I’m a student applying for 9th grade as a day student at George, Lawrenceville, Peddie, and PDS. While my family is able to pay full tuition for every school, they are considering applying for Financial Aid, because “it won’t hurt.” However, Peddie and Lawrenceville both say on their websites that financial need is considered during admission decisions. If we end up applying for Financial Aid, could I possibly be rejected because of financial need? Or is it possible that I may be admitted on full tuition anyways?
If your family is able to pay, all boarding schools will expect it to. See our experience here:
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/21888117#Comment_21888117
How any school responds to a family who applies for FA who doesn’t need it varies. If a school wants to admit an FA applicant but sees the family doesn’t require aid, they MAY reach out with the option to switch to full pay, or they may not. If the applicant is not one they want to admit that year, it doesn’t matter if they are FA or FP.
NO school on this planet will give full FA to a family who can be FP. That is just magical thinking.
I have 2 close friends who believe they were negatively impacted by their FA applications, because their PFS showed that they could be FP families. The schools these kids applied to varied from acronym schools, to the schools you mentioned, plus a few others who are selective but don’t get enough “face time” here on CC.
In one case, the student was well qualified and URM, but was wait listed or rejected at every single school. He finally got off a wait list AFTER April 10 at one school (not his first choice), and was told that his PFS showed FP and that he would only be admitted as a FP student. He took the spot and so far is doing well at that school.
Another case was not quite as extreme - that student was wait listed at several schools but did get an acceptance on M10 but with no aid.
As @choatiemom states, it will vary from school to school. Some will just wait list or reject you, others may call and give you the option to be FP, and some may just admit you with no aid. I think that if a school states in it’s FA webpage that they will not accept any student they cannot fully fund, then that is a message that they MAY wait list or reject your application if you show that you can pay but choose not to.
I don’t know anything about the day student populations at the schools to which you are applying - but if the day student percentage is small, you are probably competing against children of faculty and staff, which makes it a competitive applicant pool for someone on the outside.
I understand how tempting it is to apply even when you know (ahead of time) that you can be a FP family - it’s easy to look at massive endowments and think that these schools have money to spare. But they don’t see it that way. Think about the message it sends to the school when you know you can be full pay, but you are asking for them to fund you despite your financial position.
It is much harder to get admitted if you need FA. Most schools are NOT transparent about this, however.
The percentage of FA applicants who are admitted is smaller than the percentage of FP kids who get in.
The only boarding school that is need-blind is Andover. The rest are need-aware. So applying for financial aid will generally hurt your chances.
Some schools will make the admission decision independently of FA, that is, will send an acceptance letter, but with no aid awarded (my kid’s school did this; they felt that kids who were qualified to be admitted and worked hard on applying deserved an acceptance letter, with lack of FA being the only obstacle). Some schools will choose to deny or waitlist qualified applicants if there’s not enough aid available and it’s clear that the student would need that aid in order to attend. And some schools have FA waitlists for admitted kids who need FA when there allocation isn’t enough to go around (There is usually NEVER enough to go around…). During my kid’s process, she was WL’d at one school and they were upfront with us that it was because we had applied for FA.
And no one has mentioned that most schools use FA to round out the class. IF they want a diverse, well rounded community they likely will have to leverage FA to do so. Many FA recipients at major schools are also from urban areas or are URM or both and many are also athletes or have some other special talent the school appreciates. Some schools even have programs which funnel local kids in poor areas to their schools. Or they use FA to get kids from under represented states. I don’t think the FA applicants are so much stronger applicants as they are applicants from a broader range of categories. In a perfect world, all kids who needed aid would get it. But most schools have limited aid and they need to make tough decisions.
The amount of financial aid needed also matters. If you were an admissions officer and only had $60K left in the entire budget, what would you do:
- Accept one deserving student who needs full financial aid ($60K) or
- Accept 6 deserving students who need $10K each
Student #1 needs to be really, really desirable to get the full package. Whereas students in bucket #2 don’t need to be as stellar. As pointed out above, most schools have a rank list for FA applicants.
Schools also use FA to improve stats such as average SSAT score, etc…
Good news: My parents have managed to talk themselves out of applying. Only issue is, on our submitted profiles (using SAO) it says we want to apply for FA, but obviously, we don’t anymore. Would it be a good idea to contact the schools so there isn’t any confusion?
Yes, simply email each AO and explain that you are changing your status and will not be applying for financial aid. When we began the process our SAO apps also said we were applying for FA, but we decided not to after completing the PFS and looking at the EFC. The AO’s were more than happy to take us off the FA list!
Edited to add: your parents should be the ones to make this contact, IMO. Ultimately they are footing the bill, and I think that type of communication should come directly from them.