Reply to Discriminatory College Advising @ Big 3

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]One angle might be whether the counselor is wondering if your working class family can afford an Ivy. The Ivies don't give out merit aid and the cutoff for financial is extremely low at many of them. Have you talked to the counselor about this?

That said, you might be right in your suspicions. We just don't have enough info to help you know for sure whether the counselor is getting lots of pressure from other families, thinks your child won't get in because of having no hook.

I've also suspected that Ivies go to the private schools for full-pay kids who will subsidize the FA kids. Maybe you don't fit the counselor's thinking here.

If your DC doesn't like the state school, then DO NOT apply ED there. It's very reasonable to apply to a mix of reaches, targets and safeties. You are completely within your rights to apply to more reaches than your counselor wants. Just make sure to apply to at least some targets and safeties because, as PP said, kids who apply only to HPYSM sometimes end up with no acceptances.[/quote]

Many Ivies give NEED based aid, which sounds like exactly what the OP may need.  And actually, the cut off for financial aid is quite high. I believe that under the new financial aid guidelines there, you can qualify for aid even if your family makes 200K a year. 
I went to Harvard  and found that while there were certainly kids of the super rich (i.e. british nobility, scion of  Hong Kong casino mogul, etc) there were plenty of kids from working class or otherwise middling middle class backgrounds who were super smart, motivated, or otherwise had an extraordinary life story that made their accomplishment stand out in the face of adverse conditions.  Their freshman year may have been a slightly harder adjustment period, but almost all the freshman I knew were dealing with similar insecurities about their abilities.

Schools that have a high endowment are able to admit people without giving consideration to their need to pay. I bet there is more economic diversity at a place like HYP than a second tier, expensive private school that may not have enough of an endowment to be need blind in its admissions decisions.

I say, you should encourage your kid to go for the reach schools, while at the same including backups or safeties.  Above a certain level of academic and extracurricular qualifications, there is a great deal of randomness in the admissions decisions. [/quote]

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