<p>The Gladwell article “The Order of Things” is posted on the Colleges that Change Lives website (ctcl.org) under News & Resources | In The News.</p>
<p>Just some thoughts from someone in admissions: Absolutely no school that I know of that claims to be need-blind for a group of applicants (i.e. all US citizens; all applicants; whatever), isn’t actually need-blind. It would be unethical, deceptive, fraudulent, and shunned by the higher ed community. To repeat, I don’t know of anyone at any need-blind school who isn’t actually need-blind. </p>
<p>Any – and every – school in the country could be “need-blind” if they wanted to do so. In fact, most (every?) public institutions in the country operate that way. Being need-blind doesn’t mean ANYTHING when it comes to providing need-based financial aid. Any institution could decide it won’t consider financial need in its decision-making process (it would likely make the decision process much easier, actually!). However, what it does with its then admitted students and their need is the next step/question/problem.</p>
<p>I think many of you are conflating being need-blind with providing/meeting full need. </p>
<p>Not many schools in this country have the financial resources to be both need-blind and meet full need (where “full need” = 100% of the balance of COA - student’s contribution + EFC). There is a great diversity in how schools operate: some schools are need-blind and meet full need (Vanderbilt, Pomona, Duke, Williams); some schools are need-blind and do NOT pledge to meet full need - these schools tend to “gap” students (Bard, Albright); some schools are not need-blind but meet full need for all of its admitted students (Mount Holyoke, Reed, Oberlin, Tufts); and some schools are neither need-blind nor meet full-need.</p>
<p>Some of you assume that the percentage of enrolling students receiving financial aid somehow reveals that schools aren’t being truthful about being need-blind. Here are some examples of why a school may only have 40-50-60% of students on FA when they are actually and truly need-blind:</p>
<p>-VERY few schools (6?) are need blind for ALL groups of applicants. For example, Stanford, Vanderbilt, and Wellesley are all need-blind for U.S. citizens and permanent residents. They are NOT need blind for international students. Each of these schools has a good number of international students. Typically many of these (intl) students are full-pay. This skews the percentage on FA some.</p>
<p>-Traditionally there is also some self-selection on price going on. That is, some low-income potential applicants may be discouraged from applying to many of these schools, which are almost all universally known for being not only highly selective, but very expensive. These potential applicants may not know about the FA options or assume they cannot afford to attend - I have even heard guidance counselors tell students not to bother applying to some schools “because you’re too poor for them” (!!). Similarly this self-selection may be widespread to include middle income potential applicants too - families assume they’ll be priced out and discourage their child from applying and, if admitted, being disappointed in being unable to afford the school. Hence the number of applicants applying for financial aid in the POOL may not reflect the pool you would see at another institution (let’s use Penn State as an example). As the admissions credo goes, “The admitted students can only reflect the pool of applicants.” In other words, if your pool is full of vals, you can end up with lots of vals in your class. If your pool is full of not-applying-for-FA, its likely your class will too.</p>
<p>-Legacies of highly-selective colleges and universities (which basically make up the list of the schools which are need-blind and meet full need) are less likely to apply, or need, FA. I am not saying that all legacies are wealthy, by any stretch of the imagination. But economic research has shown this fact bears out. So, you might conclude this could skew the numbers a little bit too, especially those schools which enroll a number of legacies (Harvard for one).</p>
<p>-Lastly, and I realize what I am about to say may come off in ways other than I intend, but SAT scores are correlated with family income. These are some of the most selective colleges and universities in the country. Now, I know from personal experience that all of these schools are committed to recruiting, admitting, and enrolling low-income students. That said, however, given this correlation, it is possible there is some discrepancy between the pool % applying for FA and the % enrolling with FA based on this fact. For more information on income and SAT correlation, see <a href=“http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/cbs-2009-national-TOTAL-GROUP.pdf[/url]”>http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/cbs-2009-national-TOTAL-GROUP.pdf</a>. Now I’m NOT saying that applicants applying for FA are necessarily any less smart or any less qualified than their wealthier peers – and we all know lots of the reasons why income and median SAT score track (ability to take prep courses, availability of enrichment activities, early learning opportunities, likelihood of attending well-resourced schools, funding for learning disability diagnoses and treatment, what have you). However, it is what it is.</p>
<p>Someone upthread asked why schools didn’t decide to admit whomever and then “spread the wealth around” so to speak, gapping some needy students. Some schools DO do this. However some private colleges and universities have decided that it is more important to provide financial aid/“meet full need” to those students it can admit rather than be need blind. In several admissions circles there is a lot of discussion about how it is disingenuous for schools to admit students and then significantly ‘gap’ them (that is, provide them little or no financial aid relative to their calculated need). Why admit a student who you then put in the impossible decision of a) significant family hardship, b) significant loan debt/burden on the student, and c) not being able to attend, for $$ reasons? I know some of you may respond that it should be the individual student’s choice to incur such debt or family hardship to attend - but doing so also has consequences for the school: students with significant debt loads are more likely to transfer or withdraw, less likely to graduate, and also increase the school’s average student debt.</p>
<p>Just my two cents-- thank you for the great analysis and the candor. Just wanted to add that colleges which gap significant numbers of students end up eroding the educational experience for more than just those students. You’re assigned to a five person study group for your econ seminar- but two of the kids are juggling a 10 hour per week off campus job, in addition to their work/study job, to help plug the hole. So now the other three students in the study group have a gap. etc.</p>
<p>I attended college back in the dark ages of “scholarship students” ( I was one of them) and I don’t think going backwards in FA policies is the way to go. Even if it means that some kids won’t be admitted to Brandeis, rather than get admitted with a financial aid package which leaves the family drowning in debt.</p>
<p>SamK, thanks SO much for that link. I’d venture to say 99% of CC members need to read it.</p>
<p>Thank you for the post, justmytwocents. There has been too much confusion on this thread and I hope your post clears some of it up.</p>
<p>I would like to highlight this important point made in your post:</p>
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<p>Thats right. It is quite clear that most of the top tier colleges have made extraordinary efforts and devoted considerable resources to seek out and recruit low-income students. </p>
<p>In fact, there is one legitimate reason to question whether these colleges are truly need blind. They openly admit that they try to evaluate students in the context of the opportunities that were available to them. They do try to level the playing field for the disadvantaged students. For instance they will look favorably upon an applicant who had to struggle with financial adversity, keep a job to help with the family finances, etc. They wouldn’t be able to do so if they were truly blind to an applicant’s financial situation. </p>
<p>And that is a good thing.</p>
<p>I have heard these percentage arguments many times. I also know that for the last 10 years the same percentage of kids from a certain high school end up going to a certain college. If it were the accepted %,that would be one thing, but the percentage that I checked is the percentage of kids who choose to actually go there. How could that be?</p>
<p>It’s a steady percentage because the demographics have been stable. Some of the same reason exists for the need blind schools.</p>
<p>Also, the truth of the matter is that at schools like HPY, high need kids are given a bit of a break on the admissions end. The percentage of such kids is a controlled factor. Admissions give a certain % of such kids a “hook” or “tip” because of the challenges that they have had to overcome and still be such outstanding student. I know of a few kids in this category who went to my sons’ prep school through outreach programs. They all were accepted with full financial aid into some selective colleges. They also got a bit of a boost on their grades and SAT scores, as they should have, given their backgrounds compared to their silver spooned peers. Most of those kids did not have parents who were knowledgeable and active in their academic lives.</p>
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<p>Limiting the gapping so that it can reasonably be bridged does sound fair. This of course assumes that Brandeis’s estimates of need are reasonable. If their institutional methodology produces EFCs that are signficantly higher than the competition, that is a hidden gap. A student from a family earning $150k will pay $15k at Harvard, but will probably be a full-pay at Brandeis. I could use this to argue that Brandeis doesn’t meet full need. 
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<p>A thought experiment: imagine that Brandeis could run their admissions process twice. The first case would be with their current methodology, where all need is met and the bottom 10% of the class is made up of full-pays. The second case would be a strict merit ranking, where the bottom 10% would be gapped on FA. What I’m wondering is how many of the gapped lower 10% would matriculate to Brandeis. If every single one of the gapped students turned down Brandeis, then the adcoms would tune their yield models and reach deeper down the ranking list for admits. They’d end up accepting every full-pay student that they accept under the current model, plus all of the similarly ranked FA applicants. If Brandeis went with the second case and ended up angering the gapped applicants, the argument that they were treated more fairly might ring hollow. </p>
<p>What happens to these different admissions models if student loan availability shrinks? An increasing number of people with massive student loan balances, banks are skittish about loaning the money or the federal government announces it’s limiting its backing of educational loans, and voila, student ability to bridge the gap shrivels up. Being a “meets full need” school rather than a “need-blind” school might be the more forward-looking choice.</p>
<p>Thanks for your “two cents,” justmytwo cents. I do think most of your points were in fact made upthread, but it’s useful to have your perspective.</p>
<p>I thought the two valuable points you did make that had not been made previously were, first, that many qualified lower-income students and even middle-income students self-select AGAINST elite and expensive private schools because they don’t understand how need-based FA works, and second, that legacy preferences tend to skew the pool of admitted students toward higher income brackets, thereby increasing the percentage of full-pays.</p>
<p>As to the first point: I hear this all the time from families not wise to the ways of financing an education at an elite college. They tend to look at the sticker price and just assume an elite private college education is a luxury product for the wealthy. Which historically it was, of course. Some of these schools have made truly heroic efforts to broaden their accessibility to qualified candidates of modest means, but I think there’s still a huge information gap. Wealthier families tend to move in circles that allow them to be better informed about such things, and the most affluent simply expect to be full-pays and calculate it’s a luxury good they can afford and well worth the investment. All of this tends to skew the applicant pool toward the more affluent. Which may be just fine with the colleges, in a way, because if more low- and moderate-income families were better informed about these things, the colleges might be swamped with applications, many from highly qualified applicants with need, and their financial aid budgets might also take a hit.</p>
<p>As to the second point, I quite agree: any legacy preference will probably tend to skew the applicant pool in the direction of more affluent applicants and more full-pays, especially at the most elite colleges, simply because the median parent who is a Harvard grad is more affluent than the median parent-who-is-not-a-Harvard-grad. That much I think is incontrovertible. To some extent that may be counterbalanced by admissions preferences for first-generation college students, whose parents are on average likely to be less affluent than the applicant pool as a whole; though I suspect Harvard admits far fewer first-gens than legacies. Admissions preferences for URMs my also play a role in balancing out the legacy preference, though one of the most commonly voiced criticisms of affirmative action for URMs is that the beneficiaries are often not the socioeconomically disadvantaged but instead the most affluent URMs who are also the likeliest to have the test scores, GPAs, and other credentials elite colleges are looking for. As for recruited athletes, it’s hard to say. There may be a certain number of working class jocks who make their way to the Ivies based on their athletic prowess, but the best athletes from these communities are by and large going to opt for D-1 schools that will give them full-ride athletic scholarships and the best shot at playing their sport professionally. And given the mix of varsity sports featured at elite colleges, it seems the jocks from elite prep schools (who would tend to skew more affluent) may have the biggest admissions advantage there, too. Let’s put it this way: I don’t think very many working class kids from public high schools in Detroit end up doing crew, fencing, lacrosse, squash, or water polo at Harvard.</p>
<p>Post #147 </p>
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<p>Post#143</p>
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<p>Agreed with both. </p>
<p>Here’s a radical thought- how about turning the whole financial aid process on its head: colleges could ask students at the time of application to show up front exactly how much money they are willing to contribute and where they will get the money from. That would then clarify the exact amount of financial aid that the college will need to provide in order to ‘make it happen’ for that student. This may seem outrageous, but in fact this happens all the time when people take on other types of expense like buying a house.</p>
<p>Such a policy would also underscore the reality that you are in fact ‘buying your way’ into college.</p>
<p>Vicarious-- try getting approved for a mortgage these days if you don’t actually have the down payment, but plan to pass the hat to grandma once you’re approved to see if she’ll come up with the money.</p>
<p>And truthfully- we hear all the time here from parents who are willing to sell a kidney to pay for Yale, but are just not sure that Amherst is “worth it” since nobody down at the waffle house has heard of Amherst. So the idea of getting people to clarify upfront what financial sacrifices they are willing to make before they’ve got all the cards (i.e. admissions results) on the table, only works if you have broad name recognition across a wide swath of people. Which suggests to me that Seton Hall, Duke, Notre Dame are probably not leveraging their FA dollars as well as they could be!!!</p>
<p>Mentioning Seton Hall in the same sentence with Duke and Notre Dame is a crime,and i attended SH. ;)</p>
<p>I don’t know about that. My basketball kid says SH a lot in the same breath as Duke. I don’t hear about ND’s bb team at all.</p>
<p>Huh???.Notre Dame is ranked 9th in the country,21-5 record…Duke is ranked #1 with a rxord of 25-2…Seton hall is terrible with a record of 11-16 and in the bottom of the Big East…you may be misunderstanding your S as anyone remotely familiar with college basketball would know this…</p>
<p>I am not a sports fan. My point was that colleges with wide followings for their teams have better name recognition outside their region than those without. I apologize to anyone who I have offended. Especially graduates of Canisius, who I am led to believe are rabid sports fans.</p>
<p>Ah, but SH is nearby and we can see the games. It is all about perspecitve.</p>
<p>blossom, most home mortgages are amortized over a 30 or 15 year period. College costs are due over a 4 or 5 year period. Whether it is Yale or Amherst or Seton Hall, in purely economic terms it could be seen as reasonable for a college to ask applicants up front: “show me the money”. Early decision applicants could be asked to put up a 10% deposit.</p>
<p>my point is simply that private college education is an item that costs money (about as much money as four lexuses), but this item is sold in a very unconventional manner.</p>
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<p>okay, my kid goes to Yale and it is really amazing, but I wouldn’t dream of selling my kidney for it. So if there are any parents here who are tempted to do that, please don’t :).</p>
<p>{Here’s a radical thought- how about turning the whole financial aid process on its head: colleges could ask students at the time of application to show up front exactly how much money they are willing to contribute and where they will get the money from. That would then clarify the exact amount of financial aid that the college will need to provide in order to ‘make it happen’ for that student. This may seem outrageous, but in fact this happens all the time when people take on other types of expense like buying a house.}</p>
<p>The CSS Profile asks “how much your parents expect to pay for your education next year” and of course collects enough data about your family’s finances to get a pretty good idea where the money might be coming from (except for Grandma…)</p>
<p>vicariousparent said:
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<p>It is my understanding that colleges expect working parents to amortize the cost of college (through loans) over 10+ years. Very few parents could pay the cost of tuition out of current earnings and only a few more will have saved enough money to pay over 4 - 5 years.</p>
<p>Yeah but the amounts are payable over 4 years and goods are delivered over that period of time too.</p>
<p>Economically, from the point of view of the college- the student is consuming about $40K worth of services per year for 4 years. It makes sense to be absolutely certain that the money is actually in hand (or will be when it is due) for the transaction- whether through savings, current income, scholarships, loans, or jobs. It makes no sense to offer the service to someone who doesn’t have the money for the transaction. That is what colleges do when they ‘gap’ students.</p>
<p>ANY person admitted who does not ask for aid, will get in. However, people who cannot pay, are not going to <em>go</em>, regardless. There is really only so much the college can do!</p>
<p>It’s not unfair in the least for them not to offer a spot to someone who by their own admission cannot pay, if they do not have the charity funds to meet that person’s need. The very best needy students get in, and just the best students who can pay get in.</p>
<p>This article obviously targeted at those families in the middle-top tiers of income that might have to take out $25k in credit card debt to meet that gap (I know someone who did this for her kids, btw), and can’t decide whether it’s worth it. If that family believes that “need-blind” means equal chance at admission even if they’re asking for that extra $25k, and has a student that is iffy, then they might take a second look at admitting need. It depends whether they think a Harvard degree, with $25k in credit card debt or a second mortgage is better than, say, an NYU degree with no debt. That’s not an easy decision to make and the article helps them better judge what they should do.</p>