<p>Nicekidsmom - not sure; our office of Enrollment Management includes Admissions, Registrar, and Financial Aid - they are considered one unit at some schools. </p>
<p>I think part of the question (for us) was also to estimate funds to hold for applicants selected for verification. When finite federal funds are available, we don’t want to penalize applicants who applied early for financial aid but are selected for verification and we have to delay awarding them. If an applicant who was selected for verification put us down first on the FAFSA, and it’s more likely they’ll enroll than the applicant who put us 8th, then it gives us a better idea of how much $ to hold and not award to applicants who filed later but were not delayed by being selected randomly for verification.</p>
<p>No, I don’t believe for a minute they really care about where else you applied (at least when it comes to making FA decisions). They have enough of a hard time figuring out which of 30,000 applicants they should admit, without then also trying to second-guess kids who presumably applied in good faith. It’s about as ridiculous as the canard that they sit there and re-calculate your GPA’s to some common standard to account for the fact that this school counts gym in your GPA and that one doesn’t and this school weights honors at 4.5 and that school at 5.0 and so on. It doesn’t happen. </p>
<p>Now, if you’re a heavy-hitter from a development standpoint (for example, when Ralph Lauren’s kids applied to Duke, or you’re a Kennedy, or somesuch), that’s when I think they care about where else you’re applying so they can sell against that school.</p>
<p>gluckie - I have no idea whether or not you should list your schools on your FAFSA in order of preference. All I know is I was asked to look at this for new applicants (direct from high school) to see if there happened to be any correlation between what place the student listed us and how likely they were to enroll. In our case there was. However, we are not the norm, especially in the land of College Confidential. Out of my D’s hs graduating class of over 300 students, only 10 went out of state to attend college. Of those that went to college most stayed in-state.</p>
<p>Our school analyzed this because they WANT students to apply and they admit almost every applicant. If a school is deluged with candidates and is selective they probably don’t care.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl - I disagree. At most of the college “dog & pony shows” that I attended the admissions people stated that they disregard weighted grades and also most non-core classes. It is not difficult to “normalize” grades (except perhaps numerical weighted grades) and it is certainly not difficult to remove non-core class grades. As I understand it, they then look at the overall difficulty of the coursework and class standing.</p>
<p>My guidance counselor writes on the transcript wherever he sends the transcript (So my first school I sent it to saw U1, the second U1 and U2, the third U1, U2, and U3 and so on) so I really couldn’t keep it a secret where I applied. I’m at a very small religious school that he’s been at forever, so it’s probably a relic from another era…</p>
I think both this and what Pizzagirl said can be right–the school considers all this, but I’ll bet they don’t take the time to do a pseudoscientific analysis of all the data. I’ll bet they look at the file with the Mark I Eyeball and determine if the grades are good or not.</p>
<p>POST 15 spells out why I took the advise given long ago of submitting your Fafsa forms ONE COLLEGE AT A TIME. After each college is entered, submit the form, then go back in , delete the college just entered and then enter the next one on your list .It takes a bit longer to submit all the reports this way , but colleges then have NO IDEA where else a student is applying.</p>
<p>If financial aid is an issue, it is always better to have options IMO. Even though all of the financial aid packages from D’s potential colleges have been great, there will still be a monetary difference to consider when making the final decision. The parental contribution of one ivy is about half of the parental contribution of another (!) even though the information they received from us was identical.</p>