By Stuart Silverstein, Los Angeles Times, 5/16/2004

Jordan J. Hayles, valedictorian of her senior class this year at Murphy High School in Mobile, Ala., had her pick of some of the nation's most esteemed colleges. Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, MIT, and Stanford all accepted her.

So why did Hayles recently decide on Emory University in Atlanta, a highly regarded institution, but more often a place students choose when they can't get into an Ivy League school?

Partly, she said, because the school offered her a tantalizing financial deal, a package covering full tuition, room and board, foreign-study funds, a $1,000 stipend for a research project -- and even money to pay for cultural events or restaurant meals with fellow Emory scholars.

"I thought that was just splendid," Hayles said. "You get to go out, meet different people, and you don't have to pay anything. You can't beat that."

For some high school seniors who are academic stars, it has become more tempting in recent years to pass up an Ivy League education. Many private colleges and public universities, eager to boost their reputations by recruiting students with stellar grades and lofty College Board scores, are dangling lucrative scholarships, special programs, and other come-ons.

"Every school that can seems to be playing this game," said Patrick M. Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education in San Jose, Calif. "This is how you get your prestige up."

The students spurning the Ivies, many still fresh from the stressful May 1 decision deadlines, are bucking the much-chronicled trend of affluent families going extra lengths to get their children into the most prestigious colleges. The Ivy obsession has fostered a boom in SAT prep classes, and even college counseling summer camps, to boost students' prospects.

Ivy League schools, which provide substantial amounts of financial aid, but only to students deemed financially needy, say they haven't been measurably hurt by the widening competition for academic standouts.

Still, non-Ivies that recruit aggressively say that they are snagging more top young scholars.

There are no authoritative figures about how many students bypass the Ivy Leagues. But the scale of such recruiting is reflected in the skyrocketing sums that the nation's four-year colleges have devoted to scholarships based on academic performance. A higher-education researcher, Donald E. Heller of Penn State, has found that the schools raised their spending on merit scholarships by 152 percent, to $3 billion, between the 1992-93 and 1999-2000 school years. By comparison, they boosted grants based on financial need by 59 percent.

Cornell economist Robert H. Frank, who has written about the concentration of top students at elite colleges, agreed. "We're definitely seeing that the schools that have been most aggressive in offering merit-based aid have been taking some students away from the schools who ordinarily would get them," he said.

All the same, saying no to institutions such as Princeton, Harvard, or Yale -- or to Stanford or MIT, which often are lumped together with the Ivies -- can still be hard for a student to explain to friends and acquaintances.

"A lot of people walk up to me at school and say: 'Wow, I can't believe you turned down Yale. That's just crazy,' " said A.J. Singletary, a high school senior from Mountain Home, Ark., who accepted an offer to attend Washington University in St. Louis, starting in the fall.

Around the country, prestigious non-Ivies such as Emory and Washington University are among the leaders in vying for top high school graduates.

At one point, Singletary told the Washington University admissions office that he was undecided between that school and Yale and was called back within a couple of days and given an additional $6,000 in aid. In all, he will receive $38,700 a year in scholarships from Washington University. After outside grants, he would be left with about $3,000 to cover.

He said his offer from Yale, while substantial, would have left him with about $14,000 a year in costs.

Richard H. Shaw, Yale University's dean for undergraduate admissions and financial aid, said that more than 65 percent of accepted applicants at Yale enroll. He said the toughest ones to reel in are from middle-class families who can't easily afford the Ivy League, but have too much money to qualify for big financial-aid packages.

Policy analysts debate whether the costly competition is good for higher education in general. Critics argue that the merit aid, which mainly goes to students from middle- and high-income families, would be better spent on poorer students. But administrators say that star students enliven a campus' intellectual atmosphere.

For extraordinary students such as the Emory-bound Hayles, the college options can be dazzling. Her credentials include a straight-A average, 1520 on her SATs, and qualifying for a National Merit Scholarship, achieved by far less than 1 percent of the nation's students.

Hayles said that she appreciated the aid that would spare her parents heavy college expenses. Although her parents' income is slightly more than $100,000 and she is an only child, Hayles said: "My parents have to plan for retirement. Personally, I don't think it's fair to them to have to spend all this money on me."

This story ran on page A13 of the Boston Globe on 5/16/2004.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

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