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Doug:

It's hard to say how much the 400 new scholarships will really add to the student body. NC A&T admits about 2,000 new freshmen and 1,500 other freshmen each year. There is already a distribution of skills among the enrollees, including many with the skills and preparation to qualify for the scholarship. A&T may end paying much of the scholarship money to students who would have attended anyway. If the existing enrollee pool has more than 400 qualified, unsubsidized students, the impact on student quality could well be zero.

Also, the impacts on retention rates are far from guaranteed. An implicit assumption in this analysis is that students only leave schools because they are failing. Top-performing students also transfer to better schools when they are doing well. That is, the flows go out from the top and bottom of the academic skills distribution.

There are positives to the students if they don't have to work. There's also a nice incentive in the scholarship to keep grades up. The scholarships are generous and will be valued by the students. But there are many reasons to suspect that the large expenditure won't produce very large benefits.

Looking a gift horse in the mouth,
Dave

Thanks, Dave. Good point about the students who would be attending anyway. I'd hope this might push up the numbers of those at the higher end of the pool. I really would have to think this would get the attention of a qualifying student whose other choices don't offer such a good deal.

Doug:

It really depends on how many people are attracted into the applicant pool. As a simple numerical example, suppose that there are 400 scholarships, 800 scholarship-qualified applicants who will attend regardless of whether they receive a scholarship, and an additional 800 new qualified applicants who apply and will only attend because of the scholarships.

The problem for A&T's admissions staff is that they can't tell the students who will only attend if they get scholarships (every applicant has incentive to claim this) from the other students. Suppose now that the scholarships are randomly allocated to the qualified applicants. The net gain in high-end admissions will only be 200 students, half the number of scholarships.

If the number of qualified students in A&T's existing pool is larger or if the number of attracted scholarship-sensitive applicants is smaller, the effectiveness of the scholarship program will be less.

The full in-state cost of attending A&T is already very competitive at $8,800 (tuition, fees, room & full board). It's not clear that a discount on this already low price will move many people in the high-end applicant pool. Given the enormous existing price differences, the scholarships don't seem likely to affect decisions for NC students who currently aspire to private schools like Howard and Hampton.

So where will any new enrollees come from. A&T may draw high-end students from other NC campuses (good for A&T but not so good on the system as a whole). It may also subsidize out of state students.

Ever the dismal scientist (maybe it's the rain),
Dave

I'd love to sit in on admissions office discussions sometime. They have to play guessing games about the top students they'd like to grab. Who's sure to come? Who needs a financial incentive? Who's worth getting into a bidding battle for?

I do know, from the student's perspective, that sometimes being offered a scholarship, even if the amount isn't that significant in the big scheme of things, is flattering enough to make a difference. An applicant can reason, "I like College A better, but College B likes me better. I'm going to B."