Does being a full pay applicant increase chances or ED admission to an ivy?
No - they are need blind.
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With respect to colleges in general, this article may be of interest:
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It’s very difficult to tell. They are “need blind,” but half of the class is full pay. So the question is: are half of all applicants full pay? The world will never know.
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No, because the Ivies…
- are need blind as @tsbna44 mentioned.
- get far more full-pay applicants than they can accept.
- are consciously trying to get more low SES students.
- have very large endowments that overshadow the money they get from tuition and fees
Yes, that will provide a boost.
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Please correct me if I am wrong, but I have been told that university admissions offices, whether need blind or not, can see if an applicant is applying for financial aid. If the university is need blind, they may not know the details when they are making admissions decisions, but they can see who is full pay and who is not.
I doubt that universities with massive endowments like Harvard, Yale and Princeton care or pay much attention to this, but you have to wonder if other prestigious need blind universities with much smaller endowments (Harvard’s endowment is roughly 8x that of Brown’s for example) are occasionally influenced by an applicant’s financial aid status.
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Not true. Many schools suppress that question when reading apps. Even if they do see the answer to that question, plenty of full pay families fill out FAFSA/CSS. There are, however, other proxies that are suggestive of family income (address, HS, parents’ jobs, etc.).
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There is a large chunk of schools known as “tuition dependent” where being full pay is going to help. Help how much? None of them are going to bend over backwards for a kid who is clearly unqualified, but a kid who meets the bar is going to get a second look.
Endowments are important. Research dollars and productivity are important. The role of the grad programs is important (Harvard famously budgets so that each graduate school has its own budget and is financially independent- so the Divinity School does not benefit from the Chan Public Health’s endowment). The amount of non-educational revenue is important (colleges have developed for-profit revenue streams by leasing land, becoming commercial property owners, etc.) The amount of revenue from patents and intellectual property-- huge at places like Stanford for example, where professors have created profitable companies on Stanford’s dime.
All of these are factors. But colleges which balance their books with tuition and don’t have these other robust sources of revenue are going to care about full pay.
But not the Ivy League. They don’t look and they don’t care. They don’t need to look at whether or not you’ve applied for financial aid- even if you are the rare disadvantaged kid growing up in Greenwich CT or Atherton CA or Chappaqua NY-- and they do exist- admitting a few “they need more aid than their zip code suggested” is going to be a plus, not a negative.
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I’m hoping this will be clarified. The link above of 100 colleges that are need blind for US citizens does not include the hundreds of public universities that are need blind. Their financial aid offices are not housed with admissions, and there is no cross referencing.
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The article is just plain wrong.
No. Because the Ivies are need blind for admissions…so the admissions folks will have no idea you are full pay when they make their admissions decisions.
Back to the OP, no one here really knows if full pays have an advantage in Ivy admissions, because none of know exactly if and how financial info/proxies are used in the admissions process. Certainly all 8 Ivies have variability in their admissions processes as well.
The only piece I know is that many coaches know the fin aid status of their recruits and some express positive affirmations if the student needs minimal/no aid. Many of the Ivies will also do financial aid pre-reads for recruits. I expect all of this info finds its way to admissions, but this is a relatively small percentage of the admits.
I’m not sure why you are asking this question, but if you are asking if being a full pay Ivy applicant will minimize the impact/allow AOs to overlook stats or some other factor that is lacking, the answer is it won’t.
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But I do. Get back to the OP’s question and dispense with the debate. Several posts deleted. Responses to deleted posts are also deleted as they make no sense out of context.
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I don’t believe it helps at need blind schools. They all note it. See Penn below when noting we don’t take your financial situation into account when making a decision.
I’m speaking anecdotally now but I wonder if a higher proportion of full pay to need aid apply ED. I would think so as full pay is more risk averse (binding commitment) and wealthier kids are more likely to know about ED, have counselors driving them to it and have access to test and essay help. ED would help and if more are full pay (pure guess) - that’s where that bias would come in.
Looking at CDS only 41% of last year Harvard freshman got need aid. Dartmouth was 46%. Perhaps there’s a natural bias of the wealthy to apply and while full-pay doesn’t help by definition, it helps in access to opportunities that make an Ivy education more a reality.
Pure guess on my part but ……
https://admissions.upenn.edu/admissions-and-financial-aid/cost-and-financial-aid
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And several of the colleges named in that article (Wesleyan being a prime example) have higher numbers and percentages of FGLI students than the Ivies (with a big “i”) themselves.
Yes, your analysis is helpful. But a reminder- correlation is not causation. The fact that rich kids apply early- and the presence of many rich kids in the accepted student pile- does not mean that being rich got them in.
Being rich (whether plain vanilla affluent, two professional parents or mega wealthy) isn’t what got you in. Whether to Dartmouth, Harvard, or anything in between. It’s that being full pay is associated with all the other things that matter in admissions- excelling at your EC (easier to do with a parent driving you back and forth to cello lessons, picking you up at lacrosse practice at night, making sure you don’t have to babysit for younger siblings so you can take that research internship that Daddy arranged for you) etc…
There are plenty of full pay kids who think that’s the golden ticket to Dartmouth (et al) and end up at their safety schools. There are entire college advising industries devoted to this cohort- helping parents understand the “better” options which will take a B+ full pay student over an A+ full need student.
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I think my two cents would be (after seeing helpful posts here that were unfortunately deleted):
-full pay by itself is not a hook at an Ivy
-however, each of these schools absolutely wants and needs full pay students
-so they get their full pay students from other hooked applicants (legacies, athletes, etc.)
Harvard was the example given. If you believe athletes and legacies are full pay, you can build pretty quickly to the ~45% of their class that is full pay. So my opinion is that admissions departments (even Harvard’s) absolutely have a sense for what percentage of their class will be full pay and they aim for a certain minimum number one way or another. They do not like to dip into their endowment.
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Geography helps also. Greenwich CT is a few exits away on an interstate highway from Bridgeport CT, but the composition of the public HS’s could not be more different. The name of your HS is an important signifier.
On the “dipping into the endowment”- that’s not how it works. A high percentage of endowment funds are restricted- if you’ve donated to build a nanotechnology center with an endowed professorship, the U can’t “dip” into that endowment to pay for financial aid for a freshman from Camden NJ. “Dipping into their endowment” happens monthly. Prudent financial management is going to even out the revenue stream that way. But a donor giving to Harvard’s Divinity School isn’t supporting undergrad financial aid…
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Agree 100%.
Okay. But then where does the financial aid come from for a freshman from Camden, NJ?