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<p>I never bought into that!</p>
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<p>And this is why the number of Illinois students attending Iowa and Missouri is so high. At Mizzou Family Weekend last week, it seemed like one in every three cars in the parking lot had Illinois plates.</p>
<p>A thought experiment: Suppose your flagship state U (or UC Berkeley, or UMichigan, or UVA) had on their application check-boxes that said “Consider me for in-state tuition pool ONLY” or “Consider me for either in-state or OOS tuition pools” </p>
<p>Which box would you check? Would you check the second box – knowing that it might give you better odds, but that you’d likely end up paying more?</p>
<p>The UC Berkeley app already asks (optional) for your family’s income for the past two years.</p>
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<p>mini!=mantra!!!</p>
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<p>High income parents on average are more intelligent than low income parents, so it makes sense they have more intelligent kids, on average.</p>
<p>I am not sure how much I have EVER bought into the “need blind” claims by ANY university. Reminds me of the obscurity and inconsistency of food labeling practices.</p>
<p>Sorghum- do you think that the intelligence levels are genetic, or socioeconomic in nature though?</p>
<p>^ or based on early childhood environmental experiences, which would correlate with income level of the parent.</p>
<p>Right annasdad…which is why I used socioeconomic instead of income…</p>
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<p>Both, not ‘or’. Surely 1000 dentists, averaging $200K a year, are genetically brighter, on average, than 1000 security guards, averaging $25K a year. So their kids are genetically better, and get a better environment to learn too.</p>
<p>So then are you under the impression that children of low income parents are genetically incapable of matching the intelligence level of the children higher income parents?</p>
<p>There are some colleges that truly are need-blind in US admissions, and where the admissions staff has no access to financial aid or income information. </p>
<p>However, it is not hard for a college to spot the extremes - applicants who will potentially will need a full ride (after loans) vs. those who are most likely to be full pay. </p>
<p>It seems a common scenario is for colleges with good financial aid to mainly accept full pay students off the wait list. In other words, if you are good enough to get in through the regular admissions cycle, they meet 100% of need. However, if you are a marginal admittance, then they need you to subsidize the students who have already been admitted. At that point in the process, the financial aid budget has already been distributed. </p>
<p>Also, at the time of the wait list decisions, the college has all of the financial information from the student’s family, which they may not have had when the earlier admissions decisions were sent out.</p>
<p>In regards to a comment above, let’s try to avoid the words “genetic superiority.” Let’s all acknowledge that higher income families can provide many advantages to a student, such as:</p>
<p>1) the student having less need to work to support the family, and therefore having more time for studies and extra-curriculars,
2) the student having money for enrichment trips, classes and activities,
3) the student being more likely to be encouraged to emphasize AP and other advanced studies,
4) the student attending a better high school, surrounded by peers who are also pushed to attend a good college,
5) the parent providing more help to students in the college application process and in editing essays, and<br>
6) the student more likely to take test preparation classes, etc.</p>
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<p>Some schools are actually need-blind for admissions, such as moderately or less selective public schools that admit purely by the numbers. Or open admission community colleges.</p>
<p>Schools with more holistic admissions processes are more opaque, so there is more room to hide bending of the stated claims of being need-blind or whatever without anything provable existing. This does not mean that such bending of the stated claims exists, or is intentional if it exists, but only that if it does exist, it may not be provable (and the absence of such bending may not be provable either).</p>
<p>Of course, whether schools give sufficient financial aid to needy students is a completely different story. And if you consider the financial aid package as part of the admissions process (since admission with insufficient financial aid is effectively equivalent to rejection), then it is impossible to be need-blind.</p>
<p>^^^ Yes, I think that is a good way to explain my feeling about the need blind admissions claims, UCB</p>
<p>“The funds paid by wealthier students subsidize low-income students. The mantra here on CC has been that this is not true - that even full-pay students are being subsidized (mini) and that the money for low-income students comes from a different “bucket” of funds. If those theories were ever true, apparently they no longer are true.”</p>
<p>According to my son’s college:</p>
<p>"Bates College charges a single comprehensive fee, which includes tuition, room, board, and fees. Costs for books, personal expenses and transportation do not appear on the bill, but are factored into a student’s budget for the purpose of determining aid eligibility and awarding financial aid. For the 2011-2012 school year, the comprehensive fee is $55,300. A typical student budget (for a student from New England), including books, travel and personal expenses is $57,350.</p>
<p>The real annual cost to educate each student at Bates is much higher than the comprehensive fee. The costs not covered by fees are met by our endowment, annual giving by parents, alumni, and friends of the College and other sources." </p>
<p>The college says it costs $80K/yr to educate one student.</p>
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<p>Are you aware of any studies that correlate income level with genetics?</p>
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<p>I’m always a bit suspicious when colleges (or businesses, or nonprofits, or anything else) starts talking about “real costs.” Unless and until you dig into what they’re factoring into “real costs,” it’s really not possible to understand what that term means. For example: are they figuring depreciation on buildings? If so, they’re using an accounting fiction (most buildings have useful lives far beyond their depreciation periods.) Are there costs not directly involved with “educating a student” that get factored in, such as support of faculty research or benefits for retired employees? Etc.</p>
<p>Then there’s also the issue of marginal cost. Surely adding one more student to the Bates roster does not add $80,000 to the college’s cost of operation - it would be more like the cost of feeding one extra mouth through the mean plan. Any revenue the college gets over that is gravy (so to speak), at least until they reach the point at which they’ve filled up the dorms or perhaps had to hire an extra adjunct to cover extra freshman English sections.</p>
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<p>Where does that $80,000/year go?</p>
<p>If each faculty member costs $100,000 per year in pay and benefits, and teaches one 25 student class per term, and each student takes 4 such classes per term, then the cost of faculty to teach each student’s classes is $16,000 per year. Does the cost of building maintenance, libraries, administration, etc. really take up $64,000 per year per student?</p>
<p>And don’t forget that the students are on campus only 9 months out of that year.</p>