Are colleges really "need-blind"?

vonlost
Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:53:13 +0000

“Was Reed the college that went back and redid 5% of their acceptees and changed them to full pay after the initial acceptance go around? I think that’s why I thought they were need-blind.”

Yes, but I’d reword it for clarity: After the adcom finished their work in mid March, word came down that because of the collapsing economy’s effect on endowment and earnings, Reed couldn’t fund as many needy students as they had planned, so they had to replace (before notifications went out) about 100 FA acceptances with those who could pay full price (around 30 students with Reed’s yield). The effect was to increase the number of need-aware acceptances. Reed got close to being need-blind in recent years, but the economy derailed those efforts for the time being.

In spite of this, Reed increased its financial aid budget by 7.8 percent for this year, and was able to offer aid to 14 percent more applicants for this year’s incoming class compared to last year. But they had wanted to do even better.