Right. That can be a good thing or a bad thing for us. Hopefully resulting in less competition.
My sister just went through her college app journey several months ago. She didn’t get her dream schools and ended up attending a famous football school in California. They gave her a very generous scholarship package from RD.
Yes, important clarification.
None of the Ivies (Stanford or MIT) offer merit to any students. They meet financial need.
For the few lucky students who have these options, they would choose HYPSM if Penn doesn’t offer financial incentive. (Except Wharton, maybe?)
Many students look and consider fit vs some arbitrary rank. When you actually attend one of these schools I think you will realize not all people share your perceived preferences. It is more personal.
No merit aid. Need-based aid only. This is not unusual for schools at this level or with the resources of Penn.
46% of current Penn students receive grants, and the average award is $56k/yr.
Many schools that offer merit packages do so as a method of discounting intended to entice students to choose them over other schools. Schools with low admit rates and high yield rates do not have to resort to that discounting strategy.
No, that’s not the market we’re talking about here. Financial aid at schools like Penn is quite generous. You can run the net price calculator for Penn to understand what you are likely to pay before you apply. In fact, it’s expected if you are applying ED and know you can’t afford the list price. The difference is, Penn and all other Ivies and a lot of other well-resourced, low-admit-rate schools will not throw merit at you to entice you to enroll. They use their aid budgets to help families that need it based on household income and assets.
Nope. None of those schools, and not Wharton, offer merit aid. As has been stated several times here, all of them (and many other elite colleges) only offer need-based aid. And even though HPYMS may be need-blind in Admissons, Penn’s financial aid is going to be right where their’s are. Very generous.
Exactly. Well said.
Did you apply ED to Penn?
I also have a 3.92 UW gpa! Also don’t have high hopes for Thursday but hoping for the best 
Is it not a Holistic application review at Upenn? OR is the initial filter on GPA and then they look for other factors in the application?
Holistic. There is no GPA cap. People at my school have made it in with 3.6-3.7 uw GPA, too, though that’s on the lower side of things. You could scroll r/collegeresults on Reddit – there are lots of examples of kids with lower academics.
Yup, Penn cares a lot lot about rigor, not as much about GPA according to my naviance
Good to know. I see some schools, for example : University Of Pittsburgh for the Guaranteed Med program admission, filtering the applicants strictly on GPA before they look for any other items on profile.
3 days away from knowing lol
Source please?
My naviance chart has a lot of 3.6s admitted to penn, 4.4s rejected.
Your schools Naviance is a slim glimpse into much broader pools of applicants and is certainly meaningless for global extrapolation of comparative school approaches.
All elite private schools tend to prescreen for academic viability using a variety of objective and subjective criteria. It has been broadly reported that typically 50%+ of applicants are deemed academically eligible. From their a holistic review to distinguish amongst candidates takes place.
State schools tend to be more numbers driven speaking in generalities.
This is an example from Duke’s head of admissions describing the process several years ago. If anything the bar has been raised as applicant pools have grown…
Interesting. For us, the 3.6/3.7s are definitely outliers
