I read that college admission offices use a software called Slate, and that pulls in any info you enter into NPC. Many colleges do a first round of reading applications as need-blind, then incorporate financial considerations in the subsequent rounds. If you’re high-need and enter your info into NPC, then your high-need status will appear in your Slate profile, so you are flagged early on, creating a negative bias.
Is this true? Have you heard this? Anyone w/ real inside info from an admissioons office whether this really happens?
From what I have seen, review platforms like Slate Reader are customizable, so colleges would never be forced to share aid information with admissions officials sooner than they wanted to.
Big picture, many/most NPCs offer the option to send your info to the school and/or complete the NPC while signed in to one’s Collegeboard account. It’s going to vary by college how they use the NPC info in the admissions decision, if at all. Remember, most colleges are need blind.
Only if Slate is set up to do that by the admissions team.
Do you have an example college, or source for this statement? By the time schools are reading apps, financial aid deadlines have typically passed. So, need aware schools would have the FAFSA and/or CSS profile that show actual need based on real numbers, not estimates like NPCs…so no need to look at an NPC.
For need blind schools, there are many application components that infer an applicant’s relative level of need. So, if a need blind school wants to understand if an applicant may or may not have need during the admissions process they will look at those markers. Some need blind colleges do evaluate these markers, IME, many/most don’t.
If you want to see what one view college’s view of Slate looks like here – it is probably very helpful all around for you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDmEQTw2R8w (not sure why it starts mid-video- rewind to beginning and you can see how an AO reviews a whole app - this one has no financial info that I recall)
Each college can configure what it looks like, differently.
A number of schools are need blind, and even those that aren’t need blind $$ may only show up late process for some schools as you say .. (you can see that in a number of reports in behind-the scenes reporting of AO offices).
Slate apparently markets the capability to capture and integrate NPC info into student profiles to enable early tagging and segmentation of applicants into a high-need pool, etc.
Do you recall where you read this? I’m not doubting you, just interested to read more about it. This NPC capture capability would only seem useful for need-blind colleges, since as noted above, need-aware means that the school will eventually have actual financial data to use for such decisions - and this kind of crude sorting by financial categories would very much cut against the public messaging of most schools in the need-blind cohort.
Agree, and some schools already push this anyway by using the other various indicators of relative wealth in applications.
I wonder if Slate started marketing this recently, because of the demise of Collegeboard’s landscape tool that all the colleges used. Landscape had a number of wealth measures for both the applicant, the community, and the high school.
“Integrating the NPC within your application comm flow, can add additional transparency for the student, additional data for your institution, and automatically connects submissions to records.”
But the allegation is that even with need-aware colleges, their conventional process was to do the first round of reading (of applications) as need-blind, AND THEN in the second round start to look at financial considerations; but w/ Slate now inserting NPC info into the applicant profile early, that info is visible in round one and could create a bias.
Although some colleges read this way, I would not say this is the norm among need aware colleges. Regardless, it’s their money, so they can identify which students they want to invest financial aid in however they want.
Again, Slate doesn’t insert anything into what admissions peeps see. Each school chooses what they want readers to see.
Incorporating student specific NPC info into Slate is not a new capability.
Students can avoid this situation by simply running NPCs anonymously or as guests.
It seems you have the perception that something nefarious is happening here, is that accurate?
Regardless where need-aware schools start looking at finances, applicants are aware that their pay status matters so I don’t see that as an issue here. And I’m sure that varies by school as some simply have more aid to give than others, and the aid is always going to be offered first to the kids they want the most.
I don’t want to hijack this conversation, but just want to thank you for posting this youtube link. I have never seen how an AO reviews an app and found it very interesting.
If we are talking about a need-aware institution, what difference does it make if their first round review itself was need-blind or not? If they will eliminate a needy applicant, they will - maybe in the first round or maybe at the very end.
I did see somewhere that Slate can also be set to provide info such as “likely full pay” based on the applicant’s zip code.
I got that from link from a post on here AGES ago (I wish I remember who posted it to give them credit) and bookmarked it:) I shared it with SO many friends IRL - it is amazing right?