<p>kk19131: "I dont believe it the responsibility of colleges to insure that people receive enough aid to afford their schools. There are many different ways for people to finance a college education, ways that are not necessarily focused on the colleges themselves."</p>
<p>Yes, and unfortunately even if the parents and students were able to borrow enough money to attend the school (which certainly is not always the case), the parents might not be willing to do this.</p>
<p>Northwestern is an elite school for the company it keeps in terms of refusing to give merit aid and the diversity of the student body it is able to bring in with different views including your own. Fortunately, for some of the the less wealthy students there, they have an administration that doesn't agree with your view.</p>
<p>As I understand it, selective schools like Northwestern don't give merit aid, because they only admit students with merit. Thus they focus on enabling the students they admit with need-based aid. </p>
<p>NU need-based aid does not make it easy, but it makes it possible for most admitted students to attend, in as fair a way as possible. At least this has been our experience, and that of many others I've heard from here and elsewhere. </p>
<p>Of course, NU can't control how families choose to spend their available funds, so sometimes students do get the short end of the stick. However, it makes sense that they have to draw the line somewhere.</p>
<p>What I don't understand is why northwestern doesn't give merit aid when schools that are employing this practice such as duke and uchicago are passing them in rankings. </p>
<p>I know a girl who was admitted to harvard but chose to attend duke instead because they offered her a full scholarship based on merit... her family easily made $250,000+ a year. Northwestern is losing students like this, as northwestern isn't even as highly rated as duke and cannot expect to compete with other non-merit aid giving schools such as harvard, and also is now losing place to equally-ranked schools like uchicago by not offerent merit aid when they do.</p>
<p>FinAid also has a lot to do with that. Although Chicago manages to give merit aid, its ability to provide FinAid is somewhat lacking... I heard many stories with this theme: "Yeah, I was really thinking I'd go to Chicago... but then I got their Finaid package."</p>
<p>Both of our schools - with or without merit aid - certainly are losing the affordability battle with other top schools... we just can't match Harvard's "if you make less than 60k, you pay nothing." That is somewhat unfortunate, because we def. end up losing people that way.</p>
<p>And btw, "I know which group I want to be associated with?!?!" Cmon Werner... I expect more of wildcat...</p>