Do students not seeking FA in ED get merit aid? It would seem to me that fullpay students who are obligated to commit do not need incentives.
I encouraged someone to apply early to UPenn. She was admitted, and received good money. Parents very pleased with amount.
Penn doesn’t give merit aid. It only gives need-based aid.
As the years roll on I’m growing less and less concerned about what private colleges do. Decades ago they never had a mission to be diverse by any factor. Then they decided they wanted socio-economic and geographic diversity. If they now decide they can’t afford to subsidize their way to socio-economic diversity it is their prerogative. I’m not sure where along the continuum we decided that it was essential to society for private colleges. As time marches on and public educations are now becoming unfordable for many I’d far rather concentrate my rants on returning to the need for states to provide affordable options for their top students and let the private colleges duke it out in the free-market.
That article is confusing. Even though the writer appears to know the difference between EA and ED, sometimes she uses the terms interchangeably, maybe to make the problem look bigger than it is by the numbers.
Personally, we don’t go ED and I don’t really think that puts us at a disadvantage in the big picture.
Schools don’t really have an incentive to provide merit aid to ED applicants, but they do to provide adequate fin aid to their ED admits (since a big impetus to schools to take many ED is to increase yield, so admitting ED and then not providing enough fin aid for someone to accept kind of defeats the purpose).
Some schools provide merit aid to all students who meet certain criteria. My S applied ED, but we knew how much automatic merit aid he qualified for before he applied.
There’s a misconception in this article. Let’s imagine there were no early round.
I predict the students from wealthy families would get in at higher rates than those who need FA; however, without the early round, they’d get into twenty or thirty colleges, instead of one. Legacies and faculty children would receive an enormous boost, as they’d be more likely to enroll, which is very valuable when candidates are applying to 30 to 40 schools, but the admissions office needs to fill beds.
There would then emerge at least two rounds of admissions, only pushed back after April: The first round, in which the colleges bid for their desired candidates, and the Waitlist Round, in which the colleges would fill the rest of the class in from their waitlist. But now that I think of it, there would likely be at least a round or two more, as students who’ve accepted offers from less prestigious schools dump them when higher ranking schools come calling.
@Periwinkle, nah that would all be in the waistlist round, where it would be like the real-world job market, where prospective employers and employees offer, negotiate, reject, renege, etc.
What are examples of selective ED schools that give AUTOMATIC merit aid?
I didn’t say anything about selective.
Then what the point of binding ED if the school is not selective?
The cash, silly. Also depends what you consider selective. To get the money you have to have stats good enough for many selective schools.
There are always kids with parents who can pay who have borderline stats, even for lower ranked schools.
I tried to edit my post yesterday, but it didn’t go through. My S applied to a competitive major (video game design) at a not so selective school (RIT). At RIT you apply directly into the major. He applied ED for that reason, but we were OK with the ED part because we knew how much merit aid he would get ahead of time.
My D applied to and was admitted ED1 to Pomona. We’re definitely not rich, but we are in a position to forego the need to compare FA offers. I can understand why the smaller LAC’s use ED instead of EA, because I’m sure it’s harder to control the size of the class with EA offers when you’re targeting a class of 400. But what shocks me is Williams admitting 44% of the freshman class through binding ED. I wonder what the acceptance rate in the Williams RD pool is. That really does seem to disadvantage those who need to compare FA offers.
I think those who know they will get full need met anywhere, those with very low income and assets, can also benefit from ED. It’s the donut hole group who can’t do ED because they need to know the financial aid package.
I think for one round of admissions a college wouldn’t need to give merit aid as an incentive…but top students would soon in the future not apply ED if they couldn’t get merit aid.
@bopper: Not all top students need merit aid.
Not to mention that most of the highly selective elites give no one or only a few big merit money anyway.