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Message: [QUOTE="cuseinchina, post: 618159, member: 3079"] From a value of degree perspective as an alumnus, the idea of SU integrating into the state system makes me cringe. This is going to sound obnoxious and it's not as if even in the late 90's when I was there SU was the height of prestige, but I could have paid $12k and gone to school in my home state if I had wanted a public school educational experience/pedigree. This would however make the admissions model that has been pursued by NC sustainable. Her model is well suited to a flagship public school but absolutely horrific for a private school. Without going too far into it, she has essentially decided to shift from a quality based model to one that relies on quantity. She has grown revenue by lowering admissions standards and has made the university more diverse an inclusive - I support the latter but am really upset about the former - there are better ways to reach these goals. The problem is that when you decrease quality but don't decrease price (tuition) it forces you to decrease quality by more than you would have wanted --- thus the dramatic slide from the 30's to the 50's in the rankings and peer schools changing from BC/Tulane to Northeastern/Fordham. With the skyrocketing cost of a college education kids are no longer just going where they want to go and taking out the loans to do it, they are saying what is the best school I can go to that will provide the most bang for the buck. When you are ranked in the 50's, the return on investment you are offering (based on potential salary and/or prestige level of jobs available to you upon graduation) for private school tuition rates does not look good when compared to much cheaper in-state options. There are differentiators that still make SU attractive for those who can afford it, and the ROI for newhouse or Maxwell remain quite good I am sure - but the end game of this is you get a large pool of kids on scholarship, some of whom would be better off going to community college for a couple of years to get college ready and then transferring in to a school like SU, and a large pool of rich sort of lazy kids who want to go to a private school but don't want to work very hard. You miss out on the middle of the road kids from middle class families who want to go to a place where they can work really hard, maybe get a decent financial aid package, and can move up in the world once they are done ... i look at the people who were in my year who are doing exceptionally well in life - and the vast majority are in this category. If I'm that kid and I live in New Jersey today, why would I pay for SU when I can get the same results from Rutgers for a fraction of the price and maybe sacrifice a bit on quality of experience? I really hope whoever comes in can get this right - keep the things that were working, recognize kids in the admission process who have overcome challenges of all varieties or done well against the odds and throw scholarships at them, but also focus on getting the standards and the rankings back to a level that justifies the tuition. If they can't do that then unfortunately joining the state system would make a great deal of sense. I tend to think the impact on athletics would be negative as well - is there any evidence that existing NY state public schools have significant resources to devote to sports?? I think the athletic department would be leveled by thick thick layers of bureaucratic nonsense and eventually we would fade from national prominence. For those same reasons I would never worry about U buff becoming a serious athletic threat to SU. Time to find a chancellor who knows how to thread the needle and make this school as successful as it certainly has the potential to be, someone who understands what makes SU unique and attractive to students who are going to take their degree and go far in the future. [/QUOTE]

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