Being a full-pay student may or may not be an advantage (depending on the school). However, a student with high need is almost always at a disadvantage, unless s/he has some other significant hook or attribute that makes her/him attractive to the school.
Highly selective schools that are need-blind have focused on increasing socioeconomic diversity in the recent decade or more. Being low income but a high achiever may actually be an advantage.
But for schools that don’t have huge endowments and that are need-aware, financial aid is competitive and coming from a low income background may work against an applicant.
I’m sure this article as made the rounds before, but it’s useful here because it describes the challenge for a fairly selective school that has a limited aid budget and tuition/fee revenue targets. (It’s behind a paywall.)
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Schools can even have huge endowments and be need aware. I read somewhere that there are only 12 schools that are need blind and meet full need.
There are many schools that meet full need, but must take the family’s ability to pay into account, because they don’t have an unlimited financial aid budget. This includes most of the T50 schools.
The article about Trinity is exactly what I mean.
This article may be of interest:
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Source?
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I’m old enough to remember when a typical “scholarship student” (for some reason, it was easier to call them that than “financial aid recipient”) was a white suburbanite from a two-income family. Their parents were highly likely to be school teachers, ministers, professors from competing colleges or the occasional small town business owner. A college was considered extremely generous, if half its student body qualified for a small grant and the rest of their COA consisted of federally-backed loans. All of that changed with Affirmative Action. It took the tippy-top colleges a little time to realize it, but the connection between making their colleges more “diverse” and rapidly ramping up their “scholarship” programs became firmly and permanently rooted to each other.
IMO, this is still the primary motivation for any T50 college or university - including the need-aware ones - to continue to view low-income applicants positively. Without them, the schools would be out of sync with about three quarters of the country and under the present circumstances, that would be lethal to their continued existence.
According to Wikipedia (not sure how up to date it is), the following colleges are need blind and meeting “full” need for domestic applicants only (some with conditions):
- Antioch College (only students who qualify for the Pell Grant have the full need met)[9]
- Babson College (need-blind for Canadian students as well)[10]
- Barnard College (need-aware for transfer students)[11]
- Berea College (tuition-free for all students; need-based aid, family EFC, and work-study will cover other costs)[12]
- Boston College
- Bowdoin College (need-aware for transfer students)[13]
- Brandeis University (need-aware for transfer and waitlisted students)
- Brown University (need-aware for transfer students)[14]
- California Institute of Technology
- Carnegie Mellon University[15]
- Claremont McKenna College
- College of William & Mary (only in-state students have the full need met; out-of-state students get only up to 25% of the cost covered)[16]
- Columbia University[17]
- Cornell University[18]
- Davidson College
- Denison University[19]
- Duke University[20]
- Elon University (Odyssey Scholars only)[21]
- Emory University (may not meet full need for international students)[22][23]
- Georgia Institute of Technology (typically, only low-income in-state students have the full need met; entering freshmen from specific counties of South Carolina, Florida, North Carolina, or Tennessee who demonstrate financial need and are therefore qualified and selected for the Godbold Family Foundation Scholarship will also have 100% of their financial need covered)[24][25]
- Georgetown University ( need-blind for all students but doesn’t guarantee meeting full need for international students)[26]
- Grinnell College[27]
- Hamilton College (need-aware for transfer students)[28]
- Harvey Mudd College[29]
- Johns Hopkins University[30]
- Lehigh University (need-aware for waitlisted students)[31][32]
- List College[33]
- Middlebury College (need-aware for transfer students and wait-listed students)
- Northwestern University (does not offer financial aid to international transfer applicants who are not U.S. citizens or eligible non-citizens)
- Olin College[34]
- Pomona College[35]
- Purdue University (21st Century Scholars who are below an income level only)[36][37]
- Rice University[38]
- Soka University of America[39]
- Stanford University
- Swarthmore College
- Tulane University (only in-state first-year students below an income threshold have the full need met)[40]
- University of California, Los Angeles (only in-state students have the full need met; out-of-state students don’t receive financial aid)[41]
- University of Chicago
- University of Delaware (only in-state students have the full need met)[42]
- University of Florida (only in-state students have the full need met)[43]
- University of Georgia (through HOPE and other scholarships)[44]
- University of Michigan (need-blind for in-state students only; only in-state students have the full need met)
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill[45]
- University of Notre Dame
- University of Pennsylvania (need-blind for Mexican and Canadian students as well)[46]
- University of Richmond (need-aware for transfer students)[47]
- University of Southern California[48]
- University of Virginia[49]
- University of Wisconsin - Madison (only in-state students who qualify for the Pell Grant have the full need met)[50]
- Vanderbilt University (need-aware for waitlisted students)
- Vassar College (need-aware for transfer students)[51][52]
- Wake Forest University
- Washington University in St. Louis (need-aware for transfer students)
- Wellesley College
- Williams College
Plus a few that are need blind and meeting “full” need for both domestic and international students:
UCLA does not meet full need. There is always a self help component and will include Federal student loans, work study and parent plus loans so not accurate.
But these things are allowed and still be considered a meet full need school.
The vast majority of the schools on this list meet full need using student self help (summer jobs, work study, fed student loan). Some close the gap with parent plus loans and call it meeting full need (looking at you Gtown).
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That is true so it depends upon how a school defines their financial policy on “meets need”. Then all the California UC’s fall into this category for in-state low income students.
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Yes, a “meet need” promise can be an empty one if the college’s definition of “need” is insufficient for you. A common example would be that students with uncooperative divorced parents have no “need” at many (mostly private) colleges.
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Will search later today when i have more time. But when schools that have endowments per student north of $900,000 – and there are few schools in this category – say they are need aware but want to be need blind, I don’t see how schools that guarantee to meet need but have fewer resources can do otherwise themselves.
Source for the above is Washington and Lee’s President’s address this past parent weekend. But the same is true at Hotchkiss, with $1 million/student endowment. They are not need blind. They MUST factor the amount of financial aid that’s needed into their decisions because they simply do not have an unlimited financial aid budget.
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However, some colleges seem to be more skilled at meeting their financial aid budget without directly considering individual applicants’ financial aid applications. Weighting of various applicant characteristics that correlate to financial need or lack thereof can have an effect on the overall financial need of the entire class. For example, a heavier preference for legacy applicants will shift the class’ financial need downward, while a heavier preference for first-generation-to-college applicants will shift the class’ financial need upward.
For very selective schools with healthy – but not unlimited – financial aid budgets, I imagine being full pay only makes a difference at the margins.
Another advantage that the wealthiest schools have is that they can plan a budget such that overall financial aid up to $X is ok, even though they can be competitively generous with a predicted overall financial aid of $Y where Y<X. That way, if they “miss” by a bit (or an economic downturn causes increases financial aid need for both current students and applicants), they will still be within budget. Unlike less wealthy schools, they may not need to have the level of precision that may require looking at individual applicants’ financial aid need.
Well…they do have to exercise a certain level of precision. They just don’t advertise how they do it.
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This article is on point:
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And Grinnell says there are 40 colleges that are need blind/meet full need, Grinnell being one of them. Grinnell’s endowment per student is over $1.7 million, so i guess a quick and dirty way to figure out which schools are among the 40 would be to see which schools have this level of endowment per student.
Hey, what a great plan…JUST PAY!
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