<p>There are virtually no "need-blind" schools. Every school my d. applied to, including those which claim "need-blindedness", had a box, right on the front page of the application, asking whether you were applying for financial aid.</p>
<p>The question really is whether they take financial aid into consideration in admissions. And the answer is they all do, though they don't have to do so for each individual candidate to arrive at the result they need. Remember, they are admitting a class that they hope will serve their institutional mission, not individual candidates. Obviously, recruiting trips, which GCs they talk to, and contacts with well-healed alumni are not need-blind.</p>
<p>But look at the application itself. There is a section for ECs. Is there a section for how much financial support a student provides for her family? Or one for the number of hours spent caring for a disabled mother? Or one for the number of hours spent navigating through the child welfare system? How about the number of hours caring for an alcoholic father, or in meetings of Ala-Teen? Yes, one could find a way to reveal this in the application, but the application makes sure there is a place for fencing, and second and third languages, doesn't it?</p>
<p>It is amazing how year after year so-called "need-blind" colleges have essentially the same percentage of students receiving financial aid, and the financial aid budgets don't vary (you can check the Common Data Sets). The odds for that happening at 50 top schools consistently would be pretty close to hitting the lottery.</p>
<p>"Need-Aware" schools that are in the top echelon are "need-aware" in two different ways. Smith happens to be both, so it is easy to explain with a single example. First, they have a 3-decade commitment to economic diversity, with a quarter of the student body on Pell Grants. This means changes in recruiting strategies, heavy funding for campus visits, long-term contacts with GCs in poor schools, outreach to alums with contacts in poor neighborhoods, much wider latitude on evaluation of SATs, use of a parent essay, and a much heavier emphasis on personal interviews. It costs time and money to be "need-aware" this way, and they have to commit to it for a long period of years. (Amherst still claims to be "need-blind", yet have put a non-need-blind policy in place for the last decade to raise their percentage of Pell Grant recipients to the 15.6% they have now. And of course most of the schools that participate in Questbridge claim to be need-blind - yet the Questbridge program itself is directed at dealing with high need to begin with.) The flipside is that the financial aid budget is fixed. So when they've admitted 95% or so of the class, they check how much of the budget they've spent. If they've spent it all, lack of need will be taken into consideration for the last few admits. (Alternatively, if they haven't spent it all, they may decide to admit more high-need candidates.)</p>
<p>On an individual level, I doubt this is worth worrying about, except that if you need good financial aid, it is a reasonable idea to choose schools that have a history of providing it to large numbers of students. Not a policy of doing so, but a history of doing so. (Harvard has a terrific policy, but the number of poor students who actually attend is deadly laughable. And it is interesting to see how schools differ in what they think poor students need. Princeton did away with the loan portion of aid, which is great for middle-income students, but almost irrelevant for poor ones, who have to figure out how to help support families back home, usually through on-campus earnings or summer earnings. Ruth Simmons at Brown, in contrast, to my mind, got it right - they kept the loan portion, but abolished first-year work requirements - students who worked at college in their first year could thus send the earnings home. Ruth, of course, remembers herself doing just that. She was also responsible for the de-emphasis on SATs at Smith as heavy reliance on testing was found to be antithetical to the commitment to highly qualified low-income students.)</p>