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Financial inducements are more and more common. Ohio's Antioch College, recognizing that students now try to cut costs by attending college closer to home, is offering a $1,000 tuition rebate to any Ohio resident who qualifies for admission this year. Nearly 60% of colleges and universities today give financial aid to top students without regard to need. Southern Methodist University offers four years of free tuition (value: $30,000) to students who meet a series of criteria, including SAT scores of 1320 or higher. Trinity University in San Antonio offers as much as $20,000 over four years to National Merit scholars. Trinity attracted ten finalists in 1981, had 54 in 1983, and as of last week had promises from 124 out of a class of 600 for next fall. Is Trinity buying students? Says Admissions Dean Rudolph Gaedke: "We play hardball, but so does everyone else."
That applies to the students as well. Lisa Yen, 19, a senior in Indianapolis last year, had her choice of Yale, Princeton, Indiana University and DePauw. Says she: "I really wanted to go to Yale, but DePauw gave me a big scholarship to enter their management fellows program." The program, which combines liberal arts with a semester-long paid internship at a FORTUNE 500 company, is one reason that DePauw's applications have gone up 30% in the past six years. At Tufts University, Admissions Dean Michael Behnke occasionally gets a call from a prospective student confessing that another college has offered a better package. Says Behnke: "Sometimes the student will be asked to send in copies of the financial arrangement offered by the competing college so Tufts can study it and meet the competition." Smaller schools that cannot afford to give many merit scholarships tend to lose out in such contests. Says President Patsy Sampson of Stephens College, a Missouri women's school with an enrollment of 1,100: "Many times we recruit outstanding students who have no financial need, but another college will offer them a substantial scholarship and literally buy them away from us."
The new hard sell disturbs many administrators. The National Association of College Admissions Counselors has put together an ethics board to review college recruiting. Says Dan Saracino, a N.A.C.A.C. officer: "People are complaining that their colleagues are coming across like used-car salesmen. If we don't look into this, a Ralph Nader group will." Some educators believe that the growing student practice of "double booking" (paying deposits at more than one school) should be looked into as well. The practice forces colleges to play waiting-list roulette over the summer, not knowing until fall how many of their students will actually show up. To deal with the problem, some institutions have begun to trade lists of matriculants. Students who have double booked may soon be receiving a less welcome kind of attention from their prospective schools.
—By Ellie McGrath.
Reported by Bill Blanning/Boston and J. Madeleine Nash/Chicago, with other bureaus