How did full paying students do at early admissions?

Parents Social Lounge
1

<p>Looking at D's school result in comparison to last year
Brown ED - up 100%
Caltech EA - up 100%
Columbia ED - N/A
Cornell ED - 100%
Dartmouth ED - 50%
MIT EA - 100%
Stanford SCEA - 200%
Penn ED - up 25%
Yale SCEA - N/A</p>

<p>It was also known to begin with that D's batch is much stronger than last year but still I think that not applying for need based FA might have helped.</p>

<p>The year seems to be shaping pretty good for the D's class till now. Yale and Columbia only seems to be the one that deffered some really good students.</p>

2

<p>Not sure it matters but all the kids I know who did not apply for FA were deferred or rejected to Penn, MIT, Yale, etc.</p>

3

<p>That will be refreshing to my D as she was of the same view and I was not trying to undermine her efforts also.</p>

4

<p>How on earth do you know the financial situation of all the students in your daughter’s school who applied ED to colleges? That’s private information.</p>

5

<p>Maybe they’re all rich.</p>

6

<p>It’s so funny to chase Ivy status just for the sake of “prestige” and then being so declasse as to pay attention to the contents of other people’s pocketbooks. The tackiness of paying attention to what you perceive other people earn can’t be overcome by all the Ivy League degrees in the world.</p>

7

<p>Fireandrain: it’s not private information if the applicant chooses to discuss it.</p>

<p>More generally on the subject of the thread, at the T10 schools with the big (albeit now somewhat smaller) endowments, expect EA to be continued to be used to mine the field for URMs and other special recruits, which typically will not be full pay. </p>

<p>At other schools, with fewer resources, I would expect your hypothesis to be more valid. These schools are more likely to take full pay students than previously, but I would expect that most of this dialing for dollars would occur in RA, after they admit the special recruits via EA.</p>

<p>The middle class, non-URMs, who cant pay full freight will get further squeezed in the process, unfortunately.</p>

8

<p>Fireandrain: it’s not private information if the applicant chooses to discuss it."</p>

<p>Hey parents. Who here would want their high school senior discussing whether they are full pay or not with fellow students? Ew.</p>

9

<p>And anyway, I could certainly imagine kids “embroidering” their individual truths.</p>

10

<p>If you go to a private high school and only 5-10% of students are on financial aid, then you could assume most of students are paying full fare when attending colleges. When we had our group meeting on the college process (9th grade), financial aid was never a topic of discussion. When we met with our college advisor, financial safeties were not mentioned. We had to ask about different need/merit scholarships. The advisor couldn’t really tell us about student loans or different scholarships. She just referred us to one scholarship site.</p>

11

<p>I’ll bet the OP is guessing based on his knowledge of the parents’ professions. As in, if they are doctors and live in big houses, then they must not be applying for financial aid.</p>

<p>While it is an interesting question, whether colleges this year will be accepting a higher percentage of full-pay students, I think the evidence given by the OP is totally unreliable. And a little disconcerting to think that someone kept a record of everyone who applied to the Ivies last year and this year and kept note of their perceived financial situation.</p>

12

<p>OP didn’t have to keep track. It’s public information at many schools, at least at private schools. They post how many applied, how many accepted. At end of the year, they publish where each student is attending.</p>

13

<p>The names of applicants might be made public. I doubt their financial information is posted on a wall.</p>

14

<p>And, what difference does it make whether full pays were accepted or not? Aren’t most colleges need-blind? I have been making this argument in many threads–it should not matter what is on a student’s app w/regards to parents (education/profession). Schools are not admitting based on full pays-or at least that is what I thought need-blind admissions was all about! Maybe the rules are changing because of the changing economy!?!</p>

15

<p>RE #7 - MIA, I question the accuracy of your assumption that applicants that are underrepresented minorities qualify for need-based aid at the ivy league schools. URM does not always equate to low economic status and quite often students that are URMs and who qualify for admission to highly competitive schools come from middle and upper-middle class households.</p>

16

<p>I do not believe most schools are need blind, unless you mean most Ivies. I think actual numbers help more then percents in this case. Wouldn’t increasing from 1 to 2=%100 increase? Maybe I’m not following.</p>

<p>PS, my D is a URM who pays full price. We are doctors but or house is the smallest on the block!</p>

17

<p>^^^ notre dame AL, </p>

<p>Most colleges are need-blind in admissions, but the vast majority of them don’t promise to meet 100% of demonstrated need. They’ll continue merrily on as before, accepting students regardless of financial need, offering what they can in the way of FA (usually something significantly less than 100% of demonstrated need), and letting the chips fall where they may. If the admitted student can scrape together enough resources to attend, great, but if not, so be it.</p>

<p>At issue here are two smaller groups of colleges, most of them at the elite end of the scale. One group promises to meet 100% of demonstrated need, but these schools are “need aware” in admissions for at least part of the class. Smith, for example, promises to meet 100% of demonstrated need but claims to be “95% need-blind” in admissions, meaning it simply doesn’t have resources to meet 100% of need for 100% of its students. So the last 5% Smith admits are probably going to be full-pays, even if it means passing over some equally or better-qualified students with need. (There will also be some full-pays in the first 95% taken strictly on merit, of course). The question for these schools is whether shrinking endowments, declining annual giving, and greater demands for FA from a current student body and new admit pool that are on average in much worse financial shape than last year will push the schools in the direction of ratcheting up the number of full-pays in their admit pools.</p>

<p>The other group is schools that promise to meet 100% of financial need AND have a need-blind admissions policy. There are actually very few of these. They’re in arguably worse shape. If they continue to be need-blind and continue to meet 100% of need, their FA budgets will surely soar, just when they have fewer resources to work with. The best-endowed can manage it; Yale, for example, just announced that it will maintain its current FA policies and look for other ways to meet an estimated $100 million budget shortfall for the current academic year, due mainly to an estimated 25% shrinkage in its endowment which contributes 44% of its total operating budget. For others, it’s dicier, and the options aren’t pretty: deep cuts elsewhere in the budget; retreating from their commitment to 100% need-blind admissions; or retreating from their commitment to meet 100% of demonstrated need. </p>

<p>Or, simply cheat on the need-blind pledge by finding ways to increase the number of full-pays in the entering class, without officially changing ther policy. One way to do that might be to fill more of the entering class from the ED applicant pool. My guess is that full-pays make up a higher percentage of the ED applicant pool than the RD applicant pool, because many applicants with financial need will conclude they can’t risk a binding ED commitment regardless of what their FA package looks like. If that hypothesis is correct, then increasing the percentage of the class drawn from the ED pool from, say, 25% to 40% of the class will likely increase the number of full-pays in the entering class even if the adcom technically isn’t examining the financial need of each individual ED applicant.</p>

18

<p>marnimom: WHAT?? No doubt there are some urms who are not economically disadvantaged (and, incidentally, I disagree with any diversity policy that advances the interests of one economically advantaged applicant over another based on urm status), but dont try to turn an exception into the rule. Urms generally require more in the way of finaid. period.</p>

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<p>pizzagirl: whether you approve or not, high school seniors discuss this type of thing all the time. I dont see anything wrong with it. In fact, it’s never too early to learn that you can’t necessarily afford everything you want. It’s part of making an educated, adult decision.</p>

20

<p>Just clarify couple of issue raised here on the thread:

  1. Financial status of the parents of D classmate - It is based on the school GC meeting where it was specifically mention that 95% of the students of D school doesn’t get any FA. So if you are still interested in FA then attend a separate session with FA representative from a college as the GC office doesn’t have any expertise in it.
  2. Number of students getting accepted - School does provide list of all the acceptances and matriculation every year so it is a public fact.
  3. Absolute number instead of % number - I’ve added N/A wherever the number of students in any year were less than 2.</p>