I thought I’d start this to help current and maybe future years.
We read a lot about - should you turn down admission if you know you’re not going to attend.
For some, that could work - but others may be turning down based on cost. And as we’ve seen these past few days, colleges seem to be offering extra money to students who haven’t signed on - or declined.
Will that extra money entice you to go from no to yes?
Just in the past week, I’ve read about increased offers from:
Baylor
U Portland
Xavier (Ohio)
There’s more but I can’t remember. If you have a recently “enhanced” offer from a school, please list the school so that others can know - maybe I should wait until April 28th to accept!! And for those applying next year, perhaps it’d be a sound strategy as well.
For schools that need students one strategy is to wait to about a week before and ask for more money or your moving on. This puts the pressure on them and many times you get a few thousand dollars more.
Marist came back with more grant aid twice, after the third ask they said they weren’t able to offer more but that was kind of expected. This was at the suggestion of our financial aid rep at the school who told us some families go back 2 or 3 times asking for more $$ and the worst that can happen is they say they can’t offer any more.
I don’t know that this is 100% true. You would have to be sure that never happens for any student at any college.
With the opacity of admissions at this point, I don’t think we will ever know exactly why they each do what they do. Some of the colleges that have added merit in April do not seem to be hurting for applicants. Perhaps the merit had nothing to do with whether someone has or has not accepted but is simply the timeline of the merit process at that school.
But it is also possible that, like those who will listen to a need appeal from one student but not another, they may really want that one student but not another. To know one would have to find other comparable students and figure out if they also got some extra merit.
I think this thread is useful whether or not the merit is actually a bid to get someone to come or just a last minute addition as scheduled because in either case the premise stands: if you are interested in a school, but finances are a problem, maybe don’t give up until the last minute.
For instance, my S is the Baylor applicant who has had two additional rounds of merit added in the last ten days for a total of $10,000 more a year on top of generous merit awarded at acceptance. We don’t know how each of those awards came about, i.e. did someone ahead of him turn down the competitive weekend award so he moved up after being told in March that he did not win anything from that? Were the awards in another category always scheduled to be released on April 19? Who knows. What we do know is that if he had already declined two weeks ago over the cost, we would never have found out that it is now $10,000 less a year. (These are all merit, not need-based adjustments.) Baylor has no trouble filling its class. They had 33,000 applicants for about 3400 spots, so that is not the reason.
Our experience this year has been that waiting has worked out well! Some scholarships trickle in. Who knows for what reasons?
I think it’s like buying a car (in a normal market - which it’s becoming again, btw).
You make an offer. The dealer says no.
Two days later - you get a call. I talked to my manager, he’s willing to go $500 lower.
The money was always there - but they’re trying to have less breakage in the incentive budget.
Or they are scrambling to hit internal targets. Maybe a bonus is tied to achieving a certain # and profitability per widget is sacrificed to hit that #.
Yes, I understand the simile. I would just add that unlike with cars, the money offered may be because they want that specific student and not that they are having trouble overall filling the class. With cars, they just want to sell a certain number and don’t care to whom. The mid-range colleges which don’t have trouble just filling seats with whomever do actually care to whom they are “selling the car.”
I also was pointing out that the main takeaway to me is that waiting may result in more merit for whatever reason including just the slow processing of scholarship results that last until April. In the end, waiting until close to the deadline instead of declining if you are interested seems like a good option when finances are a main reason for hesitating to commit. More money may trickle in for various reasons.
A few years ago (now a college Junior), my DS was offered more merit than the initial award for a university with a single digit admission rate. Will it work for everyone, unlikely. He also received a non athletic likely letter two weeks after submitting the application. They really wanted him for some reason.