My sister’s daughter’s school counselor just sent the following request that must be completed in order for her senior to receive cap and gown. Anyone ever hear of a high school requesting financial aid letters? By the way this is a public high school.
“Copies/Print Outs of ALL financial Aid, Grant, & Scholarship Award Letters/Offers Submitted for Each Institution that offered Admission
Copies of all Acceptance Letters/Emails Received
Oral Notification of School of Enrollment & the Major to be Pursued”
My (public) school has “Scholarship Night” where the seniors can turn in all their scholarship offers and have them announced, but it is purely optional.
If your niece isn’t super private or concerned about it, I would probably just roll with it for the sake of peace.
Don’t see why the high school would find the financial aid numbers to be of any use by themselves. Perhaps the more useful question to ask, with less privacy backlash, would be “Was [school]'s financial aid offer similar to, better than, or worse than, its net price calculator estimate?”.
“Didn’t apply for financial aid” at an expensive college would cause the high school to assume that the family is wealthy, which is the same type of privacy concern that providing the financial aid offer numbers would be.
Bragging rights, I’m guessing. My oldest’s school, for example, likes to total up the scholarships their graduating seniors are receiving as a sort of “Check out how great we’re doing!” thing.
Our school asks how much we received in scholarships in order to make decisions about their own scholarship awards, some of which have need as a factor in choosing the recipient. They don’t ask for the actual letters, though. I report the numbers because there are a lot of kids who need the $$ more than we do and it seems like the right thing to do.
My S has been out of school for a few years and D is only in 9th grade so I am not sure, but can the data be of use in Naviance? I suspect it is being used to aid future applicants and bragging rights.
I respectfully disagree. All it does is essentially give a data point. this is not a good example because Dartmouth and many of the Ivies/ elite schools provide free tuition/ no out of pocket cost for families below a certain income threshold. In addition, most people already know the SES make up of the school that they/ their child attends (because it is public information that can be easily found through the department of education).
My school does ask, the information is totally voluntary and we remove all identifying student/family information.
I have been fortunate in asking for the information and getting it; in fact I have 2 large binders with financial aid offer letters from about 300 different schools, that I use to sit down and talk with students and families (it is especially helpful for my low income students who are applying to opportunity programs, questbridge, posse, etc) because those packages usually don’t change year over year.
It is also helpful to the families of my students with disabilities, students in foster care, etc because I am able to show them (yes, some people need to see it in writing), who at this income point, they could get X dollars and then we look at monies, fro other sources; Acess, ETV to show them how the college can be made more affordable. It also helps to recommend other schools to my students.
Yes, I have a student with disabilities that was accepted to St. Johns, which does not meet full need and able to advise them that if they also apply for A,B, C, that they would be eligible to close the gap and make it affordable.
Yes,I was able to recommend to my student, that she was a viable candidate to Fordham for EOP and if she got in they would give her a FA package of $54,000 with a max of $3500 in loans.
In both cases, it happened. I am happy that one of my former students did give me a copy of the package so that I was able to have these kinds of conversations to guide my student.
I have been able to advise my students "with this GPA you will be a good candidate for A, B and C. this coupled with 1, 2, 3, this college can be a financially viable option.
To say that it is none of the school’s business I feel that it can place schools a no win situation; families want counselors to talk more to families, about financial aid and packaging, however, they don’t want to share information to help explain to families how the process can and does work. The more information that we can provide families the better partners we can be in the process.
If the school was asking: Please submit the info in an unmarked envelope w/o the students/families’ names, then fine. Totally anonymous and the school can gather the data that it believes it needs.
However, to DEMAND it w/o being anonymous and holding graduation hostage is an outrage.
and Thumper’s right…a student who gets a full ride to any ivy is essentially saying “my family’s income is below XXX amount.”
Your school district is pretty amusing. Ask them to show you, in writing, the regulation that permits them to require that information. I’d post the request on their FB page too, if they had one, so the community is aware of what they’re doing. Refusing to give the children their caps & gowns unless families turn over private files is beyond obnoxious.
