The Necessity of Need-Aware: Looking into Tough Decisions in Admissions

The saying goes something like this: “If you like sausages, it is best not to see them being made.” The same might be said about college admissions policies. You like the results you’ve gleaned from them, but finding out what happens behind the scenes might leave a bad taste in your mouth. Perhaps no single policy seems to fit this metaphor better than need-aware admissions, a little heard of and little known practice that often becomes highly controversial when brought to the light. Against the better wisdom of one of the Internet’s best misattributed quotes I recently decided to unravel the mystery of Conn’s own need-aware admissions standard, and pleasantly found nothing at all akin to a meat factory.

Martha Merrill ’84 just oversaw the admission of her final incoming class as the Dean of Admission and Financial Aid, and I met with her to discuss need-aware admissions and the way that admissions as a whole fits into the greater goals of an academic institution like Conn. Need-aware, which began at Conn in the mid-1990s, is a term that simply means that admissions officers are allowed to view financial data on applicants and their families when deciding whether or not to admit them. Unlike at their counterpart need-blind colleges, prospective students that apply to need-aware institutions can theoretically be denied for not being able to pay as much tuition as the school would like. Given the simple facts, it’s easy to see why need-aware policies can put people off. Based on the most informal polling techniques, I was able to arrive at a sort-of-consensus on the way most Conn students feel when they hear our college weighs financial factors when deciding whether to admit students: “That sucks.”

But before lashing out with too much criticism, it’s important that I also describe a few other things that dictate decisions made both at Admissions and around the College. The first is the budget, which often becomes the target of ire any time a student believes that $60,000 of tuition money should provide more exotic nuts in the dining halls or a retina scanner for entry into dorm rooms. In reality, the budget is a tightly defined group of constraints on expenditures, set annually by the Priorities, Planning and Budget Committee. It includes things like salary for faculty and staff, spending on a variety of projects and services around the College, as well as the financial aid budget. Ergo, when the Office of Admissions sets out to identify, recruit, admit and enroll a new class of students, the amount of money it is allowed to spend on those students is already set.

While a similar process goes on annually at every college around the country, other factors determine where the budget comes from, and, consequently how much freedom exists within it. These include things like tuition and charitable contributions, but perhaps most defining is the endowment. The endowment is essentially how much money the College has put away in savings and investment, and there is usually a very limited percentage that is annually allotted to spending. At Conn, this is the spend rule, which is traditionally 5%. An interesting thought experiment is to consider the functional difference between an endowment like ours, which was the 258th-largest in the country, at 237 million dollars in 2013, and an endowment like Harvard’s, the largest in the country, at around 32 billion dollars. Assuming that these endowments grow just on pace with the rest of the American economy in 2014, Harvard can expect to add, give or take, another billion dollars to its endowment while Conn can count on about seven or eight million. These differences are obviously vast, and explain a major difference between need-aware and need-blind colleges. It is no coincidence that the majority of schools that are need-blind are also those with large endowments; they’re able to cover a large majority of their financial aid budgets with endowment spending alone. Conn’s relatively small endowment means that we draw a much larger portion of our annual budget from our annual revenue, which necessarily puts more constraints on what can be spent.

Despite all of these understandable limitations, there still is some way in which our need-aware admissions seems, well, wrong. It conjures up images of students at the end of the admissions process being put on a scale and weighed next to one another, where one rich kid is equal to two poor kids and inevitably it has to be one side or the other, or where a student applies to the college of his or her dreams, only to be denied because he or she couldn’t fork over the cash. It seems diametrically opposed to everything people in our generation heard growing up: if we put our minds to it we could do anything we wanted if we put our minds to it. The older one gets, the more one realizes that statements like that come with asterisks, normally referring to the fact that they’re truer for kids who went to elite prep schools, who come from wealthy families and who have parents that went to college. Need-aware admissions seem to add yet another asterisk to the series—one that is especially unsavory.

I don’t necessarily disagree with those characterizations, but I think to end the discussion there would do a great injustice against the reality of the situation and the careful steps that are taken to minimize these unwanted results. As Dean Merrill explained, the College takes careful steps to ensure that the admissions process is fair to everyone. “I ask my staff to read my files need-blind, and it’s fairly easy for them to do that because they don’t have any financial data in front of them. They can see that a student has applied for aid, but in many instances you really don’t know a family’s resources even if you know what their job description is. So I just ask they read a file with the idea that you admit who you believe deserves to be admitted.” After all applications are read, they end up in one of three places: admitted, denied, or in committee. Committee is generally where the most difficult decisions are made and discussed.

“Many of our applicants are in this middle zone…Where we know they can do the work and they’re desirable for one reason or another…but they may not be as strong as the group we’ve already admitted. And so in committee, on occasion, we have to ask – do they need aid? And if so, how much? And is that a worthy investment? As crass as that sounds, it’s probably the most distasteful part of our jobs,” Dean Merrill explained. Furthermore, the nightmare scenarios of above aren’t really applicable to the process that the Office of Admissions follows, and the integrity that Dean Merrill stresses throughout. “We never pit just one student against another. It’s one student against 5,399 other students. Ultimately, you go through the process and you have to give every student that opportunity. Let’s say your application is the last one I read; well, I may have already spent the budget, but I have to give you every chance that I gave the first 5,000 that I’ve read.”

If I make any unqualified criticism of our need-aware admissions policy, it’s that Conn is selective in the policies it chooses to reveal publicly, highlighting policies like SAT-optional – which carries a definite element of being for the social good – while tending to hide the need-aware part. Even this decision, however, could have its reasons. Throughout our conversation, Dean Merrill emphasized that the job of Admissions staff is to attract the best-and-the-brightest from across the country and around the world. Need-aware admissions, despite the small role it ultimately plays, could dissuade attractive students from applying to Conn out of fear that they can’t afford it. Dean Merrill points to the fact that Conn promises to meet the demonstrated need of all accepted students as a point of pride – something that most colleges around the country aren’t able to do.

“You want to support every student for a variety of reasons, but we are a selective institution and we have to say no to some, and in fact we say no to the majority. And that’s hard, but you have to wear both hats.” Maybe at some schools, admissions policies are like sausages, and it’s best not to look to closely at them if you want to keep your appetite, but, honestly, this doesn’t seem to be the case at Conn. Almost everything in life comes with a downside; I think that’s something that’s easy to forget as a dewy-eyed liberal arts student. More than anything, I think the story of need-aware admissions at Conn shows that much of life is a balancing act, and luckily we’re in good hands. •