<p>This is kind of a wild guess, but I am wondering whether colleges sometimes wait until relatively late in the game to make certain big need-related aid offers. </p>
<p>The reason I suspect this to be true is that there was a student who posted on the NYU/Tisch subforum - on the MT Forum - that he didn’t get his financial aid offer in his big purple acceptance packet from NYU. Then, a couple of weeks later, he posted that he had been offered a full ride to Tisch.</p>
<p>Another student said something similar about not getting her Tisch offer at the normal time. A couple of weeks later she was still on the fence. She had been offered a lot of money (but not quite a full ride) by BU and was waiting on NYU. (I don’t know what her ultimate outcome was.)</p>
<p>So maybe some of these schools wait until a number of their offers have been turned down, in order to be sure of having enough money in the pot to give really good awards to kids with high need??</p>