When a FA department reaches out to confirm a student won’t be applying for need-based aid, does it mean the student’s application has made it through admissions? Or does the Fin Aid department process all applications regardless of ultimate admission status?
Wishful thinking?
A college FA office can do a lot of preliminary FA processing in parallel with admission office work. Many FA applicants have relatively simple finances that can mostly be done by a computer program, which can flag a smaller number of complex ones for human review.
Then, when admission work is done, the only remaining work is including any merit or preferential packaging into FA offers before sending letters to admitted students.
Thank you ucbalumnus. Wishful thinking (on my part) indeed! Sounds like FA offices do process every application (to a certain extent) regardless of where that application is in the admissions process.
Yes. There are no tea leaves to be read in this instance.
Financial aid has to deal with certain processing of info like FAFSa and PROFile info immediately. They have to get it into their Star em. Otherwise, when acceptances are finalized, they’d have a ridiculous amount of work to do. They have to be ready to go on a tight schedule when they get thevaccepted student list, if there are limited funds to distribute.
So, yes, they’ll start in some things right away. Just asking if you are applying for fin aid generally means nothing.
Fact of the matter is that with some schools , you really can’t tell.