In Jeff Selingo’s book, Who Gets In and Why A Year Inside College Admissions, he introduces the concept of “college buyers” and “college sellers.” In this blog post, I will focus on whether a private college is a college buyer or a seller.
College sellers are the colleges that receive tons of applications and have a high yield (i.e., a large percent of accepted students choose to attend). Because of the high demand for these colleges they don’t need to “buy” students by offering merit aid or tuition discounts. College sellers typically offer financial aid to students who have financial need and a very small percent (if any) of really exceptional students.
College buyers on the other hand, are not in such high demand.
They often provide as good or better an education than the sellers, but they
discount tuition and/or provide significant merit aid to many students in order
to make sure that they have a full freshman class.
Whether a college is a “buyer” or a “seller” does NOT reflect
whether students get a great education there.
If you don’t have financial need, but you want your student to get
a good price for college, be sure your student includes buyers on their college list.
Jeff Selingo provides these rules of thumb to differentiate buyers and sellers:
- Sellers typically admit less than 20% of applicants on average. Colleges as a whole accept 67%.
- The yield at most seller colleges is nearly 45%, as compared to about 25% at most buyer colleges.
- On average, 7% of financial aid that sellers give is a merit-based discount vs. nearly 33% of financial aid that buyers give is a merit-based discount.
