Thank you! I wasn’t aware it worked that way. I just assumed they would go through them at a constant rate.
West Nottingham Academy
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14 days till D-Day :')
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Do the financial aid offices at these boarding schools process every application that the school receives (if they are requesting FA) and then discover who was actually accepted after?
2 weeks!
I would think they only go through accepted students after decisions are finalized. They decide how to distribute FA while considering the needs of the whole student body. It would be inaccurate to assign every single applicant an amount of FA, since 85% of them are to be rejected.
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Generally, yes. They may check and fine-tune with admission offers, but the admissions committees need to understand the FA cost associated with all the students they would like to admit. If they don’t have the FA budget for that class, they will make adjustments based on the $ available to them.
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Well, here is to hoping at least one school doesn’t think the cheerio (I finally landed on my CC offspring/jr nickname!) is too expensive. It makes sense that the kids get “priced”. But… ouch.
I had thought they ran the numbers after they accepted students. But your description makes much more sense.
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Schools that call themselves ‘need blind’ are the ones that run the numbers separately - admissions offices choose the students that they’d like and then the finance office works out how much it’s going to cost. This is far more common at the college level than at the high school level.
Andover used to be need-blind, I haven’t researched recently but I’d hazard a guess that they probably still are. Not sure about any other boarding schools, maybe St Andrews. Many boarding schools are ‘needs aware’ which means there’s communication between finance and admission. The school needs to balance the number of full-pay students and the number of high-need students.
At the college level, many ivies are need-blind, also MIT and some NESCAC schools.
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In a perfect world, admissions makes all it decisions, gets the price tag, and says “we can afford it!”
Remember that most schools, in an effort to have a more diverse student body, will want kids from across the socio-economic spectrum, so in and of itself, needing FA isn’t a negative. But at the same time, if the committee has put together its ideal class and then finds that class costs too much, they need to address that. That could mean swapping out some full need kids for some whose needs are more modest. It could mean dropping a fee FA kids for FP ones. And of course, while they are doing that, they are trying to maintain gender balance, fill athletic rosters, keep day/boarding ratios, and meet all the other requirements that have been given to them. It’s a big, difficult puzzle!
This is also why it’s so hard to chance applicants. If you and your doppelganger differ only in FA needed, it’s clearly better to be FP. But few students have true doppelgangers, so what you bring will be valued in the context of what else is in the pool, particularly after affordability has been factored in.
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Exeter is “need blind” as well
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When calculating FA is income the only consideration? Do schools also consider savings/assets? Exeter is need blind and it says “all families making under 125k a year have full tuition waived.” Is this really true in every single case? What if a family were to make 120k a year and have 10 million in savings? Any input is appreciated.
I believe that each school has its own way of doing this. But most also assume that there is a typical level of assets for certain income levels (and often make some vague statement to this effect), so if you make $80,000 but are sitting on millions of assets, it’s unlikely that you’ll be seen as eligible for FA. Likewise, some schools make an adjustment for a parent who doesn’t work, assuming that they could to contribute to school costs. In brief, schools don’t want you gaming the system.
Remember that most FA comes from donors, and they have given money on the assumption that they’ll be making an experience at their alma mater available to someone who otherwise couldn’t afford it - not to someone who can but doesn’t want to pay.
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yea and the calculator for fa on their website is unreliable for that reason imo. if it was income only a lot more people wouldve gotten a lot more fa but they calculate all your financial assets when deciding fa. and the calculator is just based on income so it gives a false pretense to a ton of people that theyll recieve more fa than they think.
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13 days left!
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Andover and exeter!!
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I agree - I ended up not applying to Hotchkiss but I’ve played around with their FA Estimator and I found it odd how assets/equity seemed to play very little role.
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Thank you for clarifying. It was too good to be true- I just wish they specified on their websites.
aaaaah I’m not ready 