<p>". There is a finite amount of money in the pool at the beginning of the cycle and that is all there is to spend for that year. Period. The amount may be readjusted for the following year, but not on the fly. "</p>
<p>It doesn't need to be readjusted. You have x amount for financial aid. You make financial aid offers that sum to that x amount. If this isn't enough for people who are admitted, then admits choose another school.</p>
<p>Have you considered that the children of professionals are often more academically oriented because they inherited the academic talent and the value system from their parents? Also, they have the money and time to engage in summer programs to improve themselves and develop that talent. Most professionals (doctors, lawyers, professors) make enough that they will have to pay full freight at most schools, especially if both parents work. (Harvard is especially generous, but most are not as generous.) Therefore, there doesn't need to be any gymnastics by elite schools to make sure that there is a significant portion of students that can pay full freight. And besides, people have forgotten that a significant number of people take out loans to pay for tuition. Finally, many very qualified people do not apply to elite schools because they don't think they will be able to pay for it even with financial aid, so there is some self-selection at work too.</p>
<p>
[quote]
You have x amount for financial aid. You make financial aid offers that sum to that x amount.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>That's the point mini has been making. In order to make offers that total the budgeted amount, you have to determine IN ADVANCE how many students can receive financial aid, and therefore the admissions process cannot be completely blind. </p>
<p>
[quote]
Therefore, there doesn't need to be any gymnastics by elite schools to make sure that there is a significant portion of students that can pay full freight.
[/quote]
That exactly contradicts the first statement. There HAS to be some gymnastics by the admissions office to make sure there are enough full pay students or conversely that there not too many students on financial aid. The ratio of students on financial aid cannot vary from a narrow band. Whether it is a one for one, two for one, or ten for one, some number of full pay students are needed to pay for each student on financial aid. Enrollment management is an essential function of the admissions office. In the same manner that ethnic or gender diversity is managed, economic diversity is planned not random. </p>
<p>It is a completely different issue as to whether you could constitute an admitted pool of equally qualified full pay students. You probably could. You could also have a class that is all female or all Asian. You could just as well have an admitted pool of students all on financial aid. But that cannot happen today even at Harvard without a massive increase in financial aid. There is probably some upper limit of students on any form of financial aid ( I would guess around 70-75% for colleges with the biggest endowments) above which the long term losses in alumni contributions would outweigh any benefits from increased diversity.</p>
<p>Academic excellence is not equally distributed throughout all income brackets. The yield for admittees is not equally distributed throughout all income brackets. Both are slanted toward the higher income bracket. Also, a person is more likely to apply to an expensive school if they don't have to worry about paying for it. So a lot of smart middle class people are lost from the process because of that.</p>
<p>Cellardweller:
"That's the point mini has been making. In order to make offers that total the budgeted amount, you have to determine IN ADVANCE how many students can receive financial aid, and therefore the admissions process cannot be completely blind. "</p>
<p>No, you don't have to determine this IN ADVANCE. They admit a group of people, then distribute their funds to the financial aid offers. There's no guarantee that a person of a certain income will get a certain amount until the financial aid stage (after the admission stage.) If they make unsuitable offers, then people will just turn them down. Others will incur huge loans in order to go the school. Colleges can roughly predict what the numbers will be from the previous year. Colleges admit more people than they need because the previous years yield predicts that a significant number of people will turn them down for financial and other reasons.</p>
<p>"Quote:
You have x amount for financial aid. You make financial aid offers that sum to that x amount. </p>
<p>That's the point mini has been making. *In order to make offers that total the budgeted amount, you have to determine IN ADVANCE how many students can receive financial aid, and therefore the admissions process cannot be completely blind. *"</p>
<p>No, this is not true. </p>
<p>You can just make the Financial Aid packages less generous or only offer the more desirable candidates money. Financial aid does not have to be considered for the admit stage. Just because you check the financial aid box does not necessarily mean you will necessarily get money or that you will get the same amount offered to you as everyone else from the same income bracket.</p>
<p>I completely agree with reply #103. Well-endowed colleges have much freedom when it comes to levels of financial need (& ceilings on that) than colleges not in that category, such as most LAC's. It is obvious that they have budgets, as well as financial goals for further donations. That fact doesn't need to be repeated a million times; these are intelligent repliers here.</p>
<p>For the heavily endowed U'S, being need-aware does not preclude also having a very high & wide ceiling for financial aid. Unlike most other institutions, they need not make trade-offs between excellence and donations, because they will get both -- in some cases within the same students, in other cases from separate students.</p>
<p>You gotta make the Admissions seem to be attainable for everyone who deserves the opportunity.</p>
<ol>
<li>A few full rides. Great advertising and keeps the name out there for the masses. Media loves it. </li>
<li>A bit more near full rides, whether they accept or not. Hope for the downtrodden. </li>
<li>Cater to your clientel because they will support you in the future. They are also the proven commodity. </li>
<li>Husband the wealth because wealth can buy an awful lot of everything, regardless if you need it or not. </li>
<li>Appear to be magnanimous.</li>
<li>Appear to give what the client wants. The client will never admit otherwise. </li>
<li>Network. Remember blood is thicker than water. </li>
<li>Make it appear to be worth more than what it really is and it will be worth more. Enhance the illusions. </li>
<li>Power and influence are ultimately more valuable than money alone. </li>
<li>Ignore the lessers.</li>
</ol>
<p>Harvard or Yale cannot accept every perfect scorer because then admittance would be an attainable goal but no Cach</p>
<p>except that appearances can also be reality, apart from the Name. One just has to examine the product carefully (& often participate in it, to get direct information), before making that judgment. There is also no question that there will always be the ultimate cynics like the above poster who assumes the worst of everything: that fact is a more universal absolute than any of the self-serving 10 points above.</p>
<p>Many people really do know what they're getting. They may even put up with an institution's Image in order to attain what they want out of the institution. They're not being fooled, being misled by appearances, or anything of the kind.</p>
<p>
[quote]
You can just make the Financial Aid packages less generous or only offer the more desirable candidates money.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>This type of differential pricing philosophy is more common among need aware than need blind institutions. The most generous schools will not "gap" you as you are suggesting. I know for a fact MIT and Stanford do not; neither do most Ivies and a number of top LACs that guarantee to meet your need. If they admit you, they will meet your FULL need as determined by your FAFSA or Profile. A number of these schools will provide you a calculator of financial aid on their website. If admitted, your aid WILL be in a predictable range. It is therefore not possible for these schools to make the aid determination AFTER admission. If they take you they will met your need. When our D applied to colleges last year, all the finaid offers from the need blind schools came within the same range and the differences could generally be accounted for from the way each computed income and assets. Only the need aware schools gapped her, some by giving her no aid, some by giving her merit aid instead of need-based aid.</p>
<p>I just think it's a false assumption that perfect score getters are necessarily more qualified or "better" than less perfect scores. Once you are in the 90th percentile, I think the differences in students can be more easily discerned by the balance of their application. Perfect scores might merit an article in the hometown newspaper but after that it really is a drop in a bigger bucket.</p>
<p>I would need to know more details in order to tease out what's going on. I've noticed that financial aid from elite institutions varies a lot. I've seen several which complain that their financial aid offer from MIT was worse from the one from Stanford and vice versa. So I'm confused about the promise of meeting "full need" as calculated by the FASFA profile. If both MIT and Stanford promise to meet "full need," how is it that one student can have a generous offer from MIT and a meager one from Stanford? If "full need" is determined from FASFA, then every school would be locked into giving the same amount for a given income bracket. I can only assume that the "meeting full need" promise implies one of two possibilities:
1) All candidates from a certain income bracket will get the same offer at a particular school, but every school does it differently. The financial aid offer for each income bracket would be proportional to the resources of the school that are set aside for financial aid, say by a constant factor, k. </p>
<p>Let me just hypothesize one formula that is reasonable:
F(I, k) = k/I
F = financial aid offer
k = constant factor that is determined by financial aid resources of school
I = family income
2) The offers are some constant factor times the FASFA calculation of "need." The constant factor, k, would be proportional to the resources of the school that are set aside for financial aid. </p>
<p>(I assume that the second case does not occur because I have seen some people say that school X gave them a better offer than school Y while other people say the opposite was true.) In either case #1 or #2, you could determine the constant factor k based on a prediction of how many admits would be in each income bracket. This prediction of the distribution of family income for the admits would be based on the previous year. </p>
<p>To sum up, having a financial aid budget would not necessitate that you favor full-paying candidates in the admission process. All you would have to do would be to change k in the above equation based. Hannah did raise a valid point awhile back about how too many low income people turning down offers could drive down yield, something which colleges wouldn't want. However, there are a lot of reasons why students with higher family incomes would be successful. The son of a doctor, for instance, probably would not qualify for financial aid. However, probably he would have some measure of genetic talent by virtue of being the son of a doctor. He would be aware of educational opportunities and would set standards high enough to achieve admittance to top schools. He might have pressure on him to do well in school. He would have money and time to improve himself academically. And also, he would be more likely to apply to a top school than someone of equal intelligence but lower income because he would know he could pay for it. Also, consider this scenario. 70% of Harvard admits need financial aid; 30% do not. All of the rich admits accept the admission offer. Half of the people who needed financial aid decide that they haven't been offered enough money so they turn down their offer. So you end up getting roughly a 50%-50% split in the enrolled class in terms of needing financial aid. The higher yield among high income with respect to low income admits would skew the incoming class so that it looks like higher income people were being preferred. In fact, in this scenario it would just be that the higher income people turn down offers of admission at a much lower rate than middle and low income people.</p>
<p>There are a lot of speculation here. I don't have all the information. It would be a lot easier if a financial aid officer would step in and say what is actually going on.</p>
<p>"There HAS to be some gymnastics by the admissions office to make sure there are enough full pay students or conversely that there not too many students on financial aid. "</p>
<p>I wonder about this. I suspect that if you went by conventional measures of grades (from a rigorous program), scores, and good ECs, that you'd always have a healthy crop of full pay students. If you want more students with significant financial need, you have to relax the admissions standards.</p>
<p>Enrolling a full class of full-pay customers without lowering the standards (and therefore lowering the attractiveness to full-pay customers) is not as easy as it seems. Harvard could do it. Maybe Yale and Princeton could do it. I don't think any of the top 3 liberal arts colleges could do it. If a school did enroll 100% full-pay customers, the school would be so gross, so white, so "entitled" that people visiting campus would literally recoil. It would be a marketing blunder of epic proportions.</p>
<p>Once you get past the very top rung, schools clearly can't do it. Otherwise we wouldn't see merit discounting to rich folk at places like Duke.</p>
<p>In fact, if you read the strategic plan for almost any college or university, a goal is to decrease the tuition discount rate by targeting more full-pay customers.</p>
<p>
[quote]
If you want more students with significant financial need, you have to relax the admissions standards.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Hi, Hunt, </p>
<p>This is an issue that has been the subject of some research. (I first learned about some of the sources from mini, and later found others myself.) There is still substantial underrepresentation of low-income, high-ability students at highly selective colleges. I believe colleges both underrecruit such students, never getting applications from them in the first place, and then underadmit them when they consider their applications. It may be that some colleges recently are trying to improve in how they recruit and admit low-income, high-ability students, so perhaps this situation will change over time. See my earlier thread </p>
<p>^^A few months ago, there was a newspaper article about two girls from low income families who got into Harvard. Their principal bragged about their "perfect" SAT scores. The SAT scores were listed in the 1800-1900 range in the article, not exactly perfect. For Stanford, MIT, Caltech, and the ivies, there is no relaxing of standards for the wealthy until you get to the level of development admit. Actually, Caltech and MIT do not have development admits either.</p>
<p>There are other underrepresented groups. Do you think that they are underrepresented because they are discriminated against by the admissions committees. There are many reasons why a group could be underrepresented, not just the two you listed.</p>
<p>I did not mean to imply that all schools that promise to meet full need necessarily provide the same financial aid package. The definition of need varies from school to school and most private colleges use the Profile in addition to the FAFSA. Some count house equity, some don't. Colleges often account for income from family owned businesses in different ways. Some have provisions for special circumstances such as loss of a job, unexpected medical expenses some don't. The work study component also varies from school to school. There is simply no uniform model used by all colleges. All schools within HYPSM have slightly different formulas that yield different results with identical inputs. </p>
<p>My experience with the top tier colleges claiming to meet full need, universities and LACs, was that they were not using differential pricing models and that the variations in financial aid offers had some objective basis that could be explained. There was no obvious attempt to gap the need with some discount factor. The data from our high school seems to suggest that schools will waitlist qualified students with financial need more often than those with no need. Waitlisted students were not guaranteed that their financial needs would be fully met. This appeared more frequently at LACs where enrollment management is more critical as small changes in the ratio of full pay versus students on need have a greater effect on the financial aid requirements. </p>
<p>Schools that offer loans instead of grants obviously cannot legitimately claim to meet full need and are in separate category altogether.</p>
<p>"The data from our high school seems to suggest that schools will waitlist qualified students with financial need more often than those with no need. "</p>
<p>Well, I have very little experience with LACs. You may be right about them. They were not very popular at my high school. However, there was no discernible preference from my high school for those without financial need for the ivies, MIT, Stanford, and Caltech. And since I went to a public magnet, there was a pretty large sample size of qualified applicants to judge from. There were probably 25-30 people per year that went to HYPMS.</p>
<p>Our experience was similar to yours in regards to HYPSMC. Financial need did not seem to matter much. But as soon as you dropped one level to schools like Duke, Vanderbilt and Emory there was a clear preference for full pay students at least from the Northeast. Not surprinsingly these are among the schools with the lowest percentages of students on finaid.</p>
<p>I definitely agree with post 112. It's been our experience & observation, too. Need-aware is a primary operating starting-point for schools below top-tier. When it comes to top tier, different dynamics come into play, & it's more complex.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I've seen several statements from several CC participants in various threads recently that Harvard rejects 50 percent of all the students who apply to Harvard with perfect SAT scores. Where is there a convenient source to verify that statement? Where is a webpage produced by Harvard that says so? Where is there a journalistic report of exactly such a figure? <<</p>
</blockquote>
<br>
<p>Reviving this old thread to provide a partial answer to the OP's question. Here is a story from yesterday's WSJ saying that of half of the perfect SAT scorers get rejected. I say partial because it's Princeton and not Harvard in this case. But the point is the same. The CC kids are not merely making this stuff up. There are numbers and articles floating around out there saying that a lot of perfect scorers get rejected.</p>
<p>"Princeton said 17,564 students applied to the class of 2010 and 1,231 enrolled. The university said 14% of its freshmen were Asian-American that year and in the most recent one. The school said it admitted only half of applicants with maximum SAT scores. About 5% of the U.S. population is Asian-American."</p>