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miramar
09-04-2014, 09:45 AM
I just saw this article in the NYT about Parchment, a company that tracks college preferences when a student is accepted to more than one school.

While we may lose out to Stanford 83% of the time and to Harvard 68% of the time, we easily win the Duke-UNC matchup 76% of the time.

I suspect that the 24% who decide to go to UNC do it either because of finances (understandable) or because they're addicted to Inside Carolina (incomprehensible).


http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/09/04/upshot/college-picks.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpSum&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0&abt=0002&abg=0#s=6

sagegrouse
09-04-2014, 10:55 AM
I just saw this article in the NYT about Parchment, a company that tracks college preferences when a student is accepted to more than one school.

While we may lose out to Stanford 83% of the time and to Harvard 68% of the time, we easily win the Duke-UNC matchup 76% of the time.

I suspect that the 24% who decide to go to UNC do it either because of finances (understandable) or because they're addicted to Inside Carolina (incomprehensible).


http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/09/04/upshot/college-picks.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpSum&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0&abt=0002&abg=0#s=6

The important point here is not the Duke vs. UNC comparison, where the economics are so different for North Carolina students. It is that there are only four schools (even expanding the number of observations) where Duke gets fewer than one-half of the acceptances: Stanford, Harvard, Yale and Princeton. (Columbia is a tie.) Duke does very well against Penn, Cornell, Brown, Chicago, Rice, Vanderbilt, Dartmouth, Notre Dame and Northwestern.

Overall, Stanford is the only school that wins every matchup. Hahvahd is second, losing only to Stanford. Lessee ... academics, culture, weather, athletics... there has to be a tie-breaker in there.

BTW, and my experience goes back a few years, I had two children at elite private schools (Duke and one other) and one paying out-of-state at a very good state university, where the tuition was only two-thirds as much. At this state u. it was almost impossible to graduate in four years without resort to summer sessions and winter quarters. So, add in another 15-20 percent for tuition and several more months of living expenses, and the cost differential almost disappeared. FWIW, Duke and its peers are committed to getting students through in four years at a very high graduation rate.

According to long-time Duke alum chief Laney Funderburk back in the day, there used to be seven such schools. Progress, I suppose.

superdave
09-04-2014, 10:59 AM
Should we move this to the Duke vs. Kentucky thread since it is clearly barbecue that draws people to school down here?

77devil
09-04-2014, 11:10 AM
The important point here is not the Duke vs. UNC comparison, where the economics are so different for North Carolina students. It is that there are only four schools (even expanding the number of observations) where Duke gets fewer than one-half of the acceptances: Stanford, Harvard, Yale and Princeton. (Columbia is a tie.) Duke does very well against Penn, Cornell, Brown, Chicago, Rice, Vanderbilt, Dartmouth, Notre Dame and Northwestern.

Overall, Stanford is the only school that wins every matchup. Hahvahd is second, losing only to Stanford. Lessee ... academics, culture, weather, athletics... there has to be a tie-breaker in there.

BTW, and my experience goes back a few years, I had two children at elite private schools (Duke and one other) and one paying out-of-state at a very good state university, where the tuition was only two-thirds as much. At this state u. it was almost impossible to graduate in four years without resort to summer sessions and winter quarters. So, add in another 15-20 percent for tuition and several more months of living expenses, and the cost differential almost disappeared. FWIW, Duke and its peers are committed to getting students through in four years at a very high graduation rate.

According to long-time Duke alum chief Laney Funderburk back in the day, there used to be seven such schools. Progress, I suppose.

I'm curious as to the reasons for this? None of my kids went to state schools? Is it lack of course availability, major requirements, total credits required, or all of the above or other issues Sounds unethical.

Im4howdy
09-04-2014, 12:04 PM
I'm curious as to the reasons for this? None of my kids went to state schools? Is it lack of course availability, major requirements, total credits required, or all of the above or other issues Sounds unethical.

I do not know for a fact, but it used to be that (some) state schools purposely over-enrolled (i.e. more students than available class space) with marginal students, took their $ and let them flunk out. Today with different stats being gathered, I'm not sure this is still the case with marginal students.

sagegrouse
09-04-2014, 01:23 PM
I'm curious as to the reasons for this? None of my kids went to state schools? Is it lack of course availability, major requirements, total credits required, or all of the above or other issues Sounds unethical.


I do not know for a fact, but it used to be that (some) state schools purposely over-enrolled (i.e. more students than available class space) with marginal students, took their $ and let them flunk out. Today with different stats being gathered, I'm not sure this is still the case with marginal students.

Well, there seem to be a lot more requirements for a degree at Ol' State U., necessitating extra sessions. At Duke and other private schools -- four courses time eight semesters -- you graduate, and there are deans and assistant deans and department types reviewing your transcript and courses every year to make sure you do what is needed.

Then there is the old "Marketing 400" ploy. There isn't enough room in a course you absolutely need for a major. Why isn't there? Who knows? Maybe non-full-time students enroll or non-majors enroll and take all the places. But yet another daughter had to take Marketing, THE key course for her major, as a correspondence course.

Anyway, my advice is to count on 4.5 years at a public university. "Unethical?" Nah, it's just the business of higher ed to build enrollments.

The Gordog
09-04-2014, 01:49 PM
I just saw this article in the NYT about Parchment, a company that tracks college preferences when a student is accepted to more than one school.

While we may lose out to Stanford 83% of the time and to Harvard 68% of the time, we easily win the Duke-UNC matchup 76% of the time.

I suspect that the 24% who decide to go to UNC do it either because of finances (understandable) or because they're addicted to Inside Carolina (incomprehensible).


http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/09/04/upshot/college-picks.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpSum&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0&abt=0002&abg=0#s=6

Interesting that there are no comps with smaller schools. I wonder how Duke fares vs. Williams, Swarthmore, Oberlin, etc.

JasonEvans
09-04-2014, 02:33 PM
Overall, Stanford is the only school that wins every matchup. Hahvahd is second, losing only to Stanford.

Nope... if you click at the bottom of the chart to include schools with less than 10 data points, you will find that Wash U in St Louis beats Stanford 63% - 37%. I find this more than a little amazing. I like Wash U and am looking at it for my oldest son (he likes Haverford, then Rice, then Duke... Wash U is further down the list) but I cannot imagine picking Wash U over Stanford. I guess that is why they caution against small data points ;)

-Jason "that says to me that there is no school that wins every matchup" Evans

cowetarock
09-04-2014, 03:27 PM
Nope... if you click at the bottom of the chart to include schools with less than 10 data points, you will find that Wash U in St Louis beats Stanford 63% - 37%. I find this more than a little amazing. I like Wash U and am looking at it for my oldest son (he likes Haverford, then Rice, then Duke... Wash U is further down the list) but I cannot imagine picking Wash U over Stanford. I guess that is why they caution against small data points ;)

-Jason "that says to me that there is no school that wins every matchup" Evans

Do not forget these numbers do not include all of the acceptances common to both schools.They are from schools using this particular service.While I feel sure Stanford would fare quite well if all mutual acceptances were included California is a huge source and is as reported overly represented in the total figures.

duke79
09-04-2014, 03:51 PM
Interesting analysis but I'm a little skeptical of the numbers, given the relatively small number of the sample and short time period. I'd like to see the numbers going back 5 or 10 years to give us a larger sample size and also to include smaller colleges like Williams and Amherst. Although it does not surprise me that there are only 4 universities that beat Duke one on one.

sagegrouse
09-04-2014, 04:54 PM
Interesting that there are no comps with smaller schools. I wonder how Duke fares vs. Williams, Swarthmore, Oberlin, etc.

You can go down to the "small sample" sizes:

2/5 pick Amherst
1/5 Pick Case/Western Reserve
1/8 pick Hopkins
1/7 pick Pomona (in Claremont Group)

MCFinARL
09-05-2014, 01:53 PM
Well, there seem to be a lot more requirements for a degree at Ol' State U., necessitating extra sessions. At Duke and other private schools -- four courses time eight semesters -- you graduate, and there are deans and assistant deans and department types reviewing your transcript and courses every year to make sure you do what is needed.

Then there is the old "Marketing 400" ploy. There isn't enough room in a course you absolutely need for a major. Why isn't there? Who knows? Maybe non-full-time students enroll or non-majors enroll and take all the places. But yet another daughter had to take Marketing, THE key course for her major, as a correspondence course.

Anyway, my advice is to count on 4.5 years at a public university. "Unethical?" Nah, it's just the business of higher ed to build enrollments.

I am not sure you can generalize about all state universities, but I can well believe that at some it's hard to get the courses you want and need in the standard 4 years. I teach at a large state university (not a flagship that would compete with Duke for students; one that is well down the food chain), and there are tremendous budgetary pressures, especially on any departments that don't bring in large chunks of outside research funding. Enrollments can be a bit unpredictable, even in required gen ed classes, from semester to semester, so the result is often that fewer sections are scheduled than are needed, and some students have to wait. It's also true, at least at my university, that the quality of advising is very poor--you are right that more attentive advising at private schools like Duke probably helps.

On the other hand, my kids went to Duke, and there are some times when even at Duke you need to do summer school to finish. My daughter wanted to get a Markets and Management Studies certificate, and she also wanted to take a semester abroad in the fall of her junior year (as many Duke students do). It was not possible to do this without taking summer school because, in the MMS program, you need to complete certain core classes before the spring of your junior year--but unless you have a registration priority (like being a varsity athlete, for example), you can't get into any of those classes as a sophomore because they are all full by the time you can register. Thus we signed on for two classes in summer school between sophomore and junior years so that she could get the certificate without having to sacrifice her semester abroad--and she had many fellow students who were in the same boat.

Luckily, this was not a financial hardship for us, and of course she could have chosen differently, so it's not like Duke set it up to milk students for extra tuition. But even at a private school, finishing in four years with no summer school can be tricky if you want to do certain very popular programs.

ricks68
09-05-2014, 02:26 PM
Nope... if you click at the bottom of the chart to include schools with less than 10 data points, you will find that Wash U in St Louis beats Stanford 63% - 37%. I find this more than a little amazing. I like Wash U and am looking at it for my oldest son (he likes Haverford, then Rice, then Duke... Wash U is further down the list) but I cannot imagine picking Wash U over Stanford. I guess that is why they caution against small data points ;)

-Jason "that says to me that there is no school that wins every matchup" Evans

Jason, I would strongly advise that you spend a little time checking out Rice more. A lot of small minded students, with a school that is over-rated, in my opinion. I have had many, many personal interactions with Rice students the past 35 years, while living in Houston, and my daughter worked for Rice for a few years in a bloated PR department that had 30 times---that's right, 30 times---the number of people in it than the PR department of the school she left to come to Rice. I have also observed their collaborative efforts with the UT Health Science Center for years, and it has been a bust. I have had multiple interactions with fellow faculty involved in these programs, and the politics between the different schools involved has killed every meaningful program. That's why I opted out of participating, myself. You can PM me if you want details.

In addition, it's hotter than Atlanta, with worse traffic, has vast ugly areas, and bad news mosquitoes YEAR ROUND that even made many a float in my pool intolerable after a round of golf played in the very low 90's (That's the temperature. I didn't play when the temperature was over 92-----which was an inordinate amount of the time.) And don't be fooled by the huge oak trees around the Rice campus areas. In Texas, unlike other places, the temperatures do not drop when you are in the shade.

ricks

ricks68
09-05-2014, 02:35 PM
I am not sure you can generalize about all state universities, but I can well believe that at some it's hard to get the courses you want and need in the standard 4 years. I teach at a large state university (not a flagship that would compete with Duke for students; one that is well down the food chain), and there are tremendous budgetary pressures, especially on any departments that don't bring in large chunks of outside research funding. Enrollments can be a bit unpredictable, even in required gen ed classes, from semester to semester, so the result is often that fewer sections are scheduled than are needed, and some students have to wait. It's also true, at least at my university, that the quality of advising is very poor--you are right that more attentive advising at private schools like Duke probably helps.

On the other hand, my kids went to Duke, and there are some times when even at Duke you need to do summer school to finish. My daughter wanted to get a Markets and Management Studies certificate, and she also wanted to take a semester abroad in the fall of her junior year (as many Duke students do). It was not possible to do this without taking summer school because, in the MMS program, you need to complete certain core classes before the spring of your junior year--but unless you have a registration priority (like being a varsity athlete, for example), you can't get into any of those classes as a sophomore because they are all full by the time you can register. Thus we signed on for two classes in summer school between sophomore and junior years so that she could get the certificate without having to sacrifice her semester abroad--and she had many fellow students who were in the same boat.

Luckily, this was not a financial hardship for us, and of course she could have chosen differently, so it's not like Duke set it up to milk students for extra tuition. But even at a private school, finishing in four years with no summer school can be tricky if you want to do certain very popular programs.

My daughter went to The University of Texas, did a summer session abroad, and got out in 3 1/2 years. So it can be done in less than 4 years at a state school. (But why anyone would want to graduate a semester early is beyond me. At Duke, that would mean missing the entire conference and post season. No way. I guess it works at UT because the football season would be over.)

ricks

Reisen
09-05-2014, 03:53 PM
Jason, I would strongly advise that you spend a little time checking out Rice more. A lot of small minded students, with a school that is over-rated, in my opinion. I have had many, many personal interactions with Rice students the past 35 years, while living in Houston, and my daughter worked for Rice for a few years in a bloated PR department that had 30 times---that's right, 30 times---the number of people in it than the PR department of the school she left to come to Rice. I have also observed their collaborative efforts with the UT Health Science Center for years, and it has been a bust. I have had multiple interactions with fellow faculty involved in these programs, and the politics between the different schools involved has killed every meaningful program. That's why I opted out of participating, myself. You can PM me if you want details.

In addition, it's hotter than Atlanta, with worse traffic, has vast ugly areas, and bad news mosquitoes YEAR ROUND that even made many a float in my pool intolerable after a round of golf played in the very low 90's (That's the temperature. I didn't play when the temperature was over 92-----which was an inordinate amount of the time.) And don't be fooled by the huge oak trees around the Rice campus areas. In Texas, unlike other places, the temperatures do not drop when you are in the shade.

ricks

I hate to pile on, but I have to agree. This was many years ago, but back in the mid 90's, Rice was my early favorite, and I enjoyed the tour. I might not have loved everything about Duke, but I'm very pleased I did not attend Rice.

Without getting into it too much (the previous poster did a good job), do you know how there are certain schools that just about everyone who went there LOVED? Two that come to mind are Texas A&M, and James Madison University. Rice is the opposite. Everyone I know who went there regretted it (maybe half a dozen people).

Haverford, on the other hand, I've heard nothing but good things about.

Philadukie
09-05-2014, 05:17 PM
I just saw this article in the NYT about Parchment, a company that tracks college preferences when a student is accepted to more than one school.

While we may lose out to Stanford 83% of the time and to Harvard 68% of the time, we easily win the Duke-UNC matchup 76% of the time.

I suspect that the 24% who decide to go to UNC do it either because of finances (understandable) or because they're addicted to Inside Carolina (incomprehensible).


http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/09/04/upshot/college-picks.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpSum&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0&abt=0002&abg=0#s=6

"60% of the time, it works every time."

Sorry, couldn't resist. But that's about the level of seriousness I take this.

sagegrouse
09-05-2014, 05:34 PM
Jason, I would strongly advise that you spend a little time checking out Rice more. A lot of small minded students, with a school that is over-rated, in my opinion. I have had many, many personal interactions with Rice students the past 35 years, while living in Houston, and my daughter worked for Rice for a few years in a bloated PR department that had 30 times---that's right, 30 times---the number of people in it than the PR department of the school she left to come to Rice. I have also observed their collaborative efforts with the UT Health Science Center for years, and it has been a bust. I have had multiple interactions with fellow faculty involved in these programs, and the politics between the different schools involved has killed every meaningful program. That's why I opted out of participating, myself. You can PM me if you want details.

In addition, it's hotter than Atlanta, with worse traffic, has vast ugly areas, and bad news mosquitoes YEAR ROUND that even made many a float in my pool intolerable after a round of golf played in the very low 90's (That's the temperature. I didn't play when the temperature was over 92-----which was an inordinate amount of the time.) And don't be fooled by the huge oak trees around the Rice campus areas. In Texas, unlike other places, the temperatures do not drop when you are in the shade.

ricks

Just a minute there, big fella, you're taking on a "Fightin' Rice Owl" here! Grad school version, of course.

Here are the positives about rice, circa -- well -- a few years ago:

Residential colleges produce a somewhat more democratic approach to fellow students than the fraternity system at Duke, back in my day. A bit nerdy, of course, but what U. isn't these days.

Rice had a lot of brilliant students, who did amazingly well afterwards. Probably more brilliant students than Duke back in the 1960s, but the teamwork and team spirit coming out of Duke is amazin', I tell you, amazin.'

Rice has a beautiful campus and is fortunate that it ended up in a really nice part of Houston -- not that far from downtown, close to the Montrose district.

The weather -- uhhh -- there's a reason Rice doesn't have a summer session. But October through April aren't bad, and I caught fish in the Gulf of Mexico or its bays every month of the year.

Houston has a lot of cultural offerings, and of course, there's the Shepherd School of Music at RU, bankrolled by the DeMenils.

Many, many Rice grads in the oil bidness -- chem. e., geology and other engineering departments are strong.

devildeac
09-05-2014, 06:37 PM
My daughter went to The University of Texas, did a summer session abroad, and got out in 3 1/2 years. So it can be done in less than 4 years at a state school. (But why anyone would want to graduate a semester early is beyond me. At Duke, that would mean missing the entire conference and post season. No way. I guess it works at UT because the football season would be over.)

ricks

I graduated from Duke a semester early. That was in December, 1975. Our MBB team was 12-14 (which was our first losing season in about 34 years:mad:), 10-16, 13-13 in my first three years and things really didn't look very promising after Bucky was fired/resigned and McGeahy took over. That included 4-8, 2-10 and 2-10 conference records. So, to what post season are you referring:rolleyes:? (I obviously didn't graduate early to avoid basketball Hades which is kinda/sorta what we had become, but it does make for interesting posting and a response to your "beyond me."):p

ricks68
09-05-2014, 10:18 PM
I graduated from Duke a semester early. That was in December, 1975. Our MBB team was 12-14 (which was our first losing season in about 34 years:mad:), 10-16, 13-13 in my first three years and things really didn't look very promising after Bucky was fired/resigned and McGeahy took over. That included 4-8, 2-10 and 2-10 conference records. So, to what post season are you referring? (I obviously didn't graduate early to avoid basketball Hades which is kinda/sorta what we had become, but it does make for interesting posting and a response to your "beyond me."):p

Have a beer on me for graduating Duke early. It took me 5 years, but I could have maybe pulled it off in 4 1/2------and that was with one full summer school session and one half session. (I changed to pre-med at the beginning of my junior year and had to take the chemistry courses in order-----along with failing pchem the first time.) It never really sunk in that you actually had to go to class to learn the material.:o Oh, well. At least I figured that out by the time I got to grad and post-grad school.:D

Oh, and I also got ripped off. Vic Bubas retired, and Bucky Waters took over for my last year. It was bad.............very bad.

ricks

devildeac
09-05-2014, 10:52 PM
Have a beer on me for graduating Duke early. It took me 5 years, but I could have maybe pulled it off in 4 1/2------and that was with one full summer school session and one half session. (I changed to pre-med at the beginning of my junior year and had to take the chemistry courses in order-----along with failing pchem the first time.) It never really sunk in that you actually had to go to class to learn the material.:o Oh, well. At least I figured that out by the time I got to grad and post-grad school.:D

Oh, and I also got ripped off. Vic Bubas retired, and Bucky Waters took over for my last year. It was bad.............very bad.

ricks

At least they were 17-9 that year if I'm figuring correctly. Not too shabby compared to the 72-73 season:(.

I'll be out to collect that ale some time this fall or winter ;). Or you can bring a Wicked Weed to a FB game this season.

Furniture
09-06-2014, 12:03 AM
Not a Duke grad but I am amazed that you guys even have a thread like this. Not born in the US but have lived in NC for the last few years. My daughter went to Duke. Of course any kid in their right mind would prefer to go to Duke any day! Money would be the only reason not to go. I ended up paying about 30% more for her to go to Duke over a NC Public college because of our EFC.She had a great time and has lots of opportunities but so have some of her friends that went to Wake and UNC. I have heard that for OOS students it's harder to get into UNC than Duke....that's because of the limited number of OOS allowed at UNC.

ricks68
09-06-2014, 03:51 AM
Not a Duke grad but I am amazed that you guys even have a thread like this. Not born in the US but have lived in NC for the last few years. My daughter went to Duke. Of course any kid in their right mind would prefer to go to Duke any day! Money would be the only reason not to go. I ended up paying about 30% more for her to go to Duke over a NC Public college because of our EFC.She had a great time and has lots of opportunities but so have some of her friends that went to Wake and UNC. I have heard that for OOS students it's harder to get into UNC than Duke....that's because of the limited number of OOS allowed at UNC.

It was true in my day, 50 years ago, and still is today. Harder to get into Holesville than Duke from OOS due to the same quota.

ricks

ricks68
09-06-2014, 03:52 AM
At least they were 17-9 that year if I'm figuring correctly. Not too shabby compared to the 72-73 season:(.

I'll be out to collect that ale some time this fall or winter ;). Or you can bring a Wicked Weed to a FB game this season.

Done.

ricks

miramar
09-06-2014, 09:50 AM
As several posters have noted, the problem with these numbers is the small sample size. For example, according to these statistics, no one applies to MIT and Pratt, which is obviously untrue. I also expect that Harvard gets more than 68% of the students who are also accepted to Duke.

Nevertheless, all of the admissions offices at the top schools track these statistics, so the complete numbers would give us a much better idea of student preferences. Not to mention that Admissions also sends out surveys and even makes some follow-up phone calls to understand why students turn down Duke.

jimsumner
09-06-2014, 02:28 PM
Have a beer on me for graduating Duke early. It took me 5 years, but I could have maybe pulled it off in 4 1/2------and that was with one full summer school session and one half session. (I changed to pre-med at the beginning of my junior year and had to take the chemistry courses in order-----along with failing pchem the first time.) It never really sunk in that you actually had to go to class to learn the material.:o Oh, well. At least I figured that out by the time I got to grad and post-grad school.:D

Oh, and I also got ripped off. Vic Bubas retired, and Bucky Waters took over for my last year. It was bad.............very bad.

ricks

Bubas went 15-13 in his last season at Duke, Waters went 17-9 in his first season and 20-10 in his second. The decline started in his third year.

Both of my kids graduated from state-supported schools, one in four years and one in 3.5 (got an early start on his Master's). Both worked during the school year and both worked during the summers. And both graduated debt free I do not recall either having any problems getting the courses they needed. And both graduated this millennium, so it wasn't that long ago.

Money is a mitigating factor. My son turned down Duke and Georgia Tech for Virginia Tech in large part because they offered him a boatload of scholarship money. Even paying out-of-state tuition, VT was about half the price of Duke and their Engineering program is pretty competitive.

ricks68
09-06-2014, 03:16 PM
Bubas went 15-13 in his last season at Duke, Waters went 17-9 in his first season and 20-10 in his second. The decline started in his third year.

Both of my kids graduated from state-supported schools, one in four years and one in 3.5 (got an early start on his Master's). Both worked during the school year and both worked during the summers. And both graduated debt free I do not recall either having any problems getting the courses they needed. And both graduated this millennium, so it wasn't that long ago.

Money is a mitigating factor. My son turned down Duke and Georgia Tech for Virginia Tech in large part because they offered him a boatload of scholarship money. Even paying out-of-state tuition, VT was about half the price of Duke and their Engineering program is pretty competitive.

Thanks for chiming in, Jim.

While the tuition at Texas is very low for in-state compared to other schools, and the education opportunities are excellent, housing is out of sight. Because the student body is also huge, on campus housing is limited, and most students are not able to live on campus. (Student dorms are also expensive due to the shortage.) In addition, Texas is definitely a big time social orientated party school that boosts costs even more. Even so, it was still a lot les expensive for my daughter to go there when compared to what a Duke education costs.

My other daughter went to the University of Washington in Seattle. Surprisingly, even for out of state, the tuition wasn't that much more than Texas, but the housing, food and social costs were a lot less expensive. When you consider that West Coast prices are considered to be very high, that was a huge revelation. My daughter was able to join a sorority that had an on campus house with a full meal plan (they even had their own chef that prepared great meals) that cost much, much less than what it cost me for my daughter that went to Texas.

So, even though they both went to different state schools, in very different parts of the country, the cost was essentially the same when all factors were taken into account. I would think, however, that it would show up in publications that out of state costs for UW compared to in state costs for UT are much higher. (Please correct me if this is not so.) That's why I think that a lot of information out there may not really show the true picture in many cases.

ricks

duke09hms
09-06-2014, 05:21 PM
It was true in my day, 50 years ago, and still is today. Harder to get into Holesville than Duke from OOS due to the same quota.

ricks

Do we know this is true today? Duke overall took around 10% of applicants this year. Back in 2005, Duke's overall acceptance rate was 25%. Is UNC's out-of-state acceptance rate below 10%? Even if so, I doubt that means it's "harder" given the significant differences in strength of applicant pool.

ricks68
09-06-2014, 05:33 PM
Do we know this is true today? Duke overall took around 10% of applicants this year. Back in 2005, Duke's overall acceptance rate was 25%. Is UNC's out-of-state acceptance rate below 10%? Even if so, I doubt that means it's "harder" given the significant differences in strength of applicant pool.

I think that UNC is limited by law to a 10% out of state limit. Also, I find it hard to believe that Duke accepted 25% of those that applied in 2005. Seems a bit high to me, but that does not reflect how many actually matriculated----which I know is considerably less. Reality, however, is that I would not be surprised if there are quite a few students out there that did not get accepted to UNC, but did get accepted to Duke this year.

ricks

devildeac
09-06-2014, 06:00 PM
I think that UNC is limited by law to a 10% out of state limit. Also, I find it hard to believe that Duke accepted 25% of those that applied in 2005. Seems a bit high to me, but that does not reflect how many actually matriculated----which I know is considerably less. Reality, however, is that I would not be surprised if there are quite a few students out there that did not get accepted to UNC, but did get accepted to Duke this year.

ricks

When we were in the college app mode for our children from about 2000-2006, I think the unc numbers were 82% in-state and 18% outta state and those numbers are indeed mandated by law.

DU82
09-06-2014, 06:55 PM
I think that UNC is limited by law to a 10% out of state limit. Also, I find it hard to believe that Duke accepted 25% of those that applied in 2005. Seems a bit high to me, but that does not reflect how many actually matriculated----which I know is considerably less. Reality, however, is that I would not be surprised if there are quite a few students out there that did not get accepted to UNC, but did get accepted to Duke this year.

ricks

The percentage of out-of-state students is supposed to be capped at 18% of the class. It appears the acceptance rate for OOS applicants is around 12%. The overall acceptance rate is around 28%.

duke09hms
09-06-2014, 07:10 PM
The percentage of out-of-state students is supposed to be capped at 18% of the class. It appears the acceptance rate for OOS applicants is around 12%. The overall acceptance rate is around 28%.

Given the Duke 2018 class got accepted at 9% regular, 10.8% overall, it looks like the whole "harder to get into UNC OOS than Duke" is disproved, and that isn't taking into account the differing strengths of the applicant pools.


Also, I find it hard to believe that Duke accepted 25% of those that applied in 2005. Seems a bit high to me, but that does not reflect how many actually matriculated----which I know is considerably less. Reality, however, is that I would not be surprised if there are quite a few students out there that did not get accepted to UNC, but did get accepted to Duke this year.

One can easily look up the Duke acceptance rates over time. 25% in 2004, 22% in 2005 are the real numbers I know for sure since those were my HS JR/SR years. And of course given the statistics of many thousands of students applying, there are some who got into Duke but not UNC.

The Chronicle has a recent story on regular decision acceptance rates. Including the early decision acceptances will bump the overall to be a bit higher. http://www.dukechronicle.com/articles/2014/03/27/duke-accepts-2697-applicants-class-2018

Bluedog
09-06-2014, 07:20 PM
No way is UNC harder to get into than Duke OOS. Yes, applying to UNC OOS is extremely competitive, but the applicant pool is not as strong and the acceptance rate is higher. From my high school in Illinois, people would routinely use UVa and UNC as slightly easier to get into backups to Duke for those who wanted to go to college in that part of the country. I knew of four people who got rejected at Duke and ended up at one of those two in my year, but none the reverse. Admittedly, this is a small sample size and was 10 years ago. I'm sure there's some randomness, but a 1500 SAT (two sections) valedictorian would be an almost shoo in for OOS UNC, while that's not the case for Duke. Although some years, athletes at UNC do take up more than half of the OOS quota, so certainly it can be extremely competitive for non-athletes, but not quite Duke level.

ricks68
09-06-2014, 07:54 PM
Gee, I guess Duke appears to be easier to get into than when I applied 50 years ago.:rolleyes:

I keed, I keed.

ricks

UrinalCake
09-08-2014, 02:17 PM
...there are only four schools (even expanding the number of observations) where Duke gets fewer than one-half of the acceptances: Stanford, Harvard, Yale and Princeton. (Columbia is a tie.)

I was feeling all smug after reading this post, so I shared the link with some friends, and my wife pointed out that her alma mater (Texas A&M) beat Duke 67%-33%. So I'm curious, where did you get your data from? Were you only looking at Ivy League schools?

sagegrouse
09-08-2014, 03:17 PM
I was feeling all smug after reading this post, so I shared the link with some friends, and my wife pointed out that her alma mater (Texas A&M) beat Duke 67%-33%. So I'm curious, where did you get your data from? Were you only looking at Ivy League schools?

It was the NY Times online article referenced by the OP. It was, as displayed, limited to comparisons where there were at least 10 joint acceptances. If you click a button at the bottom, it shows smaller sample sizes, down to 5. There is no Texas A&M that I saw on the Duke list., Then I went to the expanded Texas A&M list, and there is no Duke listing. Maybe your beautiful bride got access to a different list that included all comparisons, and the score was A&M 2, Duke 1 -- utterly insignificant.

nmduke2001
09-08-2014, 03:18 PM
I was feeling all smug after reading this post, so I shared the link with some friends, and my wife pointed out that her alma mater (Texas A&M) beat Duke 67%-33%. So I'm curious, where did you get your data from? Were you only looking at Ivy League schools?

I looked at both Duke and TA&M and didn't see an entry in which they were compared to one another.

Bluedog
09-08-2014, 03:21 PM
I was feeling all smug after reading this post, so I shared the link with some friends, and my wife pointed out that her alma mater (Texas A&M) beat Duke 67%-33%. So I'm curious, where did you get your data from? Were you only looking at Ivy League schools?

If you choose Duke on the dropdown on the NY Times page, there are only four schools that are >50%: Stanford, Yale, Princeton, and Harvard. No, it's not only Ivy League schools or else Stanford wouldn't be included. There are only 19 schools with greater than 10 data points, though. If you expand it to those with fewer than 10, which isn't close to a large enough sample size to be statistically significant in my mind, still nobody beats Duke. Texas A&M does not appear on the list at all as it appears that NY Times sets the absolute minimum of 5 because below that is just random noise basically. Thus, it means the Parchment data has only three self-reported students who chose between Texas A&M and Duke, and 2 out of the 3 chose A&M. Likely in-state, cheaper would be my guess, but having a sample size of 3 is worthless and meaningless. I find the sample size overall to be too small and non-random to put significant weight in the results at all actually...but still interesting nonetheless. They outwardly state that certain states are way overrepresented and others way under.

Edit: Looks like people beat me to it. But, yes, if you go on the Parchment website itself, you'll see Texas A&M 67%, Duke 33%, meaning they had a whopping sample of 3, so the NY Times chose not to display it.
http://www.parchment.com/c/college/tools/college-cross-admit-comparison.php?compare=Duke+University&with=Texas+A%26M+University+-+College+Station

ricks68
09-08-2014, 07:14 PM
If you choose Duke on the dropdown on the NY Times page, there are only four schools that are >50%: Stanford, Yale, Princeton, and Harvard. No, it's not only Ivy League schools or else Stanford wouldn't be included. There are only 19 schools with greater than 10 data points, though. If you expand it to those with fewer than 10, which isn't close to a large enough sample size to be statistically significant in my mind, still nobody beats Duke. Texas A&M does not appear on the list at all as it appears that NY Times sets the absolute minimum of 5 because below that is just random noise basically. Thus, it means the Parchment data has only three self-reported students who chose between Texas A&M and Duke, and 2 out of the 3 chose A&M. Likely in-state, cheaper would be my guess, but having a sample size of 3 is worthless and meaningless. I find the sample size overall to be too small and non-random to put significant weight in the results at all actually...but still interesting nonetheless. They outwardly state that certain states are way overrepresented and others way under.

Edit: Looks like people beat me to it. But, yes, if you go on the Parchment website itself, you'll see Texas A&M 67%, Duke 33%, meaning they had a whopping sample of 3, so the NY Times chose not to display it.
http://www.parchment.com/c/college/tools/college-cross-admit-comparison.php?compare=Duke+University&with=Texas+A%26M+University+-+College+Station

As an aside, I wouldn't be surprised if a poll taken among potential Aggies living in Texas asking if they could choose between any other school and being an Aggie, they would all choose to be Aggies. So, I think that the 2 out of 3 figure is not accurate.;) A true Aggie would never go anywhere else, given the choice.

I think UC's wife will confirm this.

ricks

Bostondevil
09-08-2014, 07:45 PM
Nope... if you click at the bottom of the chart to include schools with less than 10 data points, you will find that Wash U in St Louis beats Stanford 63% - 37%. I find this more than a little amazing. I like Wash U and am looking at it for my oldest son (he likes Haverford, then Rice, then Duke... Wash U is further down the list) but I cannot imagine picking Wash U over Stanford. I guess that is why they caution against small data points ;)

-Jason "that says to me that there is no school that wins every matchup" Evans

Really? Try financial aid. Wash U has multiple programs that award scholarships purely on academic merit, some even full rides (a la A.B. Duke). Stanford offers none. That's right, when it comes to "scholar"ships, Stanford doesn't give any. Need based and athletic financial aid only.

Kimist
09-08-2014, 08:25 PM
... Duke overall took around 10% of applicants this year. Back in 2005, Duke's overall acceptance rate was 25%...

Like others, the 2005 rate seemed a bit high to me, so I went looking around.

Assuming the data shown here ( http://www.ivywise.com/admission_statistics.html ) is factual, it would appear the overall acceptance rate in 2005 was in the range cited by duke09hms.

It's been a long time since I was at Duke (think Bubas), so I had not followed such admission stats with great fervor. (I was of the opinion the rate was historically somewhere in the low teens, at least in recent years.)

Interesting. Very interesting. . .

k

ricks68
09-08-2014, 10:19 PM
Like others, the 2005 rate seemed a bit high to me, so I went looking around.

Assuming the data shown here ( http://www.ivywise.com/admission_statistics.html ) is factual, it would appear the overall acceptance rate in 2005 was in the range cited by duke09hms.

It's been a long time since I was at Duke (think Bubas), so I had not followed such admission stats with great fervor. (I was of the opinion the rate was historically somewhere in the low teens, at least in recent years.)

Interesting. Very interesting. . .

k

I guess us crusties aren't as stoooopid as the newbies make us out to be.;)

ricks

MCFinARL
09-09-2014, 09:08 AM
Really? Try financial aid. Wash U has multiple programs that award scholarships purely on academic merit, some even full rides (a la A.B. Duke). Stanford offers none. That's right, when it comes to "scholar"ships, Stanford doesn't give any. Need based and athletic financial aid only.

It's true that Stanford does not offer merit-based financial aid. Nor do many Ivies, like Harvard and Yale (which, because they are Ivies, also don't offer athletic scholarships). But that isn't necessarily such a bad thing. Also like Harvard and Yale, Stanford has a very generous need-based financial aid program, under which families with annual income of $60,000 or less are generally not expected to contribute a penny to their children's educational expenses, and families with annual income between $60,000 and $100,000 are not expected to pay any of the tuition charges, but may be expected to contribute to living expenses. Stanford also commits to cover all demonstrated student need with outright grants rather than loans.

Why no merit-based aid? Most likely because they don't really need it--Stanford has a great reputation and a beautiful campus in a good location with great weather. They draw many more extremely capable applicants than they can enroll; they don't need to attract higher-quality applicants with merit scholarships. They DO need to attract more students from non-affluent families, who would otherwise be discouraged from attending such an expensive university.

Obviously, for a student from a family with three kids and an income of, say, $150,000 a year, for whom paying for private education would be possible but very burdensome, the option of merit aid at Wash. U. (an excellent school in its own right) rather than modest or no need-based aid at Stanford would likely be very attractive, and that's great. But it doesn't mean that Stanford doesn't care about academics.

sagegrouse
09-09-2014, 10:36 AM
It's true that Stanford does not offer merit-based financial aid. Nor do many Ivies, like Harvard and Yale (which, because they are Ivies, also don't offer athletic scholarships). But that isn't necessarily such a bad thing. Also like Harvard and Yale, Stanford has a very generous need-based financial aid program, under which families with annual income of $60,000 or less are generally not expected to contribute a penny to their children's educational expenses, and families with annual income between $60,000 and $100,000 are not expected to pay any of the tuition charges, but may be expected to contribute to living expenses. Stanford also commits to cover all demonstrated student need with outright grants rather than loans.

Why no merit-based aid? Most likely because they don't really need it--Stanford has a great reputation and a beautiful campus in a good location with great weather. They draw many more extremely capable applicants than they can enroll; they don't need to attract higher-quality applicants with merit scholarships. They DO need to attract more students from non-affluent families, who would otherwise be discouraged from attending such an expensive university.

Obviously, for a student from a family with three kids and an income of, say, $150,000 a year, for whom paying for private education would be possible but very burdensome, the option of merit aid at Wash. U. (an excellent school in its own right) rather than modest or no need-based aid at Stanford would likely be very attractive, and that's great. But it doesn't mean that Stanford doesn't care about academics.

Wow! The A.B. Duke Scholarship gives a full ride, including living expenses, for four years? Not in the old days. Then the award was need-based, although the minimum stipend was not insignificant. Duke used the AB Dukes as part of an aggressive recruiting program in the Carolinas. The scholarship recruiters went to the high schools to get interest; had regional semifinalists, getting together for a day of interviews in some nearby town; there the semifinalists were told they had been admitted to Duke and the U. would work out a way for them to afford it; the finalists went to Duke for a weekend -- my weekend it snowed a foot, the first time I had seen the stuff; there was an interview with a faculty committee that made the final decision; I can't remember that I said anything memorable during the interview, but I believe Lowcountry SC had weak representation that year. In case the scholarship office differed in judgment with the faculty committee, there were a couple of at-large scholarships to overcome the mistakes.

It was a very effective recruiting tool because they also tried to get commitments before the Ivies announced their admission decisions. Also, I believed 50 years ago that the AB Dukes were a direct response to the Morehead Scholar program at UNC, which stuffed money and perks in every orifice of the winners. But now doesn't Duke have the Benjamin Duke Scholarships for North Carolinians, which at least a few years ago emphasized leaders and citizenship, as well as academics? It seemed like a clear attempt to attract to Duke students from North Carolina who might stay and become influential members of the community. My cousin won such an award --- he was from Fayetteville and had been the national president of Teen Democrats.

As an aside, I have a friend a few years older (gasp!) who was a fraternity brother at Cornell with Angier Duke, son of Angier Biddle Duke, the long-time ambassador and JFK's chief of protocol. The younger had a different middle name (St. George!). He had various adventures as a student there and eventually transferred to Duke. He wrote back to the brothers, "the teachers here treat me a lot better than at Cornell."

As a further aside, I wonder if the Angier B. Scholarships aren't actually named after Angier Buchanan Duke, one of the original heirs to the Duke fortune?

Bostondevil
09-09-2014, 11:05 AM
It's true that Stanford does not offer merit-based financial aid. Nor do many Ivies, like Harvard and Yale (which, because they are Ivies, also don't offer athletic scholarships). But that isn't necessarily such a bad thing. Also like Harvard and Yale, Stanford has a very generous need-based financial aid program, under which families with annual income of $60,000 or less are generally not expected to contribute a penny to their children's educational expenses, and families with annual income between $60,000 and $100,000 are not expected to pay any of the tuition charges, but may be expected to contribute to living expenses. Stanford also commits to cover all demonstrated student need with outright grants rather than loans.

Why no merit-based aid? Most likely because they don't really need it--Stanford has a great reputation and a beautiful campus in a good location with great weather. They draw many more extremely capable applicants than they can enroll; they don't need to attract higher-quality applicants with merit scholarships. They DO need to attract more students from non-affluent families, who would otherwise be discouraged from attending such an expensive university.

Obviously, for a student from a family with three kids and an income of, say, $150,000 a year, for whom paying for private education would be possible but very burdensome, the option of merit aid at Wash. U. (an excellent school in its own right) rather than modest or no need-based aid at Stanford would likely be very attractive, and that's great. But it doesn't mean that Stanford doesn't care about academics.

I put Stanford in a different category from the Ivies because the Ivies don't offer athletic scholarships. Stanford does. But they offer no academic scholarships. Duke does. Northwestern does. Absolutely Stanford cares about academics, of course they do, but they care about athletics just a little bit more. If you think a straight A student with great scores who is merely an elite talent in science has the same chance at Stanford as a kid with elite talent in tennis and good enough grades to pass the smell test, you are fooling yourself.

Harvard is the same way. Duke too. All of them are going to accept the elite tennis kid first, heck, they'll recruit the elite tennis kid. And they'll give that student as much financial aid as they need to attend the school.

sagegrouse
09-09-2014, 11:39 AM
I put Stanford in a different category from the Ivies because the Ivies don't offer athletic scholarships. Stanford does. But they offer no academic scholarships. Duke does. Northwestern does. Absolutely Stanford cares about academics, of course they do, but they care about athletics just a little bit more. If you think a straight A student with great scores who is merely an elite talent in science has the same chance at Stanford as a kid with elite talent in tennis and good enough grades to pass the smell test, you are fooling yourself.

Harvard is the same way. Duke too. All of them are going to accept the elite tennis kid first, heck, they'll recruit the elite tennis kid. And they'll give that student as much financial aid as they need to attend the school.

I find the "athletics in the Ivy League" to be worse for the academic institution than the more upfront approach of Stanford, Duke, Northwestern.

I had a friend whose son was a LAX player go for an interview at UPenn. The assistant admissions director told the assembled prospective student ath-a-letes that "the only reason you may get admitted is because of athletics." Ooops! Not too cool -- he was utterly turned off and went elsewhere.

Another friend had a son applying at Div III Trinity in Connecticut, an excellent liberal arts college. He was a beefy football lineman. And while he had good academic quals, he was urged to retake the SATs and try to get to the next level. "I get only three exceptions every year," said the coach, "and I am not wasting one on no damned tackle." Oops, but really funny.

Another Division III school, the University of Chicago, decided to take football more seriously. Perhaps they only had a club team before. It turns out that football is a bit of a draw for prospective students. Anyway, the rules were "no exceptions" on admission quals. But, aha! There was a hitch. You can't recruit football players and wait until April admissions. So, the football coach could go to admissions and get an immediate decision on prospective recruits. That is definitely an advantage for prospective athletes at Chicago. Also, as it turns out, once the school started recruiting football players, the program refused to allow walk-ons. So, you have a Div III program without athletic scholarships but not open to the student body. And, they seem to be successful -- 6-4 in 2013, 1-0 this year.

Bostondevil
09-09-2014, 12:19 PM
I find the "athletics in the Ivy League" to be worse for the academic institution than the more upfront approach of Stanford, Duke, Northwestern.



Fair enough, but part of my particular beef is that the athletes eat up all the merit based financial aid at Duke and Stanford and Northwestern. At least at Harvard, once you get in, you are eligible for just as much financial aid as the athletes. I suspect the same is true at U of Chicago, maybe you can't play football there, but you have the same chance as the football guys to graduate without debt. Stanford is not "affordable" to a family of 5 making $150,000 a year but you still aren't getting any financial aid. You may have the goods to be a Nobel Laureate someday but we've got a Director's Cup to win, sorry.

MCFinARL
09-09-2014, 12:42 PM
I put Stanford in a different category from the Ivies because the Ivies don't offer athletic scholarships. Stanford does. But they offer no academic scholarships. Duke does. Northwestern does. Absolutely Stanford cares about academics, of course they do, but they care about athletics just a little bit more. If you think a straight A student with great scores who is merely an elite talent in science has the same chance at Stanford as a kid with elite talent in tennis and good enough grades to pass the smell test, you are fooling yourself.

Harvard is the same way. Duke too. All of them are going to accept the elite tennis kid first, heck, they'll recruit the elite tennis kid. And they'll give that student as much financial aid as they need to attend the school.

I certainly don't think that--I'm well aware that Stanford cares about athletics (as do Ivy schools, when it comes to admissions, even though they don't offer athletic scholarships), and that its admissions practices reflect that. Actually, the point I was trying to make (perhaps not clearly) was that straight A students with great scores and elite science talent are a dime a dozen in the admissions pools of schools with the most elite reputations, and so merit aid to recruit more of them isn't necessary. Given the amount of a few possible merit scholarships as compared to the total budget of a heavily endowed university, I'm not sure the decision to offer merit aid (in addition to or instead of athletic aid) is a good way to measure a school's priorities. Doesn't mean you can't make a strong argument that Stanford cares about athletics, a lot, and that that concern influences admission decisions.

I think Sage's comment about the history of the A.B. Duke and similar scholarships at Duke tends to support my point--these developed as recruiting tools. Arguably, now, Duke may no longer need the same kind of recruiting device to woo kids away from other schools, but the scholarships are a nice tradition that presumably do attract some very highly desirable students who might otherwise choose either Ivies or more financially manageable state schools.


I find the "athletics in the Ivy League" to be worse for the academic institution than the more upfront approach of Stanford, Duke, Northwestern.

I had a friend whose son was a LAX player go for an interview at UPenn. The assistant admissions director told the assembled prospective student ath-a-letes that "the only reason you may get admitted is because of athletics." Ooops! Not too cool -- he was utterly turned off and went elsewhere.

Another friend had a son applying at Div III Trinity in Connecticut, an excellent liberal arts college. He was a beefy football lineman. And while he had good academic quals, he was urged to retake the SATs and try to get to the next level. "I get only three exceptions every year," said the coach, "and I am not wasting one on no damned tackle." Oops, but really funny.

Another Division III school, the University of Chicago, decided to take football more seriously. Perhaps they only had a club team before. It turns out that football is a bit of a draw for prospective students. Anyway, the rules were "no exceptions" on admission quals. But, aha! There was a hitch. You can't recruit football players and wait until April admissions. So, the football coach could go to admissions and get an immediate decision on prospective recruits. That is definitely an advantage for prospective athletes at Chicago. Also, as it turns out, once the school started recruiting football players, the program refused to allow walk-ons. So, you have a Div III program without athletic scholarships but not open to the student body. And, they seem to be successful -- 6-4 in 2013, 1-0 this year.

Yes--some of the ways schools without "athletic scholarships" handle athletic admissions are not especially upfront. A friend of my daughter's went to DIII Kenyon on a "merit" scholarship (with two practicing lawyers for parents, need-based aid was not an option)--despite a pretty dismal high school GPA (but respectable test scores--he was a little sketchy in the effort and focus department). He was a recruited wide receiver.

As for University of Chicago, yes, they did win 6 games last year. But their undergraduate enrollment of 5000 is more than twice that of 4 of the 6 teams they beat (Beloit, Mcalester, Kalamazoo, Elmhurst), and almost double that of a 5th. The 6th was--Carnegie Mellon, with a 6000 undergraduate enrollment--a noted football power. :D So apparently barring "regular" students isn't all they will do for success.

miramar
09-09-2014, 01:09 PM
Why no merit-based aid? Most likely because they don't really need it--Stanford has a great reputation and a beautiful campus in a good location with great weather. They draw many more extremely capable applicants than they can enroll; they don't need to attract higher-quality applicants with merit scholarships. They DO need to attract more students from non-affluent families, who would otherwise be discouraged from attending such an expensive university.

Economic diversity is a concern for a lot of elite institutions, and it appears that most of these schools are making a concerted effort to recruit more students from lower-income families. I’m not entirely convinced by the methodology in the following chart that calculates a “College Access Index,” but the first two columns indicate the percentage of students who received a federal Pell Grant (from the bottom 40% income bracket) over time. Duke has increased from 9% in 2008 to 14% in 2012-14.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/09/09/upshot/09up-college-access-index.html?abt=0002&abg=0

One big problem for all schools is that many top students from lower-income families do not apply to selective colleges, particularly non-Hispanic whites from rural areas. This chart shows the differences by family income for students with a minimum of 1300 on the SATs or the equivalent score on the ACT, which represents the top 10% of test takers:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/03/17/education/How-Top-Students-of-Different-Incomes-Apply-for-College.html?ref=education

The reason I say rural, non-Hispanic whites is that urban and suburban students typically know of some good schools in their area, while minority students with good SATs receive an avalanche of letters from top schools because the College Board can easily provide a list of those who received a certain score and who also checked the appropriate box. (Trust me, I went through the process three times with my daughters, who sometimes received two and three letters per day.) Unfortunately, it turns out that guidance counselors usually have over 300 students, and since the counselors at Podunk High often don’t know what to do with this kind of student, they tell them to get their own information online. Many of these students do not even realize that there are many schools out there with plenty of scholarship money for disadvantaged students, so they really lose out on a great educational opportunity.

Here is the complete report:

http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/projects/bpea/spring%202013/2013a_hoxby.pdf

I have to believe that the College Board can identify rural students by zip code, then combine this information with high test scores, and in the end sell these lists to interested schools.

Bostondevil
09-09-2014, 02:06 PM
Actually, the point I was trying to make (perhaps not clearly) was that straight A students with great scores and elite science talent are a dime a dozen in the admissions pools of schools with the most elite reputations, and so merit aid to recruit more of them isn't necessary.

And that is where you are wrong. I agree that straight A students with great scores are abundant - those with truly elite science talent are more rare than a good point guard. Stanford has had two undergraduates go on to win Nobel Prizes in science. Two. (I happen to know both of them. One of them, his parents were Stanford alums, so, Stanford lucked out.) They have had 71 win Olympic gold medals since 1976 and that's not even counting Tiger Woods or John McEnroe or mere silver medalists. You could respond with "Who can predict who is going to go on and win a Nobel prize?" Hard sure, but to get into Stanford on academic merit alone, what do they consider - a few essays, high school grades, and test scores. Think any D1 level athletic program judges talent from a few essays, minutes played, and scoring average? Stanford spends no resources teasing out who among those that are really good at taking tests are actually elite science talents and yet they consider themselves an elite academic institution. It is true that they are good at identifying talent at the graduate level and for hiring of faculty, for undergraduates, I will say it again - they care about academics to a point. But, as Larry Summers said about Harvard kids, the A students go on to become professors, the C students go on to become wealthy donors. Stanford, like Harvard, really does prefer more of the latter. What university doesn't?

And a large number of those scholarship athletes are the C students. And I will argue that they are the ones who least need financial aid. Somebody will give them a job after they graduate, even if they go pro in something other than sports.

77devil
09-09-2014, 03:03 PM
And that is where you are wrong. I agree that straight A students with great scores are abundant - those with truly elite science talent are more rare than a good point guard. Stanford has had two undergraduates go on to win Nobel Prizes in science. Two. (I happen to know both of them. One of them, his parents were Stanford alums, so, Stanford lucked out.) They have had 71 win Olympic gold medals since 1976 and that's not even counting Tiger Woods or John McEnroe or mere silver medalists. You could respond with "Who can predict who is going to go on and win a Nobel prize?" Hard sure, but to get into Stanford on academic merit alone, what do they consider - a few essays, high school grades, and test scores. Think any D1 level athletic program judges talent from a few essays, minutes played, and scoring average? Stanford spends no resources teasing out who among those that are really good at taking tests are actually elite science talents and yet they consider themselves an elite academic institution. It is true that they are good at identifying talent at the graduate level and for hiring of faculty, for undergraduates, I will say it again - they care about academics to a point. But, as Larry Summers said about Harvard kids, the A students go on to become professors, the C students go on to become wealthy donors. Stanford, like Harvard, really does prefer more of the latter. What university doesn't?

And a large number of those scholarship athletes are the C students. And I will argue that they are the ones who least need financial aid. Somebody will give them a job after they graduate, even if they go pro in something other than sports.

I believe my friends at Stanford would say that it is far more efficient and rational to focus its resources on attracting the truly elite talents and potential Nobel Laureates to the graduate schools and the faculty. It's perfectly logical as the data bears out. Further, someone, i.e. those C students who become wealthy donors, has to pay for all the intellectual horsepower.

Bostondevil
09-09-2014, 03:50 PM
I believe my friends at Stanford would say that it is far more efficient and rational to focus its resources on attracting the truly elite talents and potential Nobel Laureates to the graduate schools and the faculty. It's perfectly logical as the data bears out. Further, someone, i.e. those C students who become wealthy donors, has to pay for all the intellectual horsepower.

Am I correct in assuming that you don't think it's a problem that our top universities weigh athletic ability more heavily than academic ability and that as a nation, we ensure that those with athletic talent are the ones who get to graduate from college without debt? If so, then, OK, point taken.

Your friends at Stanford must be economists.

Actually, I checked, Stanford isn't even very good at attracting future Nobel Laureates to their graduate programs. They are however good at hiring them. Which makes it even sadder that the best and the brightest students don't get to study with some of the best and the brightest faculty.

Those wealthy donors though, aren't paying for the intellectual horsepower. All top research universities in this country expect professors to get their own grant money to fund their research. The wealthy donors build the buildings, grow the endowment, and make sure the sports facilities can attract top athletic talent. We haven't reached the tipping point yet - top American universities, Harvard in particular, can still attract (potential) Nobel Laureates to their faculty, but it's coming. How research is funded at European universities is undergoing a sea change. Many institutions are recruiting talent with the promise that funding the research is the institution's job, the scientists are supposed to do what they do best. Harvard is still winning more battles for faculty than it is losing (there's a stat the New York Times should look at, how many faculty members choose somewhere else over Harvard), but if the current funding environment for science in this country stays the same that will not stay true for the next generation. Harvard has a lot of non-American science faculty. They will start losing those professors first. And when we haven't done a very good job of letting our top academic talent into our top research universities, there won't be much homegrown talent to replace them. But we'll have some really great sports to watch.

sagegrouse
09-09-2014, 05:35 PM
Am I correct in assuming that you don't think it's a problem that our top universities weigh athletic ability more heavily than academic ability and that as a nation, we ensure that those with athletic talent are the ones who get to graduate from college without debt? If so, then, OK, point taken.

Your friends at Stanford must be economists.



Actually, I don't think that your assertion is true. Stanford does not elevate athletics above academics. There are 7,000 Stanford undergrads, 300 of whom hold athletic scholarships. The athletic program is, more or less, self-funding. (Who knows where the athletic donors' money would go if there weren't athletics at Stanford?) Stanford has made an institutional decision to have a major college athletic program and has had some success, including more Olympians and Olympic medals than any other school. Otherwise, Stanford would have no athletic program and 6,700 undergrads, or 300 fewer. In that sense, athletes are not substituted for other students.

I think, evaluating two states of the world, the Stanford community* prefers the one with high-caliber athletics and doesn't see the harm in adding 300 athletes to the university. I think much of the economics and the business school faculties would agree with this definition of the problem. Much of the rest of the faculty would disagree vehemently and go on about it for 50 minutes without stopping.

I could probably argue the other side of the issue, but I choose not to -- after all, this is a sports fan site.

Kindly, Sage
'BTW, most of the Duke students from my era who became CEOs played on the football team -- John Mack, Roy Bostock, Jack Wilkinson, and so on'
'As former Arkansas coach and AD Frank Broyles said, "Athletics is the front porch of a university"'

*The Stanford community includes students, faculty, alumni, administration, Silicon Valley hotshots, and merchants in Palo Alto.

Bostondevil
09-09-2014, 06:04 PM
OK, I'm thinking maybe I should delete that last post.

I've never really been idealistic, but I'll admit I do still hold on to the idealistic notion that our top universities shouldn't use efficiency and rationality as the top motivations in attracting the best academic talent. I know, I know, dream on. I can't help but believe that America's long held standing as the best in the world when it comes to higher education is in danger. It worries me. It worries me enough to post messages on the DBR message board about it. And this winter, I will watch every Duke basketball game that I can. I never said I wasn't a hypocrite. ;-)

sagegrouse
09-09-2014, 06:14 PM
OK, I'm thinking maybe I should delete that last post.

I've never really been idealistic, but I'll admit I do still hold on to the idealistic notion that our top universities shouldn't use efficiency and rationality as the top motivations in attracting the best academic talent. I know, I know, dream on. I can't help but believe that America's long held standing as the best in the world when it comes to higher education is in danger. It worries me. It worries me enough to post messages on the DBR message board about it. And this winter, I will watch every Duke basketball game that I can. I never said I wasn't a hypocrite. ;-)

Your post was fine and said what needed to be said. I was just trying to show off. Imagine that, on the internet?

Bostondevil
09-09-2014, 06:37 PM
'BTW, most of the Duke students from my era who became CEOs played on the football team -- John Mack, Roy Bostock, Jack Wilkinson, and so on'


Thanks for making my point for me, sage - those guys didn't really need their scholarships then, did they? ;-)

How many of your friends on the football team went to medical school? More important question - how many of the kids today that play college sports go to medical school? Kids that are eventually going to medical school are the ones who most need financial aid, IMHO.

Also, my point was that many top universities, Stanford included, do not take the time and effort to truly go after elite academic talent the way they go after elite athletic talent. You can't tell merely by looking at test scores who the best science kids are. I will agree that exceptional writing talent can be displayed in the current admissions process. Exceptional science talent cannot. Understanding the concepts well enough to score high on the standardized tests and/or AP exams does not always translate into the extra spark of creativity/ingenuity/thirst for knowledge that leads to top scientific talent. Figuring out who among the 800 point scorers/5's on the AP exams is truly gifted as opposed to merely very smart takes more time than reading the Common Ap essay and teacher recommendations. And, I might agree with you that at the end of the day, John Elway or Johnny Manzell or Johnny Dawkins all bring in enough money to their universities that they deserve to have their schooling paid for, but you will never convince me that a soccer player or a field hockey player deserves to have their schooling paid for more than a kid with elite academic talent.

ricks68
09-09-2014, 08:02 PM
'BTW, most of the Duke students from my era who became CEOs played on the football team -- John Mack, Roy Bostock, Jack Wilkinson, and so on'
.

I wish you hadn't have mentioned one of those guys that unfortunately was a student at our illustrious institution. Seriously.:o

ricks

77devil
09-09-2014, 11:14 PM
Am I correct in assuming that you don't think it's a problem that our top universities weigh athletic ability more heavily than academic ability and that as a nation, we ensure that those with athletic talent are the ones who get to graduate from college without debt? If so, then, OK, point taken.

No, I think your premise is false. Where is the real data to support it? Your Stanford anecdote is a red hearing.


Your friends at Stanford must be economists.

Incorrect.


Actually, I checked, Stanford isn't even very good at attracting future Nobel Laureates to their graduate programs. They are however good at hiring them. Which makes it even sadder that the best and the brightest students don't get to study with some of the best and the brightest faculty.

Well I wrote graduate students and faculty. It is perfectly rational to focus on attracting the most elite talent as faculty when there is much more data on which to gauge future success. Additionally, I suspect most would count the undergraduates at Stanford among the best and brightest.


Those wealthy donors though, aren't paying for the intellectual horsepower. All top research universities in this country expect professors to get their own grant money to fund their research. The wealthy donors build the buildings, grow the endowment, and make sure the sports facilities can attract top athletic talent. We haven't reached the tipping point yet - top American universities, Harvard in particular, can still attract (potential) Nobel Laureates to their faculty, but it's coming. How research is funded at European universities is undergoing a sea change. Many institutions are recruiting talent with the promise that funding the research is the institution's job, the scientists are supposed to do what they do best. Harvard is still winning more battles for faculty than it is losing (there's a stat the New York Times should look at, how many faculty members choose somewhere else over Harvard), but if the current funding environment for science in this country stays the same that will not stay true for the next generation. Harvard has a lot of non-American science faculty. They will start losing those professors first. And when we haven't done a very good job of letting our top academic talent into our top research universities, there won't be much homegrown talent to replace them. But we'll have some really great sports to watch.

I wasn't being serious. Nevertheless, the athletic budget at elite research universities is irrelevant to this diatribe.

throatybeard
09-09-2014, 11:16 PM
I'm curious as to the reasons for this? None of my kids went to state schools? Is it lack of course availability, major requirements, total credits required, or all of the above or other issues Sounds unethical.

I can speak only about three state schools with authority, but with a lot of authority about those three. NC State, Mississippi State, and UMSL. But taken together, I think they are fairly representative of what's going on.

Very little of it has to do with admitting students who can't cut it and then quickly flunking them out. That's not a good business model (a term I hate when discussing higher education), but rather the sort of thing that some schools that are in the process of building prestige despite not having been founded in the 1700s do. Georgia Tech comes to mind, based on what I know from my peer group in HS, and I bet Tech isn't doing it to the degree they were in the 1980s. Indeed, everybody and their dog has been all about retention for at least twenty years. Anytime I hear anyone in a position of power at my school speak about anything, the word retention comes up. The later half of the Millennials isn't as populous as the first half, and we can't keep the ship afloat without increasing retention. Natural population increase isn't gonna cut it. It's arithmetic, as BillC would say.

Here are the big factors in my experience, mounting in severity from NC State, to MSU, and now here, some of which has to do less with the school than the passage of time.

1) Student finances. 92% of our students who fill out the FAFSA come from households that report less than $50K household income. 92%, with a nine in the tens place. Most of them fill out the FAFSA, so basically put it this way: Some huge percentage of our students come from below-median household income. Another large portion are first-gen college students. Low-income and first-gen college students don't do as well or finish as quicly as high-income students or students whose family is spending its fourth or fifth generation in higher ed.

2) Percent composition of non-traditionals. Non-traditionals are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they tend to be more mature and responsible than genpop. On the other, they tend to have way more obligations in life, mainly full-time or close to full-time jobs, spouses, and offspring. Our median student age is 27. If you're the average Duke person who got a lot of post-graduate education, married late, and had kids late, or are young and plan to do any of those things later than average, mentally adjust that to when you were or will be 33 in terms of life obligations. A huge number of our students are women who got married, squeezed three kids out, raised them, and came back to school when the kids hit high school. Duke folks have a tendency to assume that everyone goes to college when they're 18-23, because that's the case at Duke. Not so.

At NCSU and MSU, I had a draconian attendance policy that I sort of enforced. Here I have a draconian attendance policy in the syllabus and never even come close to enforcing it. If you tell me your kid is sick, I take you at your word. If you don't show up, it's often because you were working second shift at Lowes, not doing body shots off a cute 21yo woman in Mirecourt. If you tell me you live in Ferguson and the cops have been tear-gassing the area around your house and you're scared to come to school, I believe you. I have ten times as much sympathy for student hardship than I used to.

3) Lousy advising, or competent but cumbersome advising. At each of the three state schools where I've worked--look this hurts me, because I hate indicting an entire discipline--at every single one, the students from the College of Education have savaged the quality of their advising and most of the savage the quality of the teaching. I'm not saying this; but reporting it. They tend to take five years, at least, simply because their advisors don't tell them what's happening when. Our MA is designed to take two years. I just signed a graduation for a woman who has like a 3.9 GPA and took four and a half years. Additionally, some schools, those with engineering in particular, design BSE programs to take five years, not four. Additionally, a lot of fields, since we've vocationalized higher education, have time-consuming practicums after you're done with your coursework even for the Bachelors--nursing, teaching, especially in our case. I think Ophthalmology is in the mix but I don't know how they work. Additionally...

4) ...The employment crisis in higher education. The advisors can't advise kids to take required classes that aren't being offered because someone has a course release paid for by an external grant, or is on maternity/paternity leave, or who died five years ago and hasn't been replaced. Since the 1980s, state appropriations have cratered while student debt has skyrocketed. State schools, in turn, to survive, have taken to employing an every-growing army of adjuncts while the TT faculty (whose first job is considered to be research, not teaching, anyway) shrinks. What this means is that there are fewer people qualified on paper to teach graduate and upper-level Ugrad classes. When I got here, we had about 21 TT or tenured faculty in English. Several people have died and retired, and we've only gotten to replace a couple or three, so we're down to twelve tenured and two TT assistants. And one is retiring next summer. Just staffing the graduate and 4000 classes has become a crisis. And if we can't teach the classes, you don't get to take them. And it takes you longer to graduate.

5) Schools that, because of the prestige crisis, really ought to be institutions that are primarily teaching schools but have manufactured prestige by requiring large amounts of research to be performed by their TT faculty. NC State probably isn't in this category, but MSU and UMSL are. My school should have modest research expectations and have the TT faculty teach something like 3-3. Instead, it's 2-2 in the depts that grant a PhD and 3-2 in those that don't, with a 3-3 load for faculty who got tenure but haven't done much research lately. (Contrary to public opinion, there are very few of these, and a lot of them have a really good reason--excessive service obligations). UMSL was founded in 1963 and will never have the prestige of WashU or SLU because their student bodies are more selective and richer and the stones are older. But we have this idea that we can research our way out of this hole. That negatively impacts TT/tenured faculty face time with students.

6) Administrative bloat. More and more of the budget goes to a ruling class of administrators and to athletics and physical plant, but there are less-talked-about consequences too. My situation is anecdotal but instructive.

I'm our department's new MA director. This means I have to do a lot more work for no extra pay. I'm not complaining, because I'm lucky as fried hell to be an Associate Professor and not an adjunct living off of ramen noodles and babysitting in the summer. And I'm a team player who does what he's told. But it does present a staffing problem.

According to external reviews, an English Dept with our enrollment is supposed to have 25-30 TT/tenured faculty. We have fourteen. This year--one guy is probably retiring, which I can't blame him for, since he's 73. We thought we were going to be able to hire in AfAm Studies this year (we've had no one who does AfAm studies since Ruth what's her name left for greener pastures in about 2006, which is embarrassing, especially given the demographics of our student population. We lose StL kids to Mizzou and UMKC because we don't have an AfAm studies major). But the legislature passed a big tax cut and our state funding went down again. So we're back to (#4). But do the math. If you don't get any extra pay for a bunch of extra work for an administrative position in a department, they compensate you with an occasional course release. In our department, just to do basic stuff we need, at least, a Chair, an Associate Chair (they have distinct duties), an MA director, an MFA director, and a Writing Program Administrator. And there are only fourteen TT/tenured people who are allowed to do that stuff, and we're not asking the two assistants to do any of it so they can get research done so they can keep their jobs. And if the people who do research teach 2-2 or 3-2, and they get course releases, and half of them have to do administrative jobs in the Dept, who the heck is teaching the very 4000-level courses that the kids need to finish their degrees?

We've handled this by upping our small classes to a cap of 35 (compare 15 at Duke), but that is far from an ideal solution. We have at the very least--this is probably our last pedagogical sandbag--managed to limit the graduate seminars to a cap of 12, with the soft understanding that the graduate director won't pile more than 16 in a class capped at 12. We also have three teaching professors (no research expectations, 4-4 load, lots of service work, make a third less money than the TT faculty) who happen to hold PhDs, so they've been provisionally approved as having adjunct appointments on the graduate faculty, and they teach maybe one grad class a summer. And they're great, but that demonstrates how little our TT faculty are in front of the MA and MFA students. I think we have eight 5000 classes this semester. Heck, at Duke--and that's at Duke--I taught a seminar on Flannery O'Connor to 25 folks. It was capped at 15.

7) Fairly justifiable, if personal preferences of the protected class of faculty. So say you're me. You have job security and for that you're grateful, but you have no power compared to the high-level administrators. What makes your life worthwhile is getting to teach something different once in a while. It's a privilege that adjuncts will never see, and you feel bad for them, but to maintain your sanity year after year, you do accept the privilege of being able to teach some topical courses. This is allegedly the liberal arts, right?

So Torbert gets a course release for the MA director work. Guess what, that's not a reward, because IntroLing, Advanced Grammar, and History of English have to be taught all the time, and I'm the only linguist in this dept so no one else can replace me, and we don't have a pot into which to expel spent liquid from our kidneys, so we can't get an adjunct to replace me except under the direst of circumstances, like when one guy had a stroke in the middle of a semester five years ago. So if I get released from a course annually, that means no more O'Connor, no more African American English, no more seminar on The Wire, **not even the main graduate class I was hired to teach,** Sociolinguistics. At this point I'm actually rooting for the Dean to jack up our teaching loads to offset the course release I'll get just so I can do something between now and my inevitable terminal infarction beside teach the IPA and what an infinitive clause is. But if that doesn't happen, we've got one more tenured faculty who isn't teaching the MA students because he has to do something administrative.

Duke is the land of milk and honey, y'all. The rest of us live in the real world. Ain't no ivory tower up in here.

That's a very incomplete explanation of what life at state schools not named Michigan, Cal, Rutgers, or UCSD is like. But it's a start. And that's why the kids aren't finishing in four years.

ricks68
09-10-2014, 12:54 AM
Kudos to throaty for spending his valuable time telling it like it is. Your input is always appreciated by us old timers on the boards.;)

ricks

Bostondevil
09-10-2014, 01:39 AM
77devil

Stanford is not actually a red herring, when it comes to merit based tuition assistance, I have found no school that gives both athletic and academic scholarships that gives more money to those with demonstrated special academic ability than to those with demonstrated special athletic ability. Again, I'm not really an idealist, but I do believe that institutions of higher learning should be for scholars first with athletics as a nice added attraction, the fact that we give more money to athletes is just plain wrong. Yes, I know need based aid outweighs merit based aid, but seriously, what is defined as affordable by most universities isn't really, hence the loans. Duke, like many other schools, caps the amount a student can borrow in a given year so that the average debt faced by a Duke student at graduation is only $21,000. Only. That is not crushing debt. But it's still debt and it might make a difference in choice of career. Sage pointed out that his football playing friends from Duke went on to become CEOs and I respond to that, exactly. Of course they do. Who do we think becomes CEOs? Sure, Duke wants a healthy portion of their graduates to become CEOs, so does Stanford, but, and I will accept that you disagree with me on this, that is not who our best research universities are supposed to be for. They are supposed to be there to train our best students to do groundbreaking work, in science, in medicine, in economics, in literature, in the arts. The athletes are going to be fine, they will be hired by one of those companies that is headed by a former football player at their school. Perhaps I'm alone in this, but I truly believe that the financial aid should go to the folks who are there to study. Can't an athlete do both? Right now, given that playing a varsity sport at a D1 school amounts to a full time job, I don't think so. Some of them probably could be/are very talented academically but we don't give them enough time to focus on their studies.

Are your Stanford friends faculty or alums? I think the two groups might feel differently about what is an efficient and rational use of resources. Actually, the faculty, especially in the sciences, would very much disagree with you on efforts to attract the best graduate students. They want them working in their labs. You don't win a Nobel just by having the good idea. They want good undergraduates too, especially the kind that wants to learn the ropes working in a lab - for professors with high powered research teams, a hard working scientifically talented undergraduate is an extremely efficient (and rational) source of labor - they usually don't cost their grants a dime.

OK, my dire predictions about the fate of our research universities' abilities to attract top faculty may not either come true or be completely caused by the athletic budgets at those same institutions. Still, I don't think the two are wholly unrelated.

throatybeard
09-10-2014, 02:38 AM
77devil

Stanford is not actually a red herring, when it comes to merit based tuition assistance, I have found no school that gives both athletic and academic scholarships that gives more money to those with demonstrated special academic ability than to those with demonstrated special athletic ability. Again, I'm not really an idealist, but I do believe that institutions of higher learning should be for scholars first with athletics as a nice added attraction, the fact that we give more money to athletes is just plain wrong. Yes, I know need based aid outweighs merit based aid, but seriously, what is defined as affordable by most universities isn't really, hence the loans. Duke, like many other schools, caps the amount a student can borrow in a given year so that the average debt faced by a Duke student at graduation is only $21,000. Only. That is not crushing debt. But it's still debt and it might make a difference in choice of career. Sage pointed out that his football playing friends from Duke went on to become CEOs and I respond to that, exactly. Of course they do. Who do we think becomes CEOs? Sure, Duke wants a healthy portion of their graduates to become CEOs, so does Stanford, but, and I will accept that you disagree with me on this, that is not who our best research universities are supposed to be for. They are supposed to be there to train our best students to do groundbreaking work, in science, in medicine, in economics, in literature, in the arts. The athletes are going to be fine, they will be hired by one of those companies that is headed by a former football player at their school. Perhaps I'm alone in this, but I truly believe that the financial aid should go to the folks who are there to study. Can't an athlete do both? Right now, given that playing a varsity sport at a D1 school amounts to a full time job, I don't think so. Some of them probably could be/are very talented academically but we don't give them enough time to focus on their studies.

$21K debt from Duke? That's amazingly "low."

When I was in school there in the mid 1990s, the sticker price was about $130K for four years. People were graduating with $90K of debt while the school was saying "we meet all need-based aid, " which was utter hooie. I guess they've raised more money since the much-maligned Dr Keohane went double-down on that capital campaign.

Bostondevil
09-10-2014, 09:55 AM
$21K debt from Duke? That's amazingly "low."

When I was in school there in the mid 1990s, the sticker price was about $130K for four years. People were graduating with $90K of debt while the school was saying "we meet all need-based aid, " which was utter hooie. I guess they've raised more money since the much-maligned Dr Keohane went double-down on that capital campaign.

Well, that's the average. I looked it up when I was debating student loan debt in the wake of Belle Knox's piece in Time magazine on the Off Topic board. Duke caps the amount a student can borrow in a given year. Duke's student loan burden is slightly below the national average of something like $23,000. Again, average, and that might just have been the average of students attending 4 year residential colleges, I don't remember. As a statistician, I know that the average is not always a good measure of central tendency, we would need to see the median or have some hint of the distribution to get a better feel. For example, if that's the average of the entire graduating class, that would factor in all of the athletes that are graduating with $0. Perhaps it would be better to look at the average debt of just the students who have debt. I remember looking up what percentage of Duke students take out loans, I think the university makes that statistic available, but I don't remember what it is right now.

Somebody upthread said that Stanford only has 300 athletes in their student body - they have 36 varsity sports teams, so, that can't be correct. Perhaps they only have 300 athletes on scholarship.

By the way, throaty, let me join in the chorus of kudos thrown your way. In the whole brouhaha over scholarship athletes in revenue sports and how much they are being exploited, I think about students like the ones at your university and realize it's not just the athletes that are getting screwed.

(The year that Johnny Manzell won the Heisman and "brought in $300 million more in donations", the graduating class walked away with collectively ~$100 million in student loan debt. Johnny Football can bring in that much more in donations because he goes to a school that generates 10,000 new alumni every year. If he'd gone to, let's say, Boston College, he might still have won the Heisman, he might still have brought more in donations, but it wouldn't have been $300 million. It wasn't just that he was Johnny Football, it was that he was Johnny Football at Texas A&M. So, no, I don't think he should get a portion of his jersey sales, but I do think the general scholarship fund of Texas A&M should.)

devil84
09-10-2014, 10:46 AM
$21K debt from Duke? That's amazingly "low."

When I was in school there in the mid 1990s, the sticker price was about $130K for four years. People were graduating with $90K of debt while the school was saying "we meet all need-based aid, " which was utter hooie. I guess they've raised more money since the much-maligned Dr Keohane went double-down on that capital campaign.

Isn't "meeting need-based aid" giving more loans? Seems that my son's "need-based" aid (WFU) was some scholarship money, some more in federal loans, and even more "private loans" for which the university paid the interest until graduation. We paid the expected family contribution out-of-pocket, and much of the rest was loans. But we were assured that "our need was met."

duke09hms
09-10-2014, 10:52 AM
In 2008, Duke changed up its financial aid policy to keep pace with other big-name schools in the financial aid arms war (awesome), and now I think if the household income is under 80k, the student goes for free. No loans, no parental contribution, all need-based scholarship/grant that covers for tuition/housing/food. Happened to me as my middle-class family makes around 50-60k/year. I went for free, and in fact Duke paid me a little extra 1-2k/semester for incidentals. Yeah, it was awesome.

Furniture
09-10-2014, 11:08 AM
My daughter graduated last year. How much we paid was all decided by the EFC calculation generated by filling out FASFA.
We paid 78k to Duke and had about 17k in no interest government loans. 95K total. The rest was made up by Duke. There was one alumni that did contribute quite a lot to this deficit and she did go to out to dinner with him once a year along with two or three other students he was helping. She made it a point of sending him a thank you note once a year!

Bluedog
09-10-2014, 11:59 AM
In 2008, Duke changed up its financial aid policy to keep pace with other big-name schools in the financial aid arms war (awesome), and now I think if the household income is under 80k, the student goes for free. No loans, no parental contribution, all need-based scholarship/grant that covers for tuition/housing/food. Happened to me as my middle-class family makes around 50-60k/year. I went for free, and in fact Duke paid me a little extra 1-2k/semester for incidentals. Yeah, it was awesome.

The published threshold is $60k for no contribution, but student still is given loans, and $40k for no contribution, no loans. Unfortunately for me, I graduated in 2007 right before they instituted that policy (still got solid financial aid, but probably would have gotten even more the next year).

And, yes, 300 is the number of athletic scholarships Stanford offers, NOT the number of athletes. Many sports (known as "equivalency sports") also split up a single scholarship across various people. Men's tennis cap of 4.5, for example, is often awarded across 7-8 people. Total number of students that "participate in intercollegiate sports" at Stanford is 900, but this may include club sports.

MCFinARL
09-10-2014, 12:27 PM
And that is where you are wrong. I agree that straight A students with great scores are abundant - those with truly elite science talent are more rare than a good point guard. Stanford has had two undergraduates go on to win Nobel Prizes in science. Two. (I happen to know both of them. One of them, his parents were Stanford alums, so, Stanford lucked out.) They have had 71 win Olympic gold medals since 1976 and that's not even counting Tiger Woods or John McEnroe or mere silver medalists. You could respond with "Who can predict who is going to go on and win a Nobel prize?" Hard sure, but to get into Stanford on academic merit alone, what do they consider - a few essays, high school grades, and test scores. Think any D1 level athletic program judges talent from a few essays, minutes played, and scoring average? Stanford spends no resources teasing out who among those that are really good at taking tests are actually elite science talents and yet they consider themselves an elite academic institution. It is true that they are good at identifying talent at the graduate level and for hiring of faculty, for undergraduates, I will say it again - they care about academics to a point. But, as Larry Summers said about Harvard kids, the A students go on to become professors, the C students go on to become wealthy donors. Stanford, like Harvard, really does prefer more of the latter. What university doesn't?







Also, my point was that many top universities, Stanford included, do not take the time and effort to truly go after elite academic talent the way they go after elite athletic talent. You can't tell merely by looking at test scores who the best science kids are. I will agree that exceptional writing talent can be displayed in the current admissions process. Exceptional science talent cannot. Understanding the concepts well enough to score high on the standardized tests and/or AP exams does not always translate into the extra spark of creativity/ingenuity/thirst for knowledge that leads to top scientific talent. Figuring out who among the 800 point scorers/5's on the AP exams is truly gifted as opposed to merely very smart takes more time than reading the Common Ap essay and teacher recommendations.

Well, at the risk of belaboring this beyond anyone's patience or interest, a few thoughts. First, I see the appeal of the Nobel Prize winner to Olympic gold medalist comparison--and you are probably right to conclude that Stanford has been more successful in enrolling potential Olympic gold medalists than in enrolling potential Nobel Prize winners. To be fair, though, Nobel prizes in any category (including literature, peace, etc., not just science) have been awarded 561 times since 1901, while almost 6000 gold medals have been awarded since 1896 (in both cases, these numbers reflect the number of prizes, not the number of people--so that, for example, if three scientists together won a prize, that counts once, and similarly all the members of a basketball team would count as one medal). So while 71 to 2 is still a bigger ratio than 10 to 1, it's a bit unrealistic to suggest that the numbers should be comparable.

You are right, I probably would (and do) respond that it is probably pretty hard to predict who will be an elite science talent through the college admissions process--but in many cases (leaving out, say, Intel Science Competition winners, whose achievements would certainly show on their applications) that is probably at least sometimes because the talent has not yet been developed enough to show as well as because of the limitations of the admissions process. I tend to agree with the poster who said it's probably easier to identify these folks at the graduate admissions level.

Also, how would you change the admissions process to fix this? Should university officials interview every single potential elite science student on campus, while not doing so for other applicants (thus inviting charges of unfairness)? Should they ask students to submit experiments or theoretical papers, which would need to be reviewed by professors who are probably a lot more interested in doing their own research?





1) Student finances. 92% of our students who fill out the FAFSA come from households that report less than $50K household income. 92%, with a nine in the tens place. Most of them fill out the FAFSA, so basically put it this way: Some huge percentage of our students come from below-median household income. Another large portion are first-gen college students. Low-income and first-gen college students don't do as well or finish as quicly as high-income students or students whose family is spending its fourth or fifth generation in higher ed.

2) Percent composition of non-traditionals. Non-traditionals are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they tend to be more mature and responsible than genpop. On the other, they tend to have way more obligations in life, mainly full-time or close to full-time jobs, spouses, and offspring. Our median student age is 27. If you're the average Duke person who got a lot of post-graduate education, married late, and had kids late, or are young and plan to do any of those things later than average, mentally adjust that to when you were or will be 33 in terms of life obligations. A huge number of our students are women who got married, squeezed three kids out, raised them, and came back to school when the kids hit high school. Duke folks have a tendency to assume that everyone goes to college when they're 18-23, because that's the case at Duke. Not so.

3) Lousy advising, or competent but cumbersome advising.

4) ...The employment crisis in higher education. The advisors can't advise kids to take required classes that aren't being offered because someone has a course release paid for by an external grant, or is on maternity/paternity leave, or who died five years ago and hasn't been replaced.

Duke is the land of milk and honey, y'all. The rest of us live in the real world. Ain't no ivory tower up in here.

That's a very incomplete explanation of what life at state schools not named Michigan, Cal, Rutgers, or UCSD is like. But it's a start. And that's why the kids aren't finishing in four years.

All of your post rings a bell with me--though I am myself a lowly adjunct and don't deal with the particular frustrations of tenure track faculty and department administrators. I have similar experience with "non-traditional" students--I had one student who was working full time, trying to take a full class load, and raising two elementary-school-age kids, for which she was expected to take primary responsibility because she was from an extremely traditional culture. Throw in that English was her second language, so my composition class presented special challenges for her. On the other hand, without the genuine engagement of my non-traditional students, as compared to the students right out of high school, it would be hard for me to keep going.

Caps for the required second-level English composition classes I teach have just gone from 22 to 24 (meaning that non-tenure term faculty, who teach 4 such classes a semester so they can qualify for benefits, read drafts and finals of 3-5 papers each for 96 students a semester), but apparently there are still many students who couldn't find open sections to take the class this semester. And advising is a problem for us as well--there is always a lot of turnover at the beginning of the semester as students find out from me that they do not yet have the prerequisites for the class, or that their major requires, say, a Natural Sciences section instead of a Business section.


77devil

Again, I'm not really an idealist, but I do believe that institutions of higher learning should be for scholars first with athletics as a nice added attraction, the fact that we give more money to athletes is just plain wrong. ..... Sure, Duke wants a healthy portion of their graduates to become CEOs, so does Stanford, but, and I will accept that you disagree with me on this, that is not who our best research universities are supposed to be for. They are supposed to be there to train our best students to do groundbreaking work, in science, in medicine, in economics, in literature, in the arts.



You obviously feel passionately about this issue, and I don't disagree that the emphasis on athletics may be distorting our universities, and for that matter, our entire culture, in pernicious ways. But I think it is a much bigger problem than just whether merit aid is offered in the same proportion as athletic aid. And my position is probably influenced by my own belief that purely merit-based aid is a bit of a luxury when the demand for need-based aid is so great. (Notice I am not here defending athletic-based aid, which I also think should be primarily need-based if it exists at all.)


In theory, your idea of the research university as training ground for the best scholars and researchers is appealing (and perhaps marks you as an idealist after all). But it is a somewhat narrow view of the purpose of universities, and realistically, I think the days when this was the primary goal of universities, especially at the undergraduate level, are gone. The research professors who might train and inspire those future groundbreaking scholars often find undergraduate teaching a chore and delegate most of the responsibility for student contact to teaching assistants. The best and the brightest students often choose to go into finance or consulting, where they can make more money. And, like it or not, there are significant incentives for universities to admit legacies or other "development office" preferences who may be less interested in accomplishing great things in academia than in getting a credential and moving on. There are a lot of reasons for all of this, societal/cultural as well as economic. Plus, in fairness, we need talented, well-educated people to go into clinical health care, K-12 teaching, government, and business as well as to do research.

Again, though, I think I may now just be nitpicking; I don't think we are really so very far apart in our views.

Wander
09-10-2014, 01:15 PM
You are right, I probably would (and do) respond that it is probably pretty hard to predict who will be an elite science talent through the college admissions process--but in many cases (leaving out, say, Intel Science Competition winners, whose achievements would certainly show on their applications) that is probably at least sometimes because the talent has not yet been developed enough to show as well as because of the limitations of the admissions process. I tend to agree with the poster who said it's probably easier to identify these folks at the graduate admissions level.

Yeah, I think that's the appropriate point of comparison. Athletes go pro immediately after college. You become a scientist after grad school, not undergrad. All the grad programs I applied to did fly me out for a "recruiting visit" - maybe not every school does this, but certainly all the Stanfords of the world do, and they do usually try pretty hard to recruit their accepted grad students. Obviously it's not a perfect analogy and the scales are different, but I think this is the closest equivalent in academia, not undergrad admissions.

sagegrouse
09-10-2014, 01:43 PM
Somebody upthread said that Stanford only has 300 athletes in their student body - they have 36 varsity sports teams, so, that can't be correct. Perhaps they only have 300 athletes on scholarship.

By the way, throaty, let me join in the chorus of kudos thrown your way. In the whole brouhaha over scholarship athletes in revenue sports and how much they are being exploited, I think about students like the ones at your university and realize it's not just the athletes that are getting screwed.

.)

Yes, 300 athletic scholarships, some of which are split. There are admission preferences for other athletes, so the number getting a boost in admissions is larger. But this happens to some degree even at Div III schools. See my Trinity and U of Chicago examples above.

I agree about Throaty and I gave him private kudos as well. It is an amazing narrative.

Kindly, Sage

throatybeard
09-10-2014, 02:15 PM
In 2008, Duke changed up its financial aid policy to keep pace with other big-name schools in the financial aid arms war (awesome), and now I think if the household income is under 80k, the student goes for free. No loans, no parental contribution, all need-based scholarship/grant that covers for tuition/housing/food. Happened to me as my middle-class family makes around 50-60k/year. I went for free, and in fact Duke paid me a little extra 1-2k/semester for incidentals. Yeah, it was awesome.

Wow. When I was there in the 1990s, my father was making about low $40Ks/year, my mother was disabled and not working, the sticker price at Duke was low $30Ks, and they gave me almost no financial aid. Couple thousand a year, IIRC.

Bostondevil
09-11-2014, 12:11 AM
MCFinArl - I wasn't trying to equate Nobel prizes with Olympic gold medals, yes, there are many fewer Nobel prizes but since the Olympics only come around once every 4 years, I thought it was the easiest thing I could look up quickly that might be a sorta, kinda reasonable comparison. Perhaps a better comparison would be Hall of Famers (in any sport that has a Hall of Fame). I assume John McEnroe is in the tennis Hall of Fame. John Elway is in the pro football Hall of Fame. Don't know if there's anybody else, off the top of my head. Does golf have one? If so, Tiger Woods is going to be in it someday.

As to the fairness of recruiting visits for top academic talent - please - don't athletes take recruiting visits?

Coaches have a say in the undergraduate admissions process. I don't know for sure about anywhere else, but at Harvard, faculty does not. I suspect that's the main difference in success rate of identifying talent at the graduate level, the faculty gets to pick the graduate students. Of course the faculty doesn't have time to consider all the undergraduate applications, but why not give them the chance to review the kids who make the first (or second) cut and list their department as a probable major? Why not allow each department to single out 5 applicants worthy of an on campus interview/recruiting visit?

throatybeard
09-11-2014, 12:27 AM
Does golf have one? If so, Tiger Woods is going to be in it someday.


There is.

Yes, unfortunately, that awful human being you mention will be in it one day. But, he's not eligible yet, since he's about sixteen months shy of his 40th birthday.

The other bad news (for North Carolina residents) is that they moved it from Pinehurst to St Augustine. I'm sure there was a reason for this but I don't know what it was. I can name fifteen better sites, starting with Pinehurst itself, Monterey Peninsula, Augusta, La Jolla, and a bunch of places that have hosted the Open and the PGA up north.

Wander
09-11-2014, 12:53 AM
Coaches have a say in the undergraduate admissions process. I don't know for sure about anywhere else, but at Harvard, faculty does not. I suspect that's the main difference in success rate of identifying talent at the graduate level, the faculty gets to pick the graduate students. Of course the faculty doesn't have time to consider all the undergraduate applications, but why not give them the chance to review the kids who make the first (or second) cut and list their department as a probable major? Why not allow each department to single out 5 applicants worthy of an on campus interview/recruiting visit?

What are faculty (most of whom probably wouldn't want the job you describe) going to see that the admissions people don't? There's no science equivalent of playing 30 regular season basketball games to evaluate talent - in high school. And I'm not sure there should be. Once you're a scientist (or, I imagine, a doctor or lawyer), no one cares where you went to undergrad. Grad school is the equivalent thing here, and I'm sure Stanford spends a lot recruiting the "elite talent" there. I just don't think undergraduate merit based aid is an appropriate metric for "taking academics seriously."

throatybeard
09-11-2014, 09:48 AM
^ Gradskool is a decent analogy, now that I think about it. Faculty do have a say about who gets in with gradskool. As in, at my school, I'm suddenly in the rather perplexing [to me] position of deciding who gets into our MA. And, as with sports, they could decide to go elsewhere.

Bostondevil
09-11-2014, 10:43 AM
What are faculty (most of whom probably wouldn't want the job you describe) going to see that the admissions people don't? There's no science equivalent of playing 30 regular season basketball games to evaluate talent - in high school. And I'm not sure there should be. Once you're a scientist (or, I imagine, a doctor or lawyer), no one cares where you went to undergrad. Grad school is the equivalent thing here, and I'm sure Stanford spends a lot recruiting the "elite talent" there. I just don't think undergraduate merit based aid is an appropriate metric for "taking academics seriously."

OK, fine, you win. The science kids do have MIT and CalTech.

I just don't think giving all the merit based aid to athletes is good for society.

MCFinARL
09-11-2014, 02:53 PM
As to the fairness of recruiting visits for top academic talent - please - don't athletes take recruiting visits?



Yes, of course, athletes take recruiting visits. And, again, I am not suggesting that that is necessarily a good use of university resources. My point about science recruiting visits was that, at the undergraduate level, the criteria for what makes someone an "elite" candidate worthy of such a visit will likely be squishy enough that those who are not selected (or their Tiger Moms/Dads) will be all over the university with claims of arbitrary criteria or unfairness--see Wander's posts, as he/she has supported my point about when one can actually figure out who is elite much more eloquently than I did.

If a university wanted to give 5 admissions picks to individual departments and those departments wanted to take the time to go through applications and exercise them, I wouldn't have a problem with that--although I'm not sure how accurately that method will identify the students with the best potential to be great scholars and researchers, since (as also noted by Wander) 18-year-olds are generally not as far along in their intellectual development (or in acquiring the base education to do top level work) as in their athletic development. But I'm not at all sure that the academic departments would be eager to take on that responsibility on a regular basis.




I just don't think giving all the merit based aid to athletes is good for society.

I don't disagree, though I might edit (nitpicking again) your sentence to say "most of" or even "almost all of" instead of "all"--since, Stanford aside, there is at least some merit aid available at many universities to good students, musicians, etc., as well as athletes. But I also think that even merit aid, of whatever kind, should probably be distributed with some connection to financial need. If a wealthy industrialist's daughter is a promising chemist, or his son a champion tennis player, why not let them decide on their own where to go to college (if they want to), without financial inducements to go one place or another?

But since a lot of athletes, especially in the revenue sports, can easily meet the criteria for need-based aid, that wouldn't really change things all that much. Is it the financial aid or the admissions preference you dislike, or maybe both?

Bostondevil
09-11-2014, 09:31 PM
I realized "all" was an exaggeration (except at Stanford). But you know, why let facts get in the way of a good argument. ;-)

MCFinARL
09-11-2014, 10:05 PM
I realized "all" was an exaggeration (except at Stanford). But you know, why let facts get in the way of a good argument. ;-)

And of course, I knew you knew it was an exaggeration--but why let that get in the way of a good nitpick? :D

mgtr
09-12-2014, 08:17 PM
As an old guy, the numbers you folks throw around scare me. I matriculated at Stanford in 1958, and graduated in four years -- but spread over eight years. Along the way our favorite Uncle decided he wanted me, I got a divorce, got married again (different young lady). But over the entire eight years tuition remained at $1,005 per year ($335 per quarter). I realize that we have had inflation since then, but even factoring that in the max cost would be $10K per year, cheap compared to the numbers that have been quoted here. I certainly got a good education, but I would hate to be starting over in competition with some of the students graduating now. Fortunately, I am retired and don't have to compete with anybody anymore!

throatybeard
09-13-2014, 02:37 AM
As an old guy, the numbers you folks throw around scare me. I matriculated at Stanford in 1958, and graduated in four years -- but spread over eight years. Along the way our favorite Uncle decided he wanted me, I got a divorce, got married again (different young lady). But over the entire eight years tuition remained at $1,005 per year ($335 per quarter). I realize that we have had inflation since then, but even factoring that in the max cost would be $10K per year, cheap compared to the numbers that have been quoted here. I certainly got a good education, but I would hate to be starting over in competition with some of the students graduating now. Fortunately, I am retired and don't have to compete with anybody anymore!

I think I have these numbers right. Stick with me here, y'all.

In 1959, my mother as a HS senior was offered a free ride to UNCG, which is the historical(ly?) women's college of the UNC system, and of several their greatest disciplinary strengths tend to be in a lot of things women were allowed to do way back then. English comes to mind. They now have an amazing Information Sciences program (used to be called Library).

Let me tell you something about UNCG. The single best student I've ever had in all my teaching at Duke, NC State, Mississippi State, and UMSL, she went from Mississippi State to UNCG's Information Sciences program, and she is now the head reference librarian at High Point University, having followed her bf/husband to his Wake Forest law opportunities. If he'd gotten into somewhere like Georgetown, I'm pretty sure she'd own the property title to the Library of Congress or the Washington Nationals or the Jefferson Memorial or something. I had eight or ten insanely talented kids at Duke and she's insanelier talenteder than all of them. Carolina's program in the same field is even more acclaimed, along with those of Wisconsin, Michigan, and I think some other B1G schools. I think she got wait-listed at Carolina, despite a 3.99 GPA or thereabouts. This is how fierce the game has gotten. She just turned thirty last week, by the way. Here's how highly I esteem this woman. When my [amazingly still surviving] mother was in acute pall at Forsyth when she almost died from sepsis two years, ago, library chica is who I called to carry me from the airport to Winston. She didn't hesitate.

I never heard any talk of anyone ever suggesting my mother go to Carolina. (Though her BIL went to State). This is despite the fact that my maternal grandfather was a complicated man who worshiped Vince Lombardi, and more confusingly, rooted for both the Redskins and the Tar Heels, and the Cowboys and Duke. (See what I did there?) The latter two had to do with the United Methodist Church (Tom Landry was Methodist). The Redskins probably had to do with Sonny Jurgensen (Duke) and the fact that NC was Redskins territory before expansion. I don't know what the heck the Tar Heels had to do with. I'd say my father's three degrees there, but those didn't elapse until my grandfather was in his fifties. Papa himself didn't go to college, so none of it was that. I happened to be switching planes at DFW the morning after Landry died, and I bought a paper because I knew Papa would want me to even though he was six and a half years dead, and I think we lost this paper to the great condo basement mold flood of very recently. He was a heart patient the entire time I knew him, but he always hugged me like he was trying to crush my rib cage like it was a box of Cheerios. Because I was 6' and my father, uncle, and cousin were all 5'8" or so, I inherited very few physical objects from my grandfather: a watch, a couple of hats--one of which looked like it had been plucked from Tom Landry's dome, a couple ties, a couple sweaters that looked like they'd been plucked from Bill Cosby's torso, and a gold/blue tie pin from the Iron Dukes. Which I would totally put on a tie if I ever intended to wear a tie during the rest of my natural life. Maybe if my son gets married before I expire.

I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time.

Anyway, my mother dissed UNCG like a cold biscuit and hauled off to the "Co-ordinate Woman's College" (sic) of Duke University, which I believe was a separate entity from Trinity until 1972. Well I know it was, I'm just not 100% sure 1972 was the last year. She graduated in 1963, emerging from an evidently cursed freshman dorm room in, I think, Aycock. The two other gals, one died of some horrible ridiculous young person cancer like a year later, and the other got hit by a truck carrying kids to some camp in the mountains in about 1974.

The dames roamed east campus until about a generation before the administration decided to quarantine freshmen there as if freshmen were unruly sixth graders. One of the reasons I'm not completely certain of my mother's accounts, even though she seems to have something close to photographic autobiographical memory, is that she tells a story that makes it sound like they went underground on east campus to avoid Hazel. This can't be: she was in tenth grade in Lexington NC during Hazel. Maybe Jim Sumner, who knows that archivist dude, they're pals, I think his surname is name Massengill, in Raleigh, knows which hurricane? I've looked at the maps from 1959-1963 and Donna is my best guess. North Carolina leads with its chin where hurricanes are concerned.

Any anyway, I've heard differing accounts of said "co-ordinate" institution. Elizabeth Dole is only five years older than my mother and when I was young Senator Dole somewhat derisively referred to it as a ladies' finishing school, or words to that effect. My mother, who graduated in 1963, said that the guys on west campus hated when the women showed up in a class and called them "curve-busters." I tend to believe the latter, but whatever the case, there was tuition. My maternal grandfather's business apparently really picked up sometime around 1962, and he was able to pay full freight in 1962-63 for her senior year at a sticker price of $850. (I'm guessing this is equivalent to something between $4K and $5K now) She was on financial aid her first three years, during which she says it was $650 each of those years. I'm assuming back then they didn't have a Vice Provost for washing the basketball players' cars back then, or many other administrative positions that out-earn faculty and staff.

To mgtr's point, it's funny. I think I hit a sweet spot w/r/t competition. I came along when it was still kind of possible to get into this school. The downside is that it was before they started offering the children of teachers who make $40K/year hardly any financial aid relative to a low $30K sticker price. You win some, you lose some. It's almost certainly because my mother was an alumna that I got into Duke, if you happened to read the numbers out of the admissions office for the class of 1997-98. They accepted something like 70% of early-decision legacies that year, if the mailing I got was correct. But now Duke is as or more hard to get into as Harvard was back then.

(If anyone from that era has more accurate numbers about tuition in the early 1960s, I'm just repeating things my mother said fifteen or twenty years ago w/r/t that. I'm not claiming to have the definitive numbers of my own accord).

cowetarock
09-13-2014, 08:14 AM
Thanks to the Navy I finished Duke debt free in 1954. Three years later I started at Harvard Law. The tuition was $1000 per year. The Korean GI Bill provided $990 per year. In sum by 1960 I had two degrees for a personal outlay of $30 in tuition. The kicker is that several years later Harvard upgraded my LLB to a JD for a fee of as I remember $50. Needless to say I find the present state of student debt deplorable and a serious threat to the future of our country. The least we should do is pass Senator Warren's student bill to start reform.

77devil
09-13-2014, 08:55 AM
I think I have these numbers right. Stick with me here, y'all.

In 1959, my mother as a HS senior was offered a free ride to UNCG, which is the historical(ly?) women's college of the UNC system, and of several their greatest disciplinary strengths tend to be in a lot of things women were allowed to do way back then. English comes to mind. They now have an amazing Information Sciences program (used to be called Library).

Let me tell you something about UNCG. The single best student I've ever had in all my teaching at Duke, NC State, Mississippi State, and UMSL, she went from Mississippi State to UNCG's Information Sciences program, and she is now the head reference librarian at High Point University, having followed her bf/husband to his Wake Forest law opportunities. If he'd gotten into somewhere like Georgetown, I'm pretty sure she'd own the property title to the Library of Congress or the Washington Nationals or the Jefferson Memorial or something. I had eight or ten insanely talented kids at Duke and she's insanelier talenteder than all of them. Carolina's program in the same field is even more acclaimed, along with those of Wisconsin, Michigan, and I think some other B1G schools. I think she got wait-listed at Carolina, despite a 3.99 GPA or thereabouts. This is how fierce the game has gotten. She just turned thirty last week, by the way. Here's how highly I esteem this woman. When my [amazingly still surviving] mother was in acute pall at Forsyth when she almost died from sepsis two years, ago, library chica is who I called to carry me from the airport to Winston. She didn't hesitate.

I never heard any talk of anyone ever suggesting my mother go to Carolina. (Though her BIL went to State). This is despite the fact that my maternal grandfather was a complicated man who worshiped Vince Lombardi, and more confusingly, rooted for both the Redskins and the Tar Heels, and the Cowboys and Duke. (See what I did there?) The latter two had to do with the United Methodist Church (Tom Landry was Methodist). The Redskins probably had to do with Sonny Jurgensen (Duke) and the fact that NC was Redskins territory before expansion. I don't know what the heck the Tar Heels had to do with. I'd say my father's three degrees there, but those didn't elapse until my grandfather was in his fifties. Papa himself didn't go to college, so none of it was that. I happened to be switching planes at DFW the morning after Landry died, and I bought a paper because I knew Papa would want me to even though he was six and a half years dead, and I think we lost this paper to the great condo basement mold flood of very recently. He was a heart patient the entire time I knew him, but he always hugged me like he was trying to crush my rib cage like it was a box of Cheerios. Because I was 6' and my father, uncle, and cousin were all 5'8" or so, I inherited very few physical objects from my grandfather: a watch, a couple of hats--one of which looked like it had been plucked from Tom Landry's dome, a couple ties, a couple sweaters that looked like they'd been plucked from Bill Cosby's torso, and a gold/blue tie pin from the Iron Dukes. Which I would totally put on a tie if I ever intended to wear a tie during the rest of my natural life. Maybe if my son gets married before I expire.

I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time.

Anyway, my mother dissed UNCG like a cold biscuit and hauled off to the "Co-ordinate Woman's College" (sic) of Duke University, which I believe was a separate entity from Trinity until 1972. Well I know it was, I'm just not 100% sure 1972 was the last year. She graduated in 1963, emerging from an evidently cursed freshman dorm room in, I think, Aycock. The two other gals, one died of some horrible ridiculous young person cancer like a year later, and the other got hit by a truck carrying kids to some camp in the mountains in about 1974.

The dames roamed east campus until about a generation before the administration decided to quarantine freshmen there as if freshmen were unruly sixth graders. One of the reasons I'm not completely certain of my mother's accounts, even though she seems to have something close to photographic autobiographical memory, is that she tells a story that makes it sound like they went underground on east campus to avoid Hazel. This can't be: she was in tenth grade in Lexington NC during Hazel. Maybe Jim Sumner, who knows that archivist dude, they're pals, I think his surname is name Massengill, in Raleigh, knows which hurricane? I've looked at the maps from 1959-1963 and Donna is my best guess. North Carolina leads with its chin where hurricanes are concerned.

Any anyway, I've heard differing accounts of said "co-ordinate" institution. Elizabeth Dole is only five years older than my mother and when I was young Senator Dole somewhat derisively referred to it as a ladies' finishing school, or words to that effect. My mother, who graduated in 1963, said that the guys on west campus hated when the women showed up in a class and called them "curve-busters." I tend to believe the latter, but whatever the case, there was tuition. My maternal grandfather's business apparently really picked up sometime around 1962, and he was able to pay full freight in 1962-63 for her senior year at a sticker price of $850. (I'm guessing this is equivalent to something between $4K and $5K now) She was on financial aid her first three years, during which she says it was $650 each of those years. I'm assuming back then they didn't have a Vice Provost for washing the basketball players' cars back then, or many other administrative positions that out-earn faculty and staff.

To mgtr's point, it's funny. I think I hit a sweet spot w/r/t competition. I came along when it was still kind of possible to get into this school. The downside is that it was before they started offering the children of teachers who make $40K/year hardly any financial aid relative to a low $30K sticker price. You win some, you lose some. It's almost certainly because my mother was an alumna that I got into Duke, if you happened to read the numbers out of the admissions office for the class of 1997-98. They accepted something like 70% of early-decision legacies that year, if the mailing I got was correct. But now Duke is as or more hard to get into as Harvard was back then.

(If anyone from that era has more accurate numbers about tuition in the early 1960s, I'm just repeating things my mother said fifteen or twenty years ago w/r/t that. I'm not claiming to have the definitive numbers of my own accord).

My grandfather was head of the English department at UNCG for many years so it must have been excellent.

My Mother and her sister graduated from the Woman's College at Duke in the 1940's and have said they had classes on West with the guys. Both graduated Phi Beta Kappa, a couple of those dreaded curve busters, and never considered their education a finishing school. I suspect Bob Dole was jealous that his wife was smarter the he. You are correct or close about 1972. My sister started in the Woman's College in 1969 but graduated from Trinity in 1973. I suspect Jim Sumner or Olympic Fan knows for certain. I recall that my first year tuition in 1973 was $2,200. That's about 8 grand in current dollars. Tuition doubled by senior year.

jimsumner
09-13-2014, 12:44 PM
My grandfather was head of the English department at UNCG for many years so it must have been excellent.

My Mother and her sister graduated from the Woman's College at Duke in the 1940's and have said they had classes on West with the guys. Both graduated Phi Beta Kappa, a couple of those dreaded curve busters, and never considered their education a finishing school. I suspect Bob Dole was jealous that his wife was smarter the he. You are correct or close about 1972. My sister started in the Woman's College in 1969 but graduated from Trinity in 1973. I suspect Jim Sumner or Olympic Fan knows for certain. I recall that my first year tuition in 1973 was $2,200. That's about 8 grand in current dollars. Tuition doubled by senior year.

My tuition went up every year I was at Duke--I graduated in 1972--but wasn't much above $2K when I finished. A National Merit Scholarship covered most of that.

I graduated debt free from Duke but did have a small loan from grad school at NCSU. But it was paid off in the 1970s.
Can't recall when Duke women became Trinitians. Having men live on East Campus seemed to be a bigger deal at the time.

I agree that the current debt load is a major concern. My son picked VT over Duke in large part because we could not come up with a plausible scenario in which he graduated from Duke without a sizeable debt. And this is a kid who made 1560 on his SAT. But Duke only wanted to loan him money, while VT offered him grants.

And I suspect his VT engineering degrees haven't hampered him any.

But I don't see how middle-class families afford top-tier private schools without going into hock for decades. Not a good situation.

Kimist
09-13-2014, 01:22 PM
... One of the reasons I'm not completely certain of my mother's accounts, even though she seems to have something close to photographic autobiographical memory, is that she tells a story that makes it sound like they went underground on east campus to avoid Hazel. This can't be: she was in tenth grade in Lexington NC during Hazel. Maybe Jim Sumner, who knows that archivist dude, they're pals, I think his surname is name Massengill, in Raleigh, knows which hurricane? I've looked at the maps from 1959-1963 and Donna is my best guess. North Carolina leads with its chin where hurricanes are concerned...



Although I can't help you with the accuracy of your mom's memory, I certainly can provide some insight into Hurricane Hazel of 1954. It was a Category 4 storm when it hit coastal NC on October 15th, where it created tremendous damage. My mom was attending a convention in Durham (!) that weekend, and related to me how the large glass doors of the hotel ("Jack Tar" or something like that?) were swinging like crazy in the ~90 mph winds.

You might find either of these links of additional interest:

http://today.duke.edu/2014/06/archiveshurricanehazel

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/10/1014_041014_hurricane_hazel.html

k

J.Blink
09-13-2014, 02:25 PM
My grandfather was head of the English department at UNCG for many years so it must have been excellent.

My Mother and her sister graduated from the Woman's College at Duke in the 1940's and have said they had classes on West with the guys. Both graduated Phi Beta Kappa, a couple of those dreaded curve busters, and never considered their education a finishing school. I suspect Bob Dole was jealous that his wife was smarter the he. You are correct or close about 1972. My sister started in the Woman's College in 1969 but graduated from Trinity in 1973. I suspect Jim Sumner or Olympic Fan knows for certain. I recall that my first year tuition in 1973 was $2,200. That's about 8 grand in current dollars. Tuition doubled by senior year.

Minor nit: Bob Dole is still alive and still married, so the "was jealous" part seems premature (unless you're saying he got over it). Interesting side note--Dole played basketball for Phog Allen.

While I was at Duke, Liddy Dole rode into Page auditorium–down the aisle to the stage, actually–on a motorcycle for her election campaign. It was quite odd...

I'm not sure of the exact year, but my mom started at Duke right around 1970 (maybe 1971). I don't recall her ever saying anything about the Woman's College and believe she was solely in Trinity. I'll ask. Did faculty children get a free ride at that time? Her dad (my grandfather) taught in the Div. school from the early 50s to the 90s.

77devil
09-13-2014, 05:20 PM
Minor nit: Bob Dole is still alive and still married, so the "was jealous" part seems premature (unless you're saying he got over it). Interesting side note--Dole played basketball for Phog Allen.

While I know Bob Dole is alive, I'm in no position conclude whether he might be jealous now. But it seemed like a reasonable emotion to attribute to him at the time he made the snarky comment years ago hence the past tense.

Notwithstanding his misinformed comment, Bob Dole is a great American.

throatybeard
09-13-2014, 07:35 PM
My tuition went up every year I was at Duke--I graduated in 1972--but wasn't much above $2K when I finished. A National Merit Scholarship covered most of that.

I graduated debt free from Duke but did have a small loan from grad school at NCSU. But it was paid off in the 1970s.
Can't recall when Duke women became Trinitians. Having men live on East Campus seemed to be a bigger deal at the time.

I agree that the current debt load is a major concern. My son picked VT over Duke in large part because we could not come up with a plausible scenario in which he graduated from Duke without a sizeable debt. And this is a kid who made 1560 on his SAT. But Duke only wanted to loan him money, while VT offered him grants.

And I suspect his VT engineering degrees haven't hampered him any.

But I don't see how middle-class families afford top-tier private schools without going into hock for decades. Not a good situation.

Just for timeframe purposes...

...IIRC, when I was a grad student, my smartest student at the time (MT) dated your son. I think I ran into them in a convenience store shortly before Virginia Tech utterly dismantled Miami in fall 2003. She was class of 2006. So he was like 2005 or 2006?

throatybeard
09-13-2014, 07:40 PM
Although I can't help you with the accuracy of your mom's memory, I certainly can provide some insight into Hurricane Hazel of 1954. It was a Category 4 storm when it hit coastal NC on October 15th, where it created tremendous damage. My mom was attending a convention in Durham (!) that weekend, and related to me how the large glass doors of the hotel ("Jack Tar" or something like that?) were swinging like crazy in the ~90 mph winds.

You might find either of these links of additional interest:

http://today.duke.edu/2014/06/archiveshurricanehazel

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/10/1014_041014_hurricane_hazel.html

k

Thanks for the links. I was well aware of Hazel, but she's endlessly fascinating to me, so I'll look at these. Nonetheless, I know for a fact that my mother was 13 when Hazel hit, so it couldn't have been when she was at Duke. One of the things my mother likes to repeat about Hazel is that it was still a discernible system on radar (which was newish) after it plowed through Toronto and made its way to Siberia, I'm guessing more or less over the top of this planet. I'm still wondering when my mother and her contemporaries were wandering around subterranean east campus. The name of the storm has to be a woman's name, because they didn't introduce dude names for hurricanes until the 1970s.

Bob Dole doesn't need another hurricane.

-jk
09-13-2014, 08:57 PM
In the late 70s,I was splitting my grandparents' wood cut from Hazel. Wood very well seasoned, I might add.

Family lore has it their 3 story house wasn't visible from the street, there were so many trees down. I (and my blisters) believe it!

-jk

dball
09-13-2014, 10:49 PM
OK, fine, you win. The science kids do have MIT and CalTech.

I just don't think giving all the merit based aid to athletes is good for society.

I believe Stanford athletics are fully funded through the athletic department. Is any merit based aid being used?

One of the reasons they are so competitive in the Director's Cup is the athletic endowment. 36 varsity sports, 26 club sports...wow. Duke lists 26 varsity sports for comparison. A couple of years ago, Stanford had more endowed scholarships than it was allowed to use (in revenue sports).

Since Title IX they do have (as do all schools) a limit on the number of athletic scholarships they can offer. But wonderful facilities, a great education along with a beautiful campus and fine weather make it an appealing choice.

Those same attributes might attract a few science students as well.

While they may not list "merit based" funding, their need based aid sounds pretty generous.

J.Blink
09-14-2014, 10:57 AM
While I know Bob Dole is alive, I'm in no position conclude whether he might be jealous now. But it seemed like a reasonable emotion to attribute to him at the time he made the snarky comment years ago hence the past tense.

Notwithstanding his misinformed comment, Bob Dole is a great American.

Ahh, that explains it--I'm not aware of the comment you're talking about. What did he say?

Bostondevil
09-14-2014, 12:23 PM
I believe Stanford athletics are fully funded through the athletic department. Is any merit based aid being used?

One of the reasons they are so competitive in the Director's Cup is the athletic endowment. 36 varsity sports, 26 club sports...wow. Duke lists 26 varsity sports for comparison. A couple of years ago, Stanford had more endowed scholarships than it was allowed to use (in revenue sports).

Since Title IX they do have (as do all schools) a limit on the number of athletic scholarships they can offer. But wonderful facilities, a great education along with a beautiful campus and fine weather make it an appealing choice.

Those same attributes might attract a few science students as well.

While they may not list "merit based" funding, their need based aid sounds pretty generous.

The science students don't get in at the undergraduate level!!!!! That's my friggin' point. Sure, Stanford does a great job at attracting applications from top students, but they don't do as good a job at picking kids that excel in science. Given the self selection bias of who is applying to Stanford in the first place, all 30,000+ of them are good students, OK, so how does Stanford differentiate? Well, off the top, 13-15% of the slots go to best applicants that are also athletes, not the best applicants overall but the best with athletic ability. They consider the high school grades/course load combo next to make the first cut. They have to weed out some folks with just one read of the application. What's next? The essay. Yes, to get into Stanford when physics is your thing or you're the best chemistry student your high school has ever had, you gotta be able to show that with an essay. Sure, everybody needs to learn to write. Absolutely. But again, when science is your thing, you do not need to excel at the essay - once you get into college. If science is your thing, the writing you need to be good at is technical writing, reporting your work, getting it ready for publication in scientific journals - that's a very different kind of writing. Are there no science kids who can also excel at writing that essay? Sure, there are some, but not enough. Neither Duke nor Harvard makes their undergraduates take any math once they matriculate. I just checked, neither does Stanford. All of them require at least one science course - but, you know, Basketball Botany doesn't just exist at Duke. Yet everybody has to write papers. We live in an anti-intellectual society that value sports over the hard stuff. And we pick our "best and brightest" based on skills that do not always translate to, well, to the hard stuff. Is it harder to major in physics than it is to major in sociology? Yes. It is. That does not mean that we shouldn't have sociology majors, but it is easier to accomplish, hence the greater numbers of sociology majors. But down the road, to progess as a society, you need the people that can do the hard stuff, and we should be letting more of them go to Stanford (and Duke and Harvard) at the undergraduate level. Either change or quit calling yourself an elite academic institution. Very good? Above Average? Among the top? Yes. Elite, no, you gotta do better. Why do I think they don't already? I look at the kids coming out of my son's high school, a large upper middle class high achieving high school in suburban Boston. The year my oldest graduated the science team and the football team both finished runner-up in the state championships. The football team got 4 pages in the yearbook, the science team got one photo in the club section with 5 other clubs on the same page. Fully the top quarter of that class (120 or so kids) applies to at least one Ivy although Duke is not as popular a destination, there is some anti-Southern snobbery going on, it's also farther away. The very, very top of the class, the top 1% of the students all went to either an Ivy or Duke or Stanford, but the rest that got into Ivy League schools - all of them were athletes. All of them. Oops, no, sorry, one of the kids that got into Harvard was a legacy. The science team finished second in the state and the captain went to UMass. UMass is a fine school and there is nothing wrong with it, but yeah, that kid applied to all the Ivies too. This kind of situation happens every year.

I am a snob when it comes to that math thing, if you can't eke out a least a C in first semester calculus, you are not one of our best and brightest students no matter what university you managed to graduate from. I fully believe that most students at Stanford and Duke and Harvard could do that, eke out a C, but not all. And we don't make them.

mgtr
09-14-2014, 01:25 PM
Well said, Boston Devil! With all the smart people on this board, somebody ought to be able to find a practical solution. My best shot would be specialized high schools - The jock school, the nerd school, the liberal arts school, etc. Specialization is limited only by the extent of the market - a basic tenet of economics. There are probably better solutions, maybe many better. As a nation we should be concerned with this. Of course, another basic principle of economics is that if you subsidize something, you get more of it. If you tax something, you get less of it. So maybe we should tax liberal arts courses and subsidize science and technology courses.
Or possibly the smart people will just ask what any of this has to do with Duke vs. UNC!

Bostondevil
09-14-2014, 06:40 PM
I'm gonna say two more things then I promise my rant is over. That upper middle class suburban high school with a second place winning science team - want to know what kind of services were provided by the school for meetings, training, transportation to events? None. Not one dime. All of the meetings were at team member's houses, all of the transportation was provided by team members and their parents. They did have an adviser but that teacher didn't like them meeting in her classroom, she just signed the necessary paperwork. One of the team captain's primary jobs was co-ordinating transportation to competitions and raising the money for the entrance fees, jobs he completed with remarkable aplomb. Think the football team had to do any of that? (The quarterback went to Cornell, btw.) Grades aside, which position required greater leadership skills?

The second thing I'm going to point out is that I got on this diatribe/rant/tirade/what have you in response to the question why would anyone pick Wash U over Stanford. Let's say you're that science team captain and you bust your butt for four years to make sure the science team is funded and keep all the grades up and your essay hits the right tone with the admissions office at both schools so that you get into both Stanford and Wash U. Let's say that you don't get any financial aid from either one. Let's say that one other kid gets into each school from your high school, the goalie on the soccer team gets into Stanford with a scholarship and your best buddy on the science team, the one who also busted his butt with you (and helped that same soccer goalie with all of his homework in chemistry but his English grades were never better than a B+ and French for him was kind of a disaster) gets into Wash U on the strength of his science ability. What if you're that kid and you've felt like a second class citizen to the athletic teams at your high school for four years - I could see that kid picking Wash U over Stanford. Sure I could. (I could also see him or her picking Stanford.)

Well, I've talked myself out of ever paying for Stanford, whew. Glad my oldest is at Duke. ;-)

jimsumner
09-14-2014, 09:38 PM
Just for timeframe purposes...

...IIRC, when I was a grad student, my smartest student at the time (MT) dated your son. I think I ran into them in a convenience store shortly before Virginia Tech utterly dismantled Miami in fall 2003. She was class of 2006. So he was like 2005 or 2006?

Imagine that. My son graduated from high school in 2002 and got his undergrad degree from VT in December 2005.