<p>Shrinkrap, regarding the number 60, are you referring to post #114? I don’t think that post is saying that only 60 or so schools take the applicant’s financial position into account when making admissions decisions.</p>
<p>I think Shrinkrap was referring to only about 60 colleges that <em>claim</em> to be need-blind. Some of them are now admitting they may need to give up that policy - others are just quietly changing their policy without really publicizing it.</p>
<p>bclintok said in Post #114:
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<p>I think its the combination of “need-blind” and “meets 100% of need” that limits it to 60 or so colleges. If admissions are “need-blind”, but are not providing enough financial aid to the applicants, their yield will decrease because they may be admitting students who simply cannot afford to attend.</p>
<p>This is an interesting thread. Thanks for all the views.</p>
<p>Having reviewed numerous college guidebooks and CDSs for the past several years as our D has been considering schools, one matter arising from an issue mentioned by bclintock in Post 102 has always struck me as curious. Perhaps someone might be able to shed some light on it?</p>
<p>Over the past five years or so, the percentage of students receiving need-based FA at HYPSM - indeed, at a number of highly selective universities and LACs (none of which offers merit aid) - appears to have remained fairly constant. Corresponding with the figures expressed by bclintock for Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, during the past few years, the percentage of FA is cited at some of these schools as being around 40%, at others around 50%, and at others around 60%. But it is never higher or lower. My background isn’t in statistics or probabilities, but it does interest me that there has been so little annual deviation. (Again, please note that I’ve only been looking at examples from roughly the past five years, hence my observations are confined to the period from 2005-date. I well imagine there’s been a significant upward trend in FA over a longer period.)</p>
<p>Given the ‘need-blind’ process, what are the odds of such a relatively restricted range of FA happening year in and year out at a given school? In other words (and taking it to a logical extreme), it is conceptually easy to imagine that in some years, 100% of incoming students at one of the most highly selective and need blind schools might receive FA. Or, conversely, that in some years 0% of students might receive FA. This seems not to happen, however. Instead, year after year, approximately 40-60% of students in this institutional ‘tier’ receive FA. Have the past few years been a statistical anomaly?</p>
<p>I know I’m in a minority on this viewpoint, but…</p>
<p>I think if your kid has better odds because you are ‘full pay’ who cares if its called “buying your way in”. In a sense it is! It is not just about paying full price, its about your kids having BETTER ODDS because they are full pay (and especially if they might not qualify if they were not full pay). And I say this as someone whose kids could not possibly qualify for financial aid, and whose kids will likely have an edge because they are full pay. </p>
<p>But geez, I’m not also going to get all sensitive about the choice of words used in a newspaper article. If you are a family fortunate enough to be in this situation, stop whining already over a stupid headline! Get a real problem!</p>
<p>If you are a family fortunate enough to be in this situation, stop whining already over a stupid headline! Get a real problem! </p>
<p>this further exacerbates the title of the thread… there is a vast difference between need based and a family fortune… I have one child and i am full pay to a $41,000 tuition school…if i had more than one child i would probably not be able to afford the school…i will change my life style for a while to make sure i have the finances completely under control…i can afford it because of working hard and good money management…if we could just get passed the title of this thread, 99% of us are in agreement…
…there is no doubt that if a student knows for a fact that there is no way in hell he will ever qualify for need based financial aid or a merit scholarship , then that student would be wise to make that fact known to the admissions office early in the process…the student will probably be met with silence from the admissions counselor…admission counselors at most private schools, if not all, are not allowed to ask that question…my son did not use this tactic, but the fact becomes clear when the deadlines for financial aid scholarships have passed…if you are applying ED and want an edge, it will probably help…however, no one will ever admit to that…my son was accepted before the deadline for scholarships…that makes me feel good…he got in on his own merits…
another huge factor for those who are able to pay, for what ever reason, is the stress factor…it is stressful to commit to such a pricey school but i think the stress of not having the choice would be very troublesome…therefore, i do not have a problem with merit based or need based students even if i am supplementing to a small extent…i have been fortunate in my life and i am grateful for it…furthermore, the majority of these students raise the test scores of the school that my son will attend which in turn helps the reputation of the school…these universities that are so selective would not have the exceptional standardized test scores that they do without the merit scholarships coupled with the financial aid to bridge the gap…so i say more power to us all for getting it done one way or another…we are all on this sight debating this subject while 99% of the country has no clue…good luck to all with future finances and the education of your children…all of you reading this are truly exceptional people</p>
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I have a fewthoughts about this. First, I suspect there these schools have a fairly steady supply of full-pay applicants who don’t need a financial tip to get in–this is probably the case with a lot of the legacies (a different kind of hook). It may not be politically correct to point this out, but there are probably proportionally more rich kids with the stats to get into Harvard than poor kids.</p>
<p>Second, if one were very cynical, one might think that the ideal admit for these schools is a student who has financial need, but not that much need. If you take a lot of kids like that, it doesn’t cost you as much, and yet you get to tout the fact that 60% of your students are receiving need-based aid. You can imagine a modified version of the Brandeis method, where they go down the list, but consider just how much need one student has, versus several others with less need.</p>
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<p>True. In fact, I am pretty sure that places like HYP could fill their entire classes with full-pay kids and not suffer any significant deterioration in student caliber. Quite possibly, if they eliminated all special preference admissions and made the process truly blind (blind not just to need, but also to race, athletics, type of high school, geography, etc) they might end up with a larger fraction of full pay students than they currently do. Many of these would be prep school kids, even more would be from wealthy suburban school districts.</p>
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<p>I don’t have one iota of regret over giving my kids any advantage due to being full-pay. H and I worked darn hard to get to that point. If full-pay tipped the scales, oh well, so be it. Not going to lose sleep. </p>
<p>I don’t see the difference between leveraging full-pay and leveraging any of the other things parents do for their kids, whether it’s buying a house in a top public school district, sending the kid to private school, paying for expensive tutoring, lessons or coaching to facilitate athletic or EC success, etc. Spare me the sanctimony!</p>
<p>Lafalum, the spouse read the entire Gladwell New Yorker out loud to me. I was saving the link for the next time that the good old “paying for an expensive college is like paying for a luxury car” discussion broke out. :)</p>
<p>bclintonk’s explanation of how colleges want to spend more to boost their USNWR ranking is still rankling. We don’t read or consider the USN rankings, so I was unaware of how spending per student or faculty pay folded into the rankings. The nearest comparison to this kind of system is K-12 schools. For public schools, we consider how much is spent per student, but only in the context of student performance. Spending $10k a student in a district where the students do well is a positive. Spending $10k per head in a district where the dropout rate is sky-high and where few students continue on to college? It’s a waste of money. Private schools boast about their facilities and extras, but much of that comes from fundraising. </p>
<p>If elite private colleges were forced to trim $1k in spending per student per year, does anyone think it would truly impact the caliber of their education? If full-pay parents are turning down their own thermostats, why keep them turned up at their children’s colleges?</p>
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<p>I’m no statistician, but I think there’s a fairly simple statistical explanation. Suppose the pool of applicants at HYPSM is fairly consistently around 50% full-pay and 50% with need. Thus if you randomly chose a name out of that pool, there would be a 50-50 chance that the applicant would be full-pay. In order words, it’s like a coin toss—roughly a 50-50 probability that a single toss will come up “heads.”</p>
<p>Now think about how many consecutive coin tosses are involved when a need-blind school makes its admissions decisions. Take Yale, for example, which in 2009 made approximately 2,000 offers of admission out of an applicant pool of about 25,000 to fill its entering class of 1,300. What are the odds if you toss a coin 2,000 consecutive times that it would come out “heads” every single time? Conceptually possible, but the odds are infinitesimally small (1 in 2-to-the 2,000th power, whatever that is). If you toss the coin twice, there’s a 1 in 4 chance you’d get “heads” both times, a 1 in 4 chance you’d get “tails” twice, and a 2 in 4 (50%) chance you’d get one heads and one tails (in either sequence). In 3 tosses, there’s a 1 in 8 chance that you’d get “heads” three consecutive times, a 1 in 8 chance you’d get “tails” both times, and a 6 in 8 (75%) chance you’d get either two “heads” and one “tails” or vice versa, in varying sequences. In 10 tosses, there’s a really tiny probability (1 in 1,024) that you’d get all “heads”; far more likely that it’s somewhere in between, but the odds are greatest that it would be somewhere between 4 and 6 “heads,” in varying sequences. If you toss the coin 2,000 consecutive times, chances are quite strong you’ll come up with somewhere around 50% “heads,” give or take a few. Someone better at statistics than I am can perhaps give us some actual figures here. Or try it with a couple of thousand coin tosses if you like. The more tosses you’ve made, the closer you’ll get to 50% heads over time, with some minor statistical “noise” as you get some seemingly freakish runs of all “heads” for a while, or all "tails’; but over an infinitely long sequence of coin tosses, you should get approximately 50%. A sequence of of 2,000 coin tosses isn’t infinitely long, obviously, but it is long enough that you should end up in the 50% ballpark, with some minor statistical “noise.”. </p>
<p>Now that doesn’t explain why the applicant pool would be consistently 50% full-pay and 50% with need from year to year—or more precisely, why the smaller pool of those in the overall applicant pool “most likely to be admitted” would be 50% full-pay and 50% with need. But if you think about it, there are common-sense explanations for that. The demographic profile of the applicant pool is likely to be pretty consistent from year to year because the applicants are self-selected, and they tend to come from certain types of schools, and have certain types of educational and family backgrounds, and to have attained a certain level of educational achievement, and to have been encourage by the same types of teachers, GCs, parents, and peers. Not that they’re all identical to each other—there’s a fair bit of diversity within that pool. But one year’s applicant pool is likely to look a lot like the next year’s applicant pool. They’ll get a predictable pile of well-qualified applicants from certain fancy private schools and the stronger public high schools in the Northeast; a smaller number from a fairly predictable range of schools in the Midwest; a bunch from certain types of schools in California; and a certain number that perhaps demographically don’t fit the “likeliest suspects” profile but are just strong candidates who come out of the woodwork. Things just don’t change that much from year to year: the schools don’t change that much, and the types of students to whom these schools are most appealing don’t change that much.</p>
<p>One thing that does change from time to time is the colleges’ FA policies. I suspect a few years ago it may have been the case that as many as 60% of the students at Harvard and Yale were full-pays. But now those schools award need-based FA to kids from families earning up to $200,000—or even more if there’s a second kid in college. That’s pushed the figure closer to 40% full-pay and 60% with need.</p>
<p>Bclintonk: </p>
<p>I am so appreciate of your reasoned and informative posts. It really keeps this thread on track with the issues.</p>
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<p>Well, that’s obviously the case. The median household income for the U.S. is right around $50,000. Harvard gives need-based FA to anyone with a household income up to $200,000. And we know that about 40% of Harvard’s undergrads are full-pay; so we can presume that somewhere around 40% of Harvard undergrads come from households with incomes in the $200K+ range, which would put them in the top 5% or so of household incomes. (We can’t assume there’s a perfect match because some of the full-pays may come from families with lots of accumulated wealth but less than $200K income; while at the same time, there may be some on FA with incomes over $200K, because of a sibling in college or some other factor that Harvard deems “need” despite that level of income). So that, I take it, is prima facie evidence that the candidates Harvard deems “most qualified” come disproportionately from the most affluent families. </p>
<p>There’s nothing surprising or politically incorrect about this. It’s been common knowledge for a long time that high SAT scores correlate positively with family income and wealth; some want to say this is genetic, and it may partly be that, but it’s also clearly cultural. Wealthier families tend to value education, and invest in it, and inculcate those values in their children, and guide them to successful K-12 educational outcomes at far higher rates than those at lower income levels. Families with higher incomes are also far more likely than the median household to have parents with college or post-graduate educations, who “know the ropes” on the college admissions process and can effectively guide their kids through the process of constructing a HS career and an application package that will be attractive to elite colleges. That’s not to say there aren’t plenty of well-qualified applicants among the less affluent. But statistically, all these advantages favor the wealthy; so it shouldn’t be surprising that a disproportionate share of the entering class at elite schools comes from the most affluent families.</p>
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<p>I not a statistician either, but I won’t attempt your statistical explanation because there may be an even simpler explanation. Most of the “need-blind/meet 100% of need” schools use the CSS/Profile to determine “need”. And most of them do not disclose how they determine need. Therefore, the FA people could simply take the list of financial need applicants and determine that the lowest 40% (or whatever number) are the ones who need “need”. If you are above that number, who simply don’t need “need”.</p>
<p>This of course drives a number of CC posters crazy that one school may determine your need is $x and another determines it is $y (or worse yet that you have no need.)</p>
<p>Whether full pay is a hook or tip depends on the school. There are schools that accept 95% of the kids without an eye to need. The last 5% of the acceptances have to be covered by the funds that are left. Since such schools are pretty danged selective most of the time, that 95% has already been loaded with hooks like legacies, development, special skills, etc that the school has “bought” What’s left are generally the group of kids that can probably be accepted by drawing the names from a hat. </p>
<p>Also, it isn’t a simple money= accept equation. The amount of need often plays into the calculations too. If you have 5 spots to fill and $50K of aid, you look for the kids with $10K or so of need rather than one or two kids with full or half need. </p>
<p>There is nothing new about money buying privileges. This is a capitalistic society. More money buys more options. What is unusual is that there are some schools that are need blind and meet full need.</p>
<p>Another factor in the proportion of full-pay students at need-blind schools is that the full-pay kids applied knowing what the cost would be, and presumably willing to pay it. The ones who needed aid didn’t know how much would be offered since the CSS Profile process is not quite as transparent as the FAFSA formulas. Many families can’t afford their EFC - or, if you prefer, choose not to scale back their lifestyle so that their EFC is affordable. If the offer wasn’t good enough, the student may go to another school, probably one that offered merit money.</p>
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<p>Yes, I’m aware that some schools do it the way you describe. But look at the description of Brandeis’ method in post #48. They apparently rank order all the likeliest candidates for admission, in the order of how much Brandeis wants them. Then they start from the top of the list making acceptances on a need-blind basis, awarding FA to meet 100% of need to every accepted candidate with need, until they’ve exhausted their FA. At that point they accept only those applicants on the rest of the list who are full-pay, until they’ve reached their target number of acceptances. In short, using Brandeis’ method, it IS simply a matter of “money=accept” for the last X% of the class (though of course they’re still working their way down a priority list that tells them which of the full-pays they want most).</p>
<p>I think the Brandeis method is somewhat unusual. More commonly schools will try to spread the FA around and end up “gapping” a lot of kids; or as you suggest, accept fewer $50K-need kids in favor of giving an opportunity to more $10K-need kids.</p>
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<p>I don’t think you could characterize full-pay as either a “hook” or a “tip” under Brandeis’ method. It’s no advantage at all for those applicants who are in the top 80%, or 90%, or 95% (or whatever percent) of the class, above the level at which Brandeis’ FA runs out. For those offered acceptances further down the list, it becomes an absolute determinant of which applicants on that list get offered admission. That’s more than a “hook” as that term is usually used.</p>
<p>And I don’t mean to pick on Brandeis here. I think their method is interesting. I think it has advantages and disadvantages relative to other methods used by schools that can’t afford to meet 100% of need. If it were up to me, I might even be tempted to use some variant on Brandeis’ method: do the rank ordering and admit on a need-blind basis until, say, 90% of the FA budget is committed, then spread the last 10% around a little more judiciously, admitting some low-need kids but fewer high-need kids in the bottom of the class to stretch the money furhter, or even deciding that it’s OK to “gap” kids in that part of the class up the maximum level of non-subsidized Stafford loans (currently $5,500 for a college freshman), which every student is entitled to regardless of need and therefore is not properly consider part of a need-based FA package. That doesn’t seem like too onerous a loan burden for a Brandeis student to take on, and it seems fairer to me than simply saying, “We’ll, if you have ANY need and you’re on our priority list below the level at which we ran out of FA, you simply won’t be admitted.”</p>
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<p>Except that the question arose in the context of why the percentage of full-pays remains relatively constant from year to year at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. These schools are quite transparent about what qualifies as “need.” </p>
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<p>So pretty much anyone from a household with an income up to $180,000 qualifies for some level of need-based FA at Harvard; a little higher if you can show “unusual financial challenges,” possibly a little less if you have extraordinary assets (apart from the family home). Harvard leaves itself some wiggle room here, but not much. In Harvard’s case, I think it would be pretty far-fetched to say they set a target figure for what percentage of the class they want to define as having “need” and then work backwards from there to figure out what “need” has to mean that year in order to hit that target. Yale and Princeton are pretty similar.</p>
<p>The title is indeed misleading, as is the tone. Of course you buy college. It’s a service you pay for. If a college is promising to give part of it away for free, should the recipients of that expect to get their free slice ahead of those who are paying for it? Certainly not.</p>
<p>Any policy more generous than that is just that–generous. If it weren’t for the fact that they were so heavily biased in favor of legacies, I’d say it was downright philanthropic.</p>
<p>I agree with MmeZee’s statement. Those with money are at great advantage in the system. Those who get generous aid are truly the minority especially at the "sleep away’ schools. Why the heck should anyone be paying for anyone’s room and board? That is a luxury</p>
<p>For our neediest students we have the PELL which is just about enough to pay for most public local and community college courses. Just as your parents have to take care of your living expenses and give you the old 3 squares and the cot in high school, so it should be for college. It is a true gift to get someone to pay for your living expenses and everything else to go away to school.</p>
<p>I live in an affluent area, and still a lot of college students here live with their folks and commute. They have part time jobs, they borrow, and sometimes go to school part time to make ends meet. These are kids from families that do not qualify for PELL or any other need grants. Going away to boarding college is truly a luxury.</p>