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So – my son was denied admission to BYU Provo. Okay, that’s fine. He wasn’t totally on board with going there anyway, but it got me thinking…
BYU – Idaho accepts 99% of their applicants.
For my son, Idaho is his backup to his backup.
He has great test scores, quite a number of college credits already, great kid, etc. so there was no way he wouldn’t get in to Idaho, but this post isn’t about Idaho. I bring it up because one of the stipulations for Idaho becoming a 4-year school was that they needed to be as inclusive as possible…hence the low admission requirements and the track system.
We fund church schools with our tithing money (at least, in part).
So, we’ve (my family) been paying into these church schools all of our lives through tithing.
And now my son is denied admission to Provo.
And I am just not sure how I feel about that.
:think: Why can’t Provo be as inclusive as Idaho? I mean, it’s a church school, meant for church members, funded (in part) by church members (yes, even those who live in Zimbabwe), but not all church applicants are allowed in.
Why does this rub me the wrong way?
It really isn’t like he has been dreaming about Provo his whole life, it’s more like he applied as a “why not?” kind of deal, so I promise we aren’t heartbroken, but this tithing thing/admission thing is really bothering me.
You might enjoy reading one of these 2 articles I did on the BYU subsidy: https://bycommonconsent.com/2013/07/22/does-the-church-over-subsidize-byu/ https://wheatandtares.org/2013/06/04/does-the-church-over-subsidize-byu/ Your tithing dollars are paying the tuition of the kid who beat yours out. Think about that for a minute.
Full disclosure, all four of my children applied to and were accepted at Provo, one graduated and two are currently enrolled (the other is on mission deferment). Idaho was the back up plan for one of them. (Note that my daughter’s BYU experience partly accounts for her current inactivity.) That said I have wondered about this myself. I think part of the reason Idaho has such a high acceptance rate is because no one wants to go there. That’s why some of our state schools have really high acceptance rates – they’re the less desirable of the bunch. Yet Idaho continues to grow. And I am aware of Hawkgrrrl’s point that tithing is paying for other kids who are probably less qualified than kids I know who did not get into Provo. (This is true of missionaries from other countries as well – they aren’t paying $400/mo like my kids, we’re all paying for them.)
I’d be all in favor of expanding BYU to be more inclusive. They are building all the time, so it’s not like they couldn’t afford to. I’m not saying that kids who don’t really try or want to go there be allowed just because their parents are American and pay tithing and are possibly making them go there. I am saying that I think they could take more deserving kids who would benefit from the experience. I’d also be in favor of “upgrading” Idaho to be a more respected institution and possibly even building or buying another campus (like Southern Virginia). Again, I think they can afford it.
In all honesty I don’t know how one of my kids got in. It surprised him, too, and he was actually fine with the idea of going to Idaho (I wasn’t). I do think it has a lot more to do with things besides grades and tests scores, although they do count. From what our area CES guy says Seminary counts heavily, as does the bishop’s recommendation. He also says lots of community and school involvement (including sports, music, art and drama) counts more than things like being teachers quorum president. And Eagle Scout counts for boys and Young Womanhood Recognition counts for girls.
hawkgrrrl wrote:You might enjoy reading one of these 2 articles I did on the BYU subsidy:
https://bycommonconsent.com/2013/07/22/does-the-church-over-subsidize-byu/ https://wheatandtares.org/2013/06/04/does-the-church-over-subsidize-byu/ Your tithing dollars are paying the tuition of the kid who beat yours out. Think about that for a minute.
Oooh, will read these tonight, but I agree that MY money is paying for the kid who beat my son! lol.
Ugh.
DarkJedi wrote:I’d be all in favor of expanding BYU to be more inclusive. They are building all the time, so it’s not like they couldn’t afford to.I am saying that I think they could take more deserving kids who would benefit from the experience. I’d also be in favor of “upgrading” Idaho to be a more respected institution and possibly even building or buying another campus (like Southern Virginia). Again, I think they can afford it.
In all honesty I don’t know how one of my kids got in. It surprised him, too, and he was actually fine with the idea of going to Idaho (I wasn’t).
Love the idea of expanding campuses.
I’d love to see BYU more inclusive – it reeks of the BOM story of the Rameumptom – “we are better than our brothers.”
To your point of taking kids who could benefit more…what if the church offered to fly students from countries who don’t have access to good colleges out to Provo to be a student?
I mean, talk about diversity!
I’m sure that would be TOO much diversity for Utah and it would never happen, but what if?!
:clap: So you said that you were against Idaho. How come?
Did you also go to Provo?
When I look at my peers who graduated from Provo and those who came from ANY other school (including Idaho), there is such an attitude from Provo alumni that is not found in other students from other schools.
My friends who went to our large state university (very competitive) aren’t even as snotty as the BYU alum who are around here.
So odd.
But, the tithing thing is what gets me – the Savior would be looking for those who were downtrodden and would be bringing them to attend school – He wouldn’t be cutting them off, ya know?
My wife went to BYU – Provo as a Lutheran. That’s inclusion. This also hits home to me. I have some of my kids that have gone to Provo and some that have not. One of the ones that didn’t refused to go to BYUI as he said it is 4 years of EFY rules. I think he is basically right. I also read that Canadian churches are required to disclose finances. They are also not allowed to move all the surplus back to another country tax free (I can understand that). But they can move it to support education efforts across boarders if the education institution includes Canadians. So at least for several years any “extra” funds in Canada were transferred right to BYU. As a Canadian that would add even a bit more “hmmm?”
My brother-in-law married into a very wealthy Mormon family. They have made a lot of donations to BYU; perhaps coincidentally, no member of this family has been denied admission to BYU. My husband is unemployed. We are expected to pay ten percent of his unemployment checks in tithing. Some small part of that donation is going subsidize the college education of my incredibly wealthy nieces and nephew.
Yeah, that sticks in my craw a little.
They have to be somewhat selective. Schools are accredited and one of the factors the accreditors look at is graduation rates, the percentage of people that finish their degrees. I’m sure they have no shortage of statistics to help them make those determinations so they can maintain high percentages. They probably also try to build up academic prestige by being super selective. If they let in anyone it would devalue how an education from that school is perceived. Schools also have regional based quotas. I don’t want to offend anyone, I’m not implying anything about anyone’s children. Now that that’s out of the way: E.g. they’ll only accept X number of applicants from Utah County and accept Y number of applicants from Alabama, etc. If you’re a kid applying from Utah county the competition is more fierce because they have a restriction on the number of people they’ll take from Utah County, otherwise the school would fill up with Utah County residents. If you are applying from Alabama your chances are higher because there are much fewer applicants and because they want more than just people from the MorCor making up the student body.
Now I can’t say for sure that BYU works this way but I know that most state run schools work this way (county by county quotas) so I can easily imagine this being the case for BYU as well.
I didn’t go to BYU and my kids aren’t going but I helped subsidize educations there all the same. I don’t get too caught up in that though. I mean… I’ll never have an opportunity to shop at City Creek either. Paying tithing is purely altruistic. You really can’t pay in expecting to get something back in return.
QuestionAbound wrote:I’d love to see BYU more inclusive – it reeks of the BOM story of the Rameumptom – “we are better than our brothers.”
To your point of taking kids who could benefit more…what if the church offered to fly students from countries who don’t have access to good colleges out to Provo to be a student?
I mean, talk about diversity!
I’m sure that would be TOO much diversity for Utah and it would never happen, but what if?!
:clap: I think the reason this doesn’t happen is because college is often cheaper (and many times free for the best and brightest) in the country the people would come from. I think that is part of the point of the Perpetual Education Fund (an idea I wholeheartedly support). It could be argued that the education gained at BYU is better than one might get in his or her own country, but it could also be argued that degrees in most other countries are far more focused on the major and much less on liberal arts (like American universities, including BYU, are). A student studying engineering in Britain or India studies engineering, not English literature, global history or art.
Quote:So you said that you were against Idaho. How come?
My reasons are biased and more personal in nature, but I believe BYUI to be academically inferior to BYU (in part because they take 99% of applicants) and because if you think honor code enforcement and Gestapo tactics are bad in Provo, you ain’t seen nothin’ if you haven’t been to Rexburg.
Quote:Did you also go to Provo?
I did not, my wife did and she and I disagree about the moral value of a BYU education. She most definitely pressured my daughter to go there, and that hasn’t turned out so well (although I won’t argue that she didn’t get a good education in her field there or that it wasn’t a relative bargain). One of my sons is an engineering major and could have written his own ticket. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a BYU engineering degree, but he could have gotten a more prestigious degree if he wanted (and cost did play a factor – I live in the east, BYU costs about the same as a state school here). [/quote]
When I look at my peers who graduated from Provo and those who came from ANY other school (including Idaho), there is such an attitude from Provo alumni that is not found in other students from other schools.
Quote:My friends who went to our large state university (very competitive) aren’t even as snotty as the BYU alum who are around here.
I see that too – and I live near an Ivy.
And Nibbler does make good points. Only about a third of BYU students are from Utah, and I think that’s on purpose. Being from a state where the LDS population is less than 1% probably significantly increased my kids’ likelihood of admission (although not everyone who applies from my state gets in – even some smart ones).
Another strike against BYU: https://bycommonconsent.com/2016/09/16/not-even-close-faculty-gender-balance-at-the-byus/ BYU Idaho only has 11% female faculty. The reason I know this is that I was mentioning to my friend Michael that my son who attended there in fall had 6 classes and no female teachers, which seemed really odd to me. My friend Michael who is provost at a different university pulled these publicly available stats for the above post that also got picked up by the SLTrib, although they assumed the “friend” Michael was talking to was a man (but it was actually a woman – me!) Kind of a little added irony to that whole gender issue.
My son doesn’t want to go back to BYU-I. My older son went to BYU-P for one year and then didn’t go back and left the church. He hated pretty much everything about it. I suspect he only got in because he graduated high school in Singapore. My second son hates BYU-I and doesn’t want to go back, but I can’t tell how much of that is the school vs. 1) normal growing up stuff, 2) him being a big time introvert and feeling lonely there, 3) the terrible weather there (although he’s fall / spring track which is workable), and 4) being so far from home. Personally, I think the campus experience at BYU-I is better than Provo, although the school is definitely inferior. Everything is new and nice–housing is all new and off campus (no dorms). It’s a good sized community of students.
The BYUs have their issues (some of which are serious), but BYU-Provo not accepting all applicants is not one of them. I have worked in college admissions for the past eight years. Here is my blunt, abbreviated response:
1) Selective Admissions, which is the only type BYU-Provo can have, is a difficult thing to implement. It is impossible to do it in a way that won’t upset lots of people who believe their child deserves to attend one particular institution – and impossible is not hyperbolic. It. Is. Impossible.
2) BYU-Provo can’t take all applicants. It simply can’t – for too many reasons to list here. However, the biggest reasons are reputation and physical space. BYU-Idaho is expanding specifically to address that issue.
3) Yes, your tithing helps pay for other students to attend BYU-Provo – but other people’s tithing helps to pay for your kid(s) to attend BYU-Idaho and/or BYU-Hawaii, if they choose to attend. That tithing (and other funds) makes it possible, through huge subsidies, for many students to attend the BYUs who would not be able to do so otherwise. The tuition is ridiculously low, even compared to most public schools across the country, but especially within private education. The Church also is expanding the Pathways program in an attempt to allow all members worldwide to get a college degree of some kind. It isn’t there yet, but that is the goal.
I am sorry your child wasn’t accepted to the first choice, but, personally, I have no problem with tithing being used to try to make a college education affordable for all members who want to attend a church school. The fact that the Church has more than one such school, subsidizes them so heavily, and is trying to expand to meet the demand says something important to someone who works in the industry.
About BYU Provo and attitude: Such attitude is obnoxious.
For me, I no longer list BYU on my CV. It is not a positive. Plus, I hated my time there. My second undergraduate degree and grad school gets listed.
My daughter and SIL both have engineering degrees from Provo. They found it got them job interviews in Utah, Idaho, and Arizona. BYU was seen as a neutral or negative in some other areas of the country.
I have mixed feelings about this. I totally get the argument that you’ve paid tithing and so getting a piece of BYU-P should come with the deal. But when I look at it from the perspective of an educator, diverse classes (in terms of overall ability, for example) are really hard to teach. Give me a team of A listers and I can turn them into a powerful team of Certified Gold Platinum graduates. Give me a mix of A-listers and B, C, and D-listers, and the tendency is to reduce the level to the average, or lower common denominators. You can sometimes get complaints from students at both ends of the bell curve if the class is massive. Give me a group of students who are on the low end of the academic spectrum, and its easier to teach at a level they all appreciate, but the overall level of achievement and expectation is usually lower — largely due to the impact of student evaluations.
Now, you said your offspring have good grades, so this may not apply, but I do see value in schools where they can attract the best and brightest because it really helps those people get the most academic achievement and challenge.
I will say, from a StayLDS perspective, it’s best to expect nothing from your tithing dollars. That becomes really hard, I know, when they start demanding things that you find hard to give (on top of tithing), when participation starts affecting your mental or physical health (as it did me), or when the experience doesn’t seem worth the price tag. But there are ways of dealing with that I think.
There are times when it’s good to have high expectations, and times when it’s good to have low expectations. When it comes to what you get out of the Church experience, I think it’s time to have low expectations for the sake of your own happiness.
If one thing is consistent about my church experience, when I have high expectations, the church never fails to disappoint!
While I agree that traditionally, no school can accept all students, that’s why BYU-Idaho exists. It really does accept all comers. But the only think I”ll add is that with the addition of online studies, perhaps the church CAN accept all applicants. It seems there should be a way forward.
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