<p>Barnard College is my first choice. Everything about this school seems to fit me perfectly.
Which is why I’m choosing to apply Early Decision. I was checking the admission statistics on Wikipedia and what I gathered was that about 392 students applied early decision and the acceptance rate was 47.7. Are your chances higher applying to Barnard early decision vs regular decision?</p>
<p>Statistically, yes they are higher. But the pool of applicants is most likely a bit self-selecting. </p>
<p>One huge factor you must consider is the cost, and since early decision is binding, you need to be able to attend regardless of financial aid offered. Barnard does offer fairly generous financial aid based upon “need”, but if you are accepted ED you will not have any choices to make (among financial aid offers, that is).Yes, if you and your parents decide you cannot afford to attend you can say “no” but then you are back at square one…</p>
<p>So, to sum it all up, yes your “chances” are higher when applying ED…but only do it if you and your parents are sure you can afford to attend there…</p>
<p>“since early decision is binding, you need to be able to attend regardless of financial aid offered”</p>
<p>Not true, at least not at common app schools. From the common app ED instructions:
If the ED FA offer is insufficient to allow attendance, you just say thanks but no thanks, and apply RD elsewhere.</p>
<p>You are correct, vossron. What I was trying to say, here :</p>
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<p>and failed evidently, was that finances are THE thing that (if you are accepted) will be the determining factor when making the decision about attending or not. You won’t have any other offers from colleges that you can compare Barnard’s offer to, and you will be, as I said, back to square one in the college application process. One just needs to be aware of that when applying ED and particularly if financial considerations will be crucial in making this big decision.</p>
<p>I agree. ED should be used only at the one dream school she would attend above all others, if there is any way to make it work financially. ED should not be used if comparing FA offers is important.</p>
<p>Vossron, our FAFSA EFC is low enough that my daughter qualified for Pell grants her first year of college – according to our EFC, I think we should have paid something like $3500. Whatever it was, Barnard’s financial aid award left us paying +$10,000 above and beyond that. As it happens, the Barnard award was more generous than any other private college – my situation is complicated because I am a divorced, self-employed homeowner. </p>
<p>But there is no way that we could have known in December what the choices would be in the spring. </p>
<p>The point Churchmusicmom is making is that you don’t get to hang on to an ED offer to wait to see what the alternatives are. NO ONE who needs significant financial aid should ever shut the door on their financial options. It’s just plain stupid. </p>
<p>The problem that parents run into is often that in the end the choices aren’t a matter of choosing an “affordable” school over one that is not affordable – it can be a choice of which school financially is the least bad of a set of bad options. I could not have paid for my daughter’s schooling at Barnard without taking on a large amount of PLUS loans. I have budgeted it so that I am comfortable with the payments… but I am not happy about all that debt. So I would never characterize it as “affordable” – rather, it fits in the category of something both my daughter and I were willing to make a financial sacrifice for. </p>
<p>I’m assuming that the OP does not need financial aid, as she did not mention it – but I really think that I have to correct this misperception that your post suggests about financial aid. What tends to happen to many families is a case of sticker shock. Barnard does not give any merit aid – and my experience has been that while my FAFSA continually comes up with a number that I would consider very affordable, no school that uses the CSS Profile has offered aid anywhere close to that figure. (And the public schools that relied on FASFA did not meet 100% need – so there was a gap). </p>
<p>We did consider academic reputation to be an important part of the equation – but I honestly don’t know where my daughter would have gone if Chicago had offered her a stronger aid package. It’s naive and irresponsible to tell someone that it doesn’t matter, because they can always turn down an ED spot if they don’t like the financial aid – that is “advice” that can only be given by someone who hasn’t really experienced the reality of a difficult choice, or looking around for ways to fill a gap. The problem is simply that with an ED admission, the family often doesn’t have enough information to make that determination.</p>
<p>Unless there is one school that the student feels she must attend, for whatever reason. That was the case with my daughter, and I did encourage her to apply ED.</p>
<p>As it turns out, she was deferred, and we were able to compare FA packages. Barnard’s was the second best, with Mt. Holyoke being the absolute best.</p>
<p>I am certain that her ED application was a factor in her eventual RD acceptance, but like Calmom, we have a unique set of circumstances. A female humanities major from Long Island is not an especially attractive candidate to any elite eastern school, so I knew my daughter needed an admissions bump.</p>
<p>I find that very few high school aged students who are in the process of applying to colleges (and maybe even quite a few parents!!!) have a real concept of the cost of college. In our particular case, our daughter basically had to choose among a “free” state university (our state offers a fantastic “Hope” scholarship) which really did not offer anything like what she wanted; U Mich (which ended up being MORE expensive than Barnard); and Barnard which was her first choice. As Calmom said, their financial aid was good but still we paid out of pocket (through whatever means we could!) a tremendous amount to keep her there. I mean enough to buy a house in many places. </p>
<p>Unfortunately, the money part of the equation is quite often the determining factor when making college choices. And I cannot imagine the pain of applying ED to your first choice school, getting accepted, and then having to turn it down because you just cannot afford to go there…and then not knowing what other options are out there until RD decisions come out.</p>
<p>Well, the point is… it would be doubly painful in the spring if it turns out the choices at that point are not much better.</p>
<p>Another really important factor: the financial aid award that comes with ED is a tentative package, not final, based on the previous year’s income taxes. A family whose economic situation has improved in the year preceding the year of enrollment might be stunned by the dent on their financial aid eligibility. So again, the school that seemed “affordable” may not be so affordable down the line. The awards that are available in April are based on the final tax returns for the previous years, so they are much more accurate. </p>
<p>To mythmom – it sounds like you were willing to make a significant financial sacrifice, if needed, to help your daughter attend her dream school. That’s fine – but I assume that before that ED application went out, you had already decided that you were willing to borrow a lot if need be. So I think that’s a little different: its a matter of saying, “even if we can’t actually afford X, we will beg or borrow whatever we have to in order to make it happen.” So you have made a decision to disregard the economic risk. </p>
<p>But that goes back to Churchmusicmom’s advice: don’t apply ED unless willing to pay full freight if it comes to that. Some people are willing to pay MORE than they can afford for things that are top priorities in their life, knowing that they may have to make significant sacrifices in other areas. I suppose that some applicants have simple enough financial profiles that that they can get a ballpark sense of likely aid – but most applicants aren’t in that situation. I guess the real question would be: does a person have any assets or income whatsoever that will be considered by the college but is not reflected in the FAFSA? and if not, can that person meet their FAFSA EFC?</p>
<p>I do know that Barnard is very formulaic in the way they calculate aid – they aren’t pulling numbers out of a hat.</p>
<p>As a student whose first choice was Barnard, apply ED. I didn’t because of the money thing, got waitlisted (and rejected 4 months later), and while I was visiting other colleges I was accepted to had to meet other girls with seemingly the same qualifications who had gotten in. As it happens, the school I’m attending actually wants me and is paying most of my tuition for me. So no complaints there. But if you really have your heart set on Barnard, I’d go ED.</p>
<p>calmom, we just see it differently. 
For the student who has that one dream school above all others, the question here is whether to apply ED or RD, knowing that ED often confers some (albeit unknown) admission advantage. This can be important at need-aware schools (but I found a reference that says Barnard is need-blind) where FA funds can run out at RD time. In this case, if she needs FA, she has to decide if she cares about comparing FA offers from various schools, or if she wants to give herself the best chances of being accepted at her dream school. I, for one, don’t think weighing this consideration is stupid, naive or irresponsible. Some schools like students who like one school more than all the others.</p>
<p>Needy students should know that they shouldn’t avoid applying ED to their one dream school out of fear that they would somehow be locked in to attending if the FA given is not enough. They can (sadly) turn down that ED FA offer and apply RD to other schools they may be better able to afford.</p>
<p>Nobody here is saying it would be “stupid, naive or irresponsible” to apply ED. And you are correct, ED does not “lock” you in to attending a school you cannot afford. But there are quite a few kids who look at these boards who do not have their parents all that involved in this college application process. I have read and critiqued quite a few essays of students who have had no parental input or advice. And I can only imagine the distress of that student who applies ED, gets accepted and only THEN realizes that they cannot attend that dream school because their parents cannot afford to send them.</p>
<p>It just needs to be a carefully considered decision involving both the student and the parents of that student, IMO.</p>
<p>“Nobody here is saying it would be “stupid, naive or irresponsible” to apply ED.”</p>
<p>See post #6.</p>
<p>“And I can only imagine the distress of that student who applies ED, gets accepted and only THEN realizes that they cannot attend that dream school because their parents cannot afford to send them.”</p>
<p>The same disappointment applies at RD time. If the disappointment comes at ED time, she has time to find a new favorite for the RD round.</p>
<p>
Barnard IS need-blind in admissions, but “need aware” and “need blind” has absolutely NOTHING to do with institutional policies toward financial aid. Many colleges are “need-blind” but do NOT guarantee to meet 100% need of all incoming students.</p>
<p>Barnard does happen to promise to also meet 100% need, as it defines it, at least through the first 3 years – but in general it would be more likely for financial aid funds to run out at a need-blind school… since the need-aware schools may simply opt to either reject needy students or leverage their aid dollars to favor the top of their applicant pool.</p>
<p>A person who doesn’t understand the difference between “need blind” and offering 100% need is not really in a position to give good advice to financially needy college applicants. The advice clearly rests on a faulty assumption about financial aid.</p>
<p>Calmon, I think you read our situation correctly, but we did trust that the horrendous place H had gotten his business into would translate into some FA money. And it did.</p>
<p>For some reason, when RD round came we found all the FA offers fairly similar, with Mt. Holyoke being at the top, and Fordham being at the bottom.</p>
<p>But I was in a somewhat risk taking mode, determined to make the situation work and trusting that we’d pull out if it didn’t.</p>
<p>I do suspect, just in our case, if the FA hadn’t been enough she would have gone to Binghamton – the FA not being adequate from any.</p>
<p>For us, with two kids, the offers were all very similar.</p>
<p>I know other people’s experience is very different. But none of the schools involved were “gap schools” except Fordham, and their aid was appalling.</p>
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<p>The point is, in December when the ED offer comes, the family does not have adequate information TO MAKE THAT DETERMINATION. The aid award they are given is subject to change, and there is no basis for comparison.</p>
<p>Anyone who has spent any time reading the posts in the financial aid threads would know what a problem this represents. There are plenty of students who accept ED offers and then find out to their dismay in the spring that the offer they have in April is not as generous as the tentative one put forth in December – and of course at that point there are no other options.</p>
<p>^^^ Yes, good clarification, thanks. Our D1 attended a need-aware school that now guarantees 100% need for four years; it used to be need-blind and gapping, but they switched, considering it “almost cruel.” D2 attends one of the need-blind and gapping schools, infamous for its poor financial aid. The result seems to be a high proportion of well-to-do students; only the very top needy students get sufficient aid.</p>
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Fordham offers merit aid and I was surprised at how generous their offer was to my daughter. It wasn’t as high as the need based aid from Barnard, but it compared favorably to the award from Chicago. But it did very clearly include a chunk of merit money.</p>
<p>“There are plenty of students who accept ED offers and then find out to their dismay in the spring that the offer they have in April is not as generous as the tentative one put forth in December – and of course at that point there are no other options.”</p>
<p>Well, then what we need (and probably can’t easily get) are applicable statistics for the percentage of students whose final aid package is so much smaller than the initial estimated aid package that they cannot attend their dream school. We should quantify “plenty.”</p>
<p>Vossron, if you spent any time reading the Financial Aid forum on this board you would see them posting in a panic every spring. We don’t need statistics – if it happens to 1 kid who is screwed over pretty badly.</p>