There are clues in the Harvard lawsuit stuff. Ad coms there are trying to guess who is low income (for presumably good reasons - to consider their apps in the light of achieving despite hardship), by their essays and recs and such.
Checking the box doesn’t really mean much anyway - you could be looking to get the Direct Loan because you want your kid to “have skin the game” even though you are a millionaire, you could have an income of more than $200k and still be eligible for aid at many colleges, maybe just a few thousand but essentially full pay.
@twogirls answered though, what a student puts on the CA isn’t necessarily seen that way by colleges.
These schools can see where you went to school and get a sense of your background just from your application. They know who is coming from private boarding schools and who is coming from urban public schools with a large percentage of free lunch. When they’re sorting their students there is no way they aren’t making sure they have a certain percentage of private school vs. wealthy suburban school vs. urban public etc etc etc. Obviously that isn’t perfect sorting method, but I suspect it’s pretty good.
There are hints of this too in this video by a young woman who went to Yale and got to review her admissions files after the fact. Note that she went to an urban public but had highly educated parents. One way to fill a demographic but still get a student that is probably not EFC = 0.
The thing is though you can go to a fancy boarding school on scholarship and go to an urban public school and have lots of money. Anyway, good insights here. Thanks everyone
Exactly. Holistic admissions in highly selective schools CAN take family income into account. It’s not that they penalize the low income folks at a meets-full-need school; quite the contrary, being low income (with great grades+test scores) can be a plus factor in admissions. For example, Williams (used to?) even tracks what they call ‘low-ec’ students during the admissions process.
The schools achieve that percentage through broad policies that statistically favor full payers – such as SAT scores and ED. As well as financial aid policies that can deter moderate income students from applying, such weighing in home equity, or the income and assets of non-custodial (and often non-contributing) parents.
They don’t need to discriminate on an individual basis – each school has $X dollars to spend on financial aid and the full need schools don’t care which students get those dollars.
My kids applied for financial aid and were accepted at most colleges they applied to. Between two kids and 21 applications we only saw one rejection letter (from an Ivy) – and 3 waitlists. Partly that’s attributable to smart targeting, but definitely not an indication of consideration of finances.
The problem is that its darn near impossible for most low income kids to become competitive for admission – they attend public schools with limited resources, their schools don’t prep them well for standardized tests and they can’t afford outside tutoring, and their parents aren’t able to subsidize participation in outside activities and ECs, many of which have separate fees and/or require travel.
Uh, the % of full pay students being unchanged is a meaningless stat. The simple fact is that most applications with high GPA+High test score+high impact ECs originate from middle-upper income families. (not too many poor kids able to compete in the Intel/Seimens/Westinghouse science fairs.)
The question is, how many low income students with top grades AND test scores actually apply to say, Williams and the other highly selective schools? Without that number over time, you really can’t make a fair criticism.
I think schools do care who get the money. My guess is that they would rather give money to someone that checks a box off for them such as first generation etc. @calmom
Your confusing admissions priorities with information about need. If they checked to see how needy the “first generation” student is… that would be “need aware”. Need-blind means they might guess or assume that the kid who checks off “first generation” because the parents didn’t attend college is financially needy … even though that child’s parents might very well be wealthy business owners or real estate investors. And they might assume that kids with a profile that looks like they come from money (college educated parents, attending private schools, etc.) … when perhaps some of those kids are quite needy (for example – parents unemployed or disabled, attending private school on full scholarship). Those assumptions might color their perceptions of the student … but they aren’t going to delve into the finances.
And again, the financial aid office in a full-need school has $X to distribute – and they are focused on the aggregate total, not how much one student or another gets. If the school does not promise to meet full need, then the financial aid office has more flexibility. They can gap more students.
If things get tight and they go over budget one year, they can resolve that with little adjustments to admissions practices the following years. They work with consultants who are experts on understanding how the data correlates with admissions. Maybe take a somewhat larger percentage of students in the ED round, or add an ED2 round, or put greater priority on factors like SAT scores.
One of the info sessions we attended was at a need-aware school. They said that for the vast majority of applicants the FA didn’t come into account. When they got down to the borderline yes/no students was when they started looking at the applicants in terms of meeting budget. If it’s like this for an explicitly need aware school, I’d be inclined to largely trust need blind processes.
“I think it is a marketing thing and just a lot of yada, yada.”
Even though I do work in marketing, I agree that colleges use terms when describing themselves to keep up with other peer colleges, just like businesses do. So if one your peers says holistic, need blind, no difference between ED and RD for admissions, no cutting corners for athletes, everyone else will say it, regardless of how true it is. It’s up to the customer (student, parents) to figure out which college actually is who they say they are. And you can be sure that some colleges are (gasp!) not truthful.
Note the distinction between “most schools” and “most students.” Most students attend large need-blind state schools. Most schools are small private schools, need-blind or not, meeting full need or not.
I think the concept of need blind applies to pretty much every college. The number one factor in attending college is if you can afford it. The goal is never to see how many places one can get accepted so need blind is somewhat meaningless.
It’s important to research the amount of need met by a need-blind school. Anything less than 100 percent means that you may receive a financial aid offer that is insufficient.
100% need met is also often unaffordable, because the colleges decide what “need” is, often based on factors that have nothing to do with actual parental assets.
The paper value of the house you've lived in for the last 25 years. Sure, you can sell the house, but then where would you live?
The income and assets of your deadbeat ex. Sure, the ex has money to burn.... but are you ever going to see a dime of it? Divorce decree says the ex's obligations stop the day your 18-year-old graduates high school.....but the college doesn't care.
Remarried? Maybe your new spouse has a great income but huge personal debts. You and spouse agreed to keep your finances separate, maybe even did a prenup because of the financial baggage you both carried. Does the college care? No... they want to know total household income.
Self employed? Good for you. The college is going to look at your schedule C, and figure out on it's own which business deductions to disallow.
Maybe you are in a partnership instead? Partners get taxed on business profits, whether or not those profits are distributed or plowed back into the partnership. As far as the college is concerned, whatever shows on the K2 is your income.
How about this? You have a financial setback so you cash out some savings bonds you've been hanging onto for ages. Half of their value is reported as interest. The college not only counts treats that as if it were ongoing income, but they adjust the state's value of your assets upward because they figure you must have a huge cache of money somewhere to be generating so much interest income.
Or here's another one. You own an interest in real property that belonged to your dead grandparents, and is now shared among your siblings and cousins. No one else in the family wants to sell, nor is anyone interested in buying out your share. Nonetheless, the college insists on knowing the value of that property and counting it in the mix.
I’m sure this isn’t an exhaustive list. If you are really savvy about the financial aid system you might be able to anticipate some of these issues… but the point is that the more complex your financial situation is, the less likely your award will be based on actual income or accessible assets.
Good points @calmom . I understood 1 (I think it’s fair for the college to consider that though), and I had 2 and 4. Hadn’t considered the others but they’re all considering assets, just differ in how they should be counted, I’d think.
They may be “assets” on paper, but they are not assets that the parent actually has available to pay for college.
I’m not complaining about the fairness of the process. Just pointing out that there really is no such thing as a college that truly meets full need for all comers. These really are two flip sides of the need-blind / 100% need pairing. The college has systems in place to make sure it has whatever balance it wants between full-payers and financial aid recipients, and that the financial aid budget is able to serve a given number of students without being overtaxed.
One of those systems is the admission criteria and ED programs, as well as targeted outreach and marketing, which is designed to guarantee a continual influx of paying students.
And the other system is whatever set of rules are in place for the financial aid system that limits aid eligibility. They used the CSS Profile or their own financial aid requirements precisely because their system wouldn’t be sustainable if they defined need based on the FAFSA alone.