If a college is “need blind”, do they know if you have the FA box checked? A friend of mine told me that prep school kids might do better in the admissions process because going to a prep school is a rough proxy for the fact that you can pay full tuition. Many schools that are need blind still need a significant number of students who can pay full tuition.
The whole point of ‘need blind’ is that the AdComms don’t know if you have ticked that box.
As for prep school being a proxy for who can pay, the prep schools that I know best (which include some of the big names such as Andover and Exeter) are need-blind themselves, and have 40+% of students on some amount of financial aid, so it’s not a great proxy- and the AdComms know that.
…this is true BUT…between the prep school and the parents education, it’s not too difficult to guess who can pay, is it?
^^^ sorry–parents education and occupation, I should have written
^correct. That’s why there is no such thing as “need blind” (don’t forget also zip code of your address).
“Don’t consciously consider ability to pay when evaluating applicants” does happen at all the schools that say they are need blind. So while no one can say whether unconsciously they prefer richer applicants, they certainly are not actively considering the fact that someone is full pay vs. full need.
The college’s choice of what application requirements to have and what characteristics to emphasize can certainly have an effect on the SES mix of the admitted class (probably often intentionally), even if the admissions readers do not otherwise consciously favor high or low SES applicants.
An example is Harvard changing the SAT subject tests from required to recommended. This was likely intended to slightly increase the number of first generation low SES applicants from low SES high schools, who may not know in time (due to lack of information from counselors, parents, teachers, and peers) to take the SAT subject tests (while still expecting high SES applicants to submit them). On the other hand, many of other numerous application requirements still skew the applicant pool toward high SES.
I’m going to disagree with this statement. Any direct admit school with established criteria is, by definition, need blind. Make the numbers and you are in.
@“Erin’s Dad” you are correct, I didn’t think about the circumstance where the opinion of an admission officer is not a factor.
@ucbalumnus, while what you said is true, my point is that even though they make the decision to no longer require SAT 2 scores because they actively, consciously want to encourage low SES applicants, that doesn’t mean that when the adcom looks at the application they don’t unconsciously think the person without SAT 2 scores is automatically a worse candidate because there’s no SAT 2 scores. For example USNWR consciously and arbitrarily downgraded Sarah Lawrence’s ranking when they went SAT optional by giving them a place holder SAT average that was lower than their relatively steady average over the previous several years.
For example, there was a study where they found that partners at law firms were more likely to find errors and overall grade a piece of writing as weaker if they were told the author was a black associate vs. a white associate. They probably weren’t sitting there consciously trying to find more errors among the black associates or consciously forgiving errors among the white associates. The groups evaluated the pieces differently though despite reading the same exact piece of writing:
http://abovethelaw.com/2014/04/proof-that-typos-are-racist/
I believe a lot of the top schools try to train their people to minimize implicit biases, at least I know for certain that mine does for graduate school admissions. I don’t know to what extent they try to minimize implicit biases against poor people (if I recall, my school only emphasized race, gender, and sexual orientation) or to what extent these programs are successful in minimizing biases or making people more aware of them. If anyone wants to test how strong their implicit biases are, check out https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html
Implicit biases are very difficult to shake. I do believe that need blind schools do the best they can to remove the influence of need on their evaluation of an applicant.
Worth noting that a lot of prep school students get significant FA (I was one of them once).
@“Erin’s Dad” I completely agree. As for the Ivies, they go out of their way to recruit low income students. I also heard it said at one Ivy League college that coming from a professional family in Scarsdale or other upper income communities can be detrimental…that they look for excuses not to admit these students. That certainly was true at our school.
One further comment. If you look at PEA and PA, fewer than 25% of the graduating class go on to Ivies/Ivy-calibre universities. Of those who do, many/most are recruited athletes, legacies and special cases. The days when you could walk from Andover or Exeter into an Ivy are long gone.