Decisions Mailed, Tuition Announced, The Return of More Questions Answered, and Opening and Closing Doors
So, it has been incredibly busy in my office. As you now know, decisions will be mailed by the Admissions office on March 11. We hope to have financial aid decisions in those envelopes for those of you (EAs, RDs, Internationals) who have provided us all of your completed documentation by our March 1 priority deadline (and we hope to be able to get to some of you who completed even up to yesterday). If you are not complete, we will include a letter informing you of what is missing and how to go about providing the information we need. We will also have our guidebook to the Student Financial Services in your Admissions packet (for a sneak peak at this publication you can look here).
As part of the financial aid letter, we will also describe the cost and budget of the coming year. As part of this timing, tuition and fees for the coming year have been announced. You can look here for the official MIT press release and here for a Tech article on the increase. Both feature an interview with my boss, the Executive Director of Student Financial Services, commenting on the increase in aid as well as the position on Yale's move to eliminate parent contributions for those earning less than $45,000.
So, time to get to some of your questions (I apologize for the delay in answering them but we have been exceptionally busy as you can well imagine):
Suhail had some questions relating to on campus stay for international students during vacation periods and work on campus.
I had to consult with some of my colleagues for the answers to these questions. According to the Housing web page, summer housing is not guaranteed, but undergraduates may apply for housing and be entered into a lottery for placement. Housing during school year breaks (Thanksgiving, Winter, IAP, and Spring Breaks) are considered part of the academic year and are covered under your rooming charge (but again, see the Housing web page here for more information).
Jobs on campus are available to International students with very little restriction. According to the Student Employment web page:
International students are allowed by immigration regulations to work on-campus up to 20 hours per week when school is in session and full-time during their Summer and Winter vacations. The job must be on MIT premises and students should be paid by MIT.
International students who find a UROP job may need written permission from an International Student Adviser if they are not paid directly by MIT. International freshmen are allowed to apply for permission to work off-campus only after they have completed their first academic year. They should consult one of the Advisers in the International Students Office, 5-133, on the procedure to follow. Detailed information about on- and off-campus employment regulations for international students is available in the International Students Office.
Shabin also asked some other questions about international issues in previous posts, particularly regarding entries made on the financial aid application. A bit of advice: please note that we do review your information very carefully and we will be able to tell if you made an obvious mistake (like leaving off your parents from the family listing, or not knowing what your expected vacation earnings might be). We will not penalize you for making a mistake on your entry (any more than you might penalize me for something incorrect on the blog, I hope). If we do not understand something, we will wait until after the admissions letters have been mailed (so as not to ruin the surprise) and then we will get in touch with you to ask some clarifying questions.
However, do try to realize that we are human. We are faced with the unenviable task (although I love it, but I'm ill) of reading applications from many different countries with many different income tax systems and many different economies. We may not have gotten it perfect. If you think we were wrong, let us know and we will work with you on correcting it.
As for the comment on my last post by “” who said:
That was some quality lyrics, but I don't like the tone.
Verification and all that is fine, but sometimes it gets on some people's nerves. The bad people can cheat by other means if they want to, but the good people get caught up in all the formality.
Especially for people in the lower income level, calculating things like money spent on entertainment and clothes and other such stuff seems extraneous and burdening, esp when the family knows how much they can pay and how much aid they'll need. Filling the form can be a frustrating experience for them.
To quote a friend - "Man! Why don't they give us a break? We're poor, okay... is that enough?"
I certainly sympathize with your point and understand why you might feel that we ask for a lot of information, but in fact we are fairly limited in our requests (Profile, FAFSA and Tax Information will usually be all we need). I would remind you we are not quite at the level you suggest (calculate money spent for entertainment, etc) and would be extremely uncomfortable heading down that road.
There are really two issues here: 1) whether what we ask is burdensome and 2) what we do with the information you provide. I truly hope that you (and by extension I mean all of you) have not found the application process burdensome. If anything, this blog and the tone we have tried to set in our office have attempted to be encouraging, viewing the financial aid process as a stepping stone to access, not a blockage. I don't pretend that the “Verification Rap” represents our feelings at MIT; I just thought it was a humorous piece and fun to share.
But you do bring up an important point, “pa”. I hope that by sharing what we do with the information you provide us to have given you an insider's view to the financial aid process, much as Matt has done with the admissions process. I understand that doing that opens up the process for scrutiny, but I would much rather see you armed with the information you need to know than not knowledgeable about what happens behind the closed door.
So, in summary, thanks for raising an important point. If you are willing to dispense with your anonymity, I would be very interested in exploring your views further whether by email, in person, or by phone.
For all of you, good luck, get some rest, and remember: whatever the outcome, the Admissions decision is not a judgment on you, it is an opening of a new door. It may be a door you never knew existed, or it may be a door you have been waiting to open. I am a perfect example of someone who didn't get admitted to his first choice school, and look what I am doing today. For any door that closes, there are always many doors that open for you.
Having interacted with you via this blog (and via College Confidential) I can certainly say that all of you deserve to be admitted, we just don't have room for all of you (we would have to install a lot more doors).