I suspect that saying that you are not applying for financial aid signals the admissions office to not consider you for their merit scholarships either because you are indicating that cost may not be an issue.
Another argument against need-blind: If colleges were really need blind, then the financial aid budgets would differ from year to year, depending on what % of students they admitted needed aid. But surprisingly the budgets at most colleges are relatively fixed year after year. And the mix of students who need FA from year to year stays surprisingly stable.
And so what happens when they’ve run out of money in the financial aid budget? Are they still “need blind?” The truth is they are never “need blind.” That doesn’t mean that someone paying full tuition is getting in ahead of a more-qualified needy student, but it does mean that on the margins, being able to pay full tuition (and even the potential of getting more $$ from that student’s parents) is a factor in admissions.
Look at what happened at GWU a couple years ago. They finally had to admit that “need blind” was a charade when it was exposed that it only really applied to the “auto admits” and not to applicants from the 2nd read going forward. Since most applicants are not in that super-small top 1% group, that likely means that looking at finances is a factor in whether the skinny or fat envelope comes in the mail.
@sgopal2 and @84stag You guys will have to make better arguments than those in order to convince me that Chicago adcoms are now deviating from a policy of a half-century’s duration. The financial aid figures from year to year in such a large sample are likely to be pretty similar and pretty predictable without resort to the manipulation you both are alleging. Cynicism may be an attractive rhetorical posture but it’s not an argument. You learn that in HUM 1.
@marlowe1 It’s pretty simple and not semantics or rhetorical posture. When a school like Chicago says they’re need-blind, all they’re saying is that if you need financial aid, that won’t “hurt” your chances of admission. But what they won’t tell you, even if you ask, is whether not applying for financial aid will “help” an applicant. The answer, if they’re honest, is it is a factor that benefits the applicant. The same can be said of any other metric, such as race, ethnicity, geographic region, or gender.
Another example: Harvard RD applications were due on 1/1/18. However, the school told their applicants they “preferred” submissions by 12/15/17. In the next sentence, they said that anyone who didn’t submit by that earlier date would not be “punished in any way.” What they didn’t say, and what was obvious: those who did submit by 12/15/17 would be rewarded (certainly by some internal scoring boost).
It’s obvious that the same goes for the issue being discussed in this thread. The absence of harm to one applicant pool (financial aid applicants) does not equate to lack of advantage in the other (those paying full tuition). To not believe this is nothing short of oblivion of the financial realities of higher education. Just because Chicago and many other schools have tremendous endowments does not mean they will spend without regard to invading them.
@marlowe1: I have no idea if UChicago is need blind or not. My points were more broadly stated to all of the top schools.
Look, there really is no way to verify all of this without being in the admissions office. However I am very suspicious, because claiming need blind will boost application numbers, which in turn inflated rankings.
Here are a couple of other points:
Stanford Business School recently got caught red handed. While they claimed being need blind for years, an expose on Quants and Poets found out they were lying. The FA office gave out non-need based FA to desirable applicants.
I personally know someone who used to work in Yale undergrad admissions. He told me that they do pay different type of attention to full pay students. Their financial aid budgets aren’t endless, so they have to round out the class with kids who they know can pay full freight.
“The absence of harm to one applicant pool (financial aid applicants) does not equate to lack of advantage in the other (those paying full tuition).” --No, that’s a contradiction. If some kids were in fact being advantaged and therefore gaining admission simply because they were full pay, then they would necessarily be taking away places from all others. Hence it could not be said that financial aid applicants were suffering no harm. Aristotle proved a long time ago (see the Doctrine of the Excluded Middle in the “Posterior Analytics”) that a proposition cannot be both true and false.
Though I don’t quite know what this has to do with our present discussion, there are likewise many reasons why Harvard might have preferred to receive applications by a given date. It is hardly “obvious” that they intended to favor those applicants or to punish later applicants. That conclusion is a non sequitur. It’s also not really sensible. Each institution wants to recruit the best class it can according to its lights, not be in the business of excluding applicants for technical reasons.
Anecdotal and second-hand evidence of what is purported to happen at other schools doesn’t impress me very much, especially when accompanied by whiffs of paranoia. As to “claiming need blind will boost application numbers, which in turn inflated rankings” - that statement crumbles if you consider that the need-blind admission policy was in place at Chicago and I believe most of its peer schools many decades before rankings mania was introduced by US News. Sometimes a thing is only what it is and not a cover for something more devious.
And here’s another non-sequitur: That there are many factors that can advantage an applicant (the so-called hooks) is no argument that superior financial status is one such factor. It might or it might not be such a direct factor, or it might or it might not be correlated with other factors. Or it might even be an impediment. However, any of these propositions requires an argument supported by logic and evidence.
My own speculation is this: If there were any secretive hypocritical attempt to move away from the long-standing need-blind admission policy we would have heard something about it through unofficial channels. A plain brown envelope would have landed on the desk of the editor of the Maroon, or someone would have resigned and blown the whistle. One or more of the people who work in admissions would be pushing back in one way or the other. It would be a scandal. I’ll wait to hear of such an event before believing any such scurrilous accusation.
It’s like a math test with a couple of extra credit problems. This is not a zero-sum game.
Hey, I’m not claiming that there is evidence of wide-spread fraud in college financial aid offices. Quite the contrary. I believe there are subtle things that the admissions office can do to tilt towards kids who can pay in full. I don’t think there is a widespread conspiracy to take full-pay kids in place of those kids who need FA. However the entire college admissions process is so obscure that it without closer scrutiny, the admissions and financial aid Deans can do whatever they want and get away with it. But you want conclusive evidence.
Let me go back to my point about Stanford Business School. A student at SBS was browsing around on the internal network and found an unsecured spreadsheet. He opened it up and found lots of financial aid data (about 5000 applicants over a 7 year period). The student did his own analysis of the data and concluded that Stanford was lying, and that it was not truly need-blind. He then exposed this to the dean and others. Poets and Quants published several articles around this, here is just one:
https://poetsandquants.com/2018/01/05/gsb-aid-director-guess-i-shouldnt-have-told-you-that/
Now I know that this is only about business school applicants, but it has some relevance to undergrad admissions because they work in much the same way. In the business school admissions world, the Stanford case has already risen to the level of a significant scandal. In other investigative journalism by Poets and Quants, found that Stanford was preferentially admitting investment bankers/finance types to boost the mean salary statistic.
Does this same thing happen at every undergrad college? No. But with the opaque system now, there are no checks and balances. With the intense pressure to raise rankings, increase application numbers and decrease acceptances, this leaves a lot of potential abuse. I wouldn’t be surprised if these types of things are happening now at the big undergrad colleges, and that we just don’t hear about it.
Not a good analogy, @84stag . There are not a limited number of high marks available on a math test. There are, however, a limited number of places in an entering class at Chicago. Tell me why this is not a zero sum game. And tell me why such chicanery and sophistry, if it were being practiced, would not have come to light.
As @84stag points out, here is the story behind George Washington University. After intense scrutiny, it was found that GWU was pretending to be need-blind when they really weren’t. Detailed in this story (Source: Inside Higher Ed)
Relevant quote from the Inside Ed article:
@sgopal2 You’ve cited two instances. One of them concerns a business school, where I do not find an absence of need-blindness to be unsurprising, though there seems to have been some form of false advertising about the actual policy. The situation at GWU is far more serious and is in fact scandalous. Language and the ideas expressed in language have consequences. That’s something you learn early at Chicago. It sounds like “need blind” was being used At GWU as a feel-good advertising slogan unconnected with reality. The administrators in question could have used a course in Ethics, if not Linguistics.
@marlowe1 completely agree about the GWU story. To be clear, there is no evidence of impropriety at UChicago that I’m aware of. I have no reason to believe that UChicago is lying about being “Need-blind”.
I think we can all agree that the current system is not perfect, and has the potential for being gamed.
@sgopal2 You have your info on Stanford wrong. Their policy was they dont offer merit-based scholarship, they only offer need-based scholarships. Stanford’s “cheating” has nothing to do with need blind or need aware admission - its about whether or not they offer merit based aid - which could be awarded to any applicant once accepted without regard to demonstrated need.
Your argument is false and has nothing to do with college acceptance (it may have something to do with yield, specifically vs Harvard, hence the merit aid awarded to those who don’t “need” them.)
^^ Yes you’re right. I mixed up “need-blind” and “non-need based scholarships”. Thanks for the correction.
But this doesn’t mean my argument is false. In fact this supports what I’ve been saying: that there is a huge pressure for colleges to boost rankings. Some colleges will say one thing publicly, and then behave differently behind the scenes. Two cases above illustrate this point.
I agree Stanford, really really messed up. They have been doing a lot of missteps lately, reminds me of Wharton 3-5 years ago.
There’re dozens of colleges that claim to be “need-blind” as there’re dozens of colleges that claim to not take into account of “demonstrated interest”. In reality, however, only a handful are truly need-blind (and/or truly indifferent to demonstrated interest). That handful also happen to be the most elite and UChicago is not one of them.
@1NJParent “That handful [of truly need-blind colleges] also happen to be the most elite and Chicago is not one of them.” --What is your evidence for that assertion with respect to Chicago? How is Chicago’s admission policy not need-blind? Are you suggesting the rich kids are given preferences? Or are you simply sneering at Chicago’s claim to be elite?
“Demonstrated interest” is a different matter entirely. Chicago most certainly takes that into account, and properly so as I see it. You don’t seem to like that, but why is it inconsistent with the “need blind” policy? What does it even have to do with that policy?
@marlowe1 It basically comes down to trust. I’m not a cynic by nature. But I simply don’t think it’s true (nor possible) for any school, elite or not (and Chicago is definitely elite), to not consider’s an applicant’s finances, ability to pay full tuition, and prospects for donations down the road, in its admissions decisions. The schools who say they are completely need-blind are simply not being honest and complete. I understand your position. I want to agree with it. But I don’t.