You make cogent points on the budgetary front, @Zoom10 , but I think you are making a category error in linking all this to needs-blind.
You speak of what you call the ”risk” of admitting 100 percent of a class needing financial assistance (which I take to mean more than nominal assistance). But that’s no more a risk than that all the atoms in a confined space will crowd into a corner of that space - something possible in theory only. For that risk to materialize one would have to assume that the children of parents capable of full or nearly full pay are proportionally less talented than the kids of the merely middle or lower middle class, not to mention the kids of first-gens, minorities, rural folk, truck drivers, waitresses and bankrupt entrepreneurs. Whereas all the evidence is precisely to the contrary. That’s a problem in our society and the true source of the inequality that exists at highly competitive schools like Chicago. In that competition between the more-privileged and the less- or un-privileged everything indicates that the former disproportionately win out on all objective measurements of academic excellence. Privilege has bought them that, together with the mating habits of their educated and successful parents. That’s a shame in my book, and those groups need help, but it is unrelated to needs-blind.
I would put money on the proposition that the Admissions people will always jump at the possibility of recruiting anyone from these less privileged groups who shows the same outstanding attributes as do the children of privilege. I would reconsider that bet only if I could be convinced that admitting all these equally attractive non-full-payers for admission would drive the University to insolvency. I don’t believe that. I do believe that the University has a pretty good handle on how far it can lower the bar to recruit poorly represented groups and stay solvent. The degree to which it can do that could undergo reconsideration in the present climate. That would be too bad. However, it has nothing to do with dismantling the needs-blind policy, rather the contrary.
None of this is to deny that ED has some undetermined but real effect of favoring the wealthy. Many have argued on this board that that is its sole rationale. I doubt that, given the other beneficial effects of the policy, but that’s a different discussion. To the extent it does have that effect it helps to fund what is in effect a redistribution to the talented but poor kids who are not full payers and thus helps to fund needs-blind.