Merit vs. Need-blind marketing

taxguy
Sun, 17 Apr 2005 07:10:50 +0000

Interesteddad notes,"
I don’t know how much longer the few remaining need-based aid schools can hold on to their principle. They lose a LOT of students who would be perfect for them."

Actually you make a good point. If a school offers a lot of merit based aid, which CMU and Wash U did in the past, they raise the average SAT scores of the entering class and beef up the competition for good grades in the school. Merit based aid really does help a lot of schools play the SAT score game. Need based aid may or may not help depending on the scores of the needy applicant. It may help, however, in achieving diversity goals.

If some schools were really smart, they would certainly want to boost up their merit aid and thus boost up their reputation among applicants. This is one marketing play that has been shown to work historically.