<p>Hey everyone. Was thrilled to be accepted at Smith, but I just got the finaid offer in the mail today, and wow, it was terrible. :( I know some people write in to try ask for more and I was wondering how Smith is with finaid on the whole. I would love to go to Smith but without finaid it's just not possible. Is there any point in writing in for more? (and it's not just a little bit more that I'd need, either. =) </p>
<p>For those of you who've been accepted and applied for finaid, how did your offer go?</p>
<p>I'm sorry to hear you are not satisfied with your financial aid package. I would say Smith is quite generous to me because the college covers everything for me except my personal and travel expenses and books. Basically, I have to pay around $2,000 annually. You can try negotiating with Financial Aid office, but you'd better talk to someone who had done that before. Good luck with that!</p>
<p>You can negotiate but your reasons for asking for more money need to be grounded in reality, not "I want more money." </p>
<p>How does the aid given compare to your EFC?</p>
<p>I'm self-employed and their read on FinAid for my daughter depended on interpretations of my tax returns about which reasonable people could reach different conclusions. I made an appointment, we chatted, they reached a better conclusion upon subsequent review than they had the first time around. It also helped that I had competing--and better--FinAid offers for my D from three competing institutions. I suppose it's a coincidence that Smith's revised offer edged out the best of the competing offers by a couple of hundred dollars. Yes, a coincidence, it must be....</p>
<p>Be polite. Don't back them into a corner. Stress how much you want to attend Smith and indicate that if the offer is satisfactory, you will.</p>
<p>I was completely thrilled when I got my fin aid letter. For the public schools I applied to, I was only offered 2,000 or so per year. When I opened my Smith letter I couldn't believe that my family would be paying less than half the amount of a state school. I'd say Smith is very generous with their aid.</p>
<p>CuteKelly, I wish more students--and parents--understood this earlier in the game. You will often get much better FinAid from a private school than a public, to the point where the private is significantly less expensive on a net cost basis. So many students don't apply to privates because they're told or otherwise think they can't afford it.</p>
<p>TheDad, do you think this holds true for people with low efc but who are otherwise not eligible for large federal grants. I have heard that some schools favor the lowest income levels and then the upper moderate income levels with smaller efcs but there is a gap betwen the two. This was a topic of some thread a while back.</p>
<p>Whups...an answer that's too brief, I fear...I leave for the airport in 20 minutes.</p>
<p>Mr. B, we're in that upper moderate income level. In fact, if we weren't living in a very high cost area, we'd be "upper," flat out simple. If you drop me an e-mail, I'll talk specific numbers--both income and aid--when I get back on Tuesday...I don't feel comfortable doing so in public.</p>
<p>LLB, I'm sorry to hear that and without knowing the circumstances am at a loss to explain why. Which public and what are their costs? I'm comparing Smith to U/California and for sake of argument assuming that D wouldn't have gotten a Regent's Scholarship, which is a shakey assumption. The only people I know in your position have very high EFC's.</p>
<p>From what I've heard Smith is very generous for those that have a need but not with those that don't. I got nothing in my financial aid package (ie just loans) but I wasn't expecting anything.</p>
<p>When I was wandering around Smith last summer and again during a brief discussion in San Francisco with an admissions person - I was told that as Smith runs out of its financial aid budget it makes choices of applicants to extend the remaining aid as best they can...and that qualified students who require larger amounts of "Smith money" will get waitlisted at that point. Hence the term, "need sensitive" as opposed to "need blind." These people, I believe, are the people with low efcs who qualify for little or no federal money (pell grants for example.)</p>
<p>I have no way of telling how many, if any, applicants were waitlisted by this system if it exists. That is, who would answer affirmatively to each of these three questions. Were you waitlisted? Were you in need of a large financial aid package based on Fafsa's efc? At schools where you were accepted was your pell grant non existant or under $1000? The same questions could be put to those accepted for comparison.</p>
<p>If there were such a survey it might help guide future applicants or it might disprove this theory as silly and speculative. I know I have seen other threads and postings that question the machinations of need blind or sensitive admissions policies.</p>
<p>It's not exactly how it works, but it is close. After admitting about 95% of the class, meeting 100% of their needs, they total up how much they've allocated (using an algorithm based on who they actually expect will matriculate); if there is still money in the till, they continue to admit applicants without regard to need. If they've run out of funds, then they only admit those students for whom they can still meet all of their need (or who don't need any.) The waiting list works the same way: finances come into play if they've run out of funds; if not, they will meet 100% of need of those they admit.</p>
<p>Smith is very, very generous. It has the highest percentage of Pell Grant (low-income) students of any prestigious private colleges in the country. It ranks in the top 5 in grant aid per students (the others are Mt. Holyoke, Oberlin, Macalester, Occidental), and 40% more than every one of the Ivies except for Princeton (it is 20% higher than Princeton.)</p>
<p>Mini, I don't question Smith's or the generosity of any of the other colleges that help students afford to attend. I don't even claim to fully understand the source and the limitations of Pell type grants. I did not know about the 95% statistic, was aware of the limits of funding and suspected it would affect who if anyone was pulled from their waitlist. </p>
<p>I take it you don't think there is a financial aid anomaly created around the income brackets of people not eligible for large Pell grants but with low efcs non the less. I think this originated in my mind from something someone had said on another thread last fall, but I can't find it now. I hope I didn't offend anyone with this.</p>
<p>I kind of doubt it - can't see what's in it for Smith. Pell Grants, which are given to folks with family incomes of roughly $40k and below (usually far below), make the first portion of any financial aid package at ANY college. But the thing is, the need is usually so great for a Pell Grant recipient that there is no benefit to the college; it merely makes up for the extra they'd have to fork over otherwise.</p>
<p>And I think you're right, that need for aid could, in theory, affect folks hoping to get in off the waiting list. (I mean, if you ran a non-profit business, with a tight budget, but had just given out $37 million and the cupboard was bare, wouldn't you do the same?) None got off the waiting list last year. More likely to be some this year, as I'm sure they are guarding against overenrollment.</p>