D3 no academic scholarships. But in the case of St. John and Thomas' academic scholarships cover a large part of tuition. My son with a 27 act score dropped yearly cost from $56k projected to $20k. Classmate of his with a 32 ACT looking at under 10k per year.
Drake / Valpo and the rest of the Pioneer League, are D1 but not scholarships for football. They have them for D1 basketball which is the reason they are D1,
Correct. Many D3 schools use athletics to recruit many of their students. We have teams with 120 players on the Fall team with 75 freshmen. Many of them quit after the first year but stay at the school. One school in our conference brags that 45% of their freshmen are athletes.
Unfortunately my son with a 33 ACT and 1400 SAT not only didn't scholarships, he didn't get accepted to 4 of the 5 schools where he applied. In 3 of them he would have been in the top 20% of their normal incoming class. I kind of understand why the extremely wealthy sought ways to game the system. It's messed up.
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How the great high-arching heaven
Looks and laughs upon it all!
My apologies to your son.
I have no problem with legacy admissions or public gifts greasing the wheels, that's the real world. Bribery and fraud are something else.
Aunt Becky better make a deal by Monday or she is going to prison for a long time.
Aunt Becky better make a deal by Monday or she is going to spend some serious time for
Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir."
Scrooge-"Are there no prisons?". "Plenty of prisons..."
Scrooge-"And the Union workhouses." . "Are they still in operation?". "Both very busy, sir..."
"Those who are badly off must go there."
"Many can't go there; and many would rather die."
Scrooge- "If they would rather die," "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."
That's interesting because my son has an Aunt Becky! She's not greasing any palms though to get him into any school.
Legacy admissions, public gifts, and bribery/fraud do probably have some impact at many schools, but they still account for a fairly small percentage of admissions overall. The core of the issue IMO is something called The Common App. In theory it's a great idea. A student creates a profile and applies to multiple schools from that one profile. He/she doesn't have to re-enter a lot of the same data over and over. If the school requires an additional essay or letter of recommendation you may already have it in your common app account and you just attach it. You have to pay the application fee for each school so there is no savings there. A large majority of schools seem to accept applications from the Common App and consider those students equally with direct applications. It also generates a lot more applications for them to consider. The more applications the more prestigious the school appears. It also allows them to grow enrollment if they want to accept more students.
The downside is it makes it much harder for the school to determine who really wants to go to their school and also determine their yield. Not every students who is offered admission accepts it and schools had years of years of data to show how many students they had to accept to get their target enrollment class. Now that students are applying to 15 or 20 school rather than 4 or 5, there are a lot more acceptances to decline. If a school kept their acceptances flat but their yield went down (say 25% committed rather than 50%), they either need to increase the number of acceptances or figure out which of the applications are more likely to commit if accepted. That's where demonstrated interest comes into play. Ultimately you need to have established a relationship with an admissions counselor so they can advocate for you or attend as many events as possible or open emails and click on their web site. These all show you are actually interested. His #1 school only accepts 25% of the students who apply, but we weren't worried about that because he was in the top 20% of their normal incoming class. What we found out is the school is often used as a safety school for even more prestigious schools including Ivy League. So even if you are a top student you need to be engaged or they will assume you are treating them as a safety school.
I wish he would consider smaller state schools or even major universities like Alabama or Iowa that have scholarship tables like BB Bison mention. He would likely qualify for full or near full tuition scholarships. But those aren't the types of schools he wants to attend. There is a cost to that selectiveness. But there are many choices and most of them are pretty good. So you can't whine too much about not getting into a top rated university. NDSU is good and it was great for me, but it is nowhere that elite group. I checked Common Data Set and NDSU accepted 93% of the students who applied for Fall 2018. Less than 10% of the students had 30 or better on ACT. The Ivy League schools almost require straight As and perfect SAT/ACT scores. The next tier (Stanford, Northwestern, Vanderbuilt, WashU) aren't quite as high but pretty close. My son primarily looked at the schools just below that. He should have easily been accepted, but he needed to make sure an admissions counselor or academic rep was aware of his level of interest. Even then there is no guarantee which is why I understand some people went the athletic route. Admissions people will cater to the athletic department to help separate all those similar students and the coaches serve as those internal advocates to help get admitted. The admissions office has no idea they don't plan to actually participate in that sport.
I have learned so much more about this process in the last 2-3 weeks. My son's situation would have been completely different if we understood some of this stuff back in August. We had been through it twice already but one was with a D3 athlete and the other was an average students who didn't apply to schools with low acceptance rates. It's a different game if you are a high achieving student and interested in more competitive colleges.
Since this conversation was around St. Thomas and St. Johns I looked up their Common Data Set information. St. Thomas has an 81% acceptance rate, there median ACT (25% to 75%) is 21-26.5. The rate of admitted students ACT 30+ is 11.37. NDSU numbers were 93%, 21-26, and 9.75%. I couldn't find a SJU CDS but what I found similar data on their site. They admitted 80% of applicants last Fall and 5.5%-6.5% of their incoming class most years has an ACT of 32 or higher.
All 3 are very good schools but most people who apply can get into them. I would have to dig further to see if there are schools in the area with admissions rates lower than 50%. That seems to be where the game starts to change even for very good students.