<p>How can I find out which colleges are need blind and which aren't? Is there a website with this infomration or is it a formula deduced from the % of financial aid met by a college?</p>
<p>Thanks</p>
<p>In terms of top 75 or so schools, you shouldn't be concerned about them being need-blind. None of them really are. Those that announce that they aren't only use need status to determine admission status for the last 3-5% of the applicant pool (or for the waiting list), and that only if they've spent through their budgets.</p>
<p>The more important term, though equally dicey, is "meeting 100% of need" - the need is determined by the college, and may be radically different based on the same application (I'm speaking from personal experience), and the percentage of grants vs. loans vs. work-study vs. summer expectation will vary not only college to college, but student-to-student, depending on how much they really want an applicant.</p>
<p>There are also schools, some of them claiming to be need-blind (doesn't exist), that are well-known for "gapping" - leaving a hole between what one can afford to pay, and what they offer. It's not a bad business practice, because it allows them to have one candidate turn them down, to be replaced by candidate who is willing to pay more.</p>
<p>Therefore, I assume that there is no formula to choosing which colleges to apply to - given a choice - which are the better lenders and which are the stingy ones? Also which schools can you name are those so called "gap" schools?</p>
<p>Thanks</p>
<p>All need-blind means is that the adcom doesn't see the financial aid info before they decide whether or not to admit someone (the FAFSA, etc. is sent to a different office than where the application is sent so the people deciding who and who not to admit will not know how much help someone needs when making their decision). I believe that it exists, and there are colleges in the top 75 that do it (I know for a fact that Northwestern is one of them). However, like Mini, I'm a slight skeptic of the "meeting 100% of need" because there are many different ways that that need can be met (some of which I don't really like too much as a student - personally, I'm a big advocate for grants and scholarships). I think it kind of depends on the college on how well and realistically the school makes out the finaid packages (luckily of me, I've heard that NU is pretty good in that department IF, for some reason, they admit me). Like Mini stated earlier, the factor of how much the school wants the kid has a chance to come into play if the family comes to debate the finaid offer.</p>
<p>I'm not really sure where there's a listing of all of the schools that are need-blind though.</p>
<p>I've never heard of a fornula in this area.</p>
<p>Smiles, speaking anecdotally, I hear of students getting much more $ from schools with bigger endowments than they do from those with smaller ones. I don't know what schools you are considering, but some of them invite you to contact the financial aid office ahead of time to find out what sort of aid you would be likely to get. Others offer "estimators" like this one: <a href="http://www.princeton.edu/pr/aid/estim.shtml%5B/url%5D">http://www.princeton.edu/pr/aid/estim.shtml</a>
Most families find that colleges' idea of their financial need is not the same as their own...</p>
<p>On another forum, I posted a selected list of schools (24 of them), and the amount of need-based financial aid they actually give out per student attending. This is a very useful number, as it combines in a single measure 1) the number of students who receive needbased aid, with 2) the actual size of the awards. The range in this survey was from $6k to almost $13k (a huge range). Interestingly, 5 of the top 7 are NOT so-called "needblind" schools, whereas many in the lower quartiles are. This means that, through whatever mechanism used, the admissions departments had found a way to screen out needy applicants while maintaining the appearance of being "needblind". </p>
<p>Here's the data, taken from the schools' Common Data Sets. Note that there is, among these (all of which have reasonable endowments), no relationship whatsoever, between average aid per student, and endowment per student.</p>
<ol>
<li>Mount Holyoke - $12,792</li>
<li>Reed - $12,683</li>
<li>Oberlin - $12,262</li>
<li>Smith - $12,013</li>
<li>Amherst 10,925</li>
<li>Macalester - $10,764</li>
<li>Swarthmore - $10,595</li>
<li>Grinnell - $10,020</li>
<li>Hamilton - $9,795</li>
<li>Harvard - $9,527</li>
<li>MIT - $9,316</li>
<li>Princeton - $9,164</li>
<li>Stanford - $8,660</li>
<li>Bowdoin - $8,649</li>
<li>Williams - $8,560</li>
<li>Yale - $8,370</li>
<li>Dartmouth $8,132</li>
<li>Middlebury - $8,085</li>
<li>Haverford - $8,079</li>
<li>Colby - $7,638</li>
<li>Bates - $7,535</li>
<li>Washington & Lee - $6,279</li>
<li>Northwestern - $6,237</li>
<li>Davidson - $6,160</li>
</ol>
<p>It's just data. As with all data, take with two fi****ls of salt.</p>
<p>Thank you for your info - I may be a bit (probably a lot after this process) dense but I don't understand your numbers and how you arrived at them. I went to US News and searched the financial aid pages for a bunch of these schools and I cannot figure out your formula. Help please</p>
<p>Thanks</p>
<p>I went to the Common Data Set of each school listed (which is why it is a truncated list - it takes work to do.) I took the amount of $ each school says it gives out in institutional needbased aid, and divided by the number of undergraduates listed in the same document.</p>
<p>I have no idea what th problem is with the word f - i - s - t - f -u - l - l - s. Is "****l" some kind of obscenity?</p>
<p>Mini,
You know I got nothing but love for you and I have learned much from you </p>
<p>However, I understand how you got the $8744 at Dartmouth ($35,667,598 divided by the total number of undergraduates 4079). But even this is not a realistic number when you consider that 53.3% of the undergrads were full pays, so they really were not a part of the 35 million that were distributed.</p>
<p>Institutional (endowment, alumni, or other institutional awards) and external funds awarded by the college excluding athletic aid and tuition waivers (which are reported below)</p>
<p>$35,667,958 Need based</p>
<p>$3,100 -Non need based</p>
<p>The average financial aid package of those in line d. Exclude any resources that were awarded to replace EFC (PLUS loans, unsubsidized loans, and private alternative loans)</p>
<p>$ 28,113- first time full time freshmen</p>
<p>$ 25,900-Full time undergraduates (including freshmen)</p>
<p>Average need-based scholarship and grant award of those in line e </p>
<p>$ 24,375 Freshmen (507 students 46.9% of the freshmen class -1077 students)</p>
<p>$ 21,487 full time undergraduates including freshmen (1905 students)</p>
<p>But is is as you said with al data, it shoudlk be taken w/ a fi****l lof salt.</p>
<p>Mini--Thank you for confirming what I have believed for a long time. Need-blind does not really exist. Why would we have to send in the financial aid info with the application, etc. if things were truly need-blind. I'll believe that need-blind exists when schools ask for the financial info in late April . . . after all the decisions are out.</p>
<p>"However, I understand how you got the $8744 at Dartmouth ($35,667,598 divided by the total number of undergraduates 4079). But even this is not a realistic number when you consider that 53.3% of the undergrads were full pays, so they really were not a part of the 35 million that were distributed."</p>
<p>As I noted, this number is an "indicator", a "marker" for a college's commitment to providing aid to those who are to be accepted and need it, not a direct measure - because it consists of two factors: the number of students who receive aid at all, and the size of the package. A college could (as Princeton and Harvard actually do), admit very few students with high need (in other words, few Pell Grant recipients), but provide lots of aid to students above the median income to being with. It is theoretically possible (as is in fact true for USC) to provide grants to very large numbers of Pell Grant recipients (25% of the student body), and yet have the total percentage of students receiving aid be less than half. Or, a third possibility, the best example being Mount Holyoke, you could see dispensing large amounts of aid to qualified students as part of your institutional mission, and take in large number of Pell Grant recipients (22%, more than double Dartmouth's), AND give aid to more than 60% of students attending.</p>
<p>In other words, this measure is a very accurate indicator of the school's overall commitment to using its endowment and alumni contributions to first accepting and then funding students with family incomes below the top 5% of the population income-wise. It is much better indicator than the size of the average award (if you don't give many, the average size doesn't tell you much), or the percentage of students receiving aid (you could have a lot of students receiving small amounts of aid.)</p>
<p>But like any indicator, it is just that, and no more.</p>
<p>Mini -- with respect to f - i - s - t - f - u - l - s, the reason it was asterisked out is that the missing letters are s - t - f - u which in current slang terms is an initialism for "shut the f... up". CC's bizarre scanning algorithm doesn't even allow for this to appear in the middle of a legitimate word, sigh....</p>
<p>I think that the colleges that are need-blind state this on their admissions and financial aid pages.</p>
<p>One statistic to consider is the average 4 year loan total for the school you are considering, some schools are limiting the amount of loan they will even consider letting a student get, so they are heavy with grants and work study.</p>
<p>Need Blind is a funny thing, many respectable schools use the term, but you do have to wonder why don't the figures relating to financial aid fluctuate more over a decade. Why wouldn't a school have a greater range of financial aid grants, if they didn't have a preset range of financial aid students in mind when they accepted students, why would they need the profile data in November for an ED? Why couldn't they do it with Fafsa in the spring?</p>
<p>"How can I find out which colleges are need blind and which aren't?"</p>
<p>You've heard mini's take on this issue, which I appreciate but don't necessarily agree with. Quite a few colleges announce publicly that they are need blind, which, as was mentioned earlier in this thread, means that review applications for admission without regard to the applicant's ability to pay. And several of those colleges claim to meet 100 percent of an admitted student's financial need. Off hand, I am sure that </p>
<p>Harvard, </p>
<p>Princeton, </p>
<p>MIT, </p>
<p>Brown, </p>
<p>Cornell, </p>
<p>Dartmouth, </p>
<p>and </p>
<p>U. of Virginia make these claims. </p>
<p>You can check Princeton's financial</a> aid estimator to see what Princeton might cost you out-of-pocket if you were admitted. Ask your favorite schools, that is your favorite schools based on other considerations than financial aid, and see what the schools say.</p>
<p>Need blind does NOT necessarily equate to the best financial aid. The best packages often come from schools that are need-aware and engage in a practice called "leveraging" -- they don't give full aid to everyone, but they use their aid resources to build very strong packages to try to entice the best candidates to their college. So the need-aware school is not a good choice if a student is weaker than the average applicant for that college -- but if the student is stronger than average, then need-aware can be a very good thing. </p>
<p>Basically, need-blind is something that protects borderline candidates in the admission process -- they are the only ones who might be rejected if they didn't have the need, but would otherwise get in.</p>
<p>My understanding of need-blind (and I could be quite wrong) is that, when considering an applicant, adcoms do not take into account whether the applicant shows need or not. However, the financial aid that is offered to the applicant may not meet his or her need; and estimates of need vary widely from school to school. Two schools, both need-blind and offering no merit aid, offered financial packages to one applicant I know that, over the course of four years, differed by $28k. He had submitted the same financial aid form.</p>
<p>Marite:</p>
<p>* My understanding of need-blind (and I could be quite wrong) is that, when considering an applicant, adcoms do not take into account whether the applicant shows need or not.*</p>
<p>That is, indeed, the generally accepted definition of the term.</p>
<p>Mini is clearly at least a bit too sweeping in his claim that "need-blind doesn't exist."</p>
<p>At a minimum, there are surely many public colleges which are indeed need-blind. They do not worry about whether a student and his/her family can afford to pay--they just admit the students who satisfy their entrance criteria and, in essence, hope for the best--that some of these students will be able to scrape together what it takes to enroll, possibly with some help from state and federal financial aid programs.</p>
<p>It's important to not only see if colleges are need-blind, but to also check their admission and financial aid web sites to see if they guarantee to meet 100% of students' documented financial need. Keep in mind that the college's idea of how much aid your child needs may not match your views of your finances.</p>
<p>Also, it's important to realize that even if a college meets 100% of your documented financial need, it could be providing this through having your child take out far more in loans than you and your child would be comfortable doing.</p>