"Need Blind:" A Polite Fiction?

[interesteddad]

<p>From all appearances, Harvard wasn’t getting any credit for spending significant sums of money on outreach. No credit from Senator Grassley. No credit from CC posters questioning their commitment to diversity. Might as well axe the budget.</p>

[tokenadult]

<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/665708-what-college-board-really-ought-do.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/665708-what-college-board-really-ought-do.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

[Modadunn]

<p>I don’t agree that all these colleges should stop visiting schools or trying to interest students. It puts a face on an institution - small or large. But seriously, if everyone stops traveling for business, hotels and other services that accomodate travelers are going to go under as well. Scaling back is one thing, foregoing these things completely hurts the economy as well as the uninformed kid.</p>

[tokenadult]

<p>Harvard reports that it is experiencing an uptick in the number of applications from low-income students, which is what it desires even more than credit for its outreach and financial aid initiatives. That has allowed it to enroll growing percentages of students on financial aid, which is an institutional goal of Harvard.</p>

[interesteddad]

<p>

That has allowed it to enroll growing percentages of students on financial aid, which is an institutional goal of Harvard.

</p>

<p>That’s not much of an accomplishment when you give financial aid discounts to families earning $200,000 per year, including a big upper income gift of loan free discounts.</p>

[brassring]

<p>TokenAdult: Everything you say in Post # 53 merely qualifies the general proposition I outlined in post # 52. My theses is that accepting everyone of your qualifiers as potentially possible, a good reader of an application can easily put together an overall picture with a 90 to 95 % confidence of the true financial health of the applicant’s family and lifestyle. Sure a layer at a white shoe law firm may be laid off, but if the guy is a Harvard JD and worked at the firm for 15 years, he is easily likely to have the Asset Base to pay for 4 years at a LAC and a substantial prospect of landing a job or starting an independent practice in the near future. Similarly, a medical doctor, dentist or eben an x-ray technician parent readily correlate with certain income levels. On the othe hand if one or both parents are school teachers in public school system in California, you know at least one is vulnerable to a cut in public funding and once laid off may have difficulty in quickly landing ontheir feet.</p>

<p>Overall, you’d have to be a negligent reader if you didn’t develop a very sharp insight into who the candidate is and the family and social context in which the student grew up, lives in and operates. You don’t need the parents’ W-2 or business tax returns to KNOW. And in California, where everyone applies to the UCs, there is an ingrained bias toward the personal statement where candidates are encouraged to disclose their family history, their struggle against adversity etc. This carries over into the applications Californians file thru CommonApp for HYPS or LACS. So, it is the applicant’s biography and essays that tell the story. The NEED or LACK OF NEED is fully transparent without the FAFSA or PROFILE.</p>

[siserune]

<p>

@calmom

That’s a serious misunderstanding of the SAT-to-wealth correlation. The correlation is strong when you consider all high school students, but it disappears or more likely (for all sorts of demographic and admissions reasons) reverses itself in the population of students who are admissible applicants to any given elite college that promises to meet 100% of need. Those SAT ranges are <em>extremely</em> restricted.

</p>

<p>That’s exactly my point – the elite schools are SO restricted in the upper most income range of SAT scores in their admissions policies that their applicant pools are overwhelmingly skewed toward the affluent end of the scale.

</p>

<p>No, the reality of the SAT-to-wealth relation is totally opposite to your claim. </p>

<p>When the SAT medians go up at the Ivy League schools, that <em>reduces</em> the number of wealthy students they can admit; hence the introduction of elastic admissions preferences (affirmative action) for athletes and legacies as a way of helping the “right” population preserve its numbers. Without that fudging, the proportion of wealthy that get in would be much higher than their share of the national population, but it wouldn’t be all that high in absolute share of the student body. The rich are too few in number, have weaker incentives to study, and can’t purchase monster SAT scores. </p>

<p>Basically, requiring 1100+ on the SATs does keep the poor people away, but past (let’s say) 680 per section it also starts to cull the rich people from the pool. Most of the people with high-end SATs suitable for impressing elite-school admissions committees are middle class striver types. Their parents are engineers, intellectuals, recent immigrants, and assorted random smart people. That’s not a destitute population but it isn’t a wealthy one, either.</p>

[MarathonMan88]

<p>Here’s some remarkably frank talk about how need-blind schools balance the budget by declaring certain lanes of the applicant pool need-aware.</p>

<p>

Bowdoin College announced plans to expand by 50 students over the next five years, which Scott Meiklejohn, the interim dean of admissions, said would allow it to accept more transfer and waiting-list students, whose applications are not considered on a need-blind basis.</p>

<p>Brandeis University, which is need-blind except for international, wait-listed and transfer students, accepted 10 percent more international students than usual this year, and Gil Villanueva, the dean of admissions, said he expected that the university would take more wait-listed and transfer students, as well.</p>

<p>Middlebury, which is need-blind and pledges to meet students’ full financial needs, will require students on financial aid to contribute more of their work earnings. It has cut its financial aid budget for international students. It is not need-blind for those on the waiting list or for transfers, but the college has not yet determined how many of those students it will take.

</p>

<p>

This year, many of these colleges say they are more inclined to accept students who do not apply for aid, or whom they judge to be less needy based on other factors, like ZIP code or parents’ background. “We’re only human,” said Steven Syverson, the dean of admissions and financial aid at Lawrence University in Wisconsin. “They shine a little brighter.”

</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/education/31college.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/education/31college.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

[username-deleted]

<p>I have not seen a college that is not “need blind”. It is a matter of perspective. Most are blind to the applicant’s needs.</p>

[vicariousparent]

<p>Colleges are not blind to their own needs, nor should they be.</p>

[lefthandofdog]

<p>Keeping with the sight metaphor, this morning’s NY Times article opened my eyes. It explains a lot.</p>