<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>I think it’s actually more like that than people think. Except at colleges that promises to meet full need, which are VERY FEW, they bill you as you go, like most services. Some colleges will arrange payment plans and you can arrange with the government to get a loan which is basically a mortgage for college. Buy now, pay later.</p>
<p>Very few people are counting on getting needs met and very few people are under the impression that there is anything remotely meritocratic about private education in the US. La creme de la creme, of course, will get in free, because it behooves the private schools to have the brightest people there. Everyone else pays and if they can’t, tough.</p>
<p>“ANY person admitted who does not ask for aid, will get in.”</p>
<p>Isn’t that like “anybody admitted… will be admitted…”</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>Neither are in the works for OUR family, but isn’t it more likely likely the other any around?</p>
<p>Actually that statement is not true, depending on what you define as “getting in”. If those payments are not made, most schools will bounce your kid out so quickly it will make your head spin. And anyone can ask for aid any time. Getting it is a whole other story.</p>
<p>I actually know of folks who are in that situation of commuting to NYU on a merit award vs paying full freight to Harvard. Yes, NYU still costs close to $40K tuition wise, but if they do give merit within need packages to target those who they want most wheras Harvard goes totally on a need basis. Also NYU uses only FAFSA which can make a big difference. One of my high school son’s friends is a single mom living in a rent controlled apartment where she has lived for 30 years. Ex husband makes enough so that financial aid is zippo when PROFILE is used. She has a daughter at NYU who is commuting and the total cost is less than $30k which Dad picks up most of the tab, and that is the max that he will pay. The saving grace is that her D will get an NYU degree with no loans. Yes! And they are hoping that their son, my son’s friend gets a similar deal. He can commute to any number of schools from NYC which really reduces the cost to tuition only. Room and board is expensive.</p>
<p>“Drowning in debt” is one thing. Automatically rejecting every applicant with need once you’ve hit the point at which your FA budget is fully committed is quite another. What about the applicant who has only $5K of need, and maybe Grandma would cover it? Or the kid with $5K of need who is willing to take out a $5,500 non-subsidized Stafford loan? That’s not exactly “drowning in debt.” </p>
<p>My D1 is a full-pay, but that doesn’t mean we have her entire COA already saved, or that we can come up with enough out of current income to pay the full tab. (One reason D1 is a full-pay is that DW has some significant non-liquid assets in the form of a remainder interest in some farmland, which it’s virtually impossible to get cash out of; but that’s another story). So we asked D1 to take out a small ($5,500) non-subsidized Stafford loan, which every student is entitled to borrow as of right regardless of need. She gladly agreed, and her college didn’t object. She’ll come out of college with some debt, but certainly not “drowning in debt,” and we expect to be in a position to help her pay off her loan until she gets established professionally and financially. We may or may not qualify for some need-based FA once we have two in college at the same time, but whether we qualify or not, we might need to have both daughters take out unsubsidized Staffords, and/or go for a PLUS loan or a HELOC (if they’re available again by then), and amortize the cost over, say, 10 years. Nothing wrong with that, it’s a sound investment in our daughters’ future. And no college in America would object if we do that, as I’m sure many full-pay parents do. </p>
<p>Except, I guess, if D2 is admitted to Brandeis and they calculate that she does have some need, even a modest amount of need, and she’s on that part of the list that they’re still looking at after their FA budget has run out, they won’t admit her–whether her calculated need is $5,000, or $2,000, or $1,000, or whatever, and whether or not we can bridge that gap with a non-subsidized Stafford loan, and/or a PLUS loan, and/or a HELOC, and/or an extra-generous gift from Grandma that year to help us make it through the one year we’re paying two college tuitions. But they won’t object one bit if we just barely cross the line into their “full-pay” category, even if we take out the very same loans and tap the very same family sources? That seems just really arbitrary to me.</p>
<p>Oddly enough, it becomes a reason at that point to overstate our ability to pay. Borrow a bunch of cash from Grandma and temporarily park it in D2’s savings account, maybe, since they ask how much is in your bank accounts but they don’t ask about any personal debt you have outstanding (so we wouldn’t actually be lying on D2’s FAFSA, for example). That would guarantee D2 stays on the “full-pay” side of that line, and improves her chances of admission at a school like Brandeis. Craziness. So crazy, in fact, that knowing what we know, and knowing that we’re likely to be close to the “full-pay” line, just a shade on either side of it, it may become a reason for D2 not to bother applying to Brandeis or any school with a similar policy, or at least to make them a lower priority than “need-blind/meets-100%-of-need” and “need-blind-but-we-gap” schools, since by my reckoning we do have the capacity to bridge any modest gap there might be without either our Ds or us as parents taking on an unsustainable amount of debt.</p>
<p>Most schools are need blind for admissions and simply do not meet the need of anyone except the most highly desired applicant. There are many ways to meet that financial aid budget.</p>
<p>Agreed, cptofthehouse. Brandeis is different. I’m not sure anyone else uses their approach. I’m merely pointing out some of the peculiar implications of their approach, which several posters here have endorsed.</p>
<p>Brandeis might have to rethink their strategies if they run out of money too quickly and don’t have enough full pays in the pool that is left or have enough full pays in that pool that make everyone hold their noses.</p>
The WSJ article simply states that Middlebury is sometimes need-aware for domestic transfer and waitlist admits. Although this loophole isn’t well-publicized, it’s pretty common for many “need-blind” colleges. I have not seen any evidence demonstrating that Middlebury is anything but truly need-blind for domestic first-year applicants admitted in the usual Regular Decision round.</p>
<p>
Reed, actually, has talked a little bit about why they switched from this philosophy (need-blind, not full need) to the Brandeis philosophy (need-aware but full need). The articles are publicly available online, though it’s been a while since I read them so I can’t summarize for you. I believe the “Brandeis method” is also used by schools like Carleton and Smith, because it is seen as the most egalitarian philosophy for schools that can’t afford to be both full need and need-blind. As you’ve demonstrated, and as I’m sure the schools are aware, the philosophy does not maximize benefit to the college. It may be an arbitrary cut-off, but it does come closest to replicating need-blind admission; the colleges would argue that of the last 10%, the students are essentially equal. (And, if you want to stay on the “full-pay” side of the line, just don’t check the FA box!)</p>
<p>As an FA applicant, I applied almost exclusively to schools that met full need, regardless of whether they were need-blind or not–because a full need school would at least meet their definition of my need, and the only trade-off is more difficult admission, but I can account for that in the reach/match/safety calculations. A non-full-need school, even if it meets 99% of need on average, can be highly unpredictable for an individual applicant. Thus, for applicants with high to moderate need, a “need-blind-but-we-gap” school becomes a lower priority, just as a “need-aware-but-we-meet-full-need” school becomes a higher priority for “almost full pay” applicants.</p>
<p>
This is data from only one school, and not easily found online, I suspect, but Swarthmore’s FA director did tell the College community, at an open meeting (attended primarily by students) related to strategic planning, that the Class of 2014 had about 75% apply for financial aid. Ultimately, only 52% of the matriculating class receives FA, presumably through a combination of yield, admit proportions, and families who apply for FA but don’t qualify. (Also, Swarthmore is definitely need-blind for domestic first-year students–excluding waitlist and transfer–and openly need-aware for international students. International transfer students are not eligible for FA.)</p>
<p>
Not necessarily! Even if the admit rate is different for FA applicants vs. non-FA applicants, this result could be achieved while still remaining need-blind. Any number of indirect factors might influence admission, such as legacy students having higher SAT scores (and also being more likely full-pay).</p>
<p>
No idea about Brandeis, but IIRC Reed practices the same policy and did reveal a few years back that the difference was 100 “intentional” full-pay students–admitted only, though, not matriculated–at the margin.</p>
<p>
Couldn’t the college just as easily apply all tuition money to operating expenses and then all endowment money to FA? It would amount to the same thing, just switched around on the balance books. In any case, it is “technically” true (on paper) that colleges like Amherst and Williams spend more per student than the full-pay COA. Full-pay families benefit the entire college, yes, but they aren’t directly “paying for” the FA students.</p>
<p>I think it’s important to realize that “need-blind” as uniformly defined by the elite colleges is not the strictest possible interpretation of “need”+“blind” as the dictionary defines them. So sure, no college is truly need-blind, but certain colleges are much more need-blind than others, and IMHO it’s worth keeping the term in order to distinguish them.</p>
<p>
I agree that applicant pools probably don’t change much year-to-year; I am most interested in the clear disparity between overall applicant pool and the “most likely to be admitted” applicant pool.</p>
<p>
This proposed explanation would run explicitly opposite to what HAS been said semi-publicly by FA officers at elite colleges. For example, swarthmore’s FA director has said repeatedly that their financial aid calculations are output from a program into which they enter data, and that each calculation is individual to each applicant (with no regard for the overall applicant pool, at least for domestic first-years admitted via ED or RD). There is no explicit FA budget, and there is a reserves fund in case predicted yield goes awry.</p>
<p>
Please don’t! Such a policy would make ED-FA applicants like myself, already a dying breed, go extinct. :rolleyes:</p>
The colleges have the ability to change various formula in the computer program. So even when the data is the same, the output can vary depending on criteria that they change. </p>
<p>So lets say for example that money is tight and hypothetical College A need to tighten the financial aid budget. In the past, College A has always used a formula that limits home equity consideration to 1.2 times income, and also has deducted the full cost of any tuition paid for siblings to attend private school from their available income. For the coming year, the financial aid director decides to increase the home equity multiplier to 1.5 times income, and to cap the amount of private tuition they will consider for any family at $15,000. To the financial aid applicant, nothing has changed – these formula were essentially hidden from view. The numbers going into the computer don’t change either. But it makes a huge different in whether the family with $120K income, home equity of $400K, and 2 younger siblings attending private schools at a total cost of $30K annually will qualify for aid at that particular college.</p>
<p>The director of financial aid at any college will be able to run statistical projections based on past data to be able to predict with a fair amount of accuracy what the end result would be for little tweaks like this. And doing this sort of calculation and tweaking of the formula is part of their job description. </p>
<p>In my above hypothetical, there is nothing wrong with College A’s belt tightening – their previous aid policy was far more generous than many other colleges and allowed many upper middle income families to qualify for aid when the economy was good. Obviously a hypothetical tight-fisted college could also tweak their formula to become even more parsimonious with their aid policies – but again, it’s their money, they can do what they want when defining “need”.</p>
<p>I think if you look at common data set numbers over the past several years, you would find a significant number of “need-blind”, “full need” colleges that somehow managed to increase the proportion of full-pay students at the same time that the economy took a dive, something that is rather hard to fathom if in fact they were as need-blind and generous about aid as they say they are. </p>
<p>I’d note that they can do the same sort of tweaking with marketing and admission policies to achieve similar results. Maybe their admissions officers skip the annual visit to some public schools in the fall, and instead book some more stops at expensive private schools; or they decide to look more favorably upon applicants with academic credentials or EC’s that are more commonly found among wealthy students attending well-funded private schools. (Example: not many public schools have lacrosse teams, so when the school tells its lacrosse coach that he can offer a few extra spots the coming year for recruits, that’s likely to bring in some students who are less likely to have financial need.). </p>
<p>They don’t need their tweaking to be perfect on an individual basis – they just need to have it achieve an overall impact along the lines they are hoping for.</p>
<p>I was thinking of ED full pay applicants. ED-FA applicants could be asked to put up 10% of their EFC as determined by an online calculator. My point is simply that people need to remember: college is a product that needs to be purchased, and it costs a lot of money. Discounts are given out based on the purchaser’s need, but at the end of the day someone has to pay for the product.</p>
<p>I don´t understand this logic, maybe I am just dense. Why would legacy students necessarily be full pay? Why would students having higher SAT scores more likely be full pay? I would say middle class students (income less than 120k) who need FA would study harder for SAT in order to get better funding for college.</p>
<p>My son was accepted to his college in October of his senior year. No early admittances, we just applied early & heard back. We didn’t fill out the FAFSA obviously until the following February. We are full pay, except for a $1000 scholarship for the A+ program. I’m pretty sure that did NOT influence his acceptance. They didn’t know we’d be paying until the spring.</p>
<p>I think it varies depending on your school.</p>
<p>Legacy students aren’t “necessarily” full-pay, but it’s reasonable to assume that a higher percentage of the legacies from the most elite colleges and universities are the children of affluent parents, as compared to the applicant pool at large. That, after all, is one of the principal selling points of those colleges: the lifetime earnings of their graduates tend, on average, to be higher. No guarantee, of course, and individual results may vary.</p>
<p>As for the positive correlation between household income and SAT scores, I think that’s been pretty conclusively demonstrated empirically. It’s not that all kids from affluent families do well on the SAT, or that all high scorers are affluent; but the percentage of high scorers increases as you go up the income scale. Middle class students may “study harder,” as you say. But the more affluent have, on average, access to better schools all the way through. They have, on average, the advantages of growing up more often with parents who are themselves college graduates or hold advanced degrees; who value education highly and inculcate those values in their children; who often go out of their way to create “extra” learning opportunities for their children, and have the resources to pay for it; and who through their own experience understand the elite-college admissions process and begin preparing their children for it early. Not so say that many middle-class and lower-income families don’t share those same values and make heroic efforts to prepare their kids for the best colleges possible; many do. But it’s a question of percentages, in which the affluent hold many cards. Some would also say—and this is perhaps more controversial—that some of it may be genetic, that because of the kinds of things the SAT tests for (historically, “aptitude” as opposed to “achievement”), high SAT scorers may beget high SAT scorers in higher percentages than the population as a whole, so that elite college legacies and more generally the children of parents who achieved high levels of educational attainment (and subsequent professional success) in part by their prowess in SAT-taking start with a built-in advantage. I haven’t seen definitive studies on this, however, so I’m not necessarily advocating that position.</p>
<p>It all reminds me of what former Texas Gov. Ann Richards once said of George H.W. Bush: “He was born on third base and thought he got a triple!” Legacies and the children of affluence have all sorts of advantages, on average, that lead them not only to better SAT scores, but to more impressive high schools, more impressive ECs, more polished credentials, on average, than other college applicants. They view themselves, on average, as more qualified; and in the eyes of the elite colleges looking to just the sorts of credentials that the children of advantage have spent years cultivating, they are. For a kid growing up in a poor rural school district or a distressed urban area with no role models who ever set foot in an Ivy league institution, with parents and teachers and GCs who may not know the first thing about it, it’s much more of an uphill climb. Not only is that kid not “born on third base,” he needs to figure out where the batter’s box is, and may have two strikes against him (or more) before he even gets a glimmer of the rules of the game. To their credit, elite colleges are now beginning to take that into account, and crediting the accomplishments of (especially “first-gen”) kids who had such an uphill climb and overcame the odds to put themselves into contention. But on average, the path is easier if you start from affluence. And that’s not to take anything away from the children of affluence who work hard in HS to put together the GPAs and class ranks and ECs and impressive teacher recs and awards and honors and so on that they need to be competitive for elite college admission. That takes a ton of work, diligence, and talent; not everyone who starts with those advantages succeeds, or succeeds at the highest level. Even if you are starting from third base, it may still feel like you need to “steal home” in order to score at that level; that’s a pretty bold and audacious play requiring daring, skill, concentration, perfect timing, and impeccable execution, and not everyone can do it.</p>
Of course, but that doesn’t mean that the FA director has access to the whole formula. For example, swarthmore’s Board of Managers reviews FA policies every year and decides whether/how to tweak various aspects of the overall formula. I believe that these year-to-year changes do get disclosed to current students, if they’re paying attention. And the FA office claims that they will disclose specific policies (e.g. what the present home equity cap is) to prospective students, but cynical me thinks that they are counting on many vague questions and very few specific enough questions to require such a detailed response.</p>
<p>
You’re absolutely right. Also note, tweaking FA distributions indirectly–whether via formula or marketing–is entirely within the definition parameter of “need-blind.”</p>
<p>^^Re: post #174: In fact, some have argued that the correlation between SAT scores and family income is so strong that SAT scores are a better predictor of family income than of academic success at the college level.</p>
<p>I also suspect colleges know they can stretch their FA budgets farther by admitting a large percentage of their entering class from the ED pool, because many applicants with need—especially those with substantial need—are reluctant to apply ED. They can thus remain in principle and in fact “need blind” in the sense that they don’t directly consider any individual applicant’s financial status, and they continue to admit some students with need in the ED round, unaware of any individual’s financial status; but playing the odds, they probably end up with more full-pays and/or low-need students in the entering class. I noticed a pretty sharp uptick in the percentage of the entering class admitted ED at some schools during the depths of the recession. That may be partly the consequence of more applicants—or more highly qualified applicants—applying ED in a time of uncertainty. But I’m sure savvy college administrators knew that responding to that surge in ED applications with a surge in ED acceptances wouldn’t hurt their bottom line.</p>
I think a change that would impact a broad number of students, that relates to an already disclosed policy, might get disclosed – but I seriously doubt that the details or nuances of all such changes are routinely disclosed. Certainly I’ve never been able to get specific answers to all sort of policy-detail issues that applied to my family. Some schools also have far more complex formulas than the one I put forth in my hypothetical – it may not be a matter of a simple home equity cap, for example, but rather a cap that changes in relation to other income and assets of the family, and is eliminated entirely if the family owns more than one home. Or they may leave the home equity cap as is, but make all sorts of nuanced changes as to how they determine home value – things which may depend on the year when the home was purchased, etc.</p>
<p>^I wouldn’t know; just getting as much information as I did, over the course of a 30-minute face-to-face conversation, left everyone frustrated (including the well-intentioned FA director).</p>
<p>IIRC, Swarthmore announced to the current students at this meeting that next year’s budget included “no” changes in the financial aid formula. The FA director said that the office would do manual calculations (plugging in and taking out numbers) for specific policy-level information as applicable to a current family, but she appeared to begrudge the extra effort. JMHO.</p>
<p>I recall hearing that when some colleges have had to stop being need-blind, their average SAT scores increased, e.g. the “slightly less qualified” full-pay students admitted had higher average SAT scores but were lesser qualified by some other measures, perhaps grades, rank, ECs, awards, course rigor, etc.</p>
<p>Right, that’s what I said - need blind only for the first round. After that (waitlist and transfers) it’s need aware. Which is NOT what Middlebury itself says. On their website it’s all “need-blind, need-blind, need-blind.” That’s why the WSJ article was interesting and revealing - to get the full story out.</p>