Lets say there are two students with same stats.
Wouldn’t they just admit the student who can pay the full tuition?
yeah i think so lol
Um, no.
First off, in holistic admissions, stats are only a part of the equation (and at some schools, a small part).
Second off, no two people will have completely the same background, stats, ECs, and essays (and if they did, the adcoms would be mighty suspicious).
Most schools are not need blind. Generally only the wealthiest schools are.
When a school is need-blind, it means the Financial Aid office receives the FinAid application, and the Admissions Office receives your application. The admissions office does not even know if you have financial aid or not. They can’t make a decision on your ability to pay because they simply don’t know (unless you indicate in an essay you came from the White House or dire poverty)
Actually, most schools are need blind in admissions. Trivial examples are open-admission community colleges, which admit everyone (they are everything-blind in admissions). Less selective state universities that admit by a formula of GPA / rank / test-scores are also obviously need-blind.
But just because a school is need blind in admissions does not mean that it gives good financial aid. Indeed, some schools are infamous for poor financial aid and often give admission with far too little financial aid to be affordable.
Most schools are need-aware I believe. The list of need blind schools on Wikipedia is quite small.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need-blind_admission#U.S._institutions_that_are_need-blind_for_U.S._applicants_and_meet_full_demonstrated_need
That list is of schools that are need blind and claim to meet full need. The latter claim makes this list much smaller than the list of schools that are need blind alone. (Of course, a claim to meet full need may not be that strong a claim, since the school can define “need” as it sees fit.)
Need-blind means that the admissions office and the financial aid office are absolutely not allowed to communicate about applicants before they’ve been admitted. If schools are caught violating this rule, they will be penalized severely. I think it’s safe to assume that schools that say they’re need-blind are, in fact, need-blind, and my experience with applicants over the years supports that assumption.
@marvin100, I’m not sure who would do the punishing, unless you’re saying they’d be punished in the court of public opinion.
In any case, there’s not much reason for colleges to lie about being need-blind, so they generally don’t.
@PurpleTitan The government has won cases against schools for things like this–there was a famous antitrust suit back in the 90’s: http://apps.americanbar.org/antitrust/at-committees/at-exemc/pdf/highered.pdf (warning: .pdf file)
“In 1991, the Department of Justice alleged that eight Ivy League universities1 and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (“MIT”) had unlawfully conspired to restrain trade by “(1) agreeing to award financial aid exclusively on the basis of need; (2) agreeing to utilize a common formula to calculate need; and (3) collectively setting…each commonly admitted students’ family contribution toward the price of tuition.”2 The heart of the alleged conspiracy was the institutions’ agreement establishing the Ivy Overlap Group (“Overlap”), through which the schools undertook to award only need-based financial aid to admitted students and adopted a uniform methodology for calculating the expected family contributions for such students.3”
Isn’t that case more about the financial aid offices of several colleges colluding in financial aid offers, rather than colleges claiming to have need blind admissions offices that are not really need blind?
Of course, being need blind does not preclude the admissions consideration of factors that correlate to either high or low financial need, such as first generation status, legacy status, applying early decision, extracurriculars that tend to correlate with SES, etc…
1991 is an Ice Age ago, in admissions terms, 23 rounds ago.
The more telling factor is parents’ occupations and educations. Of course, nothing says a CEO or neurologist is able to pay full freight. First gen doesn’t automatically mean low income or assets, a legacy parent could be earning some low wage, whatever. At any rate, adcoms don’t tend to guess.
“Applying for Financial Aid” can show up as a check box. Some of those neurologists’ kids do select the box, so do plenty of legacies. When a college commits to need blind, they look deeply at the individual kid, his/her real accomplishments and the self-presentation in the app.
Many need-blind colleges are not looking particularly deeply at applicants as individuals. Community colleges admit everyone who applies. Less selective state universities often just turn the applicant into a number based on GPA, rank, and/or test scores and rank the applicants to the school or in buckets (major/division, in-state/out-of-state, etc.).
Yup, my perspective is higher, right. Ha.
@ucbalumnus - of course that’s a different matter. I was just using it as an illustration that there are significant legal consequences for schools who violate rules like these. That is, “need-blind” policy circumvention, if uncovered, would form the basis of a legally actionable claim.
A year or two ago, George Washington University was “outed” and admitted that it was not actually need blind, although it had been representing to applicants that it was. In fact, the school was “need aware”. Nobody sued the school as far as I know; there were no legal consequences to the lie.
I think the take-home here is that schools that claim to be need-blind are in fact need-blind. Adcoms have better ways to spend their time than sneakily finding out how much $$ you can pay.
So to be clear – since opposing opinions were stated in this thread: there is no basis for @happy1’s and @thegrant’s assertions that colleges, in general, LIE about being need blind. Case in point, the kerfuffle with GW points to the fact when one actually does lie about it.
Like ucbalumnus said, there’s a BIG difference btn a) Need Blind and b) Need Blind and Meets Full Need. And the 1991 anti trust suit was about collusion of private info – not about avoidance of being need blind.
@T26E4 - I made no assertion that colleges lie about being need blind, I simply provided a list of schools that are need blind. I apologize if anyone read such an assertion into my post. I do not think schools lie about being need blind and there is no reason for schools to lie about it. My understanding from admissions officers is that many schools are need-aware because they simply don’t have the financial resources to be need-blind. Need aware schools can still provide excellent aid to students, it just means that a student’s financial needs are a factor in the acceptance process.