Frank the Tank
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I Root For: Illinois/DePaul
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RE: Why P6 won't help the AAC
(01-09-2018 04:18 PM)Stugray2 Wrote: (01-09-2018 10:06 AM)Frank the Tank Wrote: (01-08-2018 11:58 PM)Kittonhead Wrote: (01-08-2018 04:32 PM)Lord Stanley Wrote: (01-08-2018 12:09 AM)Kittonhead Wrote: All of the MAC schools serve as overflow for the B1G, the strongest public university conference.
For instance the thing in SE Michigan for years was that if you couldn't get into the University of Michigan you would then go to Eastern Michigan. The same kind of kid from the same kind of neighborhood could be found in both schools.
What? No.
"Dad, my dreams of an Engineering degree at Michigan have been dashed so I'm hitting up EMU" has rarely been uttered, at least not un-ironically.
I assure you MAC schools are not filled with Big Ten overflow unless the idea of overflow is the same reason I didn't get into Harvard even though I sent in an application
And I am very proud NIU alumni who was accepted to a number of Big Ten schools.
B1G schools are not that hard to get into, with a couple of exceptions. Twenty years ago they were not hard at all really.
It is B1G overflow, meaning largely the same socionomic status. There are students that will pick a Miami or Kent State MAC school over a B1G for the location, feel of the campus. Maybe they are from Columbus and want to get away from the Ohio State hype. They might be doing it to try something different than what their parents did.
MAC schools are alternate major state schools. Horizon League is commuter schools. Akron and Toledo are borderline. They are mid tier urban schools like Memphis or ODU. The other 10 universities in the MAC have quality reputations in the region.
Fraternity culture, student life on MAC campuses is comparable to a P5 university. College town environments. These are university communities that you can sell and build enthusiasm around.
"Overflow" probably isn't the correct word - while there are certainly individuals that pick their in-state MAC school over their in-state Big Ten school, that's generally a very large exception as shown by cross-admit statistics (just as there might be people that pick their in-state non-Northwestern Big Ten school over an Ivy League school but that's also a large exception). The main conflict that you see is generally if there's a choice between an in-state MAC school or an out-of-state Big Ten school since there's a significant cost difference and it's a calculation about whether the ROI for a higher-ranked school is there. Where I live in Illinois, more high school grads actually end up going to Iowa, Indiana, Purdue, Wisconsin and often Michigan on a year-over-year basis today compared to NIU despite the higher out-of-state tuition. Illinois State and UIC are the schools that generally compete for the #2 spot for in-state public matriculation after UIUC now (although Iowa is actually almost always the biggest overall draw after UIUC and our local community college with Indiana close behind). UIC has been taking a lot more kids that would have gone to NIU or the other in-state directional schools in the past since living in the West Loop neighborhood has gone from being a detriment 20 years ago to a huge selling point today. It also doesn't help that state university funding in the State of Illinois is particularly horrible (to say the least) and, while the University of Illinois and Illinois State systems have been negatively impacted, those systems also have larger endowments and corporate support to cushion the blow better while the other in-state schools are hurting much more. (Note that this isn't a good thing at all speaking as an Illinois resident. We need all of our public universities to be good in-state options.)
The primary exception that I see in the MAC is Miami since it has a fairly high academic ranking along with a pretty distinct culture (e.g. a preppy New England private school vibe despite being a Midwestern public university). They're very competitive with the Big Ten schools in cross-admits since there's no perception of an academic trade-off and the campus culture is offering something legitimately different. Indeed, in my Chicago suburb, more kids actually ended up at Miami from the high school Class of 2016 than they did at NIU (despite NIU being an in-state school only an hour away). That really isn't about the Big Ten vs. MAC, but rather Miami offers a truly unique environment with the requisite academic reputation (whereas a lot of non-flagships, whether fair or not, are treated as and look like backup versions of their respective flagships). That's what I believe all colleges are going to need going forward to be competitive as US high school grad numbers are heading downward for the foreseeable future.
Frank,
Two quick comments. First, yes Miami U is unique among the tier-two schools in the Midwest (they were the only tier-two school we even looked at outside the west with my son). Cal Poly is probably the closest equivalent on the west coast.
Second, for kids from families willing to cross state lines the tuition is less an issue than you make out. Usually you are looking to go out of state because you didn't get into the flagship in state in the major you wanted. Illinois may not be as ridiculously exclusive as California, where a 3.6 GPA and 2000 SAT wont get you in, and certainly wont get you in an impacted major like Chemistry or Engineering (You'll be offered a spot at UC Merced in "arts and letters" so the system can claim 8% get offers), but the ones looking at other options are usually bringing a pretty solid academic profile. When we used my son's profile, we saw schools like Ohio State, Indiana, and Minnesota offer $10,000 or more per year in tuition cuts, effectively making them cheaper than in-State UCs. We found similar even larger grants from private schools (how he wound up at WPI, although Rochester, NYU and BU were intriguing). For laughs and giggles we threw in a few Southern and Plains schools, and LSU came back tuition free, and Nebraska so much off it was cheaper than a Cal State -- and these all put him in their honors Engineering programs. (Head of the Chicken is tempting when all you have been offered is tail of the Ox). MSRP is not the price people pay (and yes you can negotiate it down by showing another school's offer, we did that and got an additional $5K/year off). None of this is means tested.
The point is, if you are a relatively high performing but not a top student from a good major metro suburban High School, no out of state or private school will ask you to pay anything like full sticker.
A good question is, how many people are aware that MSRP out-of-state tuition rates are almost exclusively paid by foreign students and that Americans who cross state lines pay much less than that. Your comments and those I have heard from others tells me a large number of people see the sticker price and walk away without investigating the actual price people pay.
Oh, no doubt about the cost. Illinois in particular has some of the highest in-state tuition rates in the country (and there's a surcharge for the most popular impacted majors like engineering and business on top of it all), so a kid with the stats to get into UIUC often end up with great scholarship offers from neighboring out-of-state Big Ten schools that make the price comparable or outright cheaper. Now, I don't think those out-of-state schools are generally cheaper than going to one of the non-UIUC public schools in Illinois even with typical out-of-state merit aid, but it's at least close enough where going to a bigger name brand like Indiana or Iowa is more than worth it. It certainly doesn't shock me at all that the neighboring Big Ten schools (plus other close by P5 schools like Missouri and Iowa State) are hoovering up tons of Illinois high school grads that would have gone to other in-state universities a generation ago.
Merging this discussion with the national championship game, Alabama is actually one of the most aggressive and transparent providers of merit aid of any school in the country. Bama is picking off some "5 star academic recruits" from places like the Chicago and NYC areas in a way that you would have never thought was possible even 10 years ago because the merit aid they provide to high stats kids is so great.
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