I don't think JH needed to defend a position here,
Both of you are actually offering the "point-counterpoint" discussion that takes place every day in higher ed, at enrollment management conferences, among trustees and admissions deans. There is value to both points of view. How to best allocate the scarce resources. Two schools of thought:
A) Use a good portion of our aid money to reward top students and encourage them to come to our college, so that we can attract the best and the brightest. They have worked hard in HS and deserve this reward, and we would welcome them on our campus. When I worked in college admissions, this was our approach; we leveraged our limited aid dollars wisely; the calculations and financial aid matrix we used was fairly sophisticated and took into account GPA, course rigor, SATs, rank in class, extracurrics, and demonstrated interested in the college, as well as family finances.
In contrast, the no merit aid approach is,
B) No, lets use our money only where the need is greatest. Our school already attracts and retains the best of the best, so we don't need to offer merit money. Our mission is to provide access for lower income families.
(By the way, back to JH's point about using money to get top students might degrade the academic rep of a school, some in the field would look down there noses at us 'merit aid ' schools and say we were "buying the class"; which in some respects was true!)
Of course in the economic climate we are in today, position B is tougher and tougher to sustain. Someone else in this thread touched on that. If no merit aid is offered at the elite selective college, and families of modest or middle classs means are looking at 'full pay' here vs 'merit aid' there, more families will be chosing the place with the merit aid. Those still able to enroll at very expensive full pay no merit aid colleges will be heavily tilted toward the economic elite, as well as the fairly low income families getting heavy need based aid. In the extreme, this 'bi-modal' setting can lead to a social environment that is tough for the kids, the fairly low income kids and the kids with the BMWs and trips to Europe for the summer, and very few regular middle class kids in between.
Sorry, I went off on a tangent, but it is pretty interesting and important stuff in the world of higher ed......
So the experience of getting 'counter offers' in terms of merit based aid is in fact become more common place and all families should certainly know they can try! It never hurts to ask, respectfully, when the time is right. "Johnny/Jane would really love to come to your school, but the gap is just too great. At school X and Y, our out of pocket is only $***X. Is there any review process/ can you reconsider our needs and find a way to increase your support so that Jonny can enroll here?"
This is a good topic to talk about here because many families are somewhat in the dark about this, and having all points of view shared is very valuable.
Happy Labor Day everyone!