I agree. limitation of application imposes serious harm on students who need FA, and this will be even worse for international kids since they are evaluated on need aware basis.
It is perhaps reasonable for a high school to limit the number of applications that require high school support (e.g. number of unique recommendations and the like), so that any given student does not consume too large a share of the often-limited resources that a high school can provide for students applying to colleges. But capping the number of applications otherwise just penalizes the students whose situations require more applications to have affordable options in April, as noted in reply #79.
As far as transparency goes, the mandated net price calculators do improve financial aid transparency for common household financial situations. However, it does seem that their existence is not well known.
The ordering of schools on the FAFSA is correlated with where a student eventually enrolls
according to US News and Noel-Levitz a college enrollment management consulting firm.
“Research released on 153 college campuses by Noel-Levitz, which advises colleges on student recruitment, found students who listed an institution first on the FAFSA enrolled at a 64 percent rate. That rate, called the yield, dropped to 22 percent for students’ second-listed school and 16 percent for the third school.”
Common App data supplied by students will be used by colleges for yield management.
Rice University sent me a waiver to apply for free. I was halfway done with their Common App supplement when I saw that they asked what other schools I was applying to. I knew that the only reason they would ask that was yield management, I figured I would get rejected if I told them I was applying to Princeton – so I trashed the application.
since college admissions are getting SOOOOO competitive, i think each school wants to know who their competition is (from the student’s perspective) …
as an example, Emory may “think” they are competing with Rice and Stanford … when in reality, they are probably competing with U-of-GA, Auburn, and possibly Clemson …
as another example, if every student that applies to Rice, also applies to Stanford and Princeton, or possibly if every Rice student also applied to Houston Community College and University of Houston …
that will tell Rice who they are competing with … and they can target their marketing accordingly …
BUT, this question should be asked separately, anonymously, possibly in an email survey …
asking this question on the application is very anxiety provoking …
One of the colleges that admitted my son (University of Pennsylvania) asked this question on their online reply form AFTER he’d made his college choice. It was presented in a respectful way, indicating that it was an optional query and that the student should feel no pressure to respond.
This is the sort of information that can help enrollment officials with research and recruitment without seeming at all intrusive or stressful to the applicants. It’s actually not unusual for colleges to ask after the fact, as Penn did. But asking on the application is a whole other story and shouldn’t be allowed.
I don’t buy that it should be necessary to apply to a million colleges in order to locate financial (merit) aid. Second, are students applying so indiscriminately (aid only) that it really doesn’t matter (a) the quality of the academics at the school (b) the quality of the program/major at the school © the other aspects of the campus that are important to student satisfaction? If money is the entire focus of the search – such that 30 -50 college applications are “necessary,” why not apply to the cheapest public option?
In states with high in-state public costs and poor in-state public financial aid, the cheapest public option that has the desired academic offerings may not necessarily be that cheap, or even affordable, for some students and families.
The people who say things like “Well, what about your state’s public flagship?” have a point, but it only goes so far. To chime with and expand on what @ucbalumnus wrote, I’m in Alaska. If you’re here and you have kids who are interested in things like industrial design or other such less-commonly-offered fields, you have no in-state, and therefore cheaper, options at all. (And the tuition-exchange options are pretty amazingly slim for many such fields, as well.)
I appreciate the last two posts, and understand what you’re saying. However, I maintain that there should be a better way to match merit aid to the student and the student’s academic interests & strengths. The current way is highly inefficient. My point is that I am always impatient with the generic response that “there’s no other way.” There’s no other way (supposedly) right now. A different way has not yet been tried or constructed. It is not true that there can never be another way.
What’s also a problem is that need-based aid has been prioritized over merit-based aid. That [minority] kid that got into all eight ivy league schools had no where near a perfect score; yet, the val and sal in my school both did, had Intel, All-Conference Sports, Ambassadors…and still got rejected from Harvard and MIT. It’s a problem, and a reason why students must apply to more than a dozen schools.
The colleges have much more ability to change the way that they do things. The applicants have to play the game as it is presented to them.
Most colleges do not give that good need-based financial aid either.
I neither said nor implied that the burden is on the applicants to change the system. That was a conclusion of yours not based on the evidence.
This seems like one more way to make it even more difficult for students to get a clean cut answer of admission. Imagine, you got wait-listed at Harvard because you may not have been up to RD snuff but you also got wait-listed at a tier 2 school because you were TOO good of a student and they assumed they were your safety…As if this process weren’t stressful and difficult enough.
I think this question really isn’t ideal, it doesn’t seem fair to evaluate students on something which has nothing to do with their credentials as an applicant! It may become a problem in selecting safety schools (worrying if they won’t accept you because they think you won’t go)!
Davidson College includes this question the common app now… does anyone know of any others?
@soosoo948 it is not a required question for davidson