Not to be cynical, but a decent high level explanation of what all the middle-class people trying to get into Harvard and such are trying to do is get the benefit of all those gifts without actually being required to make any such gifts themselves.
And I don’t have a problem with that! I don’t think that is the ONLY path to a good life, but if you can pull that off for college (and it is otherwise affordable, which it may or may not be) . . . good for you.
I am having a hard time understanding this chart. Both schools have giant endowments invested which yield enormous returns for their operating budgets-at Princeton it is well over half. Where is that shown?
But didn’t the popular perception of HYPetc as being mainly academically elite (as opposed to SES elite with enough academically elite students to maintain an academically elite image) predate USNWR college rankings? Of course, USNWR confirms and perpetuates that pre-existing popular perception.
Just to play “devil’s advocate”–a lot of important achievements are not made by individuals, they are made by teams. And teams typically benefit from good leadership. And good team leaders may not be particularly good at any of the individual team tasks, particularly not in comparison to specialized team members, but they may be specialists at being good at leadership.
There are limits to this logic–it rarely works out well if a leader literally has no idea what the team members are doing. But the idea that some leaders may be more good at understanding things generally and then leading, rather than at specializing in doing things themselves, is not too outlandish.
Of course a more cynical point is that many important power and financial transactions involve personal relationships of some sort, and that is not so easily defended in terms of leadership abilities.
Still, even then–humans are social animals, complex human interactions typically involve all sorts of difficult agency and trust problems, and people who are good at navigating all that on behalf of some working group also arguably have a very valuable skill.
This is not to say everyone at MIT is an anti-social individualist who cannot lead a team or pitch a client or whatever. But when colleges like Harvard talk about holistic review, the importance of leadership, the importance of being social, and so on, I don’t think that is completely unrelated to how teams achieve success in the real world.
Indeed, this drives some people nuts, but Harvard apparently continues to value things like being captain of a successful varsity sports team. Some people immediately code that as frivolous at best, and perhaps worse, as an opportunity for elitism or ethnic bias.
But I don’t think it is so obvious that a kid like that has not shown something that might well be relevant to the future success of some business, law firm, or so on.
Emphasis mine.
I hate to be pedantic, but the Times should know better than to confuse “more likely” with “as likely.” Despite the labeling on the graphic, “twice as likely” = 1 time more likely (not 2 times more likely).
More to the topic at hand, a few years ago CC member Data10 posted statistics on the acceptance rate of Harvard applicants by income. The rates were remarkable similar across income groups, underscoring that one reason high-income students are vastly overrepresented at some high-ranking schools is because high-income students are vastly more likely to apply.
Harvard Acceptance Rate by Income: Classes of 2009-2016
<$40k income – 11% (would be 6% without admissions preference)
$40-80k income – 11% (would be 8% without admissions preference)
$80-120k income – 9%
$120-160k income – 10%
$160-200k income – 10% (would be 11% without lower SES preference)
$200k+ who filled out FA – 12% (would be 13% without lower SES preference)
Did not fill out FA – 7% (would be 8% without lower SES preference)
Looking at the chart from the original post, I know a lot of people who are in the dip around about the 90th percentile of income. They are in the gap where they do not qualify for need based aid, but often are not comfortable paying something like $80,000 per year per child for an undergraduate education. Quite a few of these parents that I know have master’s degrees (or in fewer cases MDs or law degrees) and would not be surprised if their kids were to also want a “non-funded” graduate degree, for which they might be a bit more willing to spend the big $$. Not all of their kids are academically strong enough to be competitive for a “top 10” or “top 20” university, but quite a few of their kids are.
In many cases they are not applying to elite universities for their bachelor’s because they cannot afford to attend, or at least are not comfortable spending that much. Quite a few are getting merit aid at very good but not “elite” schools.
I am wondering how much of the apparent dip in the 70th to 98th income percentile is caused by financial issues.
Harvard has long been considered academically elite, but there was a time that the acceptance rate was well over 50%, over 80% in the 40s. Even as recently as the late 1980s it was around 20%.
It’s my belief that had schools not been ranked, something that really is specious in my mind, that we wouldn’t have so many students applying to too few schools.
The issue is that wealth can buy those things that make an applicant more attractive. Whether it’s instruction, coaching, or especially opportunities, it’s not an even playing ground. A wealthy kid can do a solo sail, get a great debate coach, record in their own studio, travel to Europe for equestrian events – and create a great narrative around it. Middle class students doing an affordable version of the same will have a hard time standing out.
“Gifts” in my summaries included both endowment income and gifts for immediate use.
At Harvard, 45% overall was from gifts (what they call “philanthropy”), and that further broke down as 36% from endowment income, and 9% from gifts for immediate use. All that information is here, if you are interested, particularly page 5:
Princeton breaks things down a little differently, but here is their information:
They list 65% total in support from investments, but it appears to me that might be a combination of endowment income and also additional gifts from “external trust funds”, and possibly the around 4% they get from gifts for current use (I am not sure how the two documents really fit together).
Anyway, net tuition is 6%. This combination is consistent with the fact Princeton in particular relies more on gifts and less on net tuition than some of its peers, including Harvard.
They then list 15% in government grants and contracts and 9% in private grants and contracts, but apparently this includes not just research grants but also other things. I had to do some math (see Table 1 on page 22), but it looks like about 75% of that 24% is research grants, so about 18%, and I’d think most of the rest might count as returns from other operations, let’s say 5%. They then have a category specifically like that (net auxiliary sales and services) at 3%.
OK, so I am getting something like this for Princeton:
Gifts: 65%
Research grants: 18%
Returns from other operations: 8%
Net tuition: 6%
As you may be seeing, every college breaks things down differently, so it takes some work getting comparable percentages, and there is some possibility of error. Still, I think the general picture here about how MIT, Harvard, and now Princeton compare in terms of reliance on different revenue sources is about right.
From the authors of the study:
And David Leonhardt of The New York Times (who is also on the unpaid board of advisers of Opportunity Insights, the research group that published the paper) concludes that
This information seems questionable by itself. If it includes graduate schools, you are comparing apples to bananas. MIT has 7K graduate students, almost all of which are getting their full tuition paid for in exchange for their relatively cheap work as TA’s and Research assistants. Harvard has a law, medical and online graduate program where full tuition is expected and the students provide little value back to the school (while getting their degree).
I made no comment on the degree of advantage granted legacy status. Simply highlighting to make the point, one which is often incorrectly stated in the reverse.
ETA: I’d add that owed to the very nature of holistic admissions, a comment like “About half of legacy students at these colleges would not be there without the admissions boost they receive.” is at best a gross estimation of the impact. There is literally no way to strip out a single criteria which is measurable, binary, and/or label-able, and then leave all else equal for analysis because we actually have no idea what “all else” is or means in holistic admissions. Our model is simply incomplete. We don’t have all the data points because not all data are points.
And, these applicants were discussed by adcoms in their full context, legacy included. If legacy had not been included or noted in the discussions, perhaps other qualifications would’ve been otherwise stressed or discussed more. Which may make them “show up” or “measure” in some other way. Way can’t know because that’s actually not what happened.
I think that is an interesting question.
Certainly it had long before then become established that smart kids from “middle America” might want to go to Ivy League schools for various reasons. This was really true once the GI Bill was passed, but I think had started becoming true before WWII as well.
On the other hand, I am not sure people were unaware that Ivy League schools were also where the socioeconomic elites sent their kids.
I’d personally say that back in the mid-late 1980s (as far back as I can go), to me it sort of felt like people thought of these “elite” private colleges the same way they thought of “elite” private high schools. Sure, some smart kids wanted to go to elite private high schools because a lot of smart kids were there, they had interesting classes, they helped you get into good colleges, and so on. But we sure knew that a lot of rich parents sent their kids to those high schools, and it wasn’t like they were all smart. At elite private colleges, we might expect the rich kids to be the smartER rich kids, but not necessarily the smartEST kids overall. At least as I recall.
And I have never seen them as much different since, to be honest. But apparently, at some point, some people started thinking these schools were “mainly” the smartest people, and not just a mix of smart people and smartER rich people.
I can’t prove this, but that does seem to coincide with the USNWR era. But I suppose it also coincides with the rise in application volumes, and decline in admissions rates. And it seems plausible that maybe some people would intuitively understand how, say, a 20% admit rate was consistent with the “smartER” rich kid model, but struggle to understand it as applied to a 5% admit rate.
I personally think this is exactly correct.
In fact, as I noted in an early post, I am not sure some people quite understand how certain kids are being prepared for highly selective holistic review essentially from birth, or I guess even before birth given prenatal care and such. All these resources and opportunities are helping them develop not just academically, but in all the different ways that colleges like Harvard explicitly state they value.
So many factors at play…population substantially increasing while these schools stay roughly the same size, the common app, fee waivers, test optional, etc. This would likely be happening without rankings.
I don’t think anyone needs a publication to tell them that Harvard leads to better career results than Texas Tech.
Texas Tech catching strays.
Sure, once you start dividing students into subclasses, you are going to get different answers for different subclasses. Even if you are just talking about a college, research grants, say, are typically earmarked, and may mean a lot to some students, very little to others.
On this specific issue, I note Princeton reported:
Of the $219 million in net total tuition, fees, and auxiliary revenue recognized in fiscal year 2022, $188 million was from undergraduate students, $22 million was from graduate students, and $9 million was from other sources.
I think this reflects a general truism–outside of the sorts of professional schools Princeton doesn’t have, net tuition at these elite private colleges mostly comes from undergrads. Most grads expect to get funding.
Harvard then had a fun chart breaking it down by unit. Law was 47% gifts, 45% net tuition, 3% research, 5% other. Faculty of Arts & Sciences (which I assume includes grad students, although I again suspect the college students would dominate the net tuition in this category) was 59% gifts, 22% net tuition, 13% research, 6% other. Engineering & Applied Sciences was 38% research grants, 38% gifts, 21% other, and 3% net tuition. So basically, FAS was somewhere in the middle between the “extremes” of law and tech in the biggest categories.
OK, so no surprise here–tech stuff at Harvard looks at least more like MIT. FAS stuff at Harvard at least looks more like Princeton. Law is more tuition driven than any of those (although still gets a lot of gift support).
But I am not sure this is motivating a change in understanding the incentives, other than just adding nuance. Harvard does do tech stuff, and research grants are important to supporting tech stuff, not so much net tuition. Harvard also does professional stuff, and that balance may reverse in those cases. But it also does a lot of non-tech, non-professional stuff, and net tuition falls in between in those cases. And in all cases, gifts are big for Harvard, but bigger in professional than tech, and even bigger in non-tech/non-professional.
The more interesting question is, for the same student who can get admitted to both and interested in academics offered at both, how much different, if any, are the career results likely to be choosing one versus the other?
Obviously, it can depend on the type of career goals, since some career paths are much more college-elitist than others, and some are influenced much more by social connections to the existing elites than others.
In other words, 12% of Fortune 500 CEOs come from 8 colleges, while 88% from the other 3,972?