I understand it is difficult to quantify…I have many threads that people mentioned kids not admitted due to not showing interest…I wonder how need plays into the admission process for “meet full demonstrated need” schools?
As I looked further, except for the super selective schools, many of the meet 100% needs schools are not need-blind for admission…say Byrn Mawr, Tufts, Smith, case western, Reed… therefore, will high need be a major limiting factor for the kids even get admitted for the meet 100% need schools ? The family does not even have an option to borrow…(not debating whether it is a good idea to borrow, or whether it is okay to borrow 20% if the college meet 80% of the need)…
If a college does not meet 100% of need it is an overall average. If you are a top applicant they may meet 100% of your need. If you are not a top applicant they may not offer much aid at all.
It affects admissions at the margins – and it is also true that the amount of need can be a factor.
That is, if a college promises to meet full need but is need-aware in admissions, they typically will rank or score applicants and there will be some end-of-season shifting between students who are in a “maybe” tier for admission, based on financial aid status.
I’d add that “100% need” colleges are only meeting need as they define it, not necessarily anything close to what the student actually needs to go to school. So the family that does not even have an option to borrow may run into trouble if, for example, the college is looking at their home equity in calculating an expected contribution.
On the other hand, once a student gets into a 100% need college, it is likely to be more affordable than a college that doesn’t meet need – and the non-100% colleges will commonly admit students but leverage aid, so that the students who are in that same “maybe” category for admission will be given skimpier financial aid awards – sometime referred to as an admit-deny. (Student is admitted, but financial aid is so weak that the student could never afford to come).
So the application math is pretty much the same. Probably best for the student to focus attention on schools where there is a strong likelihood of admission.
Also note that at a need aware school, if you do not apply for aid at time of application, you will not be allowed to apply for aid after admission and possibly not for the remainder of undergrad study.
At Macalester College, Mount Holyoke College and Smith College, at least 95% of students are admitted without their financial aid need being a factor (i.e., “need-blind”), but a slim percentage (1%–5%), generally students wait-listed or with borderline qualifications, are reviewed in modest consideration of the college’s projected financial resources.
We were told it affects admissions at the margins, at Skidmore and Smith specifically. Sorry, I don’t buy it one bit. My daughter got wait listed at both Smith and Skidmore. She is happy at her school and would not have chosen either if she had been admitted. However, she had 1450 on her SAT, which is no way at the margin for Skidmore, her GPA, 8 ap’s and everything else were great. When talking with a Smith alumni, I thought she would defend them when I told her of my daughters results, but she told me she is in touch with some pretty high up people at the school and agreed with me that money mattered quite a bit more than they lead on.
IF I’VE LEARNED ONE THING IN THIS WHOLE PROCESS - MONEY MATTERS WAY MORE THAN THEY LEAD ON.
There was a great article about how many elite schools have more kids in the top 1% than bottom 60% combined.
^^exactly… I haven’t finalized the list of schools with my kid…but I had been reading discussions in the past few months on “demonstrated needs”… whether a kid was rejected because of lack of interest…or the randomness of the admission.etc …then last night I read the rejects for a school and noticed some of the high stat non URM kids whose income were less than $100K were rejected…but some in the higher range of income were accepted (obvious it is not a scientific analysis), I wondered how much needs play a role…
if true, the schools should really add a column in the common data set for the ability to pay …say 10%, 20%, 30% etc…
Most colleges are need-blind (obvious examples include stats-only state universities and open-admission community colleges). But many of them do not offer good financial aid.
Note that a college may be need-blind when evaluating individual applicants, but its admission processes and criteria may have been designed to result in an admissions class with a financial aid profile that fits within the intended financial aid budget. Most of the elite schools have admission processes and criteria that are much more friendly to students from upper income backgrounds than those from lower to lower middle income backgrounds, although a few of the latter do manage to get admitted (perhaps mostly those who are lucky to live in the attendance zone of a mostly upper income school system, or who have college educated parents in lower income jobs).
Examples of admission processes and criteria that favor students from upper income backgrounds, without directly looking at individual financial aid need:
Heavy use of early decision, which applicants needing to compare financial aid offers are less likely to use.
More application items required (e.g. SAT subject tests, CSS Profile, recommendations, interviews) which may be routinely mentioned by counselors in predominantly high income high schools, but not by counselors in predominantly low income high schools where few go further than the local community college or commuter-based state university.
Counselors and teachers in predominantly high income high schools may be more experienced writing recommendations through practice over the years.
CSS Noncustodial Profile excludes from financial aid those with uncooperative divorced parents.
Legacy preference.
Valuation of various types of extracurricular activities. For example, being more impressed by expensive club sports than paid work to help support one's family favors those from high income backgrounds.
I think it’s important to remember that for the college, the “margin” depends on institutional priorities, not student stats. So in their view, the “marginal” candidate (one who could be pushed to the waitlist rather than accepted because of their financial need) is not necessarily a student with weak stats-- it could be that the student is a prospective bio major in a school that is already filled to the brim with bio majors. Maybe at the same time that the school is looking at the stats on their financial aid budget they are also trying to address a gender imbalance in their admit pool … so some LAC opts to pull in some full-pay male off the waitlist and drop the needy femaie because they happen to need to accept more men. So you never know.
The bottom line is that they will accept and fund a large proportion of students, but those numbers will tend to stay steady from year to year. The students who get selected will be those who fulfill institutional priorities.
I do agree that money matters a lot more than the colleges let on, but also that there is no such thing as “need-blind” – I think that ad coms can get a good sense of finances from most applications, and they know what their financial aid budget is like. (I mean, poor kids usually don’t have the same range of EC’s and out-of-school opportunities that rich kids have – it’s just slightly more hit or miss when they can’t confirm economic status before making the admission decision.)
Perhaps the need-aware colleges have not yet mastered the technique of being need-blind for individual applicants but designing their admissions processes and criteria to produce an admissions class with a financial aid profile that is within budget (see #10), the way that some colleges have apparently done (being need-blind, but still extremely biased toward the scions of wealth).
the above brings up another question…for the need-aware schools, do they determine need, such as reading the financial application, before sending out admission?
Yes – for need-aware, they will check with the financial aid office first, at least for what they define as “marginal” cases.
Again, “margin” is not just about stats – it is about all of their enrollment goals wrapped together.
There are many ways they can handle the process. If they send out all decisions on the same day, then they can submit a list of accepted students to the financial aid office about a week or so ahead of the notification date, get a report back as to budgetary concerns, and get some numbers that way. So, for example, financial aid could tell them that they need to recover $500K from the financial aid budget and give them an ordered list of accepted students with grant amount shown, ordered from highest to lowest allocation. And then they could go through the list from top to bottom and tag the ones who they are willing to drop in favor of a full pay waitlisted applicant (applicants who didn’t even apply for financial aid)
Or they could be assigning a ranking all along the way based on how much they want the student --and then give the financial aid office a list of the admitted students on the lower end of their ranking for admitted students, and have the financial aid office report back as to which are the highest need.
If the college starts notifying some applicants earlier on in the process, then they could simply hold off on notification to students who aren’t in the “definite admit” (high ranked) category.
I’d think that high need vs. low need would be a bigger detriment in a need-aware context, simply because one student receiving a $50K grant is the equivalent of 5 students getting $10K grants – so when it’s time to trim, it’s more efficient to trim the high need students first.
@ucbalumnus, There are just five colleges that meet full need for both the US and Int’l’s, and are need-blind: Amherst, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, and Yale. This allows them to participate in a special anti-trust exemption granted by congress.
In addition, there are another 40 colleges that qualify too as meet full need for US students and are also need-blind. I believe the community colleges and some state schools you mentioned wouldn’t be exempted because they don’t meet full need according to the government’s definition.
“the above brings up another question…for the need-aware schools, do they determine need, such as reading the financial application, before sending out admission?”
"Yes – for need-aware, they will check with the financial aid office first, at least for what they define as “marginal” cases.
Or they just set those marginal apps aside, and pull the apps of students that have a similar admission profile but have checked the ‘will not be applying for financial aid’ box (Full Pay). The marginal FA kids can get waitlisted, but when they go to the waitlist, they will have a full financial picture of where the college is with budget. If the budget is good (they haven’t given away too much during RD) they can call up the FA kids on the waitlist. If the opposite is true, they call more full pays or kids with less need.
Also, many ‘meet full need’ schools don’t offer FA on the waitlist, so accepting the WL means full pay.
Its always easier to be rich (or at least full pay)!
In your post #6, you said that only a few dozen colleges are need-blind, without the qualification of also claiming to “meet full need”, which shrinks the number from most colleges to a rather small number.
I agree with all your poins in post #10 and it may be that some schools simply have financial constraints that mean that whatever predictive processes or algorithms they are using are not reliable enough. It might interesting to look at yield data for the need-aware schools and see how that compares with colleges that are similar in size and degree of selectivity, but are able to sustain need-blind policies. The ability to predict yield reliably might be closely tied in… and obviously a generous financial aid package is going to be a significant enrollment incentive. It can be risky if there is a disproportionate percentage of needy RD admits who actually enroll.