Better odds for full pay applicants
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Anonymous
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i think they will look at need only on waitlist.
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Anonymous
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One way to look at it is, look at the early and RD admits to T25 so far for your high schools. Including the newest round.
Are those all full pay? They are all mostly at our school. |
Anonymous
+1 |
Anonymous
Forbes hasn't done such an article in a while, but the last time it had, it included Hamilton among "10 Expensive Colleges Worth Every Penny": https://www.forbes.com/sites/nataliesportelli/2017/04/26/10-expensive-colleges-worth-every-penny-2017/ However, as in the above scenario, any unaffordable college may not be feasible. |
Anonymous
| My theory is that need blind schools are need blind in that they don’t look at the applicant’s financial situation individually but they have software that uses statistical analysis to make sure there will be a sufficient percentage of full pay students. The software sets the parameters- pct from private school, pct from this county or that county, etc |
Anonymous
| A lot of decisions have already been made for the '25 kids. I think you may see it more for '26 kids if the ship doesn't right. |
Anonymous
Or can run the net price calculator and you see the need based aid you get makes the school affordable. |
Anonymous
What is your evidence for this theory? AFAIK, not one of the many tell-all books written by adcoms has stated this is true. |
Anonymous
Np. I’ve read on Reddit about the fact that the higher ups do this with software - not the regional AO. They have the software showing full pay % or not and class shaping touches on this. There are two competing schools of thought in private college counseling these days. The old school of thought was don’t show your privilege at all. The young regional admissions officers are biased against wealth. A newer, emerging school of thought is your privilege is part of who you are - show what you’ve done with it and honestly reflect it. If you engage in activities that show immense wealth, they will know. It’s the values you display alongside those activities that matter, and in some ways and for some schools - that wealth could be an advantage. |
Anonymous
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Some interesting discussions on this elsewhere:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ApplyingToCollege/comments/1iswbsz/are_top_schools_actually_needblind/ This one talks about Landscape (software): https://www.reddit.com/r/ApplyingToCollege/comments/1jdhm6y/how_do_colleges_know_youre_full_pay_during_rd/ "I can’t imagine a college going into the admission cycle without having a predetermined budget for the need based awards. From what I gathered from Google search- a typical year - incoming tuition revenue at Harvard is $1.2B and outgoing financial aid is $700M - when combined all four years classes. Now if they made need blind offers to 2000 kids - I can certainly see them having to adjust once they realize that financial aid budget is overshot" |
Anonymous
NP. I agree with the PP entirely, that algorithms drive decisions but adcoms don't have a role in the algorithms and may not know much about them at all. This is the multi-billion-dollar enrollment management industry. What is unclear is at what point in the process the algorithms are involved, front, back, all of it, etc., and what of this adcoms can see in Slate, for example. I do believe adcoms at need-blind schools read the apps need-blind. We know for a fact that schools use algorithms to calculate likelihood of yield and we know that most colleges use the Landscape tool from College Board, which includes a lot of data at the level of the applicant's census tract. Top colleges arrive at roughly the same % of the class getting grants year after year. They must do this by algorithm in the aggregate, like PP was suggesting. Here is one random articles on the enrollment management industry, though plenty more can be googled: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/revenue-and-rankings-inside-the-multibillion-dollar-industry-shaping-college-admissions-e9faaabf Just google something like "higher ed yield algorithm enrollment management" and you'll start to get a sense of the industry. Why this matters is that, ultimately, yield algorithms do play a role in admission decisions, possibly in ways that adcoms are not paying attention to or aren't even aware of. It might boil down to some sort of yield score in Slate. This goes way back, e.g. from 2015, Student Yield Maximization Using Genetic Algorithm on a Predictive Enrollment Neural Network Model, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283186686_Student_Yield_Maximization_Using_Genetic_Algorithm_on_a_Predictive_Enrollment_Neural_Network_Model. "The primary objective of this research is to develop a scholarship distribution model that enables academic enrollment offices to maximize student yield through efficient scholarship distribution. This paper presents the design of and tests a multi-layer feed-forward neural network (NN) in modeling the student yield factor. For this model inputs are assumed to be ACT score, GPA/class-rank, EFC, FAFSA, zip code and scholarship award amount and the single output is the student yield, where a one/zero system for accepting/declining the offer in attending the university is considered. The network is trained by applying the back error propagation algorithm, and is tested on holdout samples." The available data here in 2025 are more detailed. It's all about the data. |
Anonymous
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Lots of information out there about Landscape, and its role in AO review:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ApplyingToCollege/comments/18l9emm/is_there_really_a_list_of_the_high_schools_of/ "But US colleges can, and some do, use data about high school locations as part of their contextual evaluation. There is actually a College Board product called Landscape which, among other things, is offered for this purpose. You can read a bit about it here: https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/landscape/comprehensive-data-methodology-overview.pdf There are two relevant parts of Landscape with respect to your question. As part of the general high school information section, Landscape will categorize high school locations geographically: Locale: This measure is based on the high school’s location, and relies on the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) system of classifying geographic areas into 4 categories: City, Suburban, Town, and Rural (NCES locale framework). – City and Suburban types are further divided into Large, Midsize, and Small, based on the population of the city or suburb (e.g., City: Midsize). – Town and Rural types are further divided into Fringe, Distant, and Remote, based on the proximity of the town or rural area to an urban area (e.g., Rural: Remote). Landscape also provides various "indicators" for an applicant's residential neighborhood and high school, which are census-tract based: Neighborhood and high school indicators are provided: (i) at the neighborhood level, which is defined by a student’s census tract, and (ii) at the high school level, which is defined by the census tracts of college-bound seniors at a high school. Applicants from the same census tract share the same neighborhood data and indicators; applicants from the same high school share the same high school data and indicators. The indicators are: College attendance: A measure based on the predicted probability that a student from the neighborhood/high school enrolls in a 4-year college (aggregate College Board and National Student Clearinghouse data) Household structure: A measure based on neighborhood/high school information about the number of married or coupled families, single-parent families, and children living under the poverty line (American Community Survey) Median family income: Median family income among those in the neighborhood/high school (American Community Survey) Housing stability: A measure based on neighborhood/high school information about vacancy rates, rental vs. home ownership, and mobility/housing turnover (American Community Survey) Education level: A measure based on typical educational attainment of adults in the neighborhood/high school (American Community Survey) Crime: The predicted probability of being a victim of a crime in the neighborhood or neighborhoods represented by the students attending the high school. Data provided by Location, Inc. For more information, please visit http://www.locationinc.com/data. These 6 indicators are averaged and presented on a 1-100 percentile scale to provide a Neighborhood Average and a High School Average. A higher value on the 1-100 scale indicates a higher level of challenge related to educational opportunities and outcomes. One of the interesting aspects of this is that high school indicators are (reasonably) determined by the census tracts of the college bound students. As they explain in a footnote: 4. A high school’s college-bound seniors include those who participate in a College Board assessment. Anyway, point being this is way more sophisticated than a list of high schools in rich zipcodes. But, say, a high school might be categorized as having a Suburban:Large location, and then get relatively low scores on the six "challenge" indicators meaning the college-bound seniors come from census tracts with high college attendance, many two-parent families, high family incomes, lots of owned homes with low vacancies, lots of high-education adults, and low crime. And of course colleges do not have to use Landscape, or they can supplement it in various ways, as they see fit. But it is helpful to know this exists." ____ "Not a list that crude, but my understanding is products like Landscape (see other post) are regularly used by College Board members in the application process, or some equivalent. This is often implicitly part of what they are referring to when they talk about evaluating applicants in context, resources by type of area (high or low), advantages/disadvantages by type of area, and so on. Products like Landscape, if the college so chooses, will tag each application with a handy set of residential and high school indicators that the colleges can then look at when evaluating each application. In many cases, many of the competitive applicants are likely to blur together, because of course many of them come from the same sorts of areas and high schools. But if a college is interested in taking context into account in certain cases, or wants to target certain kinds of diversity (still allowed), or so on, it has this sort of product available." |
Anonymous
This year no, changes happening to late in the game. Next year moving forward the above and dwindling college age applicant pool will begin to favor full pay to a greater degree. Will see a drop in percentage of US population getting college degrees. Will also see less foreign students, resulting in closure for some schools each year going forward. Top schools will still have low admit rates and will become less diverse over time. |
Anonymous
Newbie question - Do you need to complete the FA paperwork if you’re clearly full pay but want your kid to be considered for merit at their safeties? |
Anonymous
Never inputted SSN in the common app or completed ANY FA paperwork. DD received numerous merit awards from Pitt, Vermont, CU-Boulder and Case this year. |