Need-blind admissions

[Anonymous]

We've got an older kid attending private school and a younger kid who's currently attending public school but applying to private for middle school, and we're on the fence about whether to apply for financial aid. We're kind of on the high end of the scale - $350k or so - and are not from an underrepresented group, but we also understand that with multiple kids in private school you can sometimes get a bit of a price break at least. (we did not apply for aid with the first kid)

My question is this: would it hurt our chances to apply for financial aid? I know some schools - e.g. Horace Mann - specifically state on their admissions websites that admissions are need-blind; should we assume that absent such a statement, applying for aid might be a negative factor? Could this be countered with a first-choice letter or some such (reassuring them that we would still accept an offer even if they're not able to offer us aid) or does that kind of undermine the whole thing?

[Anonymous]

why are you on a DMV website?

[Anonymous]

This is the NYC forum

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:why are you on a DMV website?

Why are you in the Metropolitan New York City folder if it bothers you so much?

[Anonymous]

What would the total cost of tuition a year be if you had to pay in full for both kids? What’s the percentage of your take home income? Are you able to live without feeling a significant burden? Are you wondering about aid just because you may qualify or because you actually need it?

350k for 2 kids at a 65k/yr tuition would absolutely warrant financial aid. If it’s like $30k or less then of course I’d just minimize risk of being turned down and just budget wisely.

Depending on the school’s FA fund and tuition you may or may not qualify for aid. Will this be in the same school the older kid goes to?

Schools say they admit regardless of need but the reality is they have a budget. They can’t admit an excess of applicants that need aid. Horace does say they admit regardless of aid status, I call BS!

A couple of things to consider though. If you don’t apply for aid. Get in and later decide it might be a stretch to have both in private, you will likely not be granted one unless you can prove extenuating circumstances.

[Anonymous]

The anecdotal evidence on public tidbits is the privates give a smaller number of FA recipients a lot of money, rather than many getting $5-10k.

Given also that there are more applicants of FA than budget for it, you’re likely hurting your odds of admission quite a bit applying in the FA pool.

[Anonymous]

And their FA stats are inflated by children of faculty who get discounts then the school claims it is giving aid when they brag about how much aid they give.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for all of this.

Anonymous wrote:What would the total cost of tuition a year be if you had to pay in full for both kids? What’s the percentage of your take home income? Are you able to live without feeling a significant burden? Are you wondering about aid just because you may qualify or because you actually need it?

350k for 2 kids at a 65k/yr tuition would absolutely warrant financial aid. If it’s like $30k or less then of course I’d just minimize risk of being turned down and just budget wisely.

Payment in full for both kids would be like $130k. So a big chunk of our income. We live pretty modestly otherwise and we feel good about our savings situation, and we would not necessarily be doing this for very long - both kids are probably going to have good enough SHSAT scores to have their pick of public high schools - but financial aid would make it financially viable for keep them in private for longer if they want to be.

Anonymous wrote:Depending on the school’s FA fund and tuition you may or may not qualify for aid. Will this be in the same school the older kid goes to?

We're applying at the older kid's school too, yes, but not only applying there. I'm not sure whether applying for FA would be more or less risky there than other places - I assume the forms are going to have us list what we're paying at the older kid's school so everybody is going to have the same amount of information about what we can afford with one kid.

Anonymous wrote:Schools say they admit regardless of need but the reality is they have a budget. They can’t admit an excess of applicants that need aid. Horace does say they admit regardless of aid status, I call BS!

Thus far, HM is the only TT school I've found that even claims to offer need-blind admissions. (I'd note here that we're only looking at coed schools) Is it possible that maybe they're able to pull that off because with such a massive intake (like 50 kids in 6th grade), going a few spaces deeper on their waitlist after a couple of families reject them over insufficient FA offers is no big deal?

Anonymous wrote:A couple of things to consider though. If you don’t apply for aid. Get in and later decide it might be a stretch to have both in private, you will likely not be granted one unless you can prove extenuating circumstances.

Yeah, this is why I'm kind of focused on the long-term SHSAT plan, but obviously I'd just as soon have enough aid to be able to give them choices.

Anonymous wrote:
The anecdotal evidence on public tidbits is the privates give a smaller number of FA recipients a lot of money, rather than many getting $5-10k.

Given also that there are more applicants of FA than budget for it, you’re likely hurting your odds of admission quite a bit applying in the FA pool.

Thanks - this unfortunately does kind of make sense, the FA budget is largely going to ensuring they have a diverse pool of students and it's unlikely that an extra $10k/year would produce dramatically different kids than they'd get at full price.

[Anonymous]

Tuition alone will be more than 1/3 of your PRE-tax income. You 100% should apply for financial aid.

The math doesn’t even math, or did I miss something? You’ll be paying about 13k/month when you’re take home pay is under 20k and this is not accounting for retirement, housing, food etc… whether your kids are able to test into a good public is not a given.

A couple of resources that have helped me try to understand the system
- Leman Manhattan prep has a chart on their website https://www.lemanmanhattan.org/tuition
with the financial aid probability

-Horace Mann publishes statistics on their financial aid package. How much and how many people and at what grade level. I think the most recent is from 2022. As someone else noted, I’m starting to believe most of the recipients are staff and faculty, but it’s good info.

I think it’s great you’re wanting to maximize your chances and to provide the type of education you feel they deserve but I’d also encourage you not to neglect your other long term financial commitments. The reality is that a HHI of 350k is simply not enough for 2 private school tuitions and trying to frugal your way through it will lead to a lot of stress down the line.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think it’s great you’re wanting to maximize your chances and to provide the type of education you feel they deserve but I’d also encourage you not to neglect your other long term financial commitments. The reality is that a HHI of 350k is simply not enough for 2 private school tuitions and trying to frugal your way through it will lead to a lot of stress down the line.

Sorry, I started this thread more to ask about the 'need-blind' question rather than whether specifically our income would qualify, but I should clarify that the "$350k or so" is just salary; we have substantial assets and a substantial amount of passive income, not to mention some family help. I should have left that number out of my first question to avoid confusing people. So I really appreciate the honest talk - if $350k were in fact our only income it would have been an incredibly valuable wakeup call - but our taxable income is a good deal more than that, more in the neighborhood of the possible/unlikely threshold on that Leman chart.

But the thrust of my question was more "is it worth the admissions downside of applying for financial aid when we're making enough that if we tighten our belts a bit we could afford tuition without it" rather than "would this particular number qualify for aid." And it sounds like the consensus answer to that is mostly "no." The belt-tightening aspect also means that without aid we'll be much more motivated to send our kids to specialized high schools if they get in, but we're not assuming that will happen, we just think it's likely based on how they've done on other tests.

[Anonymous]

Ok. Figured I was missing some information! I would agree it is not worth the gamble.