Given my circumstances, I’m around a lot of students who disproportionately end up at tippy top colleges in the nation, mostly HYPS. Of them, not a single one that I know is full pay, and yet they’ve had no problem landing at these NB colleges. From my own experiences with my kids, we checked off the FA box and we did just fine, as well. There’s no way of knowing whether your D’s full pay friends were met with admissions success because they didn’t check off the FA box or their success had to do with something else entirely. With the holistic admissions system, there are myriad of qualifications other than the FA box that can tip the applicant to the admit pile or the reject pile. Your daughter’s guidance counselor must be inexperienced and new to the game or otherwise quite unwise to inform your family that your daughter should be “getting good news” from the colleges. No guidance counselor or anyone else can predict, given the nature of today’s holistic admissions practices, with enough surety to freely and so confidently say such a thing. What if you don’t receive a good news, then how is the guidance counselor going to deal with that after having lifted your family’s spirit to a false high? The only people who can say with surety are the adcoms, period.
If it’s a need blind school, the admissions counselors don’t see whether you checked the fa box or not. That info only goes to the financial aid office. If the school is need aware, then checking the box that you need aid, may be a factor in the decision to admit or deny.
Why would schools lie about being need blind or need aware? What would they gain by it? I think most schools really want those who apply to be able to attend and accept those who are qualified without worrying about need. If the student can’t afford it, that student goes somewhere else.
Schools that are trying to attract students by giving them money would do it by merit aid. Those who only give need based aid know from years of admission and financial aid cycles that a certain percentage will have great need and others will have no need. Some schools switch from need blind to need aware when they accept off the waitlist or accept international students, but those are mostly the ‘meets full need’ school. Other schools accept the students but do not give the need based aid all those student need to attend.
If you don’t trust the school FAO to be telling the truth about being need blind, don’t go to that school. There has to be a certain amount of trust on both sides as you’ll be dealing with these people for 4 years. If you are constantly worrying that you didn’t get as much as you were “promised” (by the NPC or an admissions officer or because you calculated it a different way) or that someone got more because he applied ED2, or that it just basically isn’t fair, you’ll be miserable for 4 years.
Not sure how someone says they, “think when applying ED it helps if you don’t apply for aid,” without having some basis for that. And it needs to be more than some full pay kids you know who had good admit results. It takes a great app package, every bit of it, down through LoR choices and interviews, to get an admit. Good chance you never saw their apps.
In the end, the focus should be on what makes a kid a solid match, in the colleges’ eyes. That’s a challenge to most kids, regardless of high school standing.
@tigerdad I agree that the GC should not have told my daughter that, especially since it’s a competitive school, but she isn’t new or inexperienced. I was kind of shocked that she would say this. Anyway, HYPS are a whole different kettle of wax with their bazillion dollar endowments. Again, it’s all irrelevant now and all is good. D has acceptances from other schools and hopefully more to come. I wrote this original post after the deferral. I’m over it now:)
Can someone close this thread!!!???!!
kettle of fish, not wax!^^^^^