Reply to Full-pay advantage: can someone break this down?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]When admissions aren't need-blind, how much of an advantage can full pay be?  Does it differ at more competitive vs. less competitive schools?  Is there an advantage to being able to pay more ( = having a higher notional EFC) even if not quite all?

Thanks in advance for any insights.  As you can see here we are new to this.[/quote]

I think that, if you have a great kid who'd be a good fit for a school, most schools below the Top 50 that aren't super idealistic will try to get their net cost to somewhere within about $5,000 of the true full cost of going to the kid's state flagship with in-state tuition.
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So, for example: I have a wonderful son with fine but not perfect stats (3.8 unweighted GPA; 1440 on the SATs at one sitting) and nice but not spectacular activities. Aid calculators showed we could pay $45,000 to $50,000 per year for college.

My son applied to two second-tier state universities and two private schools that are comparable to Catholic University, along with the state flagship and some lottery-level schools (Yale and Northwestern).

Yale and Northwestern rejected him.

The state flagship let him in, gave him no aid, and would have really cost about $40,000 per year, all in.

The second-tier publics gave enough merit aid to get the cost down to about $30,000.

The two Catholic University-level schools (well-known schools ranked about 80 to 150 on the U.S. News & World Report list) offered merit aid that would have pulled the net cash cost down to $40,000 per year, or about the same cost as the state flagship. [/quote]

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