The Universities With the Most Full-Payers

The opposite of discounting is charging the full-price. Let's take a look at where the full-price is charged to a substantial percentage of students.

The Opposite of Discounting is Charging Full Price

An interesting enrollment strategy is to rarely offer discounts: Apple, Louis Vuitton, and Lululemon have all built wildly successful business models around rarely-discounting. In the university space, rarely-discounting has some obvious advantages: charging a really high price, and actually having families transact at that high price, results in lots of tuition revenue.

By utilizing the IPEDS variable “ANYAIDP” we can derive which universities have the largest percentages of full-paying students.

Specifically, here are all the things the ANYAIDP variable captures:

• Grants,
• Loans,
• Assistantships,
• Scholarships,
• Fellowships,
• Tuition waivers,
• Tuition discounts,
• Veteran’s benefits,
• Employer aid (tuition reimbursement) and
• ”other monies” (other than from relatives/friends) provided to students to meet expenses. This includes Title IV subsidized and unsubsidized loans made directly to students.”

Our goal is to understand which universities utilize discounting the least frequently in their admissions offers. This is the same thing as identifying which universities have the lowest ANYAIDP percentage. If, for example, a university’s ANYAIDP percentage is 40%, that means 60% of students received no tuition discounts or aid whatsoever - those 60% paid the full sticker price.

Formula-wise it is simply: 1 - ANYAIDP = Percentage of full-payers

Below (copied from above) are the top-50 universities with the most full-paying families:

Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Given that sticker prices can sometimes contain no information (when everybody gets a discount, nobody transacts at sticker price, so those sticker prices are ‘fake’), this is interesting market information about real transactions occuring at real sticker prices.
• It is some kind of nod to pricing power. The universities on this list can command thousands of families to transact at their full sticker price.
• When the percentage is too high, that is bad. If, for example, a university had 100% of families transacting at full sticker price, that would mean the student body is monolithic in terms of wealth.
• The universities with the largest endowments, like Harvard, did not make this list. Harvard has 28% of families paying full price and would rank 65 in the above chart.