Tufts is need aware. So your level of financial need might have been considered in that ED round.
But without knowing your kids admissions stats, it’s very hard to say why they were not accepted. Actually…even knowing them…sometimes it’s hard to say why some kids get accepted and some don’t. These top schools have WAY more applicants in all admission rounds than they can accept.
It’s hard to say with any certainty.
Full pay can come into play as an advantage towards the end of RD at need aware schools, when the school is making final net revenue projections and making final admission decisions. At that point, if the projected class is short of their net revenue target, they will start swapping in full pay (or less needy) applicants for applicants with need who were in the admitted pool.
Full pay is often an advantage when schools are making waitlist decisions, as FA budgets are typically maxed out by then.
This is Haverford’s approach:
“The college will evaluate all applicants as it has in the past (at least for those from the U.S.), without regard to financial need. The college will also determine the size of its financial aid budget for the year. And as long as there is money in the budget, the college will admit applicants as it has done in the past. But the college projects that it will run out of aid money before admitting the entire class and that the last 10-15 students admitted (at a college that typically enrolls about 350 freshmen) will be those who can be admitted without going outside the aid budget.”
The thing I have always wondered is whether or not the “need aware” schools put you in that bucket of “need” based on the fact that you yourself check off the box in the Common App that says you plan to apply for financial aid or rather after they have reviewed your FAFSA, CSS etc.
What if you check that box anyway but know that you aren’t likely to qualify for need-based aid? We have always filled out all of the financial aid application forms like FAFSA because we know we want to qualify for at least the unsubsidized federal loan as well as that we have been told that it is smart to have filed the paperwork in case you have a life event like job loss, death of a parent, etc. that will allow you to update.
So does a need-aware school consider us in the category of “need” based on us applying for aid or based on running the numbers on their end?
Just checking the applying for FA box doesn’t give AOs any information…they don’t know how much need the applicant would have, or even if they have need. Some need blind schools even suppress the answer to that question so AOs don’t see it.
At need aware schools, AOs do know exactly how much need an applicant has (or they can get that info). As noted above, different need aware schools have different timing when admissions might look at the level of need at the individual level.
To hit the aggregate FA number in a need aware manner, knowing how much FA the applicant needs (by their formula) matters. Five applicants who need $15k would have the same expected value of FA as four full pay applicants and one who needs $75k, if all of them have the same likelihood of matriculation as estimated by the college, but the latter would have more variance.
If you are full pay, no aid needed category then I would assume Tufts had this knowledge when making the decision. The other T30 school – not knowing which one it is, hard to know.
We don’t know a thing about this student except she was deferred by two colleges already. For all we know, this has nothing to do with finances…at all.
It may not be an accident that Wesleyan is need-aware, if you consider the possibility that it may simply receive more applications from low-income students than its peers who - fairly or not - have reputations for being “rich-kid” colleges. There’s no way of comparing application rates without access to their admissions records. But the fact that Wesleyan is consistently at the top of the Washington Monthly poll makes it at least plausible:
2022 Liberal Arts Colleges Ranking | Washington Monthly
And then there are balloons… 
I am not sure that makes sense. many schools attract similar students, i.e. Vassar, Brown to name a few and they are need blind.
We don’t know how big the pool was from which they were chosen - both high-need and low-need. It would make an interesting study. I agree that Wesleyan, Brown and Vassar likely have similar reputations. I also think that all three have pretty tight budgets and have been need-aware at various times in their histories.
There was an excellent article in the NYT a few years back about the admissions office at Trinity. Essentially, they assembled the “perfect class” in the admissions office. And then, they got the FA budget and changed it up until they were aligned with that. Lots of trade-offs.
As described above.
Here’s that article, I don’t see a gift link, I think it’s because it’s a magazine article?
Here’s what happens at Trinity College at the end of the RD admissions process (from the article)
Like most enrollment managers, Pérez contracts with an outside financial-aid-optimization company to perform econometric modeling on his applicant pool. The company he worked with, the year I was following his progress, was Hardwick Day, a firm based in Bloomington, Minn., that, after a recent round of consolidation in the industry, is now a division of a giant higher-education consulting company called EAB. Hardwick Day’s predictive models allowed its analysts to identify, based on the behavior of past students, precisely what tuition each individual applicant would probably be willing to pay. A white student from Danbury with, say, a 3.1 G.P.A. and a 1,200 SAT? Hardwick Day’s models might predict that if Trinity offered him a $15,000 discount, he would accept, but if it offered him a $5,000 discount, he would go to the University of Connecticut instead.
On March 6, once Pérez’s admission counselors had finished whittling down the list of tentative admits, this was the math problem that he presented to Hardwick Day: Help me find the right 1,700 students to produce a class of 600 freshmen who will be willing to pay, together, $19 million — and tell me how much of a tuition discount I need to offer each one. Over the next two weeks, data flew back and forth between Hartford and Bloomington as Pérez and his team gradually cut their pile of tentative admits to 2,500, and then 2,300, and then 2,100, heading ever closer to 1,700, always trying to balance the students they wanted with the ones they needed. Each morning, Pérez would give his team a new set of instructions, based on the previous day’s analysis from Hardwick Day. One day, the tentative admit pile had too many men from the Northeast who needed financial aid, so they spent the day slicing away at that demographic. The next day, they needed to cut women from the Northeast. And on it went.
After each round of cuts, Pérez and his team would send their new, pared-down collection of proposed admits to Hardwick Day, and an hour or two later, a Financial Aid Monitoring Report, in the form of a PDF file, would show up in Pérez’s email inbox. Each report included a precise prediction of the overall class size and tuition revenue that Pérez’s latest set of theoretical admits would produce, and each time, the result was the same: The class size was too large, and the tuition revenue was too small. There were too many full-need students on Pérez’s wish list, and not enough full-pay ones.
That makes sense. I guess I am still skeptical about whether or not a need-aware school runs the numbers and then decides to bucket a kid whose numbers come out to = “needs $0 per our formula” (but whose parents had him check the “applying for FA” box anyway) in with the “not applying for aid” kids and treats them equally. If we stipulate that kids who don’t need aid have a little bit of an edge (all else being equal) over kids who need aid, wouldn’t the school be a little less likely to want a student whose family might be full-pay but that still clearly has finances in mind as a factor (since they checked the “applying for aid” box)?
I’m probably overthinking it, but I’ve never felt like I fully understand the process around what it means to check that box in terms of how a need-aware school views your application. Clearly if you say to a school outright “we are not going to apply for financial aid at your school” that’s a “we can and are willing to pay” message. Which maybe helps, maybe doesn’t – I don’t know.
I think so (said gently)
None of us really do, and every college has a different process (of which most aren’t very transparent about said process).
Schools do know that some people have no need yet apply for financial aid to simply have their student take the direct student loans.
Again a need aware school knows (or has access to) exactly what every applicant’s level of need is…they aren’t using the applying for aid question to inform the admissions decision because they can get much more detail directly from the financial aid forms (at whatever point in the process a given need aware school might do that). In practice, they likely only get to that point for applicants that they have in the ‘yes’ or ‘maybe’ piles.
Perhaps the college may assess that student’s likelihood of matriculation to be lower if it believes that student to be full pay but still concerned about costs?
Fair enough! lol 
That’s just one of the more infuriating parts of the whole experience – a lot of it is a big black box. Ah well. It is what it is!
I think at many schools, the admissions officers are aware of the “need” part and factor these into admissions decisions, along with the other intangible, “yield protection”. I am quoting this from a blog post about UM’s OOS applications (EA or RD). “ The University of Michigan practices need-blind admissions and meets 100% demonstrated need for in-state students only—the ability of out-of-state applicants to pay for college is factored into admissions decisions.” This explains the high “postpone” rates of OOS high-stat students. If you look at the anecdotal data of EA applicants, there is a high “postpone” or “defer” rates of the tippy-top candidates to RD pool, and eventual “waitlist” or “reject” status. Meaning, at many schools, the FA need and yield are very much integral to the Admissions Officer’s decision making process, even if the FA process is handled by a separate office within the college.
This is from a third party source and I believe inaccurate. Do you have a source from U Michigan that states they are need aware for OOS students? The vast majority of public universities in the US are need blind.