If you face discrimination because of what skin or what finances your parents handed to you then you are disadvantaged and if it stops you from a fair competition to get into a school or afford it then you have every right to complain, you didn’t pick that privilege any more then an URM or EA kid picked his situation. Just because your parents made a good life, doesn’t mean they didn’t make sacrifices to get there.
It’s true that there’s a subset of middle class kids who don’t get help and aren’t clued in. We see them on CC and it’s bad enough. But what about the kids not here? No one tells them how to strategize.
But WorryHurry, for top colleges, it’s not as simple as “discrimination” based on skin color or family finances.
Worryhurry, even if all applications were done anonymously or by a number, there still isn’t enough room in these schools for all the “deserving” students. So you can whine about the great injustice, or you can say hey, these schools a few notches down offer 95% of what the super elites offer. You choose.
I like how his thread turned the way of many other recent threads:
Rich people should share their wealth with all other people
Rich colleges should share their endowments with all other colleges
Students rich in elite schools admissions should stop their admissions-hoarding and share
Sometimes I wonder if those who rant about the “URMs” would like to change places with my students to get all their “advantages.” Both parents working and an income of around $26,000? Switching apartments to follow the rent deals? One or two school polos because that’s all they can afford and having to eat the school-provided breakfast and lunch every day? Working 30+ hours a week to help your family while trying to maintain your grades?
It is really not easy being poor.
So yes, maybe they’ll get full financial aid if they manage somehow to get into a full-need met school. But they can’t afford to go to the state schools because even with full pell, full Texas grant, work/study, and full stafford loans they are gapped about $7000. So they’re in a weird place where their most financially realistic choices are community college or a college where they can commute or a full need-met school.
And that’s why for my students Grinnell is more affordable than Sam Houston State.
^ I have the same thought when people whine about poor people getting aid.
I’ll gladly trade places with anyone who grew up middle/upper income. Having consistent insurance? Always having enough good food to eat? Being able to go on vacations? Having stable housing? Only having to work for pocket money (or maybe some other small expenses) in high school and college? Sign me up.
And again I ask my usual question: Who the hell goes to the press with these stories?
Maintain your dignity and your privacy, for doG’s sake.
Schools and school districts do. It makes them look good too, so why not get some free publicity.
Do you know that for sure? When my S got the highest verbal score in the state on the JHU talent search in 7th grade, his school didn’t even seem to know, much less publicize it. I think that maybe there was a tiny article in the local weekly paper about he and the other local Presidential Scholar qualifiers. I mean like one paragraph, at most.
And if so, can’t the family simply say NO?
My father was the valedictorian of a public HS in Portland, OR. He was given full scholarships to HYP. All 3. I don’t think he bothered to apply to the other five, LOL. Somehow the press was not alerted.
I really think these people need to get a grip. It’s like the Indian kid from TX a few years ago whose father arranged for him to appear in the papers because he had gotten a 2400 on the SAT–after several tries, and maybe super scored–but was rejected from Harvard, et al.
Have some dignity.
Well, I’m sure it varies from school district to school district. But when I worked in news, we were notified (I assume with the family’s permission)when a student received some sort of extraordinary honor. I remember, a kid from our city had one of the highest IB scores in the world: it was on the news. Same with a kid who got a bunch of perfect scores on the SATs/ACTs. The info came from the PR office of the school distritc.
@Consolation --I actually have found online the article from one of the New York papers from seventy years ago listing the fact that my dad was one of 10 students in NYC that were awarded Pulitzer scholarships and that it paid for him to attend Columbia. This is nothing new, and the story wasn’t there because of anything his family did.
re: 97
I like all your points. And to give the kids a chance to show preference, maybe they could list their “top 10” schools – so it couldn’t just be HYPSM for everyone, but five additional – and geographical preferences.
If a kid couldn’t be placed in one of his or her top ten schools or favored geographic region, I’m thinking the committee would then attempt to put the kid in his or her home region, or as near as possible. There would be choices somewhat close by at least (and I’m adding a few more schools for that reason):
Midwest:
UChicago
Northwestern
WUSTL
Notre Dame
Carleton
Grinnell
Oberlin
South:
Duke
Vanderbilt
Rice
Emory
Davidson
Washington & Lee
Pac Northwest:
Reed
Whitman
California/SW:
Stanford
Caltech
Pomona
CMC
Harvey Mudd
USC
New England:
Harvard
Yale
MIT
Williams
Dartmouth
Brown
Amherst
Middlebury
Wellesley
Bowdoin
Wesleyan
Tufts
Mid-Atlantic:
Princeton
Columbia
Penn
Cornell
Swarthmore
Johns Hopkins
Georgetown
Haverford
Vassar
Carnegie Mellon
Hamilton
@prezbucky that seems like a pretty good list on first glance. Getting schools to cooperate would be a challenge, of course. But I think many of them know in there heart of hearts that there is a problem, and it is only getting worse.
If you want to check out my thread to see more details on my idea, it was http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/1870996-idea-to-stop-the-vicious-cycle-of-ever-increasing-college-admission-competitiveness.html#latest , though I warn there are quite a few folks arguing that the problem I was trying to fix doesn’t exist. But I liked some of the ideas other posters had.
The “applying to all 8 ivies” seems symptomatic and the tip of the iceberg of the problem that these sort of solutions try to fight.
In the case of California, New England and the mid-Atlantic, with a few exceptions you have listed the most competitive colleges in the country. There is massive overlap in applications. Most are not viable options for all but the best students.
"If a kid couldn’t be placed in one of his or her top ten schools or favored geographic region, I’m thinking the committee would then attempt to put the kid in his or her home region, or as near as possible. "
What happens when all those fill up?
Whether you take the presbucky approach or you use a lottery or just stick with the status quo, the number of students who get to attend the tippy top schools doesn’t change one iota and plenty of “worthy” candidates are still not going to get in. I don’t see what this solves.
@Pizzagirl understood there is a limited number of spots, and nothing will change that.
The problem as I see it is there is a vicious cycle. Last year’s tough admission results means this year’s students feel obligated to apply to more and more (“top” and almost “top)” colleges to hedge their bets. Which in turn makes admission rates even lower, and further exacerbates the problem, as it will continue into the next year. It then trickles down and makes other colleges more competitive.
I don’t have the data to back it up, but I am fairly certain that kids are applying to more and more colleges on average each year, which is the primary driver of lower and lower admissions rates.
My oldest son is a URM that was admitted to all 10 of the schools he applied to, but his list is so radically different from most of these URMS in the news. He only applied to two Ivies; he didn’t apply to Stanford. He had three safeties on his list. We didn’t presume anything, and he was very particular about where he was applying and why. Prestige was never a factor, but he did need a school with advanced or graduate level math classes, and we were looking at schools that meet 100% need since we qualify for a lot of aid.
“The problem as I see it is there is a vicious cycle. Last year’s tough admission results means this year’s students feel obligated to apply to more and more (“top” and almost “top)” colleges to hedge their bets. Which in turn makes admission rates even lower, and further exacerbates the problem, as it will continue into the next year. It then trickles down and makes other colleges more competitive.”
If it makes “lesser” colleges “better” since now they are absorbing the overflow of the brightest students, isn’t that a win-win? I mean, we are well past the era where only Ivy schools are the only first-rate places. We passed that years ago. There simply isn’t anything to bemoan that the top kid goes to Tufts instead of Harvard.
I haven’t done the math on it. We’d need to know how many students score 2150+ or 32+, and are top 10% of graduating class, and are 3.8+ with course rigor.
Those who cleared those (or similar) hurdles would comprise the total number of students eligible for the “Don’t Shut Me Out” program.
Obviously most would not utilize it in their app process.
And obviously no colleges would offer up all their spots to accommodate it.
So they’d have to figure out a way to accommodate all eligible applicants.
Maybe the answer would be to expand or contract the college list to fit that year’s number of program applicants. So it would have to begin early. And it would require some skilled negotiators to cajole fringe schools into the fray some years while denying them other years.
Either that or you just push it to, say, 50 schools, and pray. But that leaves the possibility for leaving some kids out, making the program fail its stated mission.
It’s all hypothetical – it would just be nice if there were a way for top students to avoid being shut out of elite private schools, should they wish to attend one. For some it would be a low-risk way to ensure a top-notch private offer.