing more than clever marketing.

Bottom line? YOU CANNOT BE TOO CYNICAL when it comes to higher education. It has become nothing more than a business in the 21st Century and often a racket at that.

In other words, are you saying that among the merit scholarships offered by any single one of the second tier schools (Trinity, for instance) the better a student's grades the better the offer he will get?
But that if a particular student is offered merit scholarships at three different universities it is quite likely that the most generous package will come from the school that is the most desperate to increase its ranking rather than coming from the best school?

[Josh]

Being in a one true church type of church myself, I can assure you that Sattler is burning a lot of bridges and if it and its denomination still existing 50 years, many people will regret the divisive choices that were made in the present.

This remark makes me curious; I'd love to have you expand on it a bit if you care to.

By citing your One True Church experience, are you implying that your denomination was unwise to espouse that doctrine and FOTW should learn from their mistakes?

Or are you saying it's divisive to create yet another One True Church when a perfectly good One True Church already exists?

I feel that it is divisive and also anti-biblical when a denomination claims it is the only way to salvation and exclusively holds the door of salvation. This was once fashionable in Holdeman circles, with one preacher (who had been ordained after joining the Holdemans for 10 months) in particular marching around and announcing at other churches they had to join our church to be saved.

This is, of course, not valid doctrine, as salvation comes from Jesus’ free gift to any who ask to receive it, not from membership in a denomination or following rituals and practices some denomination claims are required for salvation, such as full-immersion baptism. The preacher in question eventually got frustrated with the Holdemans and marched off to run his own true church, and after a few years, finally repented. Since then, our church clarified that salvation comes from Jesus, not from the church.

Unfortunately, Followers of the Way and their denominational seminary/college seem determined to repeat these mistakes, right down to aggressively “evangelising” Mennonites and other Anabaptists who are already born again believers and baptised until they persuade them they cannot be saved unless they follow Finny Kuravilla’s teachings, particularly his doctrines of salvation-via-full-immersion that I can only assume comes from his (Int’l) Church of Christ background.

Particularly troubling is the attitude I have heard from FotW adherents and leaders that they somehow have accessed the “truth”, and the rest of Christendom lives in darkness. If it is unlikely that the Holdemans with 30,000 members and 200 congregations, founded by a farmer from Ohio, exclusively possess the keys to the kingdom, it seems even less likely that a multimillionaire medical device salesman from Boston with a handful of small congregations possesses them.

Instead, we should all recognise we have been freely offered the gift of salvation, and then try to faithfully witness for it in our communities and live quietly and peaceably in our own churches.

[Ken]

In other words, are you saying that among the merit scholarships offered by any single one of the second tier schools (Trinity, for instance) the better a student's grades the better the offer he will get?
But that if a particular student is offered merit scholarships at three different universities it is quite likely that the most generous package will come from the school that is the most desperate to increase its ranking rather than coming from the best school?

Exactly. In fact, the top schools in every category generally do not ever offer merit scholarships at all. None of the Ivy League schools offer any merit scholarships. None. They offer full financial aid for students with demonstrated financial need. But zero in the way of merit scholarships. For example, this is what Harvard says: https://college.harvard.edu/financial-a ... ted%20need.

There are no merit-based awards, and we have no preferential policies that give some students more attractive awards than others. When you qualify for financial aid from Harvard, we create an individualized aid package to meet all of your demonstrated need.

On the other hand, next door Boston University very much wants to be more like Harvard but they know full well that a student given the choice will go to Harvard. And so they offer price discounts in the form of Merit Scholarships and have a giant list of them: https://www.bu.edu/admissions/tuition-a ... ear-merit/

BU offers a wide variety of merit scholarships, some even covering full tuition, to recognize high achieving students who go above and beyond. Most awards are for academic achievement, while others go to talented athletes, performers, and artists. Plus, merit-based awards don’t require you to submit a financial aid application and do not have to be repaid.

I promise you that Boston University students are no more meritorious than Harvard students. They just have to offer price discounts to be competitive with the schools that they perceive themselves as competing with for students.

Same thing happens with public Universities. Here in Washington, the University of Washington is the premier flagship university in the Pacific Northwest and is fairly selective (they get their pick of students). Consequently they offer no merit aid to in-state students. They offer very tiny amounts to top out-of-state students but that is mainly because they want those out-of-state tuition dollars. So they will give top out of state students a $5,000 merit scholarship so they can get that $30,000 out-of-state tuition premium and attract that student away from UCLA. By contrast, the other public universities in Washington such as Western Washington University and Washington State have lots of merit scholarships based on grades and test scores because they are trying to attract top students away from UW.

The other thing that all schools do it take merit scholarships off the top before calculating financial aid. So for example, if a school has tuition at $50,000 and they offer you a $10,000 merit scholarship and it turns out that based on your FASFA forms your expected family contribution is only $30,000. They will count your merit scholarship as part of your financial aid formula and give you only $10,000 in financial aid rather than the full $20,000. So it just becomes a matter of semantics whether they are giving you $20,000 in financial aid or $10,000 in merit aid and $10,000 in financial aid. The net price is the same. They just offered you the merit scholarship BEFORE you were accepted to as a recruitment incentive but your financial aid award came afterwards.

Bottom line? The amount of merit scholarship offered by any particular school is very carefully calibrated to be just enough to attract a particular student away from the competition but no more than that since that would be throwing money away and universities are not in the business of throwing money away. They will also bargain with you like you are in a Turkish bazar. My middle daughter had very high academic credentials and was accepted into all 10 schools that she applied to. I did a big spread sheet of the different tuition costs and merit offers we got from various schools and it turned out that her 2nd choice school was offering less than the competition. I sent the admissions office an email showing what their competition was offering and they came back immediately with an offer to bump her merit scholarship up by $10K to match and exceed the competition. She didn't end up going there but it was interesting to see how quickly they bargained.

[Josh]

Yep. Getting a “full ride” means you are going to an institution where your peers will be mediocre (compared to you), and they’re desperate to get higher end students so then can boost their rankings, reputation, etc.

(Full disclosure: I had a “full ride” to college. But I make no claims my alma mater was some special institution, and also haven’t recorded any YouTube videos praising myself for qualifying for a full ride.)

[jahertz]

From what I can tell, the last several pages of comments by Josh, Ken, and JM boil down to a couple of main points:

1. The highest-status universities do not award merit-based funding to students.

2. Schools use merit-based funding as a business strategy to divert top performing applicants away from more sought-after schools which might otherwise scoop them up.

It's hard to imagine this is news to much of anyone in this discussion. But it does highlight the same point I made earlier: the considerable hand-wringing about Sattler's alleged inadequacy to prepare students for competitive medical careers is so far turning out to be unfounded.

Despite strange insinuations to the contrary, most people know medical schools like Johns Hopkins and WashU are not bush-league institutions struggling to lure any decent talent. Both are highly selective private research schools with acceptance rates of 6.3 and 7.5 respectively, and reputations for attracting some of the brightest and highest-performing students in the country.

When schools at this level throw merit-based money at accepted students, it's because, as several of you keep emphasizing, they've identified them as top performers who can help boost the school's rankings, and they're willing to sweeten the deal to divert them from running into the arms of even more prestigious and selective schools—which for JH and WashU basically means the Ivy League.

Both the students under discussion were accepted at more than one highly-ranked school. Each chose the school he did because, out of multiple options, he concluded it was the best fit for where he wanted to be and what he hoped to accomplish.

Neither student, so far as I'm aware, has ever been under the impression that the school he chose was the absolute pinnacle of academic status, or that going from Sattler to such a school represents an epoch-defining event in the history of academia.

On the other hand, both are in a situation I'd guess every undergrad school idealizes for its students. For a brand-new Christian liberal arts college with no track record (and swarms of absurdly motivated naysayers), to release content highlighting its graduates' success in getting into good medical schools seems like the most natural and appropriate thing in the world.

If they weren't doing that, I think everyone would wonder what's wrong with their marketing department.

So the constant sneering at the school for marketing itself, the rhetorical gymnastics to try to chalk it up to naivete or a lack of understanding of academia—and nuttiest of all, the attempt to frame a marketing video as an exercise in personal self-aggrandizement by the student featured—it all just comes off as nasty and ill-tempered.

I get that some people in this thread deeply dislike FOTW, Finny Kuruvilla, Sattler, and everything related to them. They have their reasons, some of which I sympathize with.

But the compulsion to pooh-pooh and pick apart every positive scrap of Sattler intel has dragged this discussion into such ludicrous territory that, as someone who hopes Sattler succeeds, I'm positively tickled to think an unsuspecting parent of a college-age student might do a web search for Sattler, stumble on this thread, and conclude that THIS represents the naysayers' best criticisms of the outfit.

[Ken]

From what I can tell, the last several pages of comments by Josh, Ken, and JM boil down to a couple of main points:

1. The highest-status universities do not award merit-based funding to students.

2. Schools use merit-based funding as a business strategy to divert top performing applicants away from more sought-after schools which might otherwise scoop them up.

It's hard to imagine this is news to much of anyone in this discussion. But it does highlight the same point I made earlier: the considerable hand-wringing about Sattler's alleged inadequacy to prepare students for competitive medical careers is so far turning out to be unfounded.

Despite strange insinuations to the contrary, most people know medical schools like Johns Hopkins and WashU are not bush-league institutions struggling to lure any decent talent. Both are highly selective private research schools with acceptance rates of 6.3 and 7.5 respectively, and reputations for attracting some of the brightest and highest-performing students in the country.

I don't think anyone here is dismissing the accomplishments or qualifications of anyone who gets into Johns Hopkins Medical School with scholarship or not. I'm certainly not. That is rarified air. On the other hand, the small liberal arts college I graduated from has produced 32 Rhodes Scholars over the years and constantly sends students to the Ivies and other top schools for law, med, business, etc. (not that i was one of them) So, shrug. That is the sort of thing that colleges do.

On the other hand, both are in a situation I'd guess every undergrad school idealizes for its students. For a brand-new Christian liberal arts college with no track record (and swarms of absurdly motivated naysayers), to release content highlighting its graduates' success in getting into good medical schools seems like the most natural and appropriate thing in the world.
I get that some people in this thread deeply dislike FOTW, Finny Kuruvilla, Sattler, and everything related to them. They have their reasons, some of which I sympathize with.

Here is where you are steering off course. Liberal Arts College? Seriously? Sattler offers only 5 majors, of which only two (History and Biology) even qualify as liberal arts. Business and Computer Science are not liberal arts. I see absolutely nothing in the literature or promotional material about Sattler that they are intending to expand to create an actual liberal arts college where diversity of ideas and freedom of thought is valued. Or provide a liberal arts education, which is, traditionally, by definition a well-rounded education including: (1) natural sciences, (2) social sciences, (3) arts, and (4) humanities. What Sattler looks like to me is a conservative Bible college with some business, computer science, and pathway to health sciences thrown in because that is what students these days are looking for. Not anything resembling a liberal arts college.

My skepticism about Sattler is based on my knowledge of the actual economics of higher education and small private colleges in this country. Even many institutions that own all their land, have facilities and infrastructure long paid for, a deep alumni base, and the support of a denomination are often struggling and even go bankrupt and close. The economics are only getting more challenging not less as time goes on. And Sattler has none of those advantages. It appears to have just one single deep pocketed donor with absolutely no apparent path towards self sufficiency or even growth. I have to imagine that no matter how deep the pockets are, the philanthropist who founded Sattler will eventually come to tire of heavily subsidizing the college educations of middle class students whose families have the wherewithal to pay for it themselves. Which yes, is exactly what is happening the more Sattler lowers its tuition to attract students (the same merit aid argument). If I had that kind of wealth, that isn't how I'd spend it if I was looking to make an impact in the world.