This actually looks like more than just a financial incentive. It looks like desperation.
From the New York Times:
Why Did Syracuse Offer $200,000 Deals to Teens Who Had Turned It Down?The university seems to have misjudged what some families would pay. Next year, maybe applicants should play their own game of chicken with such schools. …Syracuse appears to have played chicken with children and lost. Having lowballed their parents in March and April, the school presumably came up many heads short for its newest class. Once May rolled around, it had to offer eye-popping discounts to steal kids away from other schools. …It was not preordained that Syracuse would end up in this predicament. Last month, it boasted of a record-breaking number of applications.But the full, nondiscounted cost of attendance at Syracuse stands at $92,128 per year for students who are living on campus and not using the school’s health insurance. For snobs inclined to sneer — this is, after all, higher than what M.I.T. charges — the market gets to decide what Syracuse is worth, and 19 percent of its undergraduates in one recent class paid the full price.But this year appears to be different. When the stock market wobbles and people worry that extended trade wars may cost them their jobs, they may be more reluctant.Meanwhile, just under 20 percent of Syracuse’s undergraduates are from somewhere other than the United States. Many of them pay that full price.Given President Trump’s threats toward international students, it’s possible that large numbers of them decided not to study in the United States next year.Syracuse could have chosen to lick its wounds and run a deficit, but that could have meant layoffs or cuts to beloved programs. Instead, it chose to hand out merit aid, and its high list price made its discount amounts pop, even if up to $50,000 off its annual costs still didn’t bring the net price down to what many competing schools charge.
Hat tip to the TaxProfBlog.
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