Are colleges really "need-blind"?

bclintonk
Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:44:40 +0000

LOL. Besides your zip code, HS name, parental occupations, and whether or not you’ve checked the box that says whether you’ll be applying for FA, adcoms can look at your house if they want to. Try it. Go to Google Maps, enter your home address, go to “satellite view,” and zoom in. It will give them a pretty good idea of the size of the house, the size of the lot, how it’s landscaped, what the neighboring houses are like, etc. Then go to “street view” and it will show a picture from the street. In many places they can get online public records of the assessed value of the house and land, and/or estimates of current fair market value based on recent comparable sales. House value won’t tell them everything—they won’t know how leveraged your parents are with mortgages, etc—but in combination with parental occupations it goes a long way toward determining how likely it is that you’ll need FA. I have no idea whether they actually look at these things, and any school that publicly claims to be need-blind shouldn’t be doing this. But if they want to cheat, they can cheat.

I think they can also manipulate the mix of FA v. non-FA enrollment somewhat with decisions about how many applicants to take from the ED pool. In general, ED applicants are significantly more likely to be non-need, because a lot of applicants with significant need are reluctant to apply ED for fear of locking themselves in before they’ve seen the FA package.