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<p>If I understand the process correctly, the admissions office will have some sort of mechanism for knowing once they they’ve neared the cap for FA - probably near the end of the admissions cycle - at which point they will choose the remainder of the class, using socio-economic factors as an imput.</p>
<p>Let’s be conservative and estimate ~10% of the FA budget will be set aside for this purpose. That’s $1 million available for serious cherry-picking among different income groups, enough money, for example, roughly 20 students with -0- EFC ($1000000/$50000), or for what would be far more likely - 40 students with EFCs of ~$25,000. Even if the goal is only to match the EFC for some of the most competitive state flagship universities (some of which are quite pricey at $35k a year) that’s 66 additional “middle-class” students who might not otherwise have been identified as such.</p>
<p>All of this is purely speculative, of course, since the trustees have been strangely silent since they met last Friday, but here are some of the things i am concerned with:</p>
<p>1) How does this impact URMs since they obviously comprise a significant number of the students who come within the “high-need” category?</p>
<p>2) Will the lower-need students be competing with the balance of the entire applicant pool or just with each other? </p>
<p>3) How confident can we be that the adcom can actually manage yields for so many different constituencies (first, it was athletes, then it was URMs, now it’s middle-class students?) and,</p>
<p>4) The usual tranparency issues, for example, how do we know the extra $1 million will actually get spent rather than just pocketed by the university as a savings (on top of the savings they will already be receiving by establishing a cap in the first place?)</p>