The student attending MIT from my 23 student’s class was not only brilliant but was well known for being very available to her peers for help in math and computer science. I’m sure that was reflected in her recommendation letters.
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I really hope this is all still relevant to the OP. That was certainly my intention, because I think all this has helped flesh out why someone like that kid both could see MIT as a good fit, or also not.
Incidentally, my S24 has a science interest but no interest in MIT. Which I am perfectly fine with.
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OP here. Yes, this thread has been incredibly relevant and helpful for us. In fact, it’s made me think even I would enjoy MIT and I have zero interest in anything STEM related 
We’re under no illusion he has better than a 4% chance, but sounds like maybe he has the same 4% chance as anyone else. And if he gets in it, it will be one of our lowest priced schools and it sounds like he will meet really interesting and thoughtful peers.
Thank you for all the comments.
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thanks for clarifying. i now think you should apply. might get in. as good a chance as most others.
I am a bit sceptical of meet full need schools. DD last year got into Rochester and University of Richmond. These two gave us the worst FA package with the biggest expected family contribution. Richmond really messed it up. They changed our FAFSA 3 times without explaining what they did. It turned out they tried dropped one of the college kids from family because they thought that his school does not belong to FAFSA list (school does not participate with FAFSA but accredited and he was at the end counted…) They almost messed up FA at other schools. Bottom line, we are not fans of meet full need schools now. These schools will do everything possible and impossible to increase family contribution.
I’m sorry this happened to you but I have to speak up and say this was not our experience nor that of many families. Our final price was very similar (actually a bit lower) to that on the NPC. It was several thousand higher than our FAFSA EFC, but I expected that due to home equity. The school’s NPC was very accurate. We had a lot of need and ran NPCs carefully before our student was allowed to ED at her top school (which is need blind and meets need). It was our experience that meets need schools varied in what they considered our need to be so we did use NPCs to rule out certain schools for ED (none of which fortunately ended up being finalists in the end anyway - looking at you Barnard and Mt Holyoke). There were other schools that would have been much cheaper for us - below our FAFSA EFC- but we had a bottom line and our student was allowed to apply to any that met that number even if it wasn’t the lowest possible.
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In our case both were not even remotely close to FAFSA EFC. Both are CSS profile schools and sliced and diced everything any way they wanted.
Getting too far off topic but my question would be whether they were far off from the NPC not from FAFSA.
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We did not bother with NPC because we knew it was not accurate for our case.
There are more interesting things to do at MIT than there is time for. This is true even for the most capable students who can excel in classes with little effort.
They want to make sure you are not the type of student who will burnout from trying to do it all.
That is a puzzling statement. How can you know this if you never tried?
MIT’s NPC was very accurate for us, and so was Caltech’s.
Because numbers were all over the place for different colleges. She applied to 20. Plus we have a complicated family situation (not typical) that is not reflected by NPCs. So we gave up on them. In retrospect it was the correct approach.
To be clear, no one in particular has a 4% chance (there is no such thing as a single event probability).
4% (or whatever it is) is the average across the board, and some classes of applicants have higher chances than others. There was even an MIT admissions page showing some basic breakdown what the admissions rates were for several ACT/SAT ranges.
They no longer publish this info, but here is the archived version for the class of 2024 (admitted in 2020):
More details at the link:
Now, that obviously still doesn’t mean that everyone with ACT 34-36 had the same chance that year.
Each case is unique.
And no one here can really “chance you”. Not even @MITChris, as he says in his post below, and his “Applying Sideways” essay.
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That’s the whole point of NPCs.
It’s supposed to be different for different colleges.
They give out their own money, and they set their own rules.
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Each school defines need in its own way and apply it’s own algorithms. That it is what you have to do it for each school, otherwise there would be a universal NPC.
Unfortunately NPCs are not designed to handle unique situations but many colleges will do financial pre-reads if requested.
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FAFSA has very little to do with how CSS Profile institutions award their own money. FAFSA’s primary purpose is to determine eligibility for federal aid.
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As I understand it, the more complicated the family’s financials, the less likely it is that Net Price Calculators will be accurate. But for what it is worth D22’s aid packages all came in at or under the net price calculator estimates. These were all schools that met need but did not provide merit aid.
My D24 is considering a MIT RD application. She likes everything that she knows about the place, but I’m not sure MIT is the right fit. On the other hand, she really not found any single college that seems to be quite the right fit. Plus the NPC at MIT is actually higher for us than some other schools on her list.
I totaly get it. That is why “meeting full need” was total BS in our case. Not “meeting full need” schools met our need much better than Richmond and Rochester…
The question here is not whether one agrees with a particular institution’s determination of their “demonstrated financial need”, but whether a particular school’s NPC is a good barometer to help gauge what one can expect if admitted.
Yet from what you are writing it sounds like you are unhappy about the aid amount rather than the NPCs’ accuracy.
When DS20 was applying, we ran NPCs for every school of potential interest before it was added to the list. Quite a number of them didn’t make that first cut (we are in that proverbial “doughnut hole”, so our results vary quite widely). For those schools he applied and was admitted to, there were no big surprises once the award letters arrived.
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I was writing in response to some people claiming that it is better to apply to “meet need school” and was reflecting that in our experience they were not " meet need schools" but more “create a mess” (in the case of Richmond for sure, since it was messing up FA at all schools by inappropriately adjusting # of students in college in the family) schools. This has nothing to do with NPC or FA at the end (that was significantly less than at not “meet need schools”). Our criteria for choosing schools was not based on NPC, but on cost in general, ability to get merit, fit etc. BTW Richmond initially was her favorite, but after how they messed up our FAFSA at all schools we were not interested even to consider it. Who would be interested in fighting over FA over 4 years?