<p>^^the above doesn't contradict what mini said at all. What mini said is that the colleges have goals for how many rich and how many poor students to admit each year, and they achieve those goals, even though they pretend to be "need-blind".</p>
<p>It's important to understand what "need-blind" means. Need-blind means that the financial aid and admissions offices have standing authorization from the college's Board to spend whatever is necessary to meet the financial need of enrolled students, i.e. they are authorized to exceed a fixed budget. Being authorized to exceed a budget and making a habit of exceeding the budget are two different things! It certainly doesn't mean that there is no financial aid budget. In fact, hitting that budget year after year is one of the things that allows a college to go "need blind".</p>
<p>Some schools have a modified need blind policy. They are authorized to increase aid to meet need, but reaching a specified discount rate threshold automatically triggers a review of the financial aid policy.</p>
<p>"What mini said is that the colleges have goals for how many rich and how many poor students to admit each year, and they achieve those goals, even though they pretend to be "need-blind"."</p>
<p>Colleges can control how much revenue they generate as well as their socioeconomic diversity changing the financial aid packages they offer. Who they admit is need-blind, except for the poor income students who get a boost because of their financial situation and the handful of development admits whose parents donated a million dollars.</p>
<p>What does a "development admit" mean? Also, it is an interesting point that only half of Harvard/many top school students are on financial aid. With a price tag of $50K... that's actually a high proportion of people who "can" afford it, esp compared to the distribution of the entire US population.</p>
<p>
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With a price tag of $50K... that's actually a high proportion of people who "can" afford it, esp compared to the distribution of the entire US population.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>The actual bottom line price (after discounts and red tag specials) charged by the top colleges to the average student is in the $25,000 to $30,000 range. They charge the wealthiest half of the their customers full-sticker price ($45,000) in what is really an explicit progressive pricing structure where the more you have the more you pay.</p>
<p>As mini will point out, it's not completely progressive yet. The top colleges are spending $80,000 per student per year, so there's still plenty of room to jack sticker prices up some more and still offer exceptional value to the consumer.</p>
<p>Post 60:</p>
<p>No, I was <em>not</em> assuming that, I'dad. I'm separating qualities for a reason: ability to donate does not by itself trump everything else. Being brilliant + rich would tend to, definitely. You have not read my posts carefully. I said quite specifically that it is <em>all</em> shades of gray. If anything, what may trump everything else is celebrity status -- which is usually accompanied by income as well, but not always.</p>
<p>epiphany:</p>
<p>Where did I say YOU assumed that?</p>
<p>Inherent in mini's framing of rich versus poor is that colleges are somehow giving up some special brilliance when they accept a wealthy student over a poor student. I don't think that's the case.</p>
<p>I have long argued that college admissions are "slot" based. Applicants in one stack compete against others in their own stack and not so much against applicants in some other stack. That's why I find the argument that minority students are taking admissions spots from white students absurd. They are completing, largely, in different stacks of applications, each with a pre-determined rough number of available slots with acceptances based on likely yields for each stack of applicants. The goal is to enroll the best students from each stack.</p>
<p>Sorry, I'Dad. I jumped to the conclusion because I had offered a dichotomy, which made it appear as if I was artificially creating (& assuming) that dichotomy. </p>
<p>I like your last paragraph, but would add that following that theory (which I do not disagree with, & seems to be borne out when one follows trends, such as those reported on CC), in addition I find it absurd that black students take significant numbers of spots from Asian students.</p>
<p>"[Harvard director of admissions Marilyn] McGrath said fewer than 1 percent of Harvard applicants, 254 of 27,462, got a perfect 2,400 on the SAT."</p>
<p>According to the chart tokenadult posted upthread, isn't that essentially ALL 2400 scorers? I guess it could well be that virtually all 2400 scorers apply to Harvard. I don't consider it big news that Harvard rejects some of them--some of them probably have 2.8 GPAs, disciplinary problems at school, no ECs at all, etc. If you really wanted to get behind this "we reject half of perfect scorers claim," you'd want to know how many perfect scorers with decent GPAs and ECs get rejected.</p>
<p>Personally, I think they can be a very potent hook. FWIW, D1 had perfect scores across the SAT, ACT and SAT subject tests and was accepted everywhere she applied except MIT. She did a poor job on that application and one of her teacher recs was never sent. So who knows?</p>
<p>What did disappoint us was how she fared in scholarship applications. Did not make finalist for the Duke Robertson or AB, the Wash U Danforth or the full scholarship at Chicago. We think the fact that we did not indicate seeking financial aid on her applications might have been part of the problem.</p>
<p>Her handwritten notes on form acceptance letters from top schools all reference her community service and essays, though - not her scores.</p>
<p>I really think an equally interesting and relevant question to be asking is "Why do top athletes fail to gain admission to top schools?" We see a lot of that in our community - once in a blue moon the athletic hook gets a student into a top school. I'd say that's a bigger misconception than the power of perfect scores.</p>
<p>Mammall,
Chicago is a bit of a rare bird when it comes to the scholarship money compared to other schools, though. The adcomms make recommednations, they apps go to a selection committee, and then they select those who they feel have that "Chicago thing," whatever that is. (I'm leaving aside how many of those big awards go to athletes, since I have no hard info.)</p>
<p>I thought S had a decent shot at big $$ there (for reasons that we've discussed offlist :)), but we were quite happy S got the University Scholar award. Maybe it was just the sheer numbers of exceptional applicants this year. I'm really curious how many folks who were offered the University and College Honors Scholarships actually accepted. I can't imagine how he could have shown them more love than he did! I don't know that grades would have made any difference in getting more $$ at Chicago, either. We requested FA, but knew it was a borderline thing, dependent on whether they'd take extraordinary medical expenses into account. (It turns out that scholarship > need at Chicago. Were they throwing money at a kid who is almost full pay and might go elsewhere for better $$ in the hopes of yielding a great kid? I have no way of knowing, other than that FA does not make the scholarship decisions.)</p>
<p>Certainly multiple 800s on SAT and SAT-IIs didn't help S at H. His SAT score was high enough to fall within Harvard's entering class (i.e., if H accepted the top 1650 scorers in the country), but it was not enough.</p>
<p>Why do we care about this question?</p>
<p>Harvard could not be plainer that it does not consider SAT scores, no matter how high, to be a compelling argument for admission in and of themselves. All of us admit of the possibility that there may be some percentage of perfect SAT scorers who are otherwise unimpressive as students (perhaps more so than usual by dint of squandering or under-utilizing what look like prodigious gifts). And I'm certain all of us acknowledge that having perfect SAT scores does not, in and of itself, make anyone a loser, and that many perfect SAT scorers have a lot on the ball that shows up in myriad ways in their applications.</p>
<p>So, it is going to be complete dog-bites-man news if Harvard (a) accepts a lot of perfect SAT scorers, and (b) doesn't accept all of them. The only thing that isn't completely clear is what percentage of perfect-scoring applicants are rejected. So what?</p>
<p>I think it's ridiculous to suggest that Harvard has some sort of weird quota for perfect SAT scorers. "Ooops. We've already take 125 of them, better reject everyone else." More likely is that, the few obvious losers having been culled out, most of the perfect SAT scorers probably make it to some kind of advanced round of consideration in which their perfect SAT scores are basically irrelevant, or of attenuated relevance, and they are being accepted or rejected based primarily on other criteria. They have a higher than normal acceptance rate because -- guess what! -- the SAT measures something that is pretty close to our notion of intelligence, and some decent proportion of perfect SAT scorers are also going to be damn intelligent. (Not to mention, as mini points out, well-to-do.) They don't have a perfect acceptance rate because -- guess what! -- the SAT doesn't measure intelligence perfectly (it's even less perfect as an income/wealth measure), and it doesn't measure at all a whole bunch of qualities Harvard may care about, like leadership and the ability to skate backwards wearing hockey equipment.</p>
<p>After the fact, Harvard certainly has the capacity to have someone make a few keystrokes to figure out what percentage of perfect SAT scorers got accepted or rejected that year. Given the relatively small number of such applicants, and the relatively low importance of perfect SAT scores, I would expect that number to jump around a bit from year to year, because the final result is probably essentially random within some broad parameters.</p>
<p>I'm completely missing what is interesting in any of this.</p>
<p>Amen to the above.^^</p>
<p>I chimed in, way up thread, to ask what the import of the OP question was. And here on page 5, I still can't figure it out.</p>
<p>"Why do we care about this question?"</p>
<p>For some, modesty precludes an honest answer to your inquiry.</p>
<p>"As mini will point out, it's not completely progressive yet. The top colleges are spending $80,000 per student per year, so there's still plenty of room to jack sticker prices up some more and still offer exceptional value to the consumer."</p>
<p>It's actually a very regressive pricing structure, with upper income admits taken together receiving massive (plus 100k) subsidies equal to or greater than all need-based aid combined in any single year. </p>
<p>"Inherent in mini's framing of rich versus poor is that colleges are somehow giving up some special brilliance when they accept a wealthy student over a poor student."</p>
<p>I don't think they are giving up anything. On the contrary, they are getting what they want most - a highly intelligent, "full paying" customer. And, by definition, those they reject are "less qualified". </p>
<p>"Who they admit is need-blind, except for the poor income students who get a boost because of their financial situation and the handful of development admits whose parents donated a million dollars."</p>
<p>Admissions officers are professionals. They know pretty precisely the financial status of an applicant simply by looking at the application. First of all, most applications have a checkmark right on the front asking whether one is applying for aid. They know the zip codes. They know the cost of various ECs. They know which applicants are "developmental". They know the guidance counselors. They know the private schools. Do they know precisely how much money each student is going to require? For the most part, they don't need to. They need to make sure 50% (or whatever the target is) of those attending don't require financial assistance. They may have (as my alma mater does, even though it claims to be "need-blind") an actual quota for "socio-ec" (read: low-income) admits. So now we are NOT "need-blind for more than 60% of admits - this is at the "need-blind" school. The rest is filler - except that (at Princeton for example) there is a program to enroll a substantial number of students with family incomes above $125k but still requiring some aid - that's who the "no-loan" policy is directed at. Oh, and those who are rejected are "less qualified".</p>
<p>NOTHING is left to chance, if they can help it. And I can't figure out why someone would think it better if it was. The need-blind mythology is just a marketing ploy.</p>
<p>
[quote]
"Why do we care about this question?"</p>
<p>For some, modesty precludes an honest answer to your inquiry.
[/quote]
For the modest partiicpants, might I infer that they are holders (or parents of holders) of 800/800/800 SAT scores and matching SAT II/ACT?</p>
<p>And so, how will it help/inform/relax/change the stress level at all... to find out whether Harvard has, in the past, accepted 50% of perfect scorers or some differing percentage?</p>
<p>I think it is clear that the Perfect Score does not equal a 100% certitude of acceptance. And that the Perfect Score holders have significantly higher acceptance rates than those without them. What more is there to know?</p>
<p>Well, if you had a score in that range, and learned that Harvard essentially accepted all the applicants in that range who also had decent ECs and a GPA above 3.7 (or whatever), you'd relax a little bit. As a cursory reading of CC shows, even the most highly qualified applicants and their parents are still stressed out about getting in.</p>
<p>I answered the question about why the thread was opened [url=<a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1060441426-post24.html%5Dup">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1060441426-post24.html]up</a> above<a href="post%20#24">/url</a>: </p>
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</p>
<p>I STILL don't know why other CC participants think it's noteworthy to mention that Harvard is reported to reject X percent of its peak-scoring applicants (it appears that 50 percent is about right, which is something I learned from the replies in this thread). I just wanted to check to make sure that the factual statement was somewhere in the correct ballpark. I don't have any particular stake in whatever implications other people draw from the statement.</p>
<p>mini, they can get the revenue they want by just adjusting the financial aid packages. They don't need to reject middle income people. Middle income/poor people will not come if they don't get the right financial aid packages. </p>
<p>Frankly, the colleges don't care whether people take out loans to pay for part of the tuitions, so it doesn't benefit them to reject a bunch of middle class or poor people at the admit stage. </p>
<p>As for the endowment, Harvard's is more than 20 billion while a place like Northwestern is probably less than a quarter of that. Their tuition is pretty much the same, though. The endowment doesn't come from the tuition.</p>