Explore how universities can shape freshman scholarship offers with math .
This book builds a structured approach to modeling financial aid decisions, translating real-world policy into clear, testable formulas that balance yield, quality, and cost.
The work starts by framing the scholarship process as a descriptive model, linking student need, outside aid, and university aid. It then presents a general optimization framework to compare policies, and derives a practical quadratic programming formulation that can be solved by computer. A focused section extends the model to cases with upper limits on non-scholarship aid, showing how constraints affect optimal offers. Throughout, the text emphasizes how to measure outcomes like enrollment, student quality, and financial impact.
- Understand how to quantify need, outside aid, and university scholarships in a coherent model
- See how to turn policy questions into an optimization problem
- Learn how a quadratic program can yield the best mix of offers under constraints
- Discover how upper limits on non-scholarship aid change recommended strategies
Ideal for readers of applied optimization and higher-education policy, this edition offers a practical toolkit for evaluating freshman scholarship decisions.