elephant in the room ...

flashmountain
Sat, 12 Mar 2011 01:49:04 +0000

I don’t remember the exact stat about Wash U, but definitely over half of students here receive financial aid (I want to say at the chancellor’s convocation during orientation we were told 2/3, but don’t quote me on that).

Here’s my guess on what goes on with Wash U and the financial aid. Compared to the wealth distribution of the US population as a whole, there are proportionally more people applying out of the “wealthy” group than the “non-wealthy” group. Still, I think it’s more than fair to say that in pure absolute numerical terms most of the people applying do require financial aid, simply because there are far more non-wealthy people than wealthy people in this country by a long shot.

I don’t know how exactly Wash U takes into account financial need, but as with any larger represented group, you’re going to see proportionally more non-acceptances than acceptances than that same proportion of decisions from a smaller represented group. For example: if you only had 20 musicians applying, maybe 10 will be accepted because the school needs 10 musicians. But, when you have 5,000 musicians applying, the school still only needs 10 musicians. My assumption is that the financial aid process works the same… I doubt that your own individual income and financial aid requirements is considered, but instead they know that they can budget for a certain numerical amount of people that need money without busting the bank. finally, although Wash U has tons of people here from the east coast, we undoubtedly have more people applying from the midwest and south than do similar schools located on the east coast, and these regions have lower income levels and home prices for equity. Yet, our tuition is the same as private schools on the coasts. So, I think that Wash U’s applicant pool has even more people that need financial aid than other similar schools on the east coast, so it’s going to appear on the surface that it’s tougher to get accepted if you need money, because there are far more people from that pool to choose from.

And, at the end of the day, there are still more people coming here who need money than don’t need money. Not sure if this is the right answer or even if my line of thought is correct, but I think it’s a good way to think about what goes on based on the comments on this thread and the sample of data from decisions so far? If not, I might reconsider my Econ major :)