Does financial aid request affect our chances of getting admitted?

[ellenf75]

My husband and I have been debating whether to apply to additional private schools beyond the one or two we're currently looking at. For those to be real options though, we'll need financial aid. Even though schools say admissions decisions are need blind, curious to hear from others whether applying for aid will negatively affect our chances.

[oskimom]

Every tour we've been on so far, the Admissions directors have all said that the admission process is needs blind. As much as I want to believe them, they've got to know somehow, right? What if everybody they admit needs aid? If you really need aid for those schools to be options, I would go ahead and apply. What's the worse that could happen - they don't admit you? Doesn't leave you any worse off other than the time and effort you spent. But if you do get in, what a great opportunity.

[88keys]

We were in a similar situation last year debating if we should apply for Financial Aid. We decided not to because from everything we read and looking at the financial aid application we would have likely only received 2 - 3K at the most. 2 - 3K wasn't going to make a huge impact on our decision to send or not send our DD to private school. Finally, we didn't want to reveal all of our financial information for 2 - 3K/year.

My advice would be to try and figure out how much you need. That was the tipping point for us, one school FA application asked "How much do you think you can afford?" It made us really sit down & think about it which was hepful. Good luck.

[88keys]

Also meant to tell you to look at the general application on the NAIS website. You can see the information they ask for without actually filling it out and submitting it: http://sss.nais.org/parents/