<p>On the substance of affordability, I think a public commitment to “need-blind” admissions is a marketing ploy that unnecessarily ties the hands of admissions officers. Admissions officers are trusted to make wise and equitable decisions armed with all sorts of personal information about applicants, so why should they be shielded from financial data from those who will be seeking need-based aid upon matriculation?</p>
<p>How does putting all of that information behind a Chinese wall make them better decision makers when creating a freshman class? I don’t think it does. I don’t think anyone thinks it does. The point of “need-blind” is to encourage applications from low-income applicants by assuring them that they’ll get a fair shake. The benefit to the college is that more applications – and more economically diverse applications – will be submitted, giving the admissions office a larger, more diverse pool to select from. Of course they’re doing their selecting with a slight handicap.</p>
<p>This can lead to freshman classes that are middle-class-free zones, particularly where the financial aid allocations are rigid (as is the case at Wesleyan) and/or not very realistic as to what families can afford to pay as you move deeper into the middle-class pool (which is something none of us can speak to except through anecdote-sharing).</p>
<p>I’d rather see an admissions office that has its hands free to craft a fully diverse freshman class – with full-spectrum economic diversity and not polar-ends-of-the-spectrum diversity. And that means making sure that the financial aid resources are available to give very realistic full-need awards to lower-middle, middle, and upper-middle class families with students who are offered admission. That may mean fewer full-ride admittees…but that doesn’t mean the decisions will be made irresponsibly or that full-need admittees will be cut in favor of full-pay admittees. By removing the onus of “need-blind” admissions while committing to the more important goal of “full-need-met” matriculation, I think Wesleyan improves its reach. And, for now, as many other peer LACs remain cleaved to “need blind,” Wesleyan gains a marketing edge with middle-class applicants that will be at least as commensurate to the marketing edge it’s giving up by giving up on “need-blind.”</p>
<p>I wouldn’t suggest this if there was some question that the admissions office would misuse and abuse the financial aid data inputs to create an upper-class elitist academy. I think that’s the unfounded fear of those who regret a departure from a “need-blind” policy, but there’s nothing that bears that out when you look at how the other inputs – geography, ethnicity, rigor of curriculum, etc. – are managed by the admissions office without that kind of bias. Frankly, they do a great job of creating diverse classes with their hands tied by – and not because of the saving grace of – a “need-blind” policy.</p>