And other colleges that notify late March/Feb 1, like Stanford, Georgetown, etc. Why do they process your financial aid nearly two months before decisions are supposed to be made? Doesn’t this add additional administrative burden, especially since most students won’t even be admitted?
Possibly, do the colleges look at your FAFSA/CSS to determine covert factors of admission (e.g. the order of schools listed on FAFSA tells them how you rank your colleges by preference)? I am probably reading too much into this, but it doesn’t make sense to me.
The FA offers need to be ready when the admission decisions are released.
Also, it is likely that a first pass can be done with a computer program, which can take common simple situations (e.g. married parents or widowed single parent with mainly W-2 income and perhaps small amounts of interest and/or dividend income) and generate FA offers automatically, while flagging complex situations for human review.
In terms of covert factors of admission, a school does not have to be need-aware (i.e. admissions readers looking at the individual FA applications) in order to design an admissions process that gives the desired SES composition and FA profile, since weighting of different factors favors or disfavors applicants of some SES levels more than others. For example, Harvard’s decision to make SAT subject tests “recommended” instead of “required” a few years ago was probably to slightly increase the number of low SES first generation to college students, who may not have been aware of the need to take SAT subject tests due to lack of information from parents, counselors, and other students.
Many places separate admissions from financial aid. That way they can have the aid packages available and send them out along with (or immediately after) the admissions decisions. There is no way that the financial aid office could get through all of the accepted applicants in time for that if they didn’t start on them early! Of course some aid packages get designed for students who aren’t ultimately admitted, but you have to remember that these places work with their own formulae, and can sort the easy-to-calculate packages quickly.
There is no solid evidence about the order of schools on the FAFSA/Profile affecting aid or admission. However, knowing the applicants’ specific needs is indeed important for institutions that do not guarantee to meet full need (so that the best packages can be offered to applicants that the admissions office ultimately determines to be the most attractive), and for institutions that have need-aware admissions policies (so that the “cheapest” of a group of otherwise similarly attractive applicants can be admitted over more “expensive” candidates).
No longer an issue. The colleges do not any longer get a list of all of the schools to which you have submitted your FAFSA. They only get the FAFSA submitted to them.
In other words…the colleges don’t know any other schools to which you have submitted…or the order you placed them on your FAFSA application.
Thanks everyone!! Really appreciate the input.
The biggest part of producing a financial aid package is gathering all of the need documentation from families. The package can be generated in minutes once all of the information is in place. Just because a school is hounding you for your information doesn’t mean you have been accepted or that they are completing your offer at that point. They need to be prepared to send out thousands of packages in a very short time frame and they don’t want to be hunting down information at the last minute.
Top schools that have high yield rate, there is not much more effort to prepare FA package for all admitted students. Before admission is offered, I think they just enter the info but not really complete the process for FA.