Sooner or later, every argument about college prices arrives at the podium. By the podium I mean the winners’ stand: the short list of famous colleges where today’s CEOs, senators, and judges went to school. Somebody points to that list, and the numbers behind it are real.

Twelve colleges, the eight Ivies plus Stanford, MIT, Duke, and Chicago, enroll less than half of one percent of Americans. Those same twelve account for more than 10 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs, a quarter of United States senators, and three-fourths of the Supreme Court justices appointed in the last half-century.[1] That is the podium.

I did not pull those numbers from a brochure. They are the opening page of a study of elite colleges by three economists, Raj Chetty and David Deming of Harvard and John Friedman of Brown, published in 2026 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Its waitlist comparison is built to answer the question the podium cannot: whether getting in does something for the students who get in, beyond who they already were.[1]

It is not the first study of the question. One of the best known came more than twenty years ago, when two economists, Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger, compared students who were accepted by similar colleges and chose different ones. They found that for the typical student, the famous name made no measurable difference to later earnings. I read their paper all the way through when I wrote about it, and I read this one the same way. I wanted to know exactly what it measures and exactly what it leaves out.

Here is what I found, in four steps. What the podium statistic actually measures. What the study found. Where the price of the seat went. And what to say when the statistic lands on your family’s table.

The statistic answers a question no family asks

Start with the statistic. It answers this question: of the people who became CEOs, where did they go to college?

A family needs the opposite question answered. If my child goes to one of these colleges, what are her chances?

Those two questions sound alike and have very different answers. It is the difference between asking which store sold the winning lottery ticket and asking what your own ticket’s odds are. A store can sell a lot of winners because of who shops there. That count cannot tell you whether buying there improves your ticket.

Think of a championship basketball team. Measure the players and you will find they are all tall. Nobody concludes that the coach makes people tall. The team picked tall players. The podium statistic works the same way. It counts who was let in. It does not tell you what the school did for them.

Here is why the podium was always going to look this way. There are only five hundred Fortune 500 chairs. The country hands out about two million bachelor’s degrees a year.[2] So almost nobody wins. A school that picks the strongest sliver of students, less than one percent of everyone who goes to college, will supply far more than its share of the winners, whatever it teaches. Picking well would be enough to make the podium look this way.

The study’s own authors make a point the podium argument leaves out. Even if you changed who gets into these colleges, the family backgrounds of the country’s top earners would barely change. Their reason, in their own words, using the study’s name for these twelve schools: Ivy-Plus attendees “account for a relatively small share of individuals who reach the top of the income distribution.”[1]

Most people who reach the top of the income distribution never went to one of these twelve schools. The schools are over-represented on the podium, but among top earners they are still a small slice.

They test that with a concrete example. Rich students get three admissions boosts at these colleges: preference for the children of alumni, recruitment for athletes, and higher ratings for non-academic qualities like leadership and activities. Take all three away, and more students from ordinary families would get in. Follow the effect through to the Fortune 500, and the share of CEOs who come from families outside the richest 5 percent would move by four-tenths of one percentage point.[1] On a list of five hundred, that is two names. The number is small because the schools are a small part of where CEOs come from. Even a big change in who they admit is a small change in the whole. The authors expect bigger shifts where these schools hold more of the seats. The same change would raise the share of senators from outside the richest 5 percent by 1.7 percentage points, and of Supreme Court justices by 5.4.[1]

So the podium is real, but for the top of business it is a poor lever. It tells you these schools admit people who tend to end up on top. Whether the schools cause that is a different question, and it is the one the next section answers.

One caution. The people in the study are 33, an age at which almost nobody is yet a Fortune 500 CEO or a senator. So the study cannot count how many of them became leaders. What it can see is who earns in the top 1 percent at 33, who went to an elite graduate school by 28, and who works at a prestigious firm at 25. From those it projects how the family backgrounds of future leaders would change if admissions changed. That is a fair method. It also means the study’s claims about what the seat does to your child’s odds of becoming a CEO are forecasts, not counts. The podium statistic at the top of this piece is a count of today’s leaders. The study’s estimate of what the seat does to your odds of joining them is not.[1]

So how much of the podium is who walked in, and how much is the seat? That is the question the study was built to answer.

Half the top-earner gap is who walked in

The study did something new. Picture two students with equally strong applications to the same elite college. Both are put on the waitlist. Later, one gets the call. The other does not, and goes somewhere else, often another strong college. The study then puts its main estimates on one yardstick: what the same students would have done at a highly selective public flagship, such as Michigan, Berkeley, or North Carolina.

Why does that pair matter so much? Because colleges take students off the waitlist as seats open up, and which waitlisted students get those seats has little to do with differences that predict how they will do later. Once the applications look the same, which one got the call is close to a coin flip. A coin flip is exactly what you need to measure an effect, because it separates what the seat did from who the student already was. Follow both students into their early thirties and compare them, and you get what I think is about as clean a measure of what the seat does as anyone has managed.

The answer is about half. Take the gap between these colleges and the flagships in how many students reach the top 1 percent of earners. Roughly half of that gap is explained by who enrolls.[1] In plain terms, if you kept the schools and swapped the students, about half the gap would follow the students. The other half is what the seat itself does.

Go back to the championship team. Suppose you want to know how good the coach really is. Comparing his team with an ordinary team tells you nothing, because he recruited the best players. You need a third number: how those same players would have done under an ordinary coach. The study estimates exactly that.

Count everyone who attends, rather than only the students off the waitlist. Out of every 100 students at a flagship, about 7 reach the top 1 percent of earners at age 33. Out of every 100 students at these twelve colleges, about 19 do. But had those same 100 gone to a flagship, about 13 would have made it anyway.[3] The recruiting explains the step from 7 to 13. The coaching explains the step from 13 to 19. So the seat itself lifts about 6 students in 100 into the top 1 percent. The other 81 do not get there, and they are the students the averages hide.

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Watch the middle bar. About 13 in every 100 would have reached the top 1 percent from a flagship anyway.

The study also weighs in on an old argument. The things that get rich students in, alumni status, an athletic slot, glowing ratings for non-academic qualities, predict nothing good about how those students do afterward.[1]

Where the other half shows up

The seat’s effect is real. Now ask what it actually changes.

It changes the odds of a rare outcome: earning in the top 1 percent, a small group of very high earners. It does not measurably change the ordinary outcome, reaching the top quarter of earners, which is where a good salary and a secure career live.

Some families want the long shot, and they can afford to chase it. If the bet misses, they absorb the loss and life goes on.

Most families cannot take that risk. What they need is the ordinary outcome: a good, steady income they can count on, with the chance of more as a bonus.

Take the borderline student, the one who barely got in. Going to one of these colleges instead of a flagship raises that student’s chance of reaching the top 1 percent of earners at age 33 by about half. It nearly doubles the chance of attending an elite graduate school. It raises the odds of working at a prestigious firm about two and a half times.[4] Now take the result most families would actually call success: reaching the top quarter of earners. There the study finds no effect it can measure.

The authors also re-ran Dale and Krueger’s older comparison inside their own data. On ordinary earnings it matched Dale and Krueger: for the typical student, at most a modest gain.[4] The same comparison also found the jackpot effects, which is why the authors say their conclusions differ from the older studies.

So the two studies agree about the student in the middle and part ways at the top. The seat does little for that student, and something real for the odds of a jackpot.

Keep the jackpot in proportion. Look again at the 100 students. Thirteen would have reached the top 1 percent from a flagship. Nineteen did.[3] That is 6 more students out of every hundred. It is also a 50 percent improvement, because 6 is about half of 13. Both statements are true. One sounds like a lot. The other sounds like what it is. The odds went up by half, and the student still misses about four times in five.

The study also reports that attending lifts average earnings at 33 by $101,000. That is an average, and an average gets pulled up by a few huge outcomes. Picture the average income in a diner the moment a billionaire sits down at the counter. Everyone else’s income did not change. The authors show the same thing in their own data. That $101,000 is driven by the few students who land at the very top, not by a raise shared by everyone. At the very top, above about $1.8 million a year at 33, the effect is about six times what the same percentage raise for every student would produce.[3] So if your child is a typical admit, the honest expectation is not the average.

For contrast, take the school I went to, Baruch College in New York. I should say that I now chair the Baruch College Fund’s campaign committee. I did not when I wrote the model behind these essays, and nothing in this piece depends on it. In the same research group’s public data on more than 2,000 colleges, between 3 and 4 of every 100 Baruch students reach the top 1 percent in their early thirties, against about 18 at the twelve Ivy-Plus colleges.[5] That data covers a different group of students, which is why the figure is 18 here and 19 above. Those are simple counts, and they reflect who each school admits as well as what it does: Baruch takes 28 of every 100 students from the poorest fifth of families, the twelve Ivy-Plus colleges about 4.

But look at a more ordinary outcome, the top fifth of earners. About half of Baruch’s students reach it. At the twelve Ivy-Plus colleges it is about two-thirds. The jackpot column is where the schools differ. The good-income column is much closer than the podium would ever suggest.

Count the misses

Now count the misses, because every number so far has been a hit rate.

At these twelve colleges, 81 of every 100 students do not reach the top 1 percent at 33. Send the same students to a flagship and 87 do not. The seat buys six fewer misses in a hundred.

And the top 1 percent is the easier prize. The podium counts Fortune 500 chairs, and there are only five hundred of them. The study never follows anyone to a CEO’s office, so here is my own rough arithmetic. It is a headcount, not an experiment. Count the chairs, count the classmates, divide. It is rough, and the note shows the inputs.

An S&P 500 chief executive averages about seven years in the job, so about 70 chairs open up in a typical year.[6] One in eight goes to someone who attended one of these twelve colleges, which is about 9 chairs.[1] About 20,000 students start at those colleges every year. Nine chairs, twenty thousand students.

That is 4 or 5 of every 10,000 students who start there. The other 9,995 or so never sit in one. For graduates of every other college, it is a handful in 100,000. Plenty of those graduates never wanted the job, so the odds for someone who truly tries are better than this. That is true at every college.

So yes, the famous schools’ odds are better, more than fifteen times better by the study’s own shares (the rougher headcount above gives a somewhat smaller gap), and that raw gap includes who they admit as well as what the seat does. Both numbers are still lottery odds, and at any college the ticket almost always loses.

What the seat really opens

One more thing about those firm odds, before they impress anyone at your table. In the study, a prestigious firm means a firm where an outsized share of these twelve colleges’ students go to work.[1] So the measure leans toward these colleges by the way it is built. The authors checked that list against outside rankings, and many of the names match.

The coach comparison needs one correction. A great coach makes his players better. My read is that what these colleges mostly add is something else: more scouts at the games. About 25 of every 100 students land at one of these firms, against about 7 had the same students gone to a flagship.[3] That is the biggest of the study’s three headline effects, and it happens at the hiring door. Meanwhile the average student’s place in the national earnings line barely moves: around the 81st percentile from these colleges, and the same for those students had they gone to a flagship.[3] Nothing in the study shows the players got better. The pattern fits more scouts in the stands.

In my experience, the big consulting firms and law firms on that list recruit heavily at a short list of famous campuses. They let the admissions office do the screening for them. If you got in, they assume you are good. That is the same shortcut the family is buying: pay for the name, and doors open. The study does not test why the odds jump. I think they come from that habit on the employer’s side, and that they follow where the recruiters go.

I saw this from the inside. I got to McKinsey from Baruch, a commuter college in Manhattan, and from the business school at Indiana University, a public flagship, and not one of the nine highly selective ones this study uses as its yardstick. From day one, the firm treated me exactly like my colleagues with famous diplomas. Getting in the door was harder for me. Once inside, the work and the career were the same. If employers looked past the name, the graduate would be the same person. Only the odds of being noticed would change.

So far, two findings. About half the top-earner gap is who walked in. The other half shows up mostly at the very top of the earnings range and at the doors of famous firms. Now the part I keep coming back to.

The price is not in the paper

Nowhere in the results does the price of the seat appear. The earnings are before tax, straight off the tax forms. Nothing in the study subtracts tuition. Nothing counts financial aid against it. And nothing discounts for time. If I offer you $100 today or $100 in thirty years, you take it today, and any investor would tell you the far-off $100 is worth much less. A dollar earned at fifty is worth less than a dollar paid at eighteen. The study never reports that adjustment for the family. That is not carelessness. It is how this research is done. Dale and Krueger measured earnings too, and tuition entered their work only as each school’s average price after aid, never as what a particular family paid. An early version of their study did turn that average price into a rate of return, for students who attended college in the late 1970s.[7]

But the paper makes one exception, in an appendix. When the authors work out what these colleges are worth to the federal government, the math suddenly accounts for taxes and time. They apply a 30 percent tax rate to the extra earnings. They shrink every future dollar back to what it was worth at age 19, at a 3 percent rate after allowing for earnings growth, which is the kind of time adjustment the paper never reports for the family. They conclude that each student who attends produces $615,000 in extra tax revenue, in 2015 dollars, for the Treasury.[8]

Read that again. The only investor who gets a number in the paper adjusted for taxes and time is the government. The family, the one actually writing the check, gets a before-tax snapshot at age 33. The study does not answer what the seat is worth to the person paying for it. Its own appendix shows the authors have the tools to answer that question.

Someone sharp will flip that number around, so let me do it first. If the government’s 30 percent slice of the gain is worth $615,000, the other 70 percent, the student’s part, works out to about $1.4 million. Does that settle it in prestige’s favor? No. That $1.4 million is an average across thousands of students, and we just saw that the average is carried by a few huge winners while the typical student barely moves. The government collects from every student at once, so it really does get the average. That is how a casino makes money: it plays every hand at the table, so the averages work for it. Your family is not the casino. You have one child and one draw. An average built on jackpots is not what a typical ticket pays.

So run the family’s version of the math, the version I have been running for years. Here is what is actually for sale.

• For the typical admitted student, at most a modest gain in ordinary earnings. That is the study’s own re-run of Dale and Krueger.
• About 6 more chances in 100 at a jackpot. Real, but small.
• A bigger jump in the odds of landing at a famous employer, which I read as the recruiting habit above, not a change in your child.
• And the price: often six figures more over four years than the alternative, paid at sticker, with money your family has already paid tax on, up front, at the age when money has the longest time to grow anywhere else.

That is not an investment. That is a lottery ticket with a very fine printer.

The one buyer for whom the math flips

There is one buyer for whom the math genuinely flips, and the study names them: students with weak fallback options, meaning the colleges open to them at home send fewer students to the top.[1] For them the seat changes the most, because the alternative offers the least.

And here the prestige machine contains its one great mercy. The study finds that low- and middle-income applicants stand to gain more than students from the richest families, because rich students who are turned away tend to land at stronger colleges.[1] And the lower-income students among them are the ones the twelve colleges charge the least. All twelve advertise that they meet full financial need, each by its own definition of need.[9] The school decides what your family can afford, and the schools do not all decide it the same way. But for a talented student from a family with little money, the answer is usually close to free. That student collects one of the largest measured benefits at close to the smallest price, and the math says take the seat without hesitation. I said the same thing when I priced out Dale and Krueger, and this study strengthens the advice. The prestige premium is a gift precisely when it is given away.[7]

What to say at the table

Which returns us to the dinner table, where the podium statistic is usually deployed against a family deciding whether to pay full price. You can now answer it in three sentences. The podium counts winners after one of the toughest admissions filters in the country has already run, and the study behind the statistic says changing that filter would barely change the family backgrounds of the people at the top of business. Half the top-earner gap is the students themselves, and for the typical student the earnings difference is modest at most. What is left of that gap is a real but small improvement in lottery odds, which the study prices for the Treasury and never for you.

The check still might say go. If the aid package makes the seat cheap, the odds come nearly free, and cheap odds on a real lottery are a fine thing to own. The habit that gets you to that answer has two steps, in that order. Open your options first: the famous school, the flagship, the school down the road, every offer with its real price attached. Then run your numbers on each one. The famous schools have wonderful graduates, and so does the school down the road. You learn which offer pays by pricing the one in front of you, not by counting justices. You can have your dream. Do not overpay for it. The podium tells you where the winners have been sitting. It has never once told a family what a seat should cost.

Companion Pieces

• What the Prestige Study Left Out
• College Is a Bet, and No One Shows You Your Odds
• A Degree Is Not a Treasury Bond
• Compared to What?

Reference Sources

1. Chetty, Raj, David J. Deming, and John N. Friedman. “Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges.” Quarterly Journal of Economics, February 2026 (paper page, which summarizes the 2023 version). Circulated as NBER Working Paper 31492 (July 2023, revised August 2025). Figures verified against the August 2025 version. Accessed July 6, 2026. Base rates from the Introduction and Figure I: under 0.5 percent of Americans, over 10 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs, 24.0 percent of senators (117th Congress), 71.4 percent of Supreme Court justices appointed from 1967 to 2024. The introduction rounds the last two to a quarter and three-fourths. “Relatively small share” quotation, the 0.4 percentage-point CEO result, the senator shift (1.7 points) from the Introduction, and the justice shift (5.4 points) from Table V, Panel B, both developed in Section 6. Selection share: the paper’s text reports 51 percent for the top-1-percent and elite-graduate-school gaps together (Section 4). For the top 1 percent alone, Figure XIV’s values (7.0, 13.0, 19.4) imply 48 percent, which is why the body says about half. Credential-outcome correlations from Section 5. Leadership outcomes extrapolated from early-career proxies (Section 6). Prestigious-firm definition: firms accounting for 25 percent of Ivy-Plus employment by revealed preference, residualized on predicted pay, validated against Vault rankings (Section 2.3). Heterogeneity by fallback options, Section 4.
2. National Center for Education Statistics. Digest of Education Statistics, Table 322.10. U.S. Department of Education. Accessed September 23, 2026. Postsecondary institutions conferred 2,015,035 bachelor’s degrees in 2021-22.
3. Chetty, Deming, and Friedman. Figure XIIIa: mean income at age 33 of $244,000 (Ivy-Plus) versus $143,000 (flagship attendees reweighted to Ivy-Plus characteristics), difference $101,000. The effect on reaching the top 1 percent of Ivy-Plus incomes at 33, above $1,789,600, is six times what a constant proportional shift would predict, and 1.27 times at the national top 1 percent, above $241,075 (Appendix Table A.12). Figure XIV, “Earnings in Top 1%”: observed share of 19.4 percent for Ivy-Plus attendees and 7.0 percent for flagship attendees, with an implied 13.0 percent had the same Ivy-Plus students attended state flagships (gain of 49 percent). “Work at Prestigious Firm”: 24.7 percent observed, 7.1 percent implied had the same students attended state flagships, and 4.0 percent for flagship attendees (gain of 245 percent). Mean income rank: 81.5 observed, 81.2 implied, and 75.7 for flagship attendees (gain of 0 percent).
4. Chetty, Deming, and Friedman. Waitlist design: raw effect of 5 percentage points on top-1-percent earnings at age 33 (Figure VIIIa, p < 0.05). The 49 percent gain in the previous note is the flagship-rescaled estimate in Figure XIV, which is the basis the body uses. Summary causal magnitudes: top 1 percent +49 percent, elite graduate school +92 percent, prestigious firm +245 percent for the average attendee (Figure XIV), the basis of the body’s 25-versus-7 comparison. For the marginal admit, the introduction gives about 50 percent, nearly twice, and 2.5 times, the three figures the body uses for the borderline student. The abstract says “almost triples.” Top-quartile effect “small and statistically insignificant.” Matriculation-design replication “implies modest impacts… on log earnings, consistent with the findings of Dale and Krueger (2002).” The same replication finds large upper-tail effects, and the authors say their conclusions differ from those studies.
5. Chetty, Raj, John N. Friedman, Emmanuel Saez, Nicholas Turner, and Danny Yagan. “Mobility Report Cards: Income Segregation and Intergenerational Mobility Across Colleges in the United States.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 135, no. 3 (2020), with the college-level data table mrc_table2 published by Opportunity Insights. Accessed September 14, 2026. Students born 1980 to 1982, incomes measured in 2014 at ages 32 to 34 (2017 working paper). Share reaching the top 1 percent of their cohort: CUNY Bernard M. Baruch College 3.6 percent, Harvard 21.1 percent, the Ivy-Plus tier 18.3 percent weighted by enrollment. Share reaching the top fifth: Baruch 52.2 percent, Harvard 65.2 percent. Share of students from bottom-fifth families: Baruch 27.6 percent, Harvard 3.0 percent. Ivy-Plus tier, enrollment-weighted: top fifth 65.7 percent, bottom-fifth origin 3.8 percent. Raw shares, not causal estimates.
6. Author’s arithmetic, a headcount and not the study’s estimate. Inputs: Chetty, Deming, and Friedman, Figure I, 12.5 percent of the 2024 Fortune 500 CEOs they could identify attended an Ivy-Plus college, against 0.8 percent of all college attendees, and Appendix N, 19,689 students in one Ivy-Plus class. Chen, Joyce, and Carol Jerotich. “CEO Tenure Rates.” Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, Equilar, August 4, 2023. Accessed September 21, 2026. Average S&P 500 CEO tenure of 7.2 years in 2022, used as a stand-in for the Fortune 500. The sums: 500 chairs over 7.2 years is about 69 openings a year, one in eight of which is about 8.7 (9 in the body), and 8.7 in 19,689 is 4.4 per 10,000. The twelve colleges’ classes were somewhat smaller when today’s CEOs enrolled (Appendix N), so this rate runs a little low. At Equilar’s median tenure of 4.8 years instead, the same sums give about 104 openings a year and 6.6 per 10,000. For all other colleges, about 60 openings a year against 1.1 million (1990-91) to 2.0 million (2021-22) bachelor’s degrees a year (National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics, Table 322.10) is 3 to 5.5 per 100,000. This headcount divides by entering students at the twelve colleges and by degrees everywhere else, so treat it as rough. The ratio in the body comes from the study’s own shares: 12.5 percent of chairs from 0.8 percent of college attendees, about 16 times the rate for all attendees and about 18 times the rate for everyone else. The headcount’s own rates, about 44 per 100,000 against 3 to 5.5 per 100,000, imply about 8 to 15 times. That range is lower and rougher because it divides by entering students at the twelve colleges and by degrees everywhere else.
7. Dale, Stacy Berg, and Alan B. Krueger. “Estimating the Payoff to Attending a More Selective College.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 117, no. 4 (2002): 1491-1527. And “Estimating the Effects of College Characteristics over the Career Using Administrative Earnings Data.” Journal of Human Resources 49, no. 2 (2014): 323-358. Pre-tax earnings outcomes with no tax adjustment. Tuition enters as a trait of each school, the sticker tuition minus the average aid awarded to undergraduates. The 1999 working paper turned its tuition estimate into a rate of return for students of the 1970s, about 16 percent a year after inflation. The authors called that “extremely high” and said it would fall to 9 percent if tuition doubled. The 2011 working paper (published in 2014) found the return to net tuition “small and never statistically distinguishable from zero” in its model that partly controls for unobserved student traits. Working-paper versions: NBER w7322 and NBER w17159. Selectivity null for the typical matched student. Full treatment in the companion essay “What the Prestige Study Left Out.” collegeroi.org, August 31, 2026.
8. Chetty, Deming, and Friedman, Appendix N: 30 percent average marginal tax rate, 3 percent discount rate net of growth to age 19, $615,000 per-student net present value of additional federal tax revenue, $12.12 billion for the 19,689-student 2013 cohort.
9. Financial-aid policy statements, all twelve institutions, verified against each school’s own published page on July 25, 2026. Harvard, “How Aid Works”: “we meet 100 percent of our students’ demonstrated financial need.” Yale, “Financial Aid Policies”: “all admitted students receive aid that meets 100% of that need,” without loans. Princeton, “Cost and Aid”: “Princeton will meet 100% of your demonstrated financial need with grant aid.” Columbia, “Undergraduate Financial Aid”: “Need-based. Need-blind. Full need.” Penn, “Financial Aid”: “meets 100% of demonstrated financial need with grants and work-study funding.” Brown, “Financial Aid”: “Brown meets 100% of each student’s demonstrated financial need.” Dartmouth, “Introduction to Financial Aid”: “Dartmouth will meet 100% of your demonstrated need.” Cornell, “Access and Affordability”: “Cornell meets 100 percent of demonstrated financial need for all eligible undergraduates.” MIT, “Student Financial Services”: “We meet 100% of an undergraduate’s demonstrated need.” Duke, “Financial Aid”: “Duke meets 100% of demonstrated need for undergrads.” Chicago, “No Barriers”: “We meet 100% of your family’s demonstrated financial need.” Stanford is the one that says the quiet part out loud, committing in its “Bulletin” to “meeting the University-computed financial need of each admitted student.” That is the reason the verb here is advertise. Every one of these schools promises to meet need in full, and every one of them decides for itself what your need is.