Thanks for the positive words, guys. Unfortunately, the problem (in terms of our size) is that the scholarships we have to give out have remained pretty much the same, while tuition goes up a lot every year. In fact, I think there was a tuition raise not too long ago that was actually EQUAL to the size of the average scholarship that the Mustang Band can give out.
So basically, we can't really recruit people to come here, or provide money for people that wouldn't be coming here otherwise; we have to resort to getting people that would be coming to SMU anyway, and just help them out a little bit with the small scholarships we have. It'd be nice if the school would give us more money to increase our size, but they haven't seen fit to do that yet, in spite of how much praise we always seem to get for the job we do (from both the adminstration and fans, even those of opposing teams).
I know a lot of people who have visited SMU to see our band, and love what they see, and would love to come here and be in our band, but they just can't afford it and we can't help them enough to get them here. The day that changes is the day we'll get our numbers back.
Although, given that we can STILL outplay bands that are two or three times our size (see TCU), we're still doing alright.
Posted: Mon Dec 01, 2003 10:35 am