<p>A private school says that around 50% of their students are on financial aid. This means that the other half are paying full freight. They say that they evaluate each application with no regards to the amount of income the family makes. I've noticed that the number of applicants that receive financial aid is always around the 50-60% range. </p>
<p>I'm curious as to how they get to so close to those numbers. Obviously, the school needs people paying full and they need donors to help offset the costs of FA, among other needs. Do they have 2 piles of applicants, one who applies with FA and the other that doesn't ? Or do they accept applicants until they reach a certain limit of FA given out and then start accepting the more wealthy applicants?</p>
<p>If the school is NEED BLIND they do not sort the applicants by financial need. The admissions office does not look at or consider finances when they review an application for admission.</p>
<p>There are many ways to do anything, and so it goes with any kind of admissions. Need blind admissions means that students are accepted without any regard to their need. That does not mean that need is met 100%, nor does it mean that the aid packages are all grants, for most schools, though there are schools that do meet both criteria. For those schools that are that generous, and really all schools, the law of large numbers comes into play. THe fact of the matter, is that most applicants to the most selective schools are upper middle class, and well to do kids. With just a few exception, the class can be filled with full pay kids who tend to be the best applicants until non academic factors are taken into account. The distribution of students tends to be pretty uniform each year, so it’s not difficult to get enough full pay kids. THere is a direct relationship between income and academic achievement, so the admissions lines just have to be drawn to give so much leeway from the top academic standards in order to get in the same number of “needy” kids. Even doing that does not get many kids who are Pell eligible as you can clearly see from the breakdowns. </p>
<p>For those schools that have to practice some form of rationing of financial aid, they just distribute the aid they have in ratio to how much they want those kids who are needy. So need blind does not mean, you blindly get your need met. It just means that you are accepted on a need blind basis.</p>
<p>A good example of this are some of the top prep schools. One, I know is need blind in admissions, but that doesn’t mean you get need met. You can get accepted and not get offered any financial aid. Few families,especially the truly needy ones can come up with that kind of money.</p>
<p>There is a difference between these two things:</p>
<p>Need blind admissions- Schools consider application decisions without financial consideration.</p>
<p>Guaranteeing to Meet FULL Need- This means the school will meet your full need as they compute it. They will compute a family contribution and subtract it from their cost of attendance…and guarantee to meet that full need for students.</p>
<p>There are NOT a lot of schools that are need blind for admissions AND meet full need.</p>
<p>^ But would kids that are accepted that applied for FA (but didn’t receive any) be considered part of the X% of students at the school that are considered under FA, then ?</p>
<p>Would you go as far as to say that the elite privates are self selecting, in terms of income/wealth?</p>
<p>Students who did not receive financial aid are not counted as students who “are under financial aid”. Only the students who RECEIVE financial aid are counted in the %age of students who are getting financial aid at a school. </p>
<p>I’m not sure I understand your question about this.</p>
<p>Also…regarding “self selection” at the elite schools for income/wealth…what exactly do you want to know? Are you wondering if only wealthy students apply to elite schools? Answer…NO. Are you wondering if only those who know they will receive need based aid apply? Answer NO.</p>
<p>What do you want to know?</p>
<p>If anything…the elite schools with very competitive admissions are sort of self selecting in terms of the stats they bring to the application process. Many, if not most, of the applicants to theses schools are very high achievers.</p>
<p>I’m not sure I’m answering your questions because I’m not sure I understand what you want to know.</p>
<p>OP, your question, at least what I think you’re asking, has been brought up many times in the past. Here is a sampling of threads from a Search on the Parents forum for “blind” brought up. See in particular the last thread for mini’s analysis which is referred to in some of the other threads:</p>
<p>Absolutely, Brando. If our friend, Mini, one of my favorites on this board should see this thread, he will tell you that the schools are set up for the well to do families, with exceptions falling into those getting fin aid. He says this in far stronger terms than that. </p>
<p>Two of my kids went to a private prep where most of the kids do go on to selective top 25 unis and LACs. Nearly all of these kids come from well to do homes, since tuition at this school is prohibitively high with little fin aid available. The average SAT1 score on a 1600 scale is about 1400 for the school, and the rigor for the students is without doubt a 5 out of 5 with most kids getting a half dozen or so AP tests in the 4/5 level. Also the school makes sure the kids are very active. You live that school when you go there. So much to do, and no where to hide. Also kids are selected on the basis of what they can contribute on a non academic basis so you are talking about some multi talented kids. So it also is at top public high schools that send a lot of kids to selective schools. The numbers just fall into place. </p>
<p>For all of the talk of giving the challenged a bit of a break, there are truly few low EFC famiilies sending kids to these top schools. The PELL numbers show that very clearly. Just because a kid needs financial aid, does not mean he needs a lot of aid. </p>
<p>The same situtation come into play when the adcoms have to decide how many kids to accept to fill all the spots and yet not over fill the school by too much. They are pretty good at coming to a target number in terms of yield. Also there is the wait list as a buffer. Most schools, even if they guarantee to meet 100% of need for their student, do not guarantee it for those who clear the wait list. Nor for transfer. That gives them even more than the 10% play that they need to make budget.</p>
<p>When you look at the financial numbers, they are deceiving. For instance, a parent who was looking at NYU stats commented that they did not look that bad in terms of fin aid. What he did not take into account were those kids who were accepted but could not or would not go there because they were so badly gapped.</p>
<p>Entomom, I see you have brought Mini into this as well. </p>
<p>Many of the things that are important to selective colleges are things that tend to be what the wealthier students tend to have. Like those high test scores. The knowledge to apply to the school. How to present one’s self. A high school that helps them with the app. Parents and counselors that are knowledgeable of the process. The ECs that make them desirable as part of the college community. The academic preparation needed to even be considered for such schools.</p>
<p>My husband came from what is considered a deprived area. Few kids from there go to elite colleges. It is a loosely kept secret that the state school has a quota system of sorts to make sure they get some kids from there, and that includes the medical and law schools. Nearby selective colleges also know that the area is not well to do and the schools are not good, just as they know those schools that regularly have tons of applicants to them. All of this is taken into account. My husband was shocked to find that his SAT scores which were the highest in his high school were below the median of the kids at the college, particularly for his major. That he was ill prepared became painfully obvious that first term. He was accepted, with lower test scores than kids from better schools as a representative of sorts from that part of the state.</p>
<p>I think you’re asking whether the colleges you’re referring to resort to admitting applicants who are able to pay once the college’s financial aid funds are exhausted? Part of this is what CPT said: admitting students need blind does not mean that the school will meet full need. Once the funds run out, you simply receive less FA, sometimes unsatisfactory financial aid packages. The schools that can both meet the full need and have need blind admissions generally have endowment large enough that small fluctuations in the number of FA students will not cause financial hardship to the college.</p>
<p>Are there certain amount of student body engineering involved? I think so. There is a certain percentage of students receiving aid just as there are certain percentage of students majoring in a certain area, have a certain extracurricular interest (art, music, sports, etc), a certain percentage of students of different ethnicities, etc. If you mean whether being low income is detrimental, as in colleges will favor applicants who are able to pay, then I agree with the posts above that this can often work in favor of low income students. Applicants who come from higher income families in general have stronger applications because of access to more resources, and often higher SAT scores. Top colleges actually try to make sure that a certain percentage of low income students is admitted so that there is a sense of diversity in the student body.</p>
<p>I attend a college on almost full aid, and one of the forms I was asked to fill out hinted that my tuition is paid through the donations of alumni of the school. So colleges do not simply rely on the tuition of full pay students to run the school or support the students who need FA. They receive much of the money from other sources.</p>
<p>Some schools practice enrollment management. These schools DO look at the student financial situation at least partially when they make admissions decisions. They are NOT need blind for admissions. These schools know they need to have a certain number of students who are paying a certain number OUT OF POCKET in order for the college to balance their books. Sometimes students are accepted but are not given sufficient aid to attend. Sometimes a student who can pay the full price is accepted over a student who has the need for institutional financial aid. </p>
<p>As noted, a school that meets full need AND is need blind for admissions does not typically do this. The aid is awarded to all accepted students who need it by the SCHOOL’S calculations…because the school has sufficient endowment resources to do so.</p>
<p>Another thing to note…most schools include loans as part of the financial aid package…not just “free money” (money that does not have to be paid back).</p>
<p>Every application I have seen including the Common App has right on it, the question asking if you are filing for fin aid. So admissions will know that. There are also a lot of give aways like school, address, parents’ occupation that give away a student’s soci economic. I really think that it’s none of their business but they do ask.</p>
<p>For schools like HPY, being truly needy can be actually help your app. Kids are evaluated in light of their environment and advantages. These schools are up front in saying that more is expected from those kids who have so much going for them. They are not going to expect the same type of ECs from kids from truly low income families, or expect the same courses from high schools that simply do not offer the rigorous courses.</p>
<p>“For schools like HPY, being truly needy can be actually help your app. Kids are evaluated in light of their environment and advantages. These schools are up front in saying that more is expected from those kids who have so much going for them. They are not going to expect the same type of ECs from kids from truly low income families, or expect the same courses from high schools that simply do not offer the rigorous courses.”</p>
<p>This is a oft repeated myth, however with low income kids under 10% at many of the top colleges, it’s probably nonsense. The system is geared to admit large numbers of wealthy kids. Need blind admissions needs to be looked at in the context of outrageously difficult admission requirements that 99.9% of low income kids could never achieve. It is not by accident that the percentages of full payer, partial payers and heavy need kids rarely change by more than a couple of percentage points. For the most part “need blind” is little more than an advertising gimmick.</p>
<p>No, not nonsense. I know a number of low income kids who were accepted at the top schools. They were accepted despite numbers that were lower than their peers were not so disadvantaged. I know this because many of the prep schools have these outreach programs for kids from disadvantaged backgrounds. Many of these kids do not get top grades at these rigorous schools and their test scores may not be waay up there, but they would have a chance at some schools that would be considerations for their peers. But the schools do not drop the levels way down either. They have to be sure that the student can do the work. It’s not as though these kids get a truly special pass to the college in that their numbers are in line with many other kids who are accepted for reasons other than pure academic excellence. Harvard has said right out that most of their kids are NOT just peeled off the top for excellent academics. But about a third or so are. It’s a complicated balance. To get diversity using holistic admissions is not as easy as using quotas. For the top schools, there are enough applicants, that they can do this. For some schools, that have fewer applicants of certain categories, it becomes more difficult.</p>
<p>It really is not a myth, Speedo. I’ve seen the stats over a ten year period from a school that tracks these things. The fact of the matter is that there are not enough economically challenged kids that can get into the top schools without some recognition of their situation. Schools like UNCChapel Hill and UVA, for instance, even being state schools actively seek low income out of state kids and have special programs for those kids. Any number of top schools do this. And yet the number of PELL eligible kids remains low.</p>
<p>Thanks for the replies. I don’t get FA at my state school b/c I’m very fortunate that my parents make enough, but my sister is going to start college soon, and I think she will receive some aid. </p>
<p>The reason I asked is b/c my friend at Columbia gets FA to cover ~90% of his tuition and his National Merit Scholarship covers the rest. I asked, out of curiosity if his peers were wealthy and I was shocked that the overwhelming number of them were very very well off. I always wondered about the 50-60% quote you see on the school’s websites. but I guess that they could be well off middle income and received a tiny portion of aid. Then they would be part of the statistic. I failed to realize that many people can’t attend certain school’s b/c their FA is not enough or they choose to attend b/c they get higher FA.</p>
<p>My son just pitched the school’s that were expensive and didn’t offer him any or much money. Didn’t give them another thought. Many years ago I did the same thing. It did not occur to me to go even try to go to a school that would not give me the scholarship money that others were offering me. My husband also went to the school that gave him the best scholarship deal. </p>
<p>I believe Harvard is the college that has the highest yield, and even they have kids who decline to go there and go elsewhere. I remember a post from several years ago from a father whose son was contemplating accepting the Morehead scholar award at UNC over his acceptance with no money from Yale. Yes, the family did not come up as needy at all in any of the fin aid calculators. But a check for Yale each year was going to be felt. It was going to hurt. So there are many who choose one school over another due to the merit or aid packages offered, or the sticker price.</p>
<p>A private school says that around 50% of their students are on financial aid. This means that the other half are paying full freight.</p>
<p>That doesn’t mean that the 50% who are getting some financial aid are getting all their “need” met. It may just mean that 50% have been given something…it may only be a student loan.</p>
<p>Many/most schools are need blind. However, most “need blind” schools do NOT meet need.</p>
<p>And, I don’t know how this part works…if a student has no need, but takes an unsub fed loan, does that count as “aid.”</p>