@84, yep, Engineering is only undergrad, sorry for the garbling. Any international students in COE would be undergrads!!
Yeah, the psychological part is surely there. Though I suspect that's fading. I just sense that all sorts of moral loyalties are fading, and that more and more students are approaching everything (maybe logically) as a pretty straightforward financial calculus, where $200 doesn't mean much. And if they've put $200 here at college A and $500 there at college B, and are holding out for the waitlist at college C, how strong can that psychological commitment be? Probably depends on the individual student/family how they handle this. But the days of just choosing one college by commitment day are largely over I think.
FWIW. I can see both sides to the argument as completely valid. I certainly believe, with how money conscious the modern college student is, and with speaking to peers, that 200 dollars can be, For a lot of students, like signing a contract for a school. 200 is nothing to scoff at.
I can also see it from the standpoint of "just paying the deposit" on a waitlist because, "the other school is the school I want"
I think I should also mention that Purdue has changed their tactics for enrollment. Some would argue deceptively. With the new PIN campus that broke away from IUPUI, Purdue claims that as "an extension of the Lafayette campus". In other terms, it is an separate campus with Lafayette slapped over it. Now, how can this be deceptive. Well its for a method that some of you have already outlined with the cancelation of visas. Purdue is accepting students they would otherwise waitlist to the Lafayette campus, however they are sending them to Indy.
Oh yeah, definitely not something to scoff at, hope it didn't come across that way. I would cringe to lose $200 especially if the end of the month is hitting and rent/daycare/utilities aren't paid.
I'm just saying there are families (and maybe I do mean parents moreso than independently paying students) that will eat that cost because it is SUCH a big 4+ year decision, especially if they actually get a better financial package. All over the college e-board type spaces, you see families discussing waitlists or how to ask for more aide or hoping for some financial aide/scholarship appeal to come thru, and a lot more than $200 bucks is in the balance. So as things continue to shift (for all the typical melt reasons, plus the stuff cited above like the big state schools enrolling deeper down their domestic lists to make up for lost international revenue), it is not that rare people find their options do drastically change, like if they get into X school they were waitlisted at or Y school revises their financial aide package by several $K or tens of $K to entice them over. In those situations, they're not going to stay at a worse fit or more expensive school just because they put down a $200 deposit. They do sign some kind of document saying they honor the commitment, so they're really not supposed to back out. But this cannot shock us any longer after all the NIL transfer portal machinations! And it's not like the universities can do much of anything to a student who breaks that agreement and bails other than just pocket the deposit.
All these questions are important in terms of increasing the margins of VU's yield. I agree that the deposit game has changed, at least in terms of what it means to the current generation of applicants.
And for me -- with apologies for my broken recordness (is that a word?) -- this also underscores the importance of the next VU president being a transformational leader who inspires a higher proportion of prospective students to apply and attend the university.
It's still possible to turn around institutions, so long as they have value at their core. I recently watched a news feature about James Daunt, the CEO of Barnes & Noble, who was brought in to rescue the bookseller, which appeared to be headed to the glue factory because of Amazon and the pandemic. Daunt knew that brick & mortar bookstores still had great appeal, but B&N needed to do things differently. Some 5 years later, they're now opening dozens of new stores during 2025.
