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<p>The official definition of “need-blind” is this:
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<p>Of course, you can make an educated guess but that doesn’t mean you should. I am pretty sure the adcom were told to adhere and stay true to the need-blind policy. Otherwise, there would be a lot of confusion in the decision making. The kind of practice you talked about is questionable and disturbing in the sense that the adcom know Chicago well but probably not other places; wealthy kids from other places would be spared of such reverse-discrimination. Note to memtion the fact that adcom could make wrong assumptions and estiamtes. Furthermore, would NU administration really want to entertain the idea of running into a huge budget problem simply because one day, the few adcom members get together and decide that “poorer” kids deserve much better and then think to themselves, “let’s screw the wealthy ones!”.</p>
<p>On the other hand, the “first generation” would likely take care of many candidates that may come from low-income families. That is the best way to capture without all those second-guessing and flaws I just mentioned.</p>