<p>A friend of mine outlined his strategy for garnering merit aid for his D. She was a bright kid.. top 10% etc., etc., Anyway he claims it is pivotal to for the applicant to apply to a school which competes for similar high achieving students and then leverage competing aid/merit packages. Well obviously if you're looking at all Ivies you know who the competing schools are. Also, engineering schools of similar stature..., but aside from the obvious, how do you know which schools compete with the #1 school your S or D wants to attend? In my friend's case the HS guidence counselor had a handle on it.. If she knew, I'm sure some of you folks know. Or.. is it simply a guess?</p>
<p>We didn't plan this as a strategy per se but D was admitted to Smith, Wellesley, Barnard. Smith was her #1 choice but the other FinAid offers were better. The tack I took was, "Gee, she'd really like to attend here but the FinAid is better from the other two schools." I was careful not to push them into a corner, careful not to be aggressive or obnoxious, and by word and deed made it <em>extremely</em> clear that this was not an ultimatum. They did the "right" thing and beat the next best offer by about $200/year. The phone call, the e-mail, the FAXes, and the on-campus meeting together comprised about two of the more well-compensated hours I've ever spent.</p>
<p>My daughter was admitted to University of San Diego and Santa Clara University. These schools actually share a LOT of applicants and admitted students. The demographics of the schools, and the costs are similar. USD does not use the Profile, but SCU does. USD absolutely refused to discuss the finaid award at all. SCU, on the other hand, was willing to add work study and a Perkins Loan to the package after it was written. We found it odd that USD was so adamant about not discussing this situation with a student who clearly was interested in their school and was also admitted to a competing school. But that was that. So I do think it depends on the schools with which you are dealing.</p>
<p>You can ask the highschool GC. You can call the admissions office of the college and ask too. Some of the college guides will tell you what the perceived competition. Alot of it is also by description. Similar schools in the same geographics tend to compete for the same students. Many people who are just familiar with college admissions will tell you as well. And your student may have already chosen clusters if he has specific criteria for college choice.<br>
For instance, if you are looking at smallish private Catholic schools in the Northeast, you may have a list with Providence, Stonehill, Fairfield, Holy Cross, Marist, Sienna on it. You look for the ones with similar yield. Holy Cross is the most selective so your chances of getting any more money using the others as competition, but if you student gets more from HC than another school, you may have a chance of increasing the amounts from that other school if you tell them you would go there over HC if the package were more competitive. As Thedad says, it has to be handled very carefully, because any pushing can cause the fin aid office to dig in their hills.</p>
<p>The Collegeboard collegefinder is another place to look. If you add a college to you list, it tells you - "students who looked at.... college also looked at ...... and ....." We found it very helpful when trying to find colleges for students with similar SAT scores, etc.</p>
<p>I would also caution that if you don't qualify for Financial Aid, your chances of negotiating a sweeter package may be reduced, and are probably nonexistant at schools that say they don't offer merit aid.</p>
<p>first, this strategy most definitely works. the key, however, is not only getting into a school with which the one you want to attend competes students, but getting into one which wins the battle somewhat more often than not. for example, get into williams if you want to bargain with middlebury, middlebury if you want to bargain with colgate, colgate if you want to bargain with bucknell... et cetera. </p>
<p>the best place to look is on the schools website. search for things like 'comparison group' and 'peer institutions' along with a school or two that you can be pretty sure will be on the list.</p>
<p>for example, a search of bucknells website resulted in this group: Colgate, Holy Cross, Franklin & Marshall, Lafayette, Lehigh, Middlebury, Oberlin, Trinity, Union, University of Richmond, and Villanova.</p>