Duke, Carolina, Gonzaga, and… Northwestern? That’s the Final Four in one of this year’s C2i NCAA March Madness bracket predictions. But how did we get there?
Well, some people are basketball aficionados, watching every game and knowing every player. They use their wealth of knowledge (or gut feelings) about colleges to make a bracket. Others choose a bracket based on their favorite mascots. Others still choose a bracket based on team colors. We at C2i choose four brackets based on access and affordability for low-income students.
What if the colleges that enrolled the most low-income students won the most basketball games?
Wealthy, prestigious schools with large endowments are able to identify, admit, and nearly fully fund talented Pell Grant recipients. While some wealthy institutions enroll few (for example, around only 1 in 10 Duke students is a Pell grant recipient), they graduate nearly all of them (96% graduation rate at Duke). But don’t just assume that because a school is wealthy and graduating a high percentage of its Pell Grant recipient students, that it isn’t enrolling quite a few! Yale (19%) and Northwestern (18%) enroll more Pell Grant recipients as a percentage of their overallstudent populations than places like Auburn (13%) and Purdue (14%). They also graduate a far greater percentage (e.g. Yale – 93% vs. Auburn – 71%) of Pell recipients.
Perhaps surprisingly, this bracket ends up with three perennial basketball powers – Duke (96% Pell Graduation Rate), Gonzaga (82%), and North Carolina (88%) all in the Final Four. But barely edging out Duke for the national title is Northwestern, with its 97% Pell Grant graduation rate. Shout out to Colgate, Wisconsin, Florida, NC State, and Texas for having Pell Grant Graduation rates above 80%. These nine schools all graduate at least four of every five Pell Grant recipients within six years of starting their bachelor’s degrees.
Does Cinderella need a glass slipper, or really good financial aid?
• Duke provides a full tuition grant for students from North Carolina and South Carolina with family incomes lower than $150,000 (around double the median family income in the US).
• Families with incomes below $75,000 are covered at Yale. Eligible students receive grants equal to tuition, fees, food, housing, and travel, along with a $2,000 additional grant in their first year in New Haven.
• Northwestern meets 100% of demonstrated financial aid through grants. Students eligible for financial aid will be given a need-based aid package fully covered by grants.
• Colgate provides grants equal to full tuition and fees for all students with a total family income of under $175,000.
There are also schools that engage in what is called “tuition discounting” – schools forgo tuition revenue they otherwise would have collected through providing grants, fellowships, and scholarships. While tuition discounting may make colleges more affordable to students, it does allow colleges to make sticker prices artificially high. By publishing a higher price and then discounting it, students feel special and like they are “getting a deal.” Those students then become more likely to enroll. Tuition discounting can be a marketing tool!
Regardless of whether the grant aid is to offset loans through generous financial aid packages or used as a marketing/enrollment management tool, many colleges in the March Madness tournament offer very high average grant aid packages. For our last bracket, we focus on which colleges are giving the largest average grant aid amounts.
Most of the schools that move on from the first round are private institutions. Because private institution sticker prices tend to be higher than public university sticker prices, it should be no surprise that private institutions have to offer more grant aid to make up the total cost of attendance. The Final Four ends up being Yale ($60,487), Duke ($50,142), Colgate ($53,353), and (perhaps surprisingly) Saint Peter’s ($30,900). As mentioned before, Yale, Duke, and Colgate have very generous financial programs. Saint Peter’s offers 99% of new students scholarships – indicating that it could be engaging in tuition discounting as an enrollment incentive.
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