#qyote

I am currently blogging while finishing a bottle of the bottleO's finest Moscato. Its finest is valued at $9.99. aaaand I am finely drunk.

One prospective student I met from Pennsylvania had initially set her sights on the University of Chicago. Despite her near-perfect stats (a 35 on the ACT, a 1510 on the SAT, thirteen Advanced Placement courses, and a 3.95 grade-point average), she was rejected after applying early decision. At the time, she didn’t have a single public university on her shortlist. Her mother did some digging and landed on the University of Mississippi as a possibility. It has an honors college and generous scholarships, including some that come with stipends for study-abroad programs and undergraduate research. “I applied to appease my mom and get an acceptance under my belt,” she told me. It wasn’t until after she was accepted and had started the interview process for the university’s top scholarships that she seriously considered going there. She realized, “There were all these opportunities I could qualify for, and I was hearing about them before I heard I was even accepted to other schools.” Mississippi knew it was competing with much higher-ranked colleges, so it had to come in strong and early. By April, the student had acceptance letters and financial-aid packages from Rice and Vanderbilt. Neither included the full ride and other perks that Mississippi offered her. Before making her decision, she flew to Houston with her dad to visit Rice again. It was a weekday, but the campus felt dead. They walked to a nearby park, where she made a pros-and-cons list for Rice and Mississippi. Then she broke down in tears.“The only pro I could come up with for Rice,” she recalled when we spoke recently, “is that people will know I’m smart because I go to Rice.” With more tuition dollars coming in from out-of-state students, public universities such as Ole Miss could afford to offer discounts or even full rides to a select number of academic superstars. The University of Alabama, for example, spent $185.4 million on merit aid in 2023-24, more than twice what it allocated for need-based aid. These high-achieving students act as magnets, attracting others in their home towns who don’t mind paying an out-of-state sticker price that, to them, still seems like a steal.