Ha! Thats clever of EMU, offering to pay the LAST two years of a 4-year program (i.e. the qualifying students pay tuition on their own during the first two-- typically much higher attrition--years). AND they strongly encourage (though apparently not require?) that you live on campus all 4 years.

Especially when you consider it's one or the other: Either a 20 ACT or 3.0 high school GPA. If a student can't obtain one of those, they likely don't belong in college.

This might be a desperate measure, but it's probably a smart one for EMU. They're in an pretty bad enrollment free fall, and they have a low rate of success in graduating kids who start as freshmen. This would address both issues, and ideally improve the academic profile.

This nugget from Crain's last spring shows how dire it is: (EMU's) total enrollment as of this winter semester is 18,500, according to data from the university's website. That's down nearly 2,000 from last fall when enrollment was at 20,313. Total fall enrollment in 2012 was 23,502.

A drop of 5,000 in six years puts serious strain on every aspect of the budget. They gotta get creative, and this is one way to do it.

That's because the whole "front porch of the university" "Flutie Effect" nonsense is a myth meant to justify athletic spending and more precisely justifty athletic subsidies. As if spending a dollar on athletics magically creates a dollar and a half of academic worth, so heaven forbid the university actually spend that dollar directly on........I don't know...........academics in the first place.