I mentioned Harvard in my post, and you mentioned Harvard in your reply, so I will continue to use numbers from Harvard. According to Harvard’s NPC, the net ret price to parents for an income of $180k and multiple kids is $17k/year, with typical assets , not $90k/year. Most middle class families get excellent FA at Harvard, often enough to be less expensive then in state public alternatives. You generally need a far higher income than $180k to not get significant FA. A similar statement could be made for Ivy+ colleges in general.
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Some of them may offer some financial aid up to about 96th percentile or so parent income.
However, the big donut hole occurs for kids with divorced parents, who are often still fighting about their divorce and therefore uncooperative. Such students are typically shut out of whatever generous financial aid that the wealthy elite colleges claim to offer, and their parents typically have less to contribute for college costs than married parents with the same combined income (because they gave their kids’ college fund to their divorce lawyers’ kids’ college funds, and because living in separate households typically costs more than living in a shared household).
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That may be the real advantage that elite prep high schools offer to their students aiming for elite colleges. Their dedicated college counseling staffs are far more likely to give the students useful information in terms of knowing the system and how to play the elite college admissions game than a typical overburdened general counselor at a non-elite public or private high school. The dedicated college counselors may also have knowledge about what each elite college really looks for, and may steer top-end students to those elite colleges that are more likely to seem them as fits (rather than all top-end students applying to HYPS). Of course, a student from a low income family who got into an elite prep high school on financial aid or scholarship may have already had an information advantage to begin with.
Yes, much of this stuff can be found in other ways, but do most students (or their parents) know where to look (example: many new posters here do not know that net price calculators exist)? In many cases, the information that students and parents do find is inaccurate.
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Right, and the draw for schools like Duke is the network of wealthy students. This is very important for career/etc…
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Seinfeld kids, Springsteen kid, Rob Lowe kid, etc. went to Duke. All very good students, I’m sure, so hard to know how celebrity status, if any, might have helped in admissions.
Some schools definitely seem to be more attractive to celebrities than others.
I see no reason to believe that these kids are any smarter than average kids, and there is absolutely zero reason to assume that they had more academic achievements than an average kid. Other kids need to win national-level awards, be the top of the class academically, etc, and there is no evidence that these kids have those awards. Considering how much celebrity magazines love heaping praise on celebrity kids for doing even basic stuff, they would absolutely gush if a celebrity kid actually had some national-level achievement that wasn’t the result of nepotism.
I’m sure that at least some are great kids and that many are academically accomplished, but it’s highly unlikely that they are anything beyond what is known here as “average excellent”, and those kids are not being accepted to Duke.
So I would guess that celebrity status has almost everything to do with their admissions.
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Or, some schools find celebrity kids more attractive in admissions. So the kids attend the “best” college their parents status got them into.
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