<p>Momsdream said:
"How do you know such detail about the applicants coming out of your son's school? Just cruious....."</p>
<p>Hi, just word of mouth from my son. These are top students who applied from my son's school and he knows many of them personally. At our school district, this is pretty public knowledge. Many of them congregated in our basement all year and willingly told him where they applied ED and how many others applied. When my son got deferred from Columbia, there was a party for all deferred/rejected people in someone's house (not ours). And it's not that my son was trying to get this out of people. When someone got rejected from Princeton, she wrote this email to all her friends saying why she thought she got rejected! Then of course, there was a 'rejection party' at someone's house in April.</p>
<p>Oh, and Momsdream, I forgot to mention: at the end of the school year my son's GC had him and some others give a talk to rising seniors about their experiences. Apparently, my son and some others had picked the colleges right and done something right so he wanted them to share it with the entering class. When he was at the GCs office, they talked about admissions success stories and failures etc. etc.</p>
<p>Mini, I understand everything you wrote. In my D's case, she did not apply ED anyway. The funny thing was that we assumed all her schools only had financial aid based on family "need" but not any merit aid. We were almost right, but apparently two of her schools, Smith and Lehigh give merit scholarships and the way we found out was when she opened the acceptance letters! We never knew about the Stride at Smith and the reserach assistantship until the offer was made (on top of the financial aid offer for need there). With Lehigh, the scholarship for merit (and other perks) was so substantial that I could not believe it as we did not know that existed either, and it was on top of the need based aid. But that was her safety school. We did know about her full ride at our state university because it was awarded as a junior (goes to every student ranked first in their class in our state) and due to that, she sent in an app. We did not know about their Honors offer or some other scholarship they gave until April either. These were nice surprises. Her other schools clearly had no merit aid, but we assumed it was true of all her schools.</p>
<p>I admit we did not make her go where the aid offered was the greatest amount. We still let her pick the school she felt best matched what she wanted. It may have even been the lowest amount of aid she got, ironically. But she is happy and we are happy for her and happy we qualified for some aid at least. We hope it will be more next year when D2 is also in college. I realize it was not the best financial decision but it was the right decision for us in terms of what we wanted for her.</p>