Published by Inside Higher Education
Cornell College has a variety of admissions challenges. It's a liberal arts college in Mount Vernon, Iowa, a very small city that most people haven't heard of (it's east of Cedar Rapids). It's not Cornell University, the better known Cornell. It is one of a small number of colleges that use the "block plan," in which students take one course at a time, for three and a half weeks.
Despite those realities, students enroll every year, but some are held back by another fact: tuition. The total cost of attendance (including everything -- tuition, room and board, personal expenses, travel) is $63,135. And the norm for colleges is much less in the Midwest, where students generally go to large universities in their state's system. So Cornell will next year unveil the Freeway Scholarship to students in five states that surround Iowa: Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska and Wisconsin. Any student admitted to Cornell from those states will receive a renewable scholarship of $30,000. A similar program is in effect for Iowans. There is no income test. There is no academic test other that being admitted. Transfer students are eligible for $25,000 a year.
Those six states typically produce about half of Cornell's students.
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Beckemeyer said the idea was also inspired by Oglethorpe University's experience.
Oglethorpe will match public university tuition rates in every state for members of the freshman class who are from those states and who meet certain benchmarks. When the program was introduced in 2018, students had to have at least at a 3.5 grade point average, plus a minimum test score of 1250 combined SAT or a 26 as the composite score on the ACT. This year, with Oglethorpe like most colleges going test optional on admissions, the college changed the requirements to either a 3.8 (weighted) GPA or a 30 ACT or 1400 SAT.
Whitney Lewis, vice president of enrollment management and dean of admission and financial aid at Oglethorpe, said the program has been a clear success. Before the program, Oglethorpe enrolled around 330 freshmen. Every year of the program, the college has attracted more than 400 first-year students.
The discount rate, which is high, has gone up. It was 66 percent before the program and is now 69 percent.
But Lewis said tuition revenue has also gone up because of the increased enrollment. At colleges that have room for more students, like many smaller private colleges, that is more important than discount rate alone, she said.
"All colleges are cognizant of their discount rate," she said, but it's not the only factor.
Oglethorpe has seen GPA rise with the program. "We've continued to attract a high-quality academic student," she said.
At Seattle Pacific University, officials adopted more of an approach like Cornell. Students from Washington State, California, Hawaii and Oregon are eligible.
But the university also cut tuition by one-fourth for all students last year, to $35,100. With the cut and tuition matching, the university says that "qualifying students' SPU tuition and fees will be equal to or less than that of their home state's flagship public university."
Nate Mouttet, vice president for enrollment management and marketing, said that the university started off looking at the Oglethorpe model. "But covering the gap between our private tuition price compared to the majority of flagship universities was going to drive up our discount significantly -- if we did it at our current tuition," he said.
"So, we modeled what it would look like if this concept was partnered with a tuition reduction," Mouttet said. "We wanted to see if it would make more sense if our price was lower when offering this level discount. And sure enough, when combined, both strategies projected a better outcome rather than if they were done independently. We first made the larger decision to reduce our price as that impacted how we would build all of our scholarship and aid schema. Then the price matching strategy became a core scholarship commitment that we made to top students from four primary states for us, Washington, Oregon, California and Hawaii."
While last year is a poor comparison because of the pandemic, Seattle Pacific saw a 5 percent increase in yield rates for students from the states in the program.
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Nanci Tessier, senior vice president of Art & Science Group, said that what her colleagues have seen "is that while sticker price and financial aid awards are important in the college selection process, what primarily drives most student decision making is the value proposition: the lived experience -- academic, co-curricular and social. In other words, at the end of the day, students are driven to apply to and enroll at an institution because they highly value the experience they are going to receive each year more than that at other institutions: the academic program and how it plays out, academic and career advising and outcomes, opportunities for experiential learning (e.g., research with faculty, internships), community service and engagement, study abroad opportunities, and the social milieu. That’s not to say that sticker price and financial aid are not important -- they are. Each institution needs to set price and aid levels that are optimal for it in its markets. But we’ve seen through rigorous research that how the institution’s value proposition positions it competitively is almost always a stronger driver of student’s decision of where to apply and attend than is the sticker price or financial aid."
Tessier stressed, however, that "what is true for one institution is not true for another. Just because an initiative -- a substantial change in pricing, a guaranteed job or grad school placement, or funding for an internship, for example -- works for one institution doesn’t mean it will work for another, because every institution operates within its own unique market."