College Waiting Lists Can Favor the Well-Off

Many high school seniors dangling on college waiting lists and still hoping to land fall-term openings at their top-choice schools will instead get a lesson in real-world economics: It pays to be rich.

Selective private colleges acknowledge that they sometimes take affluent teens over those from poor or middle-class families needing financial aid when deciding which students to admit from their waiting lists.

The reason, college administrators say, is that financial aid budgets often have been tapped out by the time those admissions are decided in May and June. The money has been allocated to students admitted earlier whom the schools most wanted to attract, rather than the backup choices typically relegated to the waiting list.

“It’s the financial reality of things,” said Paul Marthers, dean of admission at Reed College in Portland, Ore.

At Reed, where officials take pride in providing full aid packages to needy students, “Every year we have to decide, ‘Can we give financial aid to students on the waiting list?’ ” Marthers said. Often by that point, “The financial aid is just used up.”

The practice of passing over financially needy students, little known outside the admissions field, troubles Alex Lee, 18, a high school senior from Canoga Park. He was accepted this spring at several other highly regarded colleges but remains keen on Reed, where he is on the waiting list.

Lee narrowly missed being accepted during Reed’s regular application review period in March. Even so, when Reed made admissions offers in recent days to an initial group of about 15 waiting-list students, it skipped over Lee again.

One of the main reasons, Marthers said, is that Lee needs financial aid that Reed isn’t sure it can provide. Lee keeps hoping, though, that Reed will find a way to take him before its waiting-list process ends late next month.

Even if Lee gets his wish, many others like him across the country won’t get theirs, said Michael S. McPherson, a higher education economist and former president of Macalester College in Minnesota. “The way wait lists are handled gives an advantage to students from affluent families,” he said.

Some of the financially needy students are offered admission but may be discouraged from enrolling because the schools provide too little, or no, financial aid. Others don’t get chosen at all -- and never have a chance to decide whether they should take extra loans or jobs, or ask relatives for financial help, to attend the schools they had their hearts set on.

McPherson said those results are common at all but perhaps the 40 richest of the nation’s 1,700 private four-year schools. He said many of the schools snub financially needy students even earlier in the admissions cycle but that the practice spreads to more campuses during the waiting-list season.

And even the richest schools, including Stanford, USC and Caltech, limit admissions of foreign undergraduates who can’t pay their own way.

Rising competitive and economic pressures, some experts say, have pushed more private colleges in recent years to either take a student’s ability to pay into account in admissions decisions or to skimp on financial aid for low- or moderate-income students.

The most gifted low-income students continue to be admitted to leading private schools and receive substantial aid packages. But in recent interviews, officials of some selective colleges conceded that economic considerations can come into play after they pick their top-choice applicants, particularly as they review waiting-list students.

Although most applicants to selective schools know where they have been accepted by early April, those placed on waiting lists often remain in limbo until July. Meantime, the nearly 800 U.S. schools with waiting lists determine whether they have filled up a well-rounded freshman class or whether certain types of students-- be they tuba players or engineering majors -- should be included.

Colleges rarely tell the waiting-list students who never get actual offers -- the vast majority of them -- why they were passed over. McPherson lauds schools such as Reed that are honest with applicants about the financial side of these issues.

McPherson, now president of the Chicago-based Spencer Foundation, estimates that, at most of the nation’s private colleges, a student’s ability to pay for school is taken into account in at least 5% of all freshman admissions decisions. Those decisions, he said, typically occur with waiting-list students and other late-round candidates.

Such preferences for affluent students have been overshadowed in public debate by better-known breaks, such as “legacy” admissions for children of alumni, along with affirmative action for minorities. But waiting-list practices could grow in importance as colleges increasingly rely on the lists to enroll enough students. Predicting enrollment has gotten more complicated in recent years, partly because of the growing number of schools to which high school students apply.

The University of California does not use waiting lists in undergraduate admissions decisions and neither do most California State University campuses. In addition, both state university systems say that they ignore a student’s ability to pay in undergraduate admissions

But at selective private schools, where waiting lists are fairly common, administrators take varying approaches with financially needy students on the lists.

Occidental College in Los Angeles, a national leader in enrolling large numbers of low-income students, acknowledges that it sometimes favors well-off students in waiting-list and other late-round admissions decisions.

Vince Cuseo, Occidental’s dean of admission, estimated that in 90% of his school’s admissions decisions, students are evaluated without considering how much financial aid they will need.

In March, though, when Occidental begins a secondary round of admissions decisions covering an estimated 5% to 10% of incoming students, the school usually starts tilting in favor of more affluent applicants. Likewise, in May, when decisions are made on waiting-list students, some years, Cueso said, “you may have to make some decisions that are weighted more in favor of students whose families can contribute more to the cost of an education.”

College counselors such as Hector Martinez, director of college guidance at the Webb Schools in Claremont, advise high school seniors who need lots of financial aid not to get their hopes up about waiting lists. The situation came up this spring when two of Martinez’s students, twins Greg and Matt Burris of Burbank, landed on the waiting list at Kenyon College in Ohio.

The twins, who attend their private school on scholarship, started making plans to visit Kenyon to persuade admissions officers to admit them. But Martinez, after consulting with a contact at Kenyon, talked them out of it. Getting chosen from a waiting list, he said, always is a long-shot, but especially for financially needy students.

“I’m more protective with those kids,” Martinez said. “I explain that it’s probably not going to happen, so we need to be excited about the places they did get into.” The Burrises accepted his advice and decided to attend the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Wash., where they will receive substantial financial aid.

Jennifer Britz, Kenyon’s dean of admissions and financial aid, said she was pleasantly surprised this month to have ample financial aid money left over to offer students selected from the waiting list. Still, she said that this doesn’t happen most years and that Martinez gave his students good guidance.

Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh states in its application booklet that applying for financial aid “may have an effect” on waiting-list students’ chances of admission.

Michael Steidel, director of admission, said his school also offers financial aid packages that are less generous than the norm for some of its academically weaker prospects, both waiting-list students and other applicants.

That financial aid practice, known as “gapping,” often is criticized as placing an unfair burden on students. But Steidel said the financial offers are delivered early, giving students plenty of time to make an informed decision. “It puts the kids really in the driver’s seat,” he said.

Reed occasionally offers other options to financially needy waiting-list students whom the college is eager to admit. Sometimes they are offered deferrals allowing them to start at Reed, with aid, a year later.

But Lee, a B student who earned an impressive 1440 out of a potential 1600 on his SATs, still is waiting for an answer from Reed.

He could enroll at Pitzer College in the fall term or at USC in the spring semester. The Pitzer acceptance came with a financial aid package, and he is waiting to find out USC’s aid offer.

Yet Lee says he is drawn to Reed, an iconoclastic school with no fraternities or varsity sports, and where teacher evaluations are emphasized over letter grades.

“There seems to be an attitude there where you can learn just for the love of learning,” said Lee, a photography enthusiast who hopes to study psychology and English.

The situation is frustrating for his Korean-born father, Robert, a telecommunications consultant whose income has suffered since the high-tech downturn about five years ago.

The senior Lee said he largely used up his savings putting Alex through the private Harvard-Westlake School in Studio City, and now, with his business slumping, he can’t afford a private college without lots of aid.

Unless Alex gets a generous aid package beginning with his freshman year, he said, “there’s a 90% chance I won’t be able to send him to Reed. I wish there was some better way to help kids have a chance to go to the school of their choice.”