<p>As Marite and Calmom both mentioned, there is disconnect as to whether or not a school is need blind and my understanding of need blind is</p>
<p>* the school does not take into consideration a students financial need in making admissions decisions* But do you ever notice that on the first page of the application there is a box to check if you are requesting financial aid? So theoretically, the school already knows who needs aid, they just don't know how much aid a student needs and that amount of aid that is needed is not held against the student in making an admissions decision (in this case Mini is correct in stating that a school is truly not need blind).</p>
<p>I think the disconnect does not come with the need blind issue, it is more with the definition of demonstrated need. Most people think that a school which meets 100% of your demonstrated need which means different things to different people.
Often parents and studnets think that meeting the demonstrated need means that after the EFC has been deducted everything else is 100 % covered. Theoretically that is also true, however, covering everthing means that you can be given loans, scholarships, grants, workstudy to meet this need. </p>
<p>A school may give you 100% of your demonstrated need in loans and will tell you that they have met your need -maybe not in the way you thought it would be met, but they did not lie.</p>
<p>Schools which are need aware or need sensitive are the ones that will most likely reject/accept a borderline candidate based on their abiltity to pay.</p>
<p>Sybbie, do you think the admissions officers always really know whether you checked that box? I wonder if a clerk enters that info into the computer, then produces a standard report for each file, and forwards the need for aid to the FA office.
If a school felt truly committed to need-blind, it would be pretty easy to hide applicants status from the readers' standard examination of the file. Now if an admissions officer REALLY wanted to know about a particular candidate, I'm sure it would be hard to keep that information from them, but you could easily prevent the situation of "assumptions" coloring thinking.</p>
<p>Again though we are still talking about obscuring the need of the middle class/upper middle, all they have to do is look at the name of the high school and know something about most (not all) kids' economic class - there are those kids at prep schools on scholarships, and application magnet schools hide status fairly well. What really makes them need blind is the personal integrity of the readers and the mission of the institution - it would be easy to ignore money, or just give extra points for the lack thereof, if you wanted to.</p>
<p>Every private college admissions in the country that I know of bases its recruiting strategies, its mailings, its contacts with GCs, its evaluation of ECs on knowing the financial status of students likely to be found at certain zip codes and certain schools. It's just sound business practice. Indeed, there are some schools (like Amherst) that, while claiming to be "need-blind', are so need-aware that they actually recruit at low-income schools, with GCs at schools where incomes are low, and hold special programs for low-income students, because they've made it a priority to recruit an economically diverse student body. ("Need-aware" could mean they look for students with HIGH need.) </p>
<p>And the proof is in the numbers: the chances that the percentage of the student population that requires financial aid each year varies so little, and the amount of aid actually awarded each year varies so little quickly approaches zero in a truly need-blind situation. </p>
<p>In short, it's a hoax, and every admissions director in the country knows it. Yes, it is probably true that the admissions department does not have a parent's financial statement before them in making decisions, but that is a far, far cry from "need-blind'. (They may be "need-blind" for individuals - though even that's doubtful - they definitely are not need-blind when it comes to the class. And they aren't admitting individuals, as much as we'd like to think so. They are admitting classes that fulfill their institutional missions.) Hey, let's give the admissions office folks some credit: these are professional people, with collectively dozens of years of experience behind them and they know what they are doing.</p>
<p>Actually, did we ever answer Smiles question? Basically need blind are the most selective LACs and universities, and, from another perspective, most rolling admission schools, particularly state schools for in-state. Probably the easiest way to assess this is to make your list then check each school individually, because some have subtle policies.</p>
<p>Yup. Figure 1 tells the tale, doesn't it. Actually, though, it is now even more extreme - this study used Pell Grant data from 2000-2001; the Mortenson data I have is from 2003. And as the authors duly note, Pell Grant data doesn't tell the whole story. "Need-blind" schools tend to have fewer total students receiving any financial aid (and are thus likely to have higher percentages of top five percenters.)</p>
<p>So you can either argue that the schools are "need-blind" and it all happens by happy accident, or you give the school admissions departments credit for knowing what they are do. I tend toward the later hypothesis. ;)</p>
<p>According to the adcoms the financial aid box is there so that the info can be sent to fin aid if a positive decision is made. It is also another indicator of whether the student comes from a priviliged life or not, not the strongest but ANOTHER indicator. The box is pretty useless for admissions purposes in that you can't tell if the student is going to need $5K or a full ride. Having worked in a need aware admissions office that freely admits that it is not need blind, I did see how it worked. Applicants were accepted with no regard to how the box was checked. All applicants were coded "A", "B", "C". The A's were invited to special events, considered for merit awards, and got the goodies in financial aid. B's were ok in financial aid though they would only get the grants that were left. C's were culled depending on the money that was left and those who stayed in the running got government grants, workstudy, loans and only small grants. And it did make a big difference whether you needed $5K or a full ride. Better to take 6 "Cs" that were entitled to $5K, then 1 "C" who needs $30K.</p>
<p>Some need-aware schools operate this way, and some just the opposite, or at least the data would so indicate. (A system of large numbers of small financial awards to upper middle income students has long been rumored at, for example, Macalester, though I haven't seen the evidence of it.) At USC, for example, over half the financial aid admits are Pell Grants recipients - clearly, their system favors high cost, rather than low-cost, admits. At Mount Holyoke and Smith and Occidental, Pell Grants recipients make up more than a third of financial aid admits; at Amherst, it is just under a third. (In contrast, at Harvard it is about an eighth.) The system you describe to me sounds more like what one sees at so-called "need-blind" schools, where low priority students are "gapped", and high priority ones have their loan portions turned into grants. </p>
<p>But the point is, need-blind or not, the issue is the amount of dollars allocated per student. There are, as the report above confirming my data shows, many schools that are "need aware" which are far more generous than the "need blind" ones - and it doesn't matter whether that is measured by percentage of Pell Grant recipients, or dollars per undergraduate attending, or even total financial budgets. Regardless of how one measures it, the so-called need-blind schools with the largest endowments - Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford - don't even get close to breaking the top ten.</p>
<p>I agree that the boxes are irrelevant, though. They have far, far more information about economic status of applicants on the application itself, beginning with zip code and guidance counselor.</p>
<p>Thanks for the info on the coding of the "A's", B's and C's. Now with that understood, what happens to the applications which are received which indicate no financial aid needed. Where is the play in all of this? A college can't accept a freshman class where there are many/most (that is an unknown number) of applications checked for aid.</p>
<p>Well, in fact you can. MIT, Caltech, RPI, Case-Western, University of Chicago, Bryn Mawr, DePauw, Wellesley, Oberlin, Macalester, Occidental, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and Agnes Scott (just to name a few) do it all the time (and most of them are NOT "need-blind".)</p>
<p>Some schools that used to be need blind, because of recent reductions in endowment income, have become need sensitive, or "need aware". This is changing by the month-so you need to specifically inquire at each school. This change from need blind (all decisions on admission made BEFORE looking at financial need requests) to need sensitive may be very significant for students on the cusp of being accepted at a particular school. All other things being equal (GPA,SATs, etc), a substantial financial request, particularly from a family with significant resources, may drop the student on the cusp off the admission list.</p>