Rankings force schools to recruit aggressively, at high costs (U. Alabama)
By Nick Beadle
The Crimson White (U. Alabama)
08/23/2006

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. -- Locked in a never ending battle for students, money and prestige, public universities -- including the Capstone -- are hurling scholarships to lure top academic prospects and inch up college rankings, such as the U.S. News & World Report list released Friday, Aug. 18.

But with many top recruits coming from affluent areas, some say students from poorer areas lose out as universities race for larger and presumptively better student bodies.

Rankings such as U.S. News' "America's Best Colleges" and the credibility they can assign have become vital pieces in the recruiting game, said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.

U.S. News' list hoists up universities rife with top high school performers and their high entrance test scores. That gives schools a "perverse incentive" to focus recruitment in areas that churn out National Merit Scholars and other top students, Nassirian said.

The National Merit Scholarship Program names roughly 8,200 scholars each year. It whittles the list from the thousands of high school juniors who perform well on the PSAT, a test similar to the SAT college entrance exam. Personal essays and recommendations help determine the list of finalists.

Merit Scholars at the University get four years of tuition and housing, laptops and $6,000 for summer study, books and other expenses. Comparatively, roughly 80 percent of Merit Scholars' tuition is covered at West Virginia University, and they receive thousands toward housing and stipends for overseas study.

The University of Alabama aims to swell its enrollment by 6,000 to 28,000 in 2013. Because of a stagnant high school enrollment and graduation rate in Alabama, the University targets Florida, Georgia and Texas, states with ripe -- and growing -- youth populations in large affluent communities.

The University ranked 13th among public universities for recently enrolled merit scholars in 2005, when it enrolled 72. Its 145 total merit scholars, black National Achievement Scholars and National Hispanic Scholars last year was a 50 percent increase from 2004-05. Officials expect an even greater number of those students to start fall classes today.

The Capstone climbed 11 spots in this year's U.S. News rankings, tying Auburn University, the University Tennessee and four other schools as the nation's 39th-best public university.

UA President Robert Witt said the University's aggressive recruitment of merit scholars, though pooh-poohed by leadership at some other Alabama colleges, is integral to expanding enrollment. Where those students go, he said, their classmates are likely to follow.

To get those students, the University must compete with schools that already thrive off top academic talent. The University of Oklahoma has an office devoted solely to recruiting and retaining merit scholars. Each year the school mails campus visit invitations to all of the roughly 16,000 national merit semifinalists, consistently netting enough to be one of the top 20 recruiters of those students.

OU expects to enroll 136 merit scholars this fall.

To ward off competition, UA academic recruiters now use a staple of their athletic counterparts: offer the money upfront and reel the student in.

"They do things right when it comes to recruiting," said Kevin Whitaker, associate dean for academic programs for the College of Engineering, which will start a more than 500-strong freshman class today. Two years ago there were less than 300 students in engineering.

"If the University of Alabama was looking for a top quarterback, I don't think they would say they were interested in you and, 'We'll let you know in March that we'll pay for it," he said.

The University aggressively offers scholarship packages based on blanket standards for grades and test scores, even if it doesn't have the money to pay for them. If recruiters cast the net too wide, officials seek patronage, usually from alumni, to make up for the shortfall in scholarship cash.

"Maybe some day the light will turn off on that, but so far it's working," Whitaker said.

Schools' reliance on test scores and automatic cash to fill their ranks is widening the socioeconomic gap poorer students must cross when they head to college, said David Breneman, University of Virginia education dean and the former president of Michigan's Kalamazoo College.

A paper by Cornell University and University of Minnesota professors released in June 2005 found that, as campuses increased merit scholar recruitment, the number of students who received federal Pell grants, aid based on financial need, decreased.

High school graduates from wealthier communities, Breneman said, are more likely to have spent their teens being coached on how to drive up entrance test scores and breeze through college admissions. That leads schools desperate for top students to spend the glut of their scholarship on students who do not need the help, he said.

And if students head to a school purely for money, he said they are unlikely to be good alumni -- if they do not transfer first.

"You would be better off taking your scarce resources and putting it on kids that it would really make a difference," Breneman said.

But many schools say they have no choice. They are trying to gather the resources they need to survive and carry out their academic missions as state financial crises have clipped funding for universities in recent years, Nassirian said. Capturing a crop of top-ranking students makes schools more apt to climb the rankings, bring in more students and nab prestige and cash for research and other projects.

"They're doing it because they are desperate for resources to do the right things," Nassirian said. "Nobody's doing anything evil, but the system as a whole is probably not doing right by the nation."

Witt attested the Capstone balances its out-of-state recruiting in affluent areas with in-state recruiting. He said he makes several visits to rural Alabama schools each year. "It's a very balanced effort," he said.

And with the blanket scholarship standards, the University does not have to choose between poor and rich students, Whitaker said.

"Try to get both of them," he said. "That's been our approach."

Craig Hayes, an OU recruitment official, said the dozens of merit scholars his school pulls in each year typically span a wide social and economic range.

"We're not talking about the most affluent members of our society," he said. "Some students who have achieved at the highest of levels have no parent support and qualify for Pell support."

Still, "there is no easy answer" to making sure those from poorer backgrounds get in with so much emphasis on catching top performers, said Brenda Thompson, WVU's assistant vice president for enrollment management.

But a school that chooses to recruit more in areas that produce fewer merit scholars and top students will likely find itself falling behind -- or under, Nassirian said.

"Whatever moves you up the food chain," he said.