I think most of the “unfairness of ED” arguments go away if (possibly a big if) the NPCs are accurate and universities stand by them. Then families are going into the process with their eyes open.
Merit awards get subtracted from need awards at most of the ED schools I’m familiar with.
ED agreements are NOT “binding unless I get a better offer.” You promise to attend except in the case that the college is truly not affordable.
It really angers me when posters here say it is fine to break Early rules. No. It is unethical to apply to two schools SCEA or to turn down an ED acceptance because you ‘got a better offer.’
@pickpocket that usually doesn’t happen with ED since you have to accept/reject before any RD acceptances are sent out. So you need to have been accepted EA or rolling somewhere else, and I have no problem with someone turning down an ED offer for any other university that is indeed lower cost for them to attend. As mentioned before many times the NPC isn’t accurate and why should an applicant who is expecting something close to the NPC and then doesn’t get it be forced to attend? If the university won’t stand by the NPC then nor should the applicant.
“I have no problem with someone turning down an ED offer for any other university that is indeed lower cost for them to attend.”
That completely breaks the terms of ED. No one is forced to apply ED. Breaking ED can harm later students at that student’s HS, as it makes the counseling staff look incompetent or duplicitous.
And I don’t believe NPCs are off by thousands and thousands of dollars. I am skeptical that a parent would run the NPC and expect to pay 10K, and then the cost is 50K per year. The actual cost for D17 was within a thousand dollars (less) than the EFC we had calculated.
The ED agreement says that you do not have to attend if it’s unaffordable, this word “unaffordable” is very subjective. So what makes something unaffordable to you will be quite different than what makes something unaffordable to someone else.
Depends on the school. Some of the NPC’s we ran for D17 were off by several thousands of dollars, some were spot on. (And Colgate, for whatever reason, was more than ten thousand off, but the difference in the actual offer was in our favor.) There’s wide variation in reliability.
And we’re never-divorced parents with no weird business ownership or investment real estate situations. Once you get any degree of complexity, NPCs can go very badly.
Applicants should do their homework ahead of time, and not be dependent on merit. I believe the compliance rate for ED is in the high 90s at most schools. I don’t deny that ED benefits schools greatly. But if it didn’t help a bunch of students as well, no one would use it.
Oh—and one other thing: Why the focus on this thread on the very, very tippy-top of the USN&WR list? More important to the discussion, I think, are the not-tippy-top-but-competitive schools that use ED.
I have a question. I am applying ED to a top LAC who is “need blind”. On the common app it asks if I am applying for financial aid Yes or No. So doesn’t it give the full payers an advantage? While the school doesn’t know how much I may need - a little or a lot - isn’t the assumption that a “no” to that question means that student will be full pay? I guess I just don’t see that question as “need blind”. They must want at least some full pay to offset the others, as they offer “100% of demonstrated need”. Thoughts?
^^ That answer will be omitted for the admissions counselors… on their end… and only seen by the FA office… or at least that’s what we were told by a school that is need blind and also meets full need.
This school actually showed us what the common app looks like when viewed by admissions… and that answer was not able to be viewed.
@ilmqnwft I was told by a former adcom rep at a selective LAC that applying for Fin Aid in the ED round does not matter. With ED, schools will choose the students they want: academics, athletics, geographical coverage, etc.
Now, for the RD round at need aware schools, not needing fin aid could boost admission chances.
“Can y’all stop debating which schools belong in the HYP&c… acronym soup? Or at least take it to its own thread?”
Agree, especially since the acronym is only used on CC, I mean if you said HYP to someone affiliated with colleges or high schools, they would get it, but no one outside of that, you’d have to explain it.
“This school actually showed us what the common app looks like when viewed by admissions… and that answer was not able to be viewed.”
That may be true but there’s other information on the app that will tell an adcom about the financial need of an applicant. If an applicant is from a private high school that costs 25K a year (regional counselors know this) and comes from a wealthy suburb of New York or San Francisco, they have a pretty good idea on the family income.
I would take need blind and holistic with a grain of salt, they’re words used to make the admission and FA process more opaque than it needs to be.
Problem is that a if there from a private high school and on scholarship the AO has made the wrong assumption, and I’m pretty sure they are told not to assume things…
If the their home address is in a place in the bay area where the average house price is $5 million dollars, I think the colleges will know whether the applicant is on a scholarship at the private high school, without any assumptions.
Hmmmm giving those AOs a lot if credit or discredit with the level of sleuthing that they have to do in order to find out who’s got the money, even though they are told, and tell us they don’t do exactly that.
“I get that but these are very high performing low income students. Its a disservice to say that they lack awareness in this day of information technology.”
Maybe somebody brought this up and I’ll say it again, you cannot assume that everybody, especially lower income families have a computer and internet connection at home or access to it at school.