@CallieMom Wait a year. What little you’ve got for the first year might well be gone in the following years. Colleges ARE stingy! 
@panpacific, do you have any suggestions for overcoming the shock your post just had on my nervous system? Prayer, lottery tickets, wall punching, for instance? [-O< %-(
@CallieMom Don’t know about you, but what we did manage to negotiat out from the college was really “nominal” in the first place. Losing even that the next year wasn’t pleasant but the fact that it wasn’t a huge loss anyway helped us move on. 
@RedSoxFan18 @CallieMom thanks for the info. hope to contribute to this conversation after m10.
Returning to an issue discussed on the first page of this thread: I have no knowledge of whether admissions people share information with each other about financial aid offers. But I don’t think it would be too hard. In fact, I can imagine a website where schools could designate other schools with whom they’d like to share information–just as parents are able on SSS to designate schools with whom they’d like to share their financial information. If the two (or however many) schools agree to share, the names of all of their common applicants appear on a page, with a space for each school to insert a figure. It would be a starting point, and conversations between schools could follow.
Of course, a school that doesn’t share could also make an offer to a family. The sharing schools wouldn’t know about it, and so could potentially be navigating in partial darkness.
Once again, I’m just letting my imagination roam. I know nothing. And if such a website existed, you’d think someone would be talking about it. Or is it that schools honor omerta, a “code of silence”? [Insert sinister-sounding music here.]
I think your imagination is running away from you. Snowbound?
@DonFefe That’s pretty wild imagination you have there. It’s as likely as companies voluntarily starting a bidding war by putting their potential hires up on a website for their competitors to see
Off the topic a little bit - how are you suppose to know if the school offer FA for international student or not? Some school does put it on their website some school doesn’t. anybody know the list of schools that do not offer FA to international student?
As I suggested, my scheme has no basis in reality. I’m just saying that if schools wanted to share information, they could. But I would like to hear more about what was said on the first page about schools sharing information. That wasn’t based on speculation, from what I understand.
@DonFefe-- Your concept, while imaginative, is not too far off base. In addition to six BS, my daughter has also applied to a local day school. We do not think that they will give her much, if any aid, but went ahead and added them to the PFS school list and recently emailed all schools some supplementary information. We received a (rather cryptic) response back from their Director of FA/Admissions telling us that they would need to speak with our son’s school in March regarding aid amount offered for next year. Translation: we have an eight million dollar endowment, they have a 1/2 a billion+ dollar endowment, let the “Big Guys” pay.
I do wonder if the TSAO schools have some type of system set up to “manage” applicants??
It’s an invasion of privacy and therefore unethical to share applicants info without their consent. I don’t believe they are doing that. For high yield ( which in itself is typical peer competition), they will rely on their experience and communications with applicants and families throughout the process. Coming M10, they will woo the admitted ESP those with options.
Sure, it would be an invasion of privacy to share applicants’ information–except that here the applicants have already shared this information with each of the competing schools. Besides, the schools would be sharing their own information (their proposed offer) with other schools–not the applicants’ information. I don’t imagine that we, as financial aid applicants, would have any say in what schools choose to do with their own information.
(I’m not conversant enough on privacy issues to take my analysis any further than that. Perhaps others can weigh in.)
But, again, I’m not saying that the schools are doing this. I’m just saying that it would not be at all difficult, from a logistics standpoint, to do it.
I will add, however, that if schools are, in fact, as zealously protective of their yield figures (and as hungry for applicants–even non-competitive applicants) as some on this forum have suggested, then I would imagine that these schools, at the very least, WISH they could share proposed offers with each other.
And the end result of such sharing, if it took place, would not necessarily be detrimental to applicants. When we approach schools and say “educate my child for free–or for a greatly reduced fee” we are asking for a big favor. If schools want to share their offers (or non-offers) and the result is that a family gets only one offer, that’s still better than no offers. A family is still free to negotiate a better offer or walk away.
I, for one, would gladly take an acceptance and an offer from one school (and waitlisting from the others who want to protect their yield figures)–if the alternative is that we walk away empty-handed. For financial aid families, it just goes with the territory. Anyone who has taken financial aid from a school already senses, at least, that there is a price to be paid for this aid. There is no free lunch. They’ve got us.
@DonFefe cool idea. conspiracy theories abound. they become more believable as one ages;-)
@DonFefe If it’s a legitimate approach, then I guess it’s just not the “business model” currently adopted by BS. The reality is that it happens more often than not that applicants applying/qualified for FA receive multiple offers - sometimes very different offers. It doesn’t at all appear that schools are coordinating with each other. Are you suggesting that they should be doing that? Because I don’t think that approach would be to the best interest of the schools. They all want to make their money worth it, which is recruiting the students they want most who wouldn’t be able to attend without FA. The purpose of the process is not to distribute FA so the most individuals can benefit.
Yeap, applications are all in and received verification from schools. Obviously, admission decisions come out M10. At what point or date do the financial aid decisions arrive? Thanks for any information you can pass along, best of luck to everyone who took the effort to go through the application and interview process!!!
@blue77skidoo Admission decisions are announced on-line by email, website portal, etc, but FA decisions usually are sent by postal mail so some FA may arrive by fedex on M10 or in a few days after M10.
Thanks for prompt reply!!!
I repeat: I have no knowledge of how schools make their financial aid decisions. A couple of earlier posters stated that they had reason to believe that schools confer on these matters. I have no idea if that’s true. My initial posting in this thread was a response only to the suggestion made on page one that such sharing of information among schools would be difficult and time consuming. I don’t think it necessarily would be. My further musings are merely replies to the responses of others. And the beat goes on…
panpacific, I am not suggesting that schools try “to distribute FA so the most individuals can benefit,” as you put it (though that wouldn’t be a bad idea). Moreover, what you suggest about multiple and differing offers may be true–my only question is how you know this. Do you have knowledge of a sufficient number of financial aid situations that you are able to generalize? I, for one, certainly don’t have such knowledge.
Consider this possible scenario–and once again, here, in the icy dead of winter, I’M SIMPLY AMUSING MYSELF WITH FANCIFUL SPECULATIONS. Say School X and Y like a candidate and are each willing to offer $20k. Then along comes school Z, which really likes that candidate and decides to offer $35k. Schools X and Y conclude that they now have a significantly lesser chance of landing this candidate, and decide not to offer admission but to waitlist–thereby saving their yield percentages a little. The candidate gets the $35k offer from school Z and happily accepts. Schools X and Y then proceed to offer their money to two other candidates who are virtually indistinguishable from the one admitted by school Z, and who are themselves thrilled to receive the $20k package.
That’s one scenario–I’m sure there are others that are possible. I would add that such hypothetical instances of cooperation need not follow from explicit rules, but rather may arise informally as opportunities present themselves. That is, no one is suggesting that there is an admissions protocol that requires all schools to confer on every offer of financial aid–that would be ludicrous. (And the fact that no school has a 100% yield rate would confirm that schools are competing with each other.) But can we cavalierly dismiss all such informal acts of cooperation out of hand?
Again, I’m not suggesting that this is standard practice among schools–heck, I’m not even suggesting that this is how they operate EVER. But just as it is easy to dismiss such scenarios as wild and baseless conspiracy theories, it is naive to presume in every case that organizations and individuals do not cooperate in the advancement of their common interests. We see evidence of this ALL THE TIME with organizations such as OPEC–and while the level of cooperation among members can vary over time, these organizations live on, as they apparently continue to serve some valuable purpose.
Someone mentioned in this regard the Ten Schools Admission Organization. Is it really a stretch to imagine that this chummy group of admissions colleagues might be informally discussing issues beyond those that are listed on the TSAO website?
Once again, I wish that someone who knows how this process works from the INSIDE would shed some light–though I don’t believe there is much possibility of that. And for now, I’ll happily redirect my speculations to more momentous matters–such as who will win the Superbowl.
Well put, @donfefe. We like your cold-weather musings.
I would like to mix the pot a bit further with the conversation of a sibling applying, both to the school their sibling is at,as well as other schools of their choice. In that case, I think the schools (especially TSAO schools) ABSOLUTELY confer (and defer?) with said sibling school. Can anyone shed light on how sibling admissions/FA packages may unfold? I would find it hard to believe that they do not “ask” the sibling school where it stands with admission/aid for a candidate that they regard highly and would like to admit.