I am going to apply for Andover and have researched about the need-blind admission. I’m still not really sure how it works because I was too afraid to bring it up to the interviewer. Does it apply to everyone?
What it means is that they do not look if you are a financial aid applicant during the process. They decide who they are accepting and then fund them (if they applied) based off of their algorithm.
Thank you @momof3swimmers
For other people that are reading this and wondering about “need-blind” admission at other schools, I recently asked an AO this questions. His response was that although they try not to let it influence their decisions and they don’t want it to, any school that tells you they are “need blind” is lying.
While I do believe that Andover and Exeter are need-blind as they say they are. Most other schools are not. And are schools that say they are need-blind, but still weight legacy and big donors, truly need-blind?
At need blind schools, FA students with equal academic and extracurricular qualification as FP student, have much better acceptance chance than at other schools. It’s still harder for FA students as it is generally harder to build up either good academics or extracurricular qualification without family’s financial support.
But if they did, then they would have better chances, if not exactly the same chances. There are some argument that need blind is not really need blind. But I guess it will be at least “less” need aware. Something is better than nothing IMO. And more of partials can be better than less of full; Two 90% vegetarians can reduce more meat consumption than one 100% vegetarian can, and almost as much as two 100% vegetarians can, in all practical matters.
Note that boarding schools are not as well endowed as colleges, and most of them can’t afford to be need blind in any level.
If you are afraid that asking it to the school will hurt your application, then you can ask them anonymously with a different email account.
“Need blind” is just a comforting lie told by certain schools. None of them is need blind. Not one. Common sense, folks.
Note that there are certain day schools that will only allow an applicant to apply for financial aid once he or she has been admitted. I’m not aware of any such day school that will guarantee to meet an applicant’s financial need, but at least at those places you can be sure that the financial aid decision is truly separate from the decision to admit.
A system like that could have been set up by the TSAO, for instance, and so it should be pretty obvious why it wasn’t.
I thought the Anodover and St Andrews Delaware are the ONLY need blind schools. Exeter is need aware.
And I do believe Andover is need blind.
Side note, Princeton is now need aware I heard because they want social econmaic diversity and know that poor families can’t afford all the “extras” to pad an application.
Deerfield, Groton, MX all claim to be “need-blind”. Reality is…you will get WLd instead of accepted if there is another kid who needs FA but is a better fit, a URM needed, Legacy, sibling, etc etc … as others have stated…a school cannot truly be need blind unless they make you wait to apply for FA until after accepted.
If you want some bathroom reading on the need blind issue, here you go:
In all those pages and since, no one has ever satisfactorily addressed my question:
Wow. Thanks for the enlightenment. That’s not what I have guessed.
@ChoatieMom, that is a very good point. It seems if they were truly need blind there would be great fluctuations in the yearly ratios. How are they able to maintain almost the same ratio year after year? Things that make you go hmmmm.
Well, I gave it a little bit more thought and got a plausible theory; If Andover PA has maintained a same preference of student demographics; certain number of legacy. athletes, URM, Asians, etc etc, and also similar applicant profile is maintained year after year (because of no change in marketing practice), than it seems natural for them to have a similar FA/FP ration year after year, even with need blind policy.
In short, the same status-diversity conscious admission policy, even if it is need-blind, may cause the stable FA/FP ratio.
@SculptorDad: You’re making the assumption that those demographics will have the same FA need year over year, but that is not realistic. For example, not all URMs/legacy/athletes/ORMs, etc. necessarily need FA nor are necessarily FP. Conceivably, if truly need-blind and unbiased, a school could build a class where all of those buckets could be FP or all of those buckets could need FA, and the ratio c/would fluctuate wildly annually. I’ve spent much of my career as a data analyst. These ratios just don’t work under my definition of need blind which I freely admit may be incorrect. There absolutely is some gating factor at work here.
What makes sense to me is that the gating factor is the FA budget. Andover says, “We will spend $X on FA this year. Here are 500 admissible applicants broken down by the buckets we need. You (FA office) figure out how to spread the allocated/limited dollars to produce a balanced, incoming class of, say, 250 students (or whatever Andover typically admits).” This approach keeps the FA/FP ratio stable, but it isn’t what I think of as need-blind as Andover’s endowment enables it to buy any class it wants regardless of cost; no need to pre-determine an FA budget. St. Andrews cannot do this as it has a fraction of Andover’s endowment but still markets itself as need-blind. So, my conclusion is that the FA budgets at all schools are fixed and the incoming classes, even at need-blind schools, are built based on that pre-set limit. There may be blindness when building that “yes” pile, but it’s a large pile that is culled by the FA budget no matter how large the endowment.
Maybe this is obvious to everyone else. I just thought (hoped) need-blind meant “buy this class regardless of cost.” It doesn’t.
MODERATOR’S NOTE:
The Original Poster is a 12 or 13 year old girl who asked a simple question. Please feel free to answer the simple question. She did not ask for, and does not need, jaded responses about whether a school is truly need-blind. That conversation has been had numerous times here, and will never be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. Believe it or don’t believe it, but don’t debate it.
The 12 or 13 year old’s answer is that any school, but most especially the most famous, most elite, schools admits in discrete groups for every class, and the FA-or-not needs of many of those groups and individuals within those groups will be known and accounted-for before any applications are read. Schools have many tools to get to know people, families, and potential students before the admissions deadline. Any need-blind activity happens within a relatively small group of applicants about whom not much is known before the application deadline beyond which can be learned in interviews and from things like school history and zip code. It’s pretty easy to keep the ratio of FA kids to full-pay kids relatively constant because you only need to be “need blind” with a small bunch of applicants/potential new students every year.
Sorry, @skieurope. Please feel free to delete my post. It IS a dead horse.