I'm currently in a US News top-10 university with a Type-1 -- in short, elite institutions couldn't care less whether an applicant has a scholarship or not. First, if I'm not mistaken, all of the Ivy Leagues have a need-blind policy for US Citizens/Green Card holders so outside scholarships do not factor into the admissions decision.
That's the official line, but the numbers don't support this claim.
For any school in this country, Ivy or otherwise, to meet its
revenue target is not possible unless the process can somehow - indirectly or otherwise, with algorithms or human intervention - take into account each applicant's likely revenue ie tuition contribution.
Consider: Year in, year out, not less than 45-50% of each matriculating class is paying full-freight, ie, of the 12 Ivy+ schools, nearly 10,000 students must be found among the 1-2% of the population that can actually pay nearly $300k for an undergrad degree.
Here's the problem with the "need-blind" claim: the 1-2% stratum of our society isn't (yet) large enough to produce 10,000 super-achieving students! It is a statistical certainty that, of the 16,000 National Merit Semi-Finalists in the nation each year, no more than 20-25% - MAXIMUM - will come from the wealthiest 1-2% of American families. As the College Board's own SAT score distribution and score data by income indicate, the likely % of NMSF students who are super-wealthy is probably <10% of NMSFs.
Also note that, even among the wealthiest cohorts - our elite private schools charging >$40k per year - typically no more than 25% are National Merit Semi-Finalists. (There are a handful of outliers such as Silicon Valley's Harker School, of which ca. 50% win NMSF status each year). Add up all the nation's super-achievers who are also super-wealthy and you won't get close to the 10,000 seats that need to be filled each year by the Ivy+ 12 schools.
So some significant portion of the 10,000 admits who contribute maximum tuition, ie who are full-freight, must be drawn from the NON-wealthy portion of the population.
That means the Ivy+ Admissions officers need to find super-achievers who are either
a) super-wealthy US or "international" ie Chinese, Korean, etc children of gazillionaires, oligarchs, royalty etc
OR
b) US students who can pay tuition 100% thanks to scholarships from external sources (Gates Foundation, ROTC etc).
It may well be that Harvard and Yale can find enough students to fill their full-freight slots from among category a) above, with no real need to dip into category b). Probably also the case for Princeton, Columbia and maybe even MIT.
But it is almost certainly the case that the other schools need to meet their revenue (tuition) numbers with a non-trivial number of b) super-achieving, non-wealthy, external scholarship recipients.
So the "need-blind admissions" line is a fib.
(Note also that our science of inferring consumer income, credit-worthiness etc is advanced enough that that all that ANY Admissions Office needs, in the way of data elements, to infer an applicant's likely ability to pay full freight ie wealth is a combination of their own historical financial aid data joined to some/all of these easily extracted attributes of the college application, each of which is a good predictor of wealth and income:
- home address (can easily ascertain the annual principal, interest, mortgage and tax payment)
- school name (can be matched to historical applicant and enrollee data to estimate income)
- parents' occupation;
- extracurricular pursuits;
- foreign travel.
There's no need to contact the Financial Aid office regarding any individual application when you have many decades of such data points sourced from tens of thousands of students.