Posted on 06/10/2009 5:04:01 AM PDT by reaganaut1
The admissions team at Reed College, known for its free-spirited students, learned in March that the prospective freshman class it had so carefully composed after weeks of reviewing essays, scores and recommendations was unworkable.
Money was the problem. Too many of the students needed financial aid, and the college did not have enough. So the director of financial aid gave the team another task: drop more than 100 needy students before sending out acceptances, and substitute those who could pay full freight.
The whole idea of excluding a student simply because of money clashed with the college’s ideals, Leslie Limper, the aid director, acknowledged. “None of us are very happy,” she said, adding that Reed did not strike anyone from its list last year and that never before had it needed to weed out so many worthy students. “Sometimes I wonder why I’m still doing this.”
That decision was one of several agonizing ones for this small private college, celebrated for its combination of academic rigor and a laid-back approach to education that once attracted Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, to study on its leafy campus minutes from downtown.
With their endowments ravaged by the financial markets and more students clamoring for assistance, private colleges like Reed are making numerous changes this year in staff, students, tuition and classes that they hope will tide them over without harming their reputations or their educational goals.
Reed and others have admitted more students to bolster revenue with larger classes. Many are cutting costs by freezing or reducing salaries, suspending hiring and postponing building maintenance and construction. And the cost of attendance is rising; in Reed’s case, by 3.8 percent, to nearly $50,000 a year for its 1,300 students.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Who would spend that kind of money for a no-name school?
A more curious question is, why do colleges require parent financial information for students who are themselves adults?
Well, the profs and administrators need their substantial salaries so they can continue to buy Beemers and Volvos and vacation in Europe.
C'mom, put your money where your mouth is.
You know the answer -- because they have figured out that they can charge students from "rich" families a lot more!
The question is whether the acceptances were based on ‘diversity’ or merit.
That is a great question, considering that those same parents are prohibited by law from knowing their kids’ grades, unless the kids choose to divulge them.
My thoughts as well. This is a blessing in disguise for those students who are dropped. A debt of up to $200k, with no more guarantee of a job than a graduate of a much cheaper state school? No thanks.
The libs always talk about “Big Oil,” “Big Pharma,” however, they never mention the failing “Big universities,” “Big college”!!!
Education standards are so low that a liberal arts education even at the finest universities is not equal to what a good student can give themselves by reading. Almost the entire value of the “education” is now the diploma — and I’m not sure that at 1/4 million dollars at the beginning of a students adult life the student wouldn’t be better off buying a home and paying it off in full.
For engineering or the “trades” (law, medicine) it is possibly still worth the cost.
They are gouging all of us and our children now.
The same as the usurper in the White House!!!
“If Reed managed expenses so that the base costs were say $30K instead of $50K, it would not need to give out so much “financial aid”. “Financial aid” means “we’ll try to gouge your family for as much as they can afford”. “
Exactly. Cut the tenured $120,000 professor who teaches one class a semester.
We had this little deal with our kids - they supplied the password to their student accounts and we paid the tuition.
No password, no money. This was a monetary investment we were making and we had every right to monitor it’s growth or decline.
This kind of attitude gives insight into the larger problem with the liberal philosophy.
If they want something, they believe they should have it when they want it.
Let someone else (like taxpayers) worry about mundane issues like paying for it.
After all - that is the way Obama and the democrats are governing the entire country.
To help determine the demand curve for dependent students.
What kind of an idiot would send their kids to a $50k (or even $30k) per year school when there are good state schools available? I just don’t get it. My cousin lives in CT and sent his daughter to UMass/Amherst, where she is wasting his money with a useless “Psychology” focus. Then last year she got caught up with the Obamania and MassPIRG, far-left nutbags, and went down to D.C. 4 times for activist bullshit. I told him he should yank her funds until she does something which will make her money. I just don’t understand why parents coddle kids at college.
<Cut the tenured $120,000 professor who teaches one class a semester.
Reed is not a research university. I imagine that the profs there teach at least a 3/3 schedule - 3 classes a term, if not a 4/4.
I teach a 2/2 but am expected to do a lot of research and publish a lot of papers. For many fields, research is funded (and not always by government, industry funds a lot of research as well), bringing in money to the school. For the few profs who teach 1 class a term, their time in class is usually ‘bought out’ by monies brought in by research funding. The two environments are completely different.
According to the latest survey, a full professor makes $102,000 at Reed, with an untenured prof (generally <6 years on the job) makes 64K. Not unreasonable.
btw - Reed is not an ‘unknown’ school. It is a well-respected liberal arts college, though perhaps better known in the Pacific Northwest.
Most of the state schools are liberal breeding grounds. I go to a private school because I wanted to go to a school that was Christian and small (and along the way became conservative). I had some scholarships to my school (30k for everything including books, food, etc) and I offered to my father to take out loans, however, my father was adamant against it (He said he didn’t want his child working through college like he did). I’ll be getting out early (3 and half years) and my father (a dem) will be getting home a young conservative to work for him, quite the opposite.
We often have our political affiliations like benign tumors that grow through life along with us; perhaps he is a Democrat from almost habit alone.
Your continuing sincere effort to live a valuable life with respect for him in all things will do more to win him to the conservative cause than anything else.
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