Wash U Is Distasteful!

melanieeek
Fri, 09 Mar 2007 12:17:13 +0000

I think you should call the WashU admissions or financial aid department, because they have very good reasons for being need-aware.

At a need-blind school, students are accepted regardless of their financial situation. While it may seem like need-aware schools would exclude (or at least limit) the amount of poor students accepted, the opposite is actually true. At need-blind schools, your acceptance is based on your merit as a student. I took a full-IB load my senior year, which was only possible because the school I went to, though public, is in an especially high-income area and thus received and especially high kickback from income taxes. At lower-income schools, where classes like this aren’t always offered, and where students don’t have the same availability of extra-curricular programs, students are at an obvious disadvantage when being compared to their peers based on academic merit alone. Need-aware schools, unlike their need-blind peers, have a policy that takes into account financial need NOT so that they can exclude lower-income students that they would be responsible for financing, but instead so that they can admit these students by looking at the whole picture: academics and extra-curriculars, as well as financial stability and family situation. WashU doesn’t exclude students who can’t pay to go here; it admits them and then promises to cover 100% of their need.