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Showing posts from July, 2018

All the 2015 Freshman Full-pays

There is no problem so great that it can't be solved by enrolling more full-pay students, it seems.  And in the minds of some, there is no solution so frequently tossed out there.  I've heard several presidents say, "We're doing this to attract more full-pay students." Before we dive too deeply into this, a definition: A "Full-pay" student is not one who receives no aid; rather it's one who receives no institutional aid. Often these overlap considerably, but a student who receives a full Pell and/or state grant, and then takes out a PLUS loan is a full-pay; all the revenue to the college comes in cash, from another source, rather than its own financial aid funds.  The source of that cash matters not to the people who collect the tuition.  Got it? This is a fairly deep dive into the IPEDS 2015 Fall Freshman data (there is 2016 admissions data, but financial aid data is only available for 2015-2016, so I used that admissions data to line things up.