“During the meeting, Sears announced the end of need-blind admissions at the Atlanta campus. The University’s need-blind admission policy meant that the admission committee would not consider an applicant’s financial status when making admission decisions. The Atlanta campus will now switch to a need-aware policy, which means they will consider an applicant’s financial status during admission. Already, Oxford College uses a need-aware policy during its admissions process.”
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I doubt that the timing of Emory University Now Tuition Free For Family Income of $200,000 or Less is a coincidence.
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Not to mention Emory already has a very wealthy student body. Per CDS, only 575 of 1437 got any sort of need aid (first years). They’ll become even more exclusive. Yes, they have merit and 81 received. So under half getting anything.
I wonder if this is related to government funding.
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Sometimes if the school is very generous with aid they revert to being need-aware for admissions so that they can actually afford what they’ve promised.
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Being explicitly need aware for individual applicants suggests that use of proxy measures of financial need to get an expected level of financial need for the class may not be accurate enough for their budgeting purposes.
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Or they could reduce frosh admissions, which is what NYU did when it changed its policy to meet need. I assume every college will do the calculations to optimize the cost aspect in terms of its own priorities. I think, though, that if Emory had announced it was moving to need aware at the same time as the $200k announcement, it would not have got quite the good press it did.
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Maybe I just need coffee, but are you saying that their estimates were out so they want to see actual financials (fafsa/css) before deciding?
In which case, “need-blind” would be very narrowly defined as not looking at financial aid forms, but still considering need via proxies, as long suspected occurs at virtually all schools, either individually, or in the aggregate via algorithm?
Haven’t finished coffee yet either…
Colleges whose admissions are need-blind for individual applicants can adjust the priority of things like legacy (correlates to less financial need) and first generation (correlates to more financial need) to try to target an overall level of financial need for the entire class. Even things like the relative weighting of HS GPA versus SAT/ACT scores can have an effect. This does not mean directly or indirectly considering whether an individual applicant will individually have high financial need.
But some colleges may not have found their predictions of overall level of financial need to be accurate enough, so they have to be explicitly need-aware to make budget.
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You appear to have expressed an inverted cynicism that favors colleges with explicit need-aware policies over those with stated need-blind policies.
I would not be surprised if there was more of this. Big picture, cost competition for middle or even upper-middle class families has really seemed to ramp up over the last 8 or so years. But budgets have to be balanced.
If there is anything “bad” about this, it could be seen as hurting lower income kids who may lose a few spots to full pay kids as part of that balancing act. But there is also pressure on these colleges to improve those numbers (lower income enrollments) as well. So I am not so sure that will happen much.
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Any college needs to be somewhat need aware over the entire student cohort for both budgeting and mission purposes (the latter may cause a college to try to tilt toward more financial aid need if it can afford it, if the mission is to serve the underserved). After all, isn’t that what enrollment management is (partially) about? This does not necessarily mean basing an individual applicant’s decision on assumptions of the individual’s financial aid need.
Even pure stats based admission can have different weightings of GPA, rank, and SAT/ACT scores that affect the overall level of financial aid need.
Of course, open admission or minimally selective colleges may not be able to do much here through admission, though they may choose their marketing targets with that in mind.