<p>We can pay full freight for our daughter to go to any college she can get into, and we would like to use this fact to give her every possible advantage in the admission process. I've read that many extremely good schools can't afford to be need-blind and practice need-aware admissions at some point in their selection process. I've also read that, in order to take advantage of need-aware admissions, you have to somehow make the admissions office "aware" that you can pay.</p>
<p>How does one make the admissions office "aware"?</p>
<p>Will they figure it out when we don't submit a financial aid form? Or do we have to call the admissions office and tell them? How would one make such a call without sounding incredibly crass?</p>
<p>I realize you can't really buy admission anywhere (except possibly some school that you really wouldn't want to go to), but I've also heard that ability to pay full freight can be worth the equivalent of an extra 100 points on the SAT. To the extent that advantage really exists at some schools, I simply want to know how to get it. I would hate to be in a situation where we can help the school by paying full tuition and they can help our daughter by admitting her, but where the admissions office doesn't know that we are in a position to pay simply because we didn't know how to communicate that fact to the admissions office.</p>
<p>Call me snarky, but college admissions isn’t exactly quid pro quo… </p>
<p>Regardless, many top schools are need-blind. What schools has your D applied to? On the Common App, since she picked “no” on the Fin Aid question, it’s already known to the University that she doesn’t need any aid, and will more than likely be paying sticker if she doesn’t receive scholarships. </p>
<p>Still, many top universities are need-blind. Duke, Georgetown, Ivies, etc, are all examples. You can research the specific school’s policy, but unless you’re a legacy or a donor, money doesn’t really give an edge to admissions. That being said, if you wanted money to give an edge, donating would’ve been the best bet to do so. If your name’s on one of their libraries, it’d be a bit hard for them to reject your D. </p>
<p>TL;DR: They already know you’re paying sticker as your daughter checked “No” on their application’s “Do you need financial aid?” question. As most top-tiered schools are need blind, it doesn’t help.</p>
<p>As Vctory said - You made them fully aware when your child checked “No” on the common app when asked if applying for financial aid
You do not need to make them any more “aware” than that!</p>
<p>Yup, that is all you need to do, don’t apply for need based aid and her application will end up in the “full pay” pile if they have such a pile and if they care.</p>
<p>First, thanks for the explanation. My daughter is a junior, so we haven’t filled out the common app yet, so I didn’t realize there was just a point-blank question about whether you’re applying for financial aid. While the schools you mentioned are, indeed, need-blind, there are a number of excellent schools that don’t even claim to be need-blind, and a number of others that say they are but are probably applying a very loose definition of “need-blind.”</p>
<p>Vctory: I certainly don’t think your remark is snarky, but - really - we’re through the looking glass on the question of whether admission is a quid pro quo. Schools admit people all the time because of what the school is going to get, rather than because the person meets the usual admission standards. Most obvious example: School relaxes the admission standards to admit someone who plays one of the big money sports like football.</p>
<p>Parent829…I think your question is a good one…while i’m not in the position to do this for my kids, I sometimes move in circles where I have friends who can I will tell you one thing that NYC friends did…and please keep in mind that they are honestly great people…and while they knew it would help their daughter at NYU admissions, they also did this to help others. Starting in their kid’s sophomore year,they established a scholarship at the catholic high school that the dad attended that gave a 4-year, $10,000 annual scholarship to a deserving kid. The family help choose this kid (via the school administration) and the daughter wrote about the big impact it has on her family to know that they were helping a kid who might not have gotten in otherwise. It was a good essay…but also with an underlying message.</p>
<p>Anyway, I won’t mention where their smart daughter got in (privacy but will just say that the essay and the concept seemed to have a big impact on the colleges.</p>
<p>Yeah… but I am guessing that kid also had the best private college counselor money can buy. The scholarship fund may or may not have helped… I would not count much on being full pay making a big difference. An example of a school that is not need blind is Carleton. But in reality if you talk to the head of admissions there, you will hear that it is actually only for a very small number of students on the cusp that they look at need to make a decision. Most students clearly fall in the “admit” or “don’t admit” category. She indicated to me that it matters for less than about 5% of the class when I asked directly.</p>
<p>Selective schools like UF (your daughter’s dream school) may not be all that excited about your ability to full pay. They have many, many applicants that can afford to do so. </p>
<p>Make sure that she applies to other schools as well as UF.</p>
<p>Haha, very true regarding recruited athletes and the like; I was fixed on financial terms. Typically, a selective school’s endowment is so large that they’re not excited with an applicant paying sticker, as that is expected when applicants are in a certain income bracket. (>180k is where people usually stop seeing financial aid) Anyway, for UF (saw in your post history), just make sure that your daughter does well on her SATs. Admissions to state schools are largely number driven; consequently, an effective investment might be in an SAT coach or tutor. A few friends of mine go to UF/are applying to UF, and the magical score for their Honors College is a 2070 Composite (SS) with a weighted 4.0 GPA. </p>
<p>This whole “need blind” thing always confused me. So don’t all schools have some sort of budget for financial aid? Or is that budget so large that even if by chance they admit a class where 100% of the students need a lot of FA they can still fund them? Hard to believe that all schools don’t have some sort of threshold for the amount of $ they will award in total each year.</p>
<p>Very simple. Just don’t apply for financial aid. You are then regarded as full pay and at schools that take that into consideration, your student is in a favored pool for admissions. If she is borderline and there is only so much money left, she will be taken before those who need aid If she is an excellent prospect for the school, it may not matter at all as those the school most wants are generally snapped up without regard for ability to pay until the money pot starts to get low at which point “enrollment management” come into play. </p>
<p>Do be aware that if your DD is admitted to such a school, the financial aid policies tend to exclude her from getting financial aid in future years unless you can show a change in financial circumstances from this first year to the the latter years. These schools are well aware that some students will apply as no need and then try to get money for future years once they are in the door.</p>
<p>@Harvest moon: “need blind” is different that “meets full need”</p>
<p>Need blind means they’ll accept/reject w/o regard to the applicant’s paying ability. Those accepted are then evaluated for any FinAid awards. That amount may or may not be affordable to the applicant – often based the limited means of the awarding college: some are richer, some are poorer. Thus, a lower income applicant may be admitted, but offered no FinAid, effectively cancelling the possibility of attending. Need Blind refers to the Chinese Wall between Admissions and FinAid.</p>
<p>“Meets full need” is a very small number of colleges. Not only are they need blind for admissions purposes, but once accepted, their FinAid dept is supposed to fully meet EFC shortfall. As you can imagine, these colleges have very deep pockets. Some schools even offer “meets full need” for international applicants. These are those with the LARGEST coffers.</p>
<p>You are asking the unknowable question, do some need-blind schools “peek”? The answer is probably yes at some schools, though it’s nearly impossible to prove. There are also probably way to predict whether financial aid will be necessary that don’t involve direct peeking, but are ethically questionable, like knowing where someone goes to HS or the zip code of the home address. Why do you think so many admits are from boarding schools and high income public HS? - it’s a reliable indication of ability to pay.</p>
<p>T26E4, as school can guarantee to meet full need but NOT be need blind in admissions. As well as be need blind and not guarantee to meet full need. THe list of schools that out and out proclaim that they are need blind in admissions AND guarantee to meet full need is very small. Whether they are all truthful about this is a whole other question. George Washington was caught lying about this. </p>
<p>But if the OP 's student is not applying for financial aid, s/he just has to not check the little box on the application that indicates that an applicant is applying for aid. IF it makes any difference in admssions, then the admissions officers will certainly look for that check mark, and take it into consideration according to their policies.</p>
<p>At a number of schools, the way the admissions office handles need aware applicants, isn’t going ot affect many of the students. Some say 5-10%, as they do have the funds to just do their admissions on an need blind basis, until they come down to the last 10% of the applicant pool when the money is low enough where there has to be consideration for need. In such chases, even then a need for $10K in aid is viewed a lot differently than needing a full ride. one can accept 5 such students needing $10K for the same cost if they all accept as taking the one kid who needs $50K and that’s when enrollment management kicks in. </p>
<p>I’ve known a number of admissions folks and they HATE, HATE, HATE having to take need into account, so it’s not the sort of thing that admissions officers like to do. From what some of my kids’ counselors who have been dealing with the need aware/ selective schools for years, the ones that say they are need blind tend to operate that way according to the tracking. There are some that may seem a bit suspicious, but over time and large numbers, one can see the trends more clearly, though for any given admissions season, one cannot predict until after the fact.</p>
<p>I would say checking the box (or not) doesn’t really tell a school anything. Our income is too high for financial aid, so we’re not applying, but that doesn’t mean we’ll be forking over 60 grand per year. We won’t. We can’t. We’re only applying to merit aid granting schools and state schools. I’m actually hoping that not checking the financial aid box has the opposite effect - that it indicates that we’re hoping for some serious merit aid. After all, there’s no point accepting our daughter if we can’t afford their school.</p>
<p>I see from the other comments that you’re talking about UF where the instate cost is around 20k - I would think it wouldn’t make much difference there that you were full pay. We’re in Pennsylvania, and I literally know dozens of full pay families to our state schools and not just doctors, lawyers, and CEO’s. We’re talking about cops married to nurses. Electricians married to respiratory therapists. Teachers married to government workers, etc. </p>
<p>Now if you’re full pay plus significant donations, that’s probably worth letting any school know. I also suppose if you’re full pay at a 60k private school without an Ivy League sized endowment, being full pay probably does make a difference, no matter how the school bills itself.</p>
<p>^^Agreed completely with onthecollegehunt. </p>
<p>Additionally, I did some more research on ‘developmental’ admits; top-tiered schools (HYPSM, not so much Y; Duke, GTown, Vandy, 90% of schools on the CC top list), look for not only full freight pay, but donations. There are a few articles (google developmental admits wsj, forbes, etc) on the topic, and most say that if you can buy a building, there’s an advantage; otherwise, the legacy bump kicks in far before donations come into play. I read on the Duke forum a few weeks ago that some students talked to an admissions committee member about paying sticker, and she responded (paraphrase) by saying “Unless your name’s on a library, money doesn’t affect admission.” Sorry for the rambling. </p>
<p>The only thing I don’t agree with OTCH about is the check box. (I believe) All students are put in the same pool for merit, with need-blind merit aid. </p>
<p>If your D’s set on UF, I’ll reiterate that the donations/ability to pay full will have negligible impact on admissions. </p>
<p>For more research though, a great topic to plug into google is ‘developmental admits’.</p>
<p>Oh, I would think she’ll be put in the same pool, but I’m just wishful thinking a few things:
If they’re not going to bring their price under 30k, they can just go ahead and deny admission because she’s not going there. And 2) Just because our daughter’s stats are well over the top quartile of their admits, please don’t assume this is our daughter’s safety school. </p>
<p>I’m really hoping (and it is just a hope at this point) that when we check off the no financial aid box that it might occur to some of these admissions committees that we’re chasing merit aid - it’s becoming clear to me that some merit granting schools will deny admission if they think a kid’s not serious about attending.</p>
<p>The admissions office tends to award merit money for those kids on the school’s wish list to entice them to come. Top test scores are often on that wish list, geographic diversity helps as well as other holistic factors. If you look at the common data stats, the kids who do get merit money usually are the ones who do not get financial aid at most schools. In part because the merit money does reduce the need component which can bump some out of the need bracket, and also because of the strong link between income and achievement . </p>
<p>Most schools are need blind. They simply gap the kids in terms of aid. They don’t have the time to try to configure their admissions around the need numbers. They accept and then have set formulas for need, though some may have a “grading system for those who have need too”, and they give merit to those they most want. There are really only a few schools that are need aware in admissions.</p>
<p>Sorry about that, I meant for the UF comments to go towards the OP; I wasn’t referring to your daughter’s potential school </p>
<p>Otch- I’m in the same boat as your daughter in that I’m hoping for merit aid from my schools, as my family’s out of income bracket to be considered for need-based aid. However, I put “yes” on the checkbox for financial aid. My reasoning: if they see I need money to go to their school, and if they see I can’t get federal money, then they may give me some merit scholarships instead. It’s fallacious, but I’ll keep trying for merit aid regardless. Now, I understand that if I do get into some of my reach schools, I will receive very little aid; but I’m prepared to get into some debt before grad (law) school, and some of the student-work/student-loan programs in conjunction with scholarships could definitely make sticker prices more…manageable (I didn’t want to say reasonable; the price of college tuition in America is absolutely absurd).<br>
It depends on the school (you said it was a match, not a safety), but some allow you to send in supplemental materials for merit scholarship consideration. After receiving an acceptance from UPitt (a rolling admissions safety of mine), I called admissions and asked if I could send in some supplemental essays that could be added to my file for scholarship review; they admired the initiative and gave me an email address. I don’t think this path would work for, let’s say, Georgetown, but it might for low-mid matches. Additionally, I’m applying for numerous local/county/state/national/private scholarships. Check with your county’s school system and make sure you’re not missing any scholarships. For example, my county has a scholarship that’s so under broadcast to the point where only about 200 people compete for 20 scholarships. They’re <em>only</em> worth 1k-2k, but it’ll start chipping away at the bolder that is college costs. </p>
I will tell you one thing that NYC friends did…and please keep in mind that they are honestly great people…and while they knew it would help their daughter at NYU admissions, they also did this to help others. Starting in their kid’s sophomore year,they established a scholarship at the catholic high school that the dad attended that gave a 4-year, $10,000 annual scholarship to a deserving kid. The family help choose this kid (via the school administration) and the daughter wrote about the big impact it has on her family to know that they were helping a kid who might not have gotten in otherwise. It was a good essay…but also with an underlying message.</p>
</p>