Paying in Full as the Ticket Into Colleges

The article “Paying in Full as the Ticket into Colleges,” is about the struggles that all high school seniors and their families are coming too, when applying to college. The colleges are now not only taking into consideration of how intellectual a student is, and how many clubs and community service hours they partake in, but also, how wealthy the student is.

With the low economy, colleges are willing to accept students that are on the waiting list or have transferred, rather than the highly academic applicants with a brilliant resume, just because they can’t afford to pay all expenses. In the article it states, “Colleges say they are not backing away from their desire to serve less affluent students; if anything, they say, taking more students who can afford to pay full price or close to it allows them to better afford those who cannot. But they say the inevitable result is that needier students will be shifted down to the less expensive and less prestigious institutions.”

Surprisingly, it also mentions in the article that students who do not apply for financial aid will also have a better chance of getting in. “This year, many of these colleges say they are more inclined to accept students who do not apply for aid, or whom they judge to be less needy based on other factors, like ZIP code or parents’ background…they shine a little brighter.” Also, colleges are even accepting more students early, so that they have security when December comes along. I found this article very interesting and I have to say that I was stunned at how colleges were going about this.

The main idea that stuck out was when it says, “Institutions that have pledged to admit students regardless of need are finding ways to increase the number of those who pay the full cost in ways that allow the colleges to maintain the claim of being need-blind — taking more students from the transfer or waiting lists, for instance, or admitting more foreign students who pay full tuition.”

The fact that Universities are willing to accept the applicants who can afford all of the expenses without applying for aid or any scholarships, even if they don’t have the greatest test scores or enough after school activities. This author does a great job at explaining details and weaving in quotes. Also, she did a great job of keeping the reader’s attention, it’s a matter that I’m very interested in and I learned a lot in the end.






For more information, the article is on the New York Times website.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/education/31college.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&hpw