<p>When a school receives your FAFSA, can it also see the other five schools that you're having your financial aid info sent to?</p>
<p>Is this good or bad?</p>
<p>Someone told me that the financial aid offices look at your list and then base their offers accordingly. Also, some schools can tell from your FAFSA list whether they're your backup choice or a safety school, etc. </p>
<p>Does anybody know anything about this?</p>
<p>Thanks.</p>
<p>An admissions person who visited my daughter's high school said that he can see the other schools on FAFSA.</p>
<p>Regarding strategy, I don't think there is one correct way to swing it. I listed my daughter's schools in alphabetical order, rather than in any terms of preference.</p>
<p>I think it is good to list them in preference order. Why not let the #2 and #3 schools sense what their competition is? Or tell #1 that it is in that spot, but is going to have to work to keep it? It makes no sense to just negotiate in the blind.</p>
<p>Even if I had just 3 schools I was applying to, I would throw in another 3 equivalents on the FAFSA list just to keep them all guessing.</p>
<p>Yes, they can see the other schools that were on the form with them. I wouldn't worry about it. I have seen threads that discuss if this is a problem. Since more than half the kids who apply to colleges also get financial aid, you are not in a small pot here. Can it make a difference? Yeah, it could. It could be an advantage as well as a disadvantage. That's why the advice about applying to some like colleges is sound. Dickinson goes head to head with Gettysburg and some other like schools and you had better believe they know it and know the financial aid policies of their direct competitiors. When they see a kid with a cluster of these schools, they know that they are likely to be a pick and the fin aid can be the decider.<br>
Most of the more selective schools have admissions separate from fin aid, and they do not bother to look at where else a candidate has applied as they have their hands full looking at other info. Even need aware schools do not incorporate that info till the very end. The info just does not play well in making an admissions decision. But the fina aid officers will have the data in front of their faces, and they can play with it.</p>
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I think it is good to list them in preference order. Why not let the #2 and #3 schools sense what their competition is? Or tell #1 that it is in that spot, but is going to have to work to keep it? It makes no sense to just negotiate in the blind.
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<p>I'm no expert in financial matters, but I think this boils down to the old "six of one, half-dozen of the other." Why let your No. 1 school know it's in first place? I say, keep 'em guessing. And as far as telling No. 1 that it is in that spot but has to work to keep it, that's a bit much to assume a school can interpret, IMHO.</p>
<p>I think it is good, as cptofthehouse said, for everyone to apply to a few schools that regularly compete for applicants. But I think most college-bound kids do that anyway, for other reasons.</p>
<p>Most of the families I know just list the danged schools in random order. Many time the "name" schools are first simply because those were the first names that came to mind when listing. </p>
<p>My kids go to a catholic elementary school where most of the kids go on to a catholic highschool. You have to take an exam for the admissions process, and the way it works is that you designate 3 schools to get the exam results. I was surprised to learn that some schools do take the order seriously. One of my sons was rejected from his third choice school and the letter said that it only considers those who list the school as a first or second choice. The two most popular schools emphatically proclaim that they do not care where they are placed in choice order, but the rumor is that it would matter in merit money. I doubt very much that colleges bother with trying to figure out what the order you listed them on the FAFSA implies in your choice order.</p>
<p>Your story about the catholic schools proves my point. If you just put them in no order whatsoever, and the schools imply something about the order anyway, then you are sending the wrong message which is worse than no message at all. I would say, if you don't want to reveal your preferences, either list them alphabetically or rig it so you send the FAFSA to one at a time by amending each time to be a single school. Of course then you are sending the message that maybe you are applying to only that school, which is not so good.</p>
<p>I still think, this is your one chance to send a message about your preferences, and if you waste that opportunity you are, well, wasting that opportunity.</p>
<p>In our house we listed the schools alphabetically. Since all of the schools were need blind and the financial aid and admissions offices did not share information, it made very little difference (there was also a lot of overlap in d's schools so even if they did the schools would have known that the same pool of candidates apply to similar schools).</p>