So we have data from the seven colleges that in fact said they were need blind and meets need for Internationals as of the 2023-24 cohort. Here are their percentages of Internationals receiving aid and average International award:
Amherst 84.3%/$81,202
Bowdoin 66.4%/$77,156
Dartmouth 69.3%/$81,378
Harvard 72.2%/$75,088
MIT 75.8%/$72,712
Princeton 75.1%/$78,606
Yale 61.5%/$80,285
There are some interesting variations, but overall I would say it is obvious that being need blind and meets need for Internationals is typically going to lead to a relatively high percentage of Internationals with aid, and a relatively high average amount of aid per International on aid, as one would expect.
What I think is interesting and important for Internationals to know is that although there is a rough consistency among the need blind colleges, there is much less consistency among need aware colleges, even when they say they are meets need.
Mount Holyoke, the college we were discussing, does not claim to be need blind for Internationals, so I am definitely not accusing them of doing anything dishonest. I am more just trying to observe how they actually use being need aware. And their comparable numbers are 54.4% and $52,109. So a significantly lower average award, and then a somewhat lower percentage of Internationals on aid.
Let’s compare that to their 5C colleague Smith. For Smith, the numbers are 43.5% and $79,023. So Smith is demonstrably not spreading their International aid budget around as much as Mount Holyoke in the way I am defining it. Indeed, Smith has an average award similar to the need blind colleges, but it has a significantly lower percentage of Internationals getting aid at all, which means Smith is using being need aware primarily just to be more selective for needy Internationals generally, but not specifically as to very high need Internationals. Whereas Mount Holyoke appears to be a little more generous as to needy Internationals generally, but conversely appears to be drawing more of a distinction between high need Internationals and low-to-medium need Internationals.
Now of course I have no idea what actual mechanisms they are using behind the scenes to achieve these results. Like, I don’t know if they are doing this on an individual level, using policies which predictably have these effects on a group level, or some combination of both. But since neither Smith nor Mount Holyoke claim to be need blind for Internationals, they are free to do it however they like.
For example, you may be right that Mount Holyoke is simply favoring applicants from the sorts of International secondary schools where they know the applicants are more likely to be somewhere in the full pay or low-to-medium need categories, and not the high need category.
And for that matter, I suspect to some extent the need blind colleges do this too–they certainly do something similar domestically–and I agree that if they are doing that just for academic preparedness reasons, then whatever effect that has on the percentages of successful applicants with high need would be incidental, not intentional.
But we also know from the statistics above that whatever effect that might be having at those officially need blind colleges, it is still resulting in a range of average awards and percentage of Internationals getting aid that are much higher than Mount Holyoke’s.
So this cannot be the full story at Mount Holyoke. And again, Mount Holyoke does not claim to be need blind anyway. So even if, hypothetically, Mount Holyoke is favoring applicants from such secondary schools more than usual in part for budgetary reasons, well, they never said they wouldn’t.
thanks for the clarification!
If she can, she can make an appointment, although it may be a bit late 
but still worth a try.
I’m going to take a wild guess and assume (sorry if this is wrong) that there’s a…system that at least considers low income or poor people over there. Its sadly just not thne same here but like it doesn’t even phase me cuz 15 years in the same useless government will do that to you. So i’m not offended or anything I promise