This is very uncomfortable
If you are raising your eyebrows now, managers feel for you. They also don’t like the equity implications of merit aid, even though wealthy families who receive $ 20,000 rebates may be helping to subsidize low-income families in many schools.
However, these enrollment managers also wonder why you are so shocked that they use merit aid in the first place. After all, it is terribly difficult to fundamentally change the character of a college – its location, its effective faculty, the type of students who come year after year, what the brand represents in the job market for beginners and 22-year-old college students right.
But price? This is something that administrators can change on a dime.
“I am impatient with people who think it is an easy decision or that schools that offer much more merit aid than we are being morally corrupt,” said Brian Rosenberg, former president of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. “They are trying to keep their schools open. “
In fact, it’s just business or something.
“The better the student – and that includes choosing the curriculum as well as the grades – the more money it will take to change the student’s enrollment choice,” said Robert Massa, a former admissions, financial aid and communications administrator, when he was working at Drew University in New Jersey before becoming a consultant.
But when I pointed out to Mr. Massa that it is logical, then, that students should know how it works – so that they can take more difficult classes and get better grades if they choose – he shuddered a little. “Accept a strong workload because you want to,” he said. “Not because you think I want to.”
If all of this seems very tense, you should know that experts in the field have also not figured out what they are going to say to their children. Maureen McRae Goldberg is the former executive director of financial aid at Occidental College and now has a similar role at Santa Barbara City College. She looked resigned and exasperated when I asked her what she meant to say to her daughter when the time came.
Is explaining that your performance in high school could be worth a six-figure discount absurd pressure? Is it really fair to bring this up when many schools – private colleges in particular – don’t reveal what brand a teenager will need to reach to get merit help?
“I’m scared,” she said. “These are the same questions that I have been asking for 20 years and, in my naivete, I thought that we had already resolved some of these issues”.