A lot of this is comparison shopping. Colleges, especially private colleges, are notoriously opaque when it comes to pricing. Sure you can look at the sticker price on their web site but only the very wealthy pay that. You don't really know what a school is going to cost until you actually apply and see their financial aid and scholarship offer. And even those can frequently be negotiated. But you have to know how to play the game and that isn't necessarily something that a child of poor immigrants who attends a public school where there is one counselor per 500 students is necessarily going to know how to do. The differences can be in the tens of thousands of dollars. So yes, it is worth it to comparison shop.ohio jones wrote: ↑Thu Aug 05, 2021 12:32 pmI'd be surprised if it wasn't. After all, their chief weapon is surprise ... surprise and fear ... fear and surprise.... Their two weapons are fear and surprise ...
Is the shotgun approach to applications really what's being recommended these days? Seems like a job in itself to submit that many, and it doesn't even pay minimum wage.
Colleges are doing the same exact thing in reverse. They are using financial aid and merit awards as a pricing mechanism to recruit the classes that they want. So you have to play the game. It also depends greatly on the social class of the applicant.
Wealthy students have parents who can write the tuition checks at any university so college admissions is largely just trying to get into the "best" and highest status school that the child can get into. Dad is just going to write the check regardless. A lot of wealthy students go to top out-of-state public schools like Michigan or UCLA which the schools love because it brings in hundreds of millions of dollars in out-of-state tuition fees. Here in the PNW I think there are nearly many wealthy CA students attending the University of Oregon as there are local OR students. EDIT. I looked it up. 48% of the 22,700 student body at UO is out-of-state or international. If they are all paying the $25,000 out-of-state tuition premium, that means they are bringing in an additional $275 million dollars of tuition money compared to if all those students were from in-state. That is some serious economic incentive to recruit wealthy out-of-state students. It also means that going to an out-of-state public school is a suckers game if you aren't wealthy.
Middle and upper-middle class students face the biggest squeeze. They don't qualify for as much need-based aid so the most economical path is usually either in-state public schools, or private schools that offer generous merit aid. Those are usually the universities that are a step or two down from the top echelon who need to use pricing discounts to attract students that would otherwise not be interested. The very top schools tend not to offer any merit aid because they don't have to. A school like Stanford or Harvard gets plenty of applicants each year who's parents are willing to pay full price so they don't need to offer discounts. So if you are middle class your sweet spot is going to be your in-state public schools or 2nd tier private schools that are aspiring to rise in the rankings.
Poor students have an entirely different calculation. If they are exceptional students then the very top private schools are going to be their best bet (if they can get in) because those schools have the wealth to offer full rides to "deserving" poor students. In-state schools often have good financial aid packages and state-based scholarship programs so those are also good options. Less wealthy private schools can be hit and miss as they don't have the resources to fully fund every student. So they have to pick and choose. The very worst options for poor students are out-of-state public schools which are going to have very high out-of-state tuition fees and not much in the way of financial aid for out-of-state students.
The days of just applying to one or two colleges like I did 40 years ago are long over. But you have to know how the game is played if you are going to come out ahead.
Note: This is also why a lot of small rural parochial colleges are struggling. They don't have either the wealth or status to play this game. And they no longer have enough students from their own denominations to fill out their ranks without recruiting. The exceptions like BYU and Baylor are few and far between and are successful largely due to economies of scale and being affiliated with really large denominations.