They’re not blind to how much tuition income they’ve brought in from year to year. They’re blind to whether any one candidate is asking for FA. They can determine how much of a hike they need based how they did on the previous year’s FA budget and of course the increased costs for services across the entire university budget
There’s a Chinese wall between the admissions office and the financial aid office for a need-blind school. How properly the Chinese wall is set up and how impermeable it is depends on the school. My observation is that for schools that offer EA and EA only, that wall works very well. For these schools, the FA office doesn’t even start process applicants’ information until they’re accepted, because, unlike an ED school, it doesn’t need to offer FA packages at about the same time as acceptances. So, if an applicant isn’t accepted, it doesn’t even need to look at his/her FA application, ever. For an ED school, it has to look at FA applications simultaneously and immediately along with the main applications, for all potential admits. The workload is much higher and some staff may be shared between the two offices at some schools. The Chinese wall could be a little leaky at these schools.
@BelknapPoint Right, but that’s in hindsight, correct? How are they predictive for the year without that info?
Although I guess you can accept X number of students and just not give them much aid at all to stay in their range, but that seems like a pretty flawed system if they can’t attend.
We have high financial need (pell eligible). D19 was accepted at Bryn Mawr and received high merit aid and excellent financial aid last spring. She was NOT accepted at most (maybe all) other small liberal arts colleges that she applied to (including Dickinson), whether they were need blind or need aware, and was not accepted at one university, USC, which also claims to be need blind.
Several, like Pomona, sign their rejection letters from the Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid. Do I trust that that all colleges who say they are are need blind, truly are? No, I do not. (This is also partly based on students we know who were accepted.) Do I think need aware is a significant factor in admission? Yes, I do, especially at small LACs like Haverford (where she was waitlisted). D19 was accepted at Tufts, which is need aware, but she had much better luck at universities in general (other than USC).
I did trust that public universities were need blind, as the FAFSA was not even downloaded until after acceptance. So, maybe factor in mind the size of the student body, acceptance rate and the school’s endowment when considering whether to apply for financial aid or not from a strategic standpoint.
Daughter was accepted to and is attending Princeton, so it’s not like her application was shabby.
It’s a lot simpler than many assume. I agree with Sue, based on what some NA schools actually describe on their sites.
Imo, it’s dicey to throw in implications that, “Ya never know, those NB readers may be influenced after all.” We don’t know each other’s income and assets based on a job title. Same in an app.
The curiosity about finances affecting admits borders on conspiratorial thinking. Meanwhile, these threads rarely consider the whole pictire- the app package, first.
Of course, NB colleges know “how much tuition revenue they take in.” Theyve got accountants and many colleges’ annual reports can be found online.
The wealthier are allocating more FA $ than they expect to use. We saw that at the end of 2008, when they had funds to help affected kids.
A school that is need blind for individual applicants can still run statistical models on expected FA need and net tuition for the entire class based on changes to list price, FA policies, and admission policies (since many admissions attributes correlated to high or low FA need), so that it can be well informed about the financial impact of any such change.
For example, the school may know that increasing the value of legacy preference will tip the class toward less FA need based on the lower FA need of legacy students overall, even though some legacy students will still have large FA need.
@ucbalumnus Thanks, that makes sense. I was always curious about what need-blind schools do if they take who they want and end up with 80% of the class on FA. Obviously that’s not sustainable.
Sounds like a) that wouldn’t happen and b) the following year, legacies or grads from expensive prep schools are a priority overall but not individually. Does that sound right or is that too cynical?
To recap, there are various ways schools deal with financial aid:
Need blind, meets 100% of need
The school does not consider FA need when making admissions decisions and meets all need.* School may come in or below FA budget. This is a very small subset of schools.
Partial need blind, aka partial need aware, meets 100% of need.
The school does not consider FA need when making admissions decisions for much of the class but at some point begins to consider need in admitting the remaining part of the class. Meets all need.* School meets a set FA budget. Students with high need who are on the bubble make be at a disadvantage. Tends to be schools that are wealthy, just not as wealthy as the need blind, meets need schools.
*Need aware, meets 100% of need. **
School admits based the FA budget and financial need of all students. Won’t admit a student for whom they can’t provide sufficient financial aid. School meets a set FA budget. Students who have high need will tend to be at a disadvantage.
Need blind, does not meet 100% of need
School admits based on whether they want a student and apportions FA based on a set FA budget. Commonly covers the same percentage of everyone’s financial need. For instance, when admissions are done the college finds that the FA budget will only cover 85% of the need of all admitted students, so every student gets 85% of their assessed need. Merit awards can be used on the back end to bring in desirable students. May make it tough for a student with high need to afford the school, while students with little assessed need may be able to come up with the funds to cover the “gap.” For some students who can’t afford the school without substantial aid this becomes a “soft no.” This method is fairly common, especially among public universities.
Need aware, does not meet 100% of need.
Admissions sees the FA requests of students and makes some decisions based on a student’s FA need but also doesn’t meet 100% of need. In this case the school might decide to take students with less need to keep the FA budget low but might still not be able to cover 100% of the need of those students. Students might be given different amounts of need based aid or desirable students might be given merit awards to cover the gap. Fairly common among schools without a lot of resources,.
Another complication is that many schools have different rules for different categories of students. For instance a school might be need blind for domestic first year applicants but need aware for international students and transfers.
Many schools use merit awards to bring in high stats students. Some schools also use small merit awards to draw in full-pay students, freeing up FA dollars for students with greater need. A few schools give virtually every student a merit award.
- as defined by the school .
Again, realize that, at many sweet colleges, the bulk of the pool is not very high need. There are other, more anecdotal, common factors among them. The hard work top colleges do is year round, to find deserving, highly qualified lower SES kids.
Ucb, some of what we think of as “admissions attributes” is borderline bogus. Lol, playing LAX is no special indicator. Not all club sports are expensive or without fin support. Hs travel opps often involve the kids fundraising for a long time and are stripped down to be inexpensive. And so on.
The same way that any organization that needs to craft a budget does it – they make informed predictions based on past experience. I don’t understand why you think that having a need-blind admissions policy makes it so difficult to create a college budget.
My kid’s school is need blind, meets 100%. That’s what I was curious about when it comes to predicting tuition revenue and implementing tuition hikes. Since we are paying a few thousand more each year and they say it’s for FA, I was curious about how they got to that number. That’s all.
I’ve seen a number of need blind schools that have admissions and financial aid in one office. A lot of the larger schools operate that way, a lot of state schools. A lot of them do not have much aid to give anyways. They have a system as to who gets aid, who gets scholarships, after entitlements are allocated, and they simply gap a lot of students. That’s where I’ve seen a lot of loans come into play, PLUS and other loans involving the parents. Sometimes they are even included in the award package.
A number of these schools are pretty much open admissions as long as certain minimum set standards are met and seats are not filled, at which point in time even Einstein can’t get in. These schools tend to have pretty consistent models of who is going to attend and cough up the money somehow.
A lot of factors go into admissions to some of the selective schools and Its fruitless to wonder whether financial need was a factor or not. I know a young woman with need who was not accepted to a number of LACs but got into Harvard and USC. Yet those same LACs did accept high need applicants that year. You cannot tell the mother of that young woman that need was not why she did not get accepted to some of those schools that were less selective than the one that did accept her, and there is no telling whether she is right or not.
Some of the predictive aspects have nothing directly to do with the students. Eg, knowing you haven’t bumped faculty salaries in a few years, knowing what capital improvements are needed/planned, watching alum giving or a new campaign upcoming, utility costs rising, a major grant ending, investment rates declining…so many variables that are integral to operating.
I’ve seen (not that this affirms) colleges say that a tuition hike is the last way they want to raise money.
@sue22 's post is very helpful. Another quick and dirty way to figure out whether a school is need aware is to look at its endowment. If it’s in the billions, the school is probably need blind. If it is below $500 million ( and I’m just guessing, though it is an educated guess, the threshold could well be higher) the school is almost certainly need aware.
Every school would love to be need blind. The sad fact is, most cannot afford to be.
I haven’t actually seen any proof from all those asserting that there are thousands of need blind institutions out there, I would love to see some. I would exclude community colleges, as admissions to them is a different animal to four year institutions.
Yes, it sounds about right. Here are some other admission policies that colleges can use to tip the class to lower or higher FA need:
- Greater emphasis on SAT/ACT versus HS grades (SAT/ACT is more strongly associated with high SES).
- More application items (SAT subject tests, CSS Profile, recommendations) required (favors those in high SES schools where counselors/parents/peers are more likely to help students keep track of such things).
- Recommendations (favor high SES schools where counselors and teachers are more experienced with writing them).
- CSS Noncustodial Profile (screens out probably around half of FA-needy students).
- Types of extracurricular activities favored (e.g. expensive travel sports versus working to help support one's family).
- Relative emphasis on legacy (more higher SES) versus first generation (more lower SES).
- In transfer admissions, whether the emphasis is on applicants from highly selective four year schools (higher SES) or non-traditional applicants and those from community colleges (lower SES), and how many transfer students are admitted.
Whether the endowment size indicates depends on the nature of the donations in it. You see a lot of schools with fundraising campaigns designed to improve FA. Those monies (the profit from them and at a %) need to go to FA. If there’s old money sitting there for building/maintenance projects, library endowments, etc, if affects. I think the many campaigns we now see that are directed for FA is a new thing.
There is also something called “preferential packaging” of nominally need-based FA. This is where the most desired (to the college) admits are given enhanced FA without explicitly calling it a merit scholarship.
Note that while both Harvard and USC are “need blind meet full need” schools, their NPC results and FA offers could be very different for the same student and family. “Meet full need” is college-defined.
Pick up the phone and call your local colleges admissions offices. I can’t come up with a single school that says they are need aware within a couple of hours from me and I live near NYC— take that back; Sarah Lawrence is need aware
None of the Catholic colleges, from Fordham to tiny Dominican College say they are need aware in admissions. None of them meet full need either , and some of them offer little more than state and federal entitlements. At a lot of these schools, nearly everyone has need. None of the CUNYs are need aware— Yes, they say so, and I believe them.
NYU gaps big time, they are well known for that, but they profess to be need blind in admissions. I know a lot of NYers with high need who break their banks paying for NYU through loans. Pace is a popular private school here. A lot of kids with need. They don’t fully meet it most of the time. But they say they are need blind. Your problem how to pay for it, but they’ll accept you with high need.
The need aware schools tend to be small private schools with some name recognition and selectivity. Off top of my head, in NY state, Union, Colgate , Sarah Lawrence and Hobart William Smith are need aware. There are likely more, but by and large, schools are not need aware. If you are googling “need blind” schools you will notice that the list consists nearly entirely of schools with name recognition. You won’t find schools like Eastern New Mexico State on those lists and there are many many more schools in that category than the hundred or so schools they do list. ENMS is need blind in admissions, by the way
Schools do not say they are need aware, nor are they required to. If a school does not explicitly say it is need blind, you can assume it is need aware.
Did you read the NY Times article I linked up thread? It really is worth it. The reporter did call Admissions offices and couldn’t get a straight answer.