After submission of the application for admission we have received a school’s email to ask us to submit our materials as soon as possible by a specific date but the school indicates there is no penalty for submitting documents after the deadline. Does submission of an financial aid application affect one’s chance of getting into the top college? Thank you for your answer.
If the school is need aware and you’re on the cusp, perhaps. If the school is need blind, no.
How shall I know what the school needs? Does the school prefer the rich family kids?
Have a look at
If school is need-aware: APPLYING for FA doesn’t affect admissions. THE AMOUNT OF DEMONSTRATED NEED you have may affect the admission decision. If you apply for financial aid, but don’t qualify for financial aid, it will have zero effect.
I’ve read several of your other threads. It sounds like you can afford your state’s public colleges but would have to borrow heavily ($200k or more) for a highly ranked school and your plan seems to be to cosign the loans and make your kid repay them. Please don’t saddle them with that kind of debt.
If you you can’t afford to pay without getting aid then apply for it. And if your child isn’t awarded enough to make the school affordable then choose a less expensive option.
Cost needs to be treated as a precondition, and it really should be done before applying to the school. If your kid applied to a bunch of colleges you’re not sure you can afford, there’s no rational reason to believe you will afford them. Financial Aid packages for private schools are never as generous as they claim, and there’s always a parent with more money who’s willing to pay it. That’s how the game is played.
Is is worth co-signing debt because it’s a “ranked” university? N0! And that’s where parents should draw the line. It’s a sure setup for failure, and will financially cripple him for many years to come. Plus, if your son/daughter fails to make loan payments, the bank goes after you. There’s no bachelors degree worth taking out $100,000 in loans for, when your state university offers a degree with the same accreditation for a fraction of the cost.
Need-blind admission - Wikipedia
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Interesting list, I had thought most top schools were need blind in admissions (even if not meeting full need) and didn’t realize that there is now a sizeable list of “need aware but meet full need” schools. Maybe that’s the group to target - sure your chances of admission are lower but if you’re in you’re good. (And avoids the horrible issue of child getting into a great school that you can’t afford.)
I would like to know whether the family income is a factor for a child to be considered for acceptance by the school. It seems IT IS unless an applicant is much excellent. The school needs to do the business rather considers academic only. Does it make sense leaving the submission of the financial aid until one has known the admission results or it does not matter?
AFAIK, You cannot change your FA option once you’ve been admitted. If your student is a US citizen they can get a student loan after the fact regardless of what they put for FA but that amounts to only $5500. I do know some students have changed their FA option by phone call or email to “YES I Want to be considered for FA” after the application has gone in. That was usually done at the urging of people on these boards because they couldn’t afford to attend otherwise.
You were asking for top schools. The answer is that mostly, it is not taken into account (and mostly, all those admitted are “excellent”). Also, doing it the way you suggest, even if possible, adds an extra layer of complication as usually any aid offer is released with the decision. By not submitting financial info, you will then have to wait till after the decision, submit the financial info, and hope there is still funds left, and who knows how long they will take to do that and give you an aid number while you are weighing up offers, etc?
Schools do not need to “do business”. They need to fund their operations and provide funding for students who need it, and some of that comes from endowments and some from fees, the balance between the two will determine need blind/need aware/whether meet full need. I am not aware of any “top school” that is a for profit school.
Assume it does. But why does it matter? What good is it for your kid to get into a top school if you can’t afford it without financial aid?
The schools that carry enough prestige that could arguably justify (which is a whole other debate) a $70k± a year price tag are generally need blind and at the top of this pile offer very generous 100% grant aid. If you are considering any of those schools, you’d be foolish to not apply for FA.
For need aware (but meets full need) schools, a practical way to look at this is to run the NPC for the targeted schools and see what you are giving up in aid over 4 years and ask yourself is the school worth the amount you are now giving up to get a pretty marginal admissions advantage. I can’t imagine that ever being the case unless the calculated potential aid were de minimis. The larger question then is if full pay for that school is worth it vs other alternatives.
“I would like to know whether the family income is a factor for a child to be considered for acceptance by the school.”
It’s a factor for sure, as the Harvard data has pointed out, (at the risk of generalizing the Harvard data to other colleges). But it’s not a simple answer, applicants get some preference for low income, but Harvard’s average family income is like $200K, so they also want wealthy families.
“Does it make sense leaving the submission of the financial aid until one has known the admission results or it does not matter?”
Can you clarify? The FA questions is in the college app itself, so you can’t go back and change that answer after you submit or get accepted, as others have noted.
You can’t apply saying you don’t need aid, get an acceptance, then expect any kind of substantial aid. They may look at a change in circumstances, but I wouldn’t expect the financial aid office to scramble at the end of the cycle to pull together a package for you just because you wanted to game the admissions office.
If you can’t afford the school without aid then apply for aid. What good is it to get an acceptance if you have to tell your kid to turn it down because you can’t afford it?
theloniusmonk and austinmshauri above have contributed good replies. I know a case. A kid has applied for a top university through an early binding application but his family did not request the financial aid because they thought their kid would unlikely be accepted. However, the school offered the admission without financial aid package attached. The parents become worried about the high tuition and contacted the school financial office. The school requested them to submit the FAFSA. There has been no result yet. I am curious about 1) if the kid had told the school needing financial aid, would the school still have offered the admission; 2) will the school consider the financial aid as the same as to the requested applicants after the admission has already been made. Does anyone know about the inside of the admission and financial aid?
Yale is an exception. They have a recommended deadline if you want an award letter along with your admittance package, but no hard deadline for fin aid apps.
@compiler the question about ED can’t be answered without knowing which school it is, and therefore whether it is need aware/need blind/meets need. There is also a difference between doing this ED and RD, when in the latter the school believes it has finalized both admit and aid decisions by the time you get your answer.
It can still vary by school; we were told in one info session that the ED applicants and the first clear round of RD choices were pretty much need blind, and it was only in finalizing the class with the maybes at the end of the RD that they weighed up full pay vs need aid. Other schools will be looking at that equation much earlier in the cycle.
“1) if the kid had told the school needing financial aid, would the school still have offered the admission; 2) will the school consider the financial aid as the same as to the requested applicants after the admission has already been made.”
There’s really no way to answer that question definitively, if the college thought the ED applicant was full pay, it’s possible that’s part of the reason they accepted him or her. But now they know that the only way you can get out of ED is if you don’t like the financial aid, they’ll probably offer a competitive FA package.
I can’t believe we’re going over this question again on CC. There is so much info out there explaining how FA works, what different terms mean, etc. Need Blind vs Need Aware, Meet Full Need, etc.
The difference is this OP apparently has not come across that available info yet. Don’t shoot a few darts back at posters trying to answer questions. Don’t refer to some anecdote as proof a kd can apply late for FA…only to tell us those kids don’t have an aswer back yet. They may get nothing.
You want the right info. If you would like help, it pays to get started in the right places. How about a book like “Financial Aid for Dummies?” Or a web site like finaid.org? Are you familiar with terms like Fafsa, CSS Profile, how assets are tallied, what’s protected?
Colleges are under no obligation to offer aid to those who can afford to self pay. Nor to offer aid if it’s not their policy or they don’t have the funds. They are allowed to set deadlines and expect the proper, accurate info about your financial details. This info appears on their web sites.
If you cannot afford a college but get admitted- and you did not ask for FA and fill out the forms- you won’t be on the list of FA kids.
Yes, you can get out of an ED offer, IF the aid package is not sufficient. But if you didn’t apply for FA, what FA package do you expect?
They offer the packages per their policies. In the case of “Meet Full Need,” it still means, per their policies.