<p>Long article in Business Week profiles the makeover of Amherst to boost lowest income students to 25% of the total population:</p>
<p>And an interesting table on the academic ratings:</p>
<p>The faculty reaction was the most interesting to read - a bit of NIMBY.</p>
<p>Good article, but it left out one thing: Amherst's founding documents and its articles of incorporation filed with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts call for the "education of indigent youth of sound moral character". With 56% of the student body coming from families with incomes above $160k, and the median among them being far higher, he has a long way to go for fulfill its state mandate.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, it is nice to see it happening.</p>
<p>Don't see that many native americans strolling around Dartmouth neither :)</p>
<p>Oops, sorry forgot the reason to post: Thanks, KateLewis for posting the links to this interesting article.</p>
<p>Part of the appeal of the elite schools is you get to hang around rich people and make connections.</p>
<p>There aren't too many elite private schools with 25% of the student body receiving Pell Grants.</p>
<p>I wonder how Amherst will be perceived as it makes the changes. I hope it is perceived very favorably. </p>
<p>What Amherst is doing can change education for the better in this country. And the school can give the finger to US News, an added bonus.</p>
<p>FWIW, dropping a few points in selectivity should not hurt Amherst in the rankings at all. Just look at what happened in the 2006 rankings to Wellesley vs Swarthmore and Bowdoin vs Pomona. Schools that increased their selectivity did not necessarily boost their rankings. Wellesley, in particular, has never suffered from its average selectivity. </p>
<p>Ticking off the crowd that gleefully rigs the USNews rankings through cronyism in the peer assessment or annoying one's alumni base could be a lot more costly.</p>
<p>Very interesting article.</p>
<p>Definitely check out the second link. Do you know how many of us have been dying to see the actual definitions of the Academic Rating categories for schools like Amherst and Williams?</p>
<p>Xiggi:</p>
<p>As you have pointed out, USNEWS has the built-in "predicted grad rate" that largely nullifies selectivity in the ratings. Plus, the differences in selectivity among the top schools are so slight, that there is little impact.</p>
<p>BTW, if Amherst attempts to keep their median SAT scores up, the will end up with a two-tier student body. Very wealthy students with very high SATS and "others" with low SATs. The big losers will be middle-class high achievers with so-so SATs. They won't fit in the mix.</p>
<p>Did you guys read the article to suggest an increase of 100 students for the overall student body or an increase of 100 slots in each freshman class? If it's the later, then Marx must plan to grow Amherst to Williams' size.</p>
<p>I-dad, the table is nice, but do we know how it works? Is it Column A AND Column B or one of the two? </p>
<p>Considering that over 40% of HS students graduate with a A or above average, this may indicate that the grading scale mostly represents students who attend VERY selective high schools. A fact reinforced by the surprising lack of correlation between the GPA and SAT scores. </p>
<p>My take is that the table provided in the article is a rather loose interpretation of the real thing, or at best a very incomplete summary. As far as the disclosure of academic ratings, most of the tell-all books written by former admisssion officers did just that and in greater details -albeit with the same approximations. </p>
<p>I do NOT think that we are that much wiser about the arcane practices of the inner sanctum. :)</p>
<p>The Academic Rating is a judgement call within the parameters listed for each category. In other words, a 1440 ranked 1st or 2nd or a 1500 with a top 5% class rank would get you an AR2. You have to have both the class rank and the SATs.</p>
<p>It may not mean anything to you guys, but I have several Williams reports (one on Diversity, one on Athletics) that makes very specific references to the distribution of AR rankings. Without the "cheat sheet", it's always been difficult to fully parse those two reports.</p>
<p>A bit of cross-posting here! </p>
<p>I-Dad, upon reading, I had the same question about the 100 extra spots. I would tend to believe that the increase would be compounded over several years. If I remember correcty, the author mentions an increase in the budgets/endowments of several hundred millions. As you know, McKenna has its own plan to increase the size of the student body, but the budget did not seem to be as large as the numbers discussed in the article. </p>
<p>No matter what the exact number is, it is a substantial increase for a dedicated category of students.</p>
<p>I-Dad, check your PM</p>
<p>Seems that it would be 100 over several years:</p>
<p>Report to the Faculty, January 2006</p>
<p>II. Access to an Amherst Education
Students come to Amherst to learn with and from the best talents of their generation. The students the College admits to that exchange provide the clearest statement possible of the value we place on diversity of background, viewpoint, and voice. We must live up to the standard of intellectual and ethical reach we hope to instill in our students. Although challenges remain, over the past several decades Amhersts student body has been diversified to the point that half of our students are women and a third or more are students of color. The benefits of this inclusion are clear; it would be unthinkable to turn back the clock. </p>
<p>Time has stood still in one respect, however. While the College has, without fanfare, led higher education in developing and maintaining need-blind admission and full-need financial aid, the socio-economic profile of the student body remains much the same today as it was twenty-five years ago. Though we compare favorably with our peer institutions, we still enroll less than a quarter of our students from below the top quintile of family income. As a result students from households earning up to the US median family income find themselves part of a small economic minority at the College. </p>
<p>Amhersts current socioeconomic imbalance undermines our historic mission and puts artificial constraints on the learning community that we form here. Consistent with the College's charter to educate bright, indigent young men, Amherst should aspire to strengthen our leadership position among selective private colleges and universities in admitting talented low-income students (e.g., those eligible for Pell grants).Recent initiatives by the Office of Admission suggest that this portion of the applicant pool can be expanded while maintaining the Colleges high academic standards, a finding that we hope will be validated by further cycles of admission. </p>
<ol>
<li><p>We recommend that talented students from less affluent backgrounds be more vigorously recruited and that the Trustees seek funds to meet the additional aid burden.</p></li>
<li><p>We recommend that the Trustees consider significant reductions in the loan burden of all our students, as has been done for our highest-need students, in particular to avoid the limit that loans may impose on future career aspirations. </p></li>
<li><p>We recommend that the proportion of non-US students admitted be increased from about 6 to about 8 percent. </p></li>
<li><p>We recommend that admission for non-US students be made need-blind.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>*5. We recommend that entering classes be increased by between 15 and 25 students. * </p>
<p>"Time has stood still in one respect, however. While the College has, without fanfare, led higher education in developing and maintaining need-blind admission and full-need financial aid, the socio-economic profile of the student body remains much the same today as it was twenty-five years ago."</p>
<p>Actually, according to Schapiro at Williams, the net cost (relative to income) for low-income students at these institutions has actually gone up in the past 25 years. While it may look like there are more students receiving aid, that is simply a reflection of the list price rising, not a change in student body composition - both Williams and Amherst and, I suspect, Swarthmore, are less economically diverse than 25 years ago.</p>
<p>"BTW, if Amherst attempts to keep their median SAT scores up, the will end up with a two-tier student body. Very wealthy students with very high SATS and "others" with low SATs. The big losers will be middle-class high achievers with so-so SATs. They won't fit in the mix."</p>
<p>Don't know about SAT scores, but income-wise, that is the way it has already played out at Amherst. 16% of the Amherst student body is now on Pell Grants, about double what is was 10 years ago, and well higher tha W or S (or HYP, etc.) But the percentage of students receiving no need-based aid hasn't budged - and is still a remarkably high 56%. What has actually happened is that low-income students have replaced near-low-income or middle class ones. In fact, if you do the math, you find out that there are virtually no (under 5%) Amherst students with family incomes between $45k-$90k (and I'd be willing to bet that the majority of those are athletes.) It will be interesting to see what group the extra 9% of low-income students comes from.</p>
<p>Great articles. Don't know if anyone caught the article in the sidebar about low income admissions at Harvard, Smith and West Point:
<a href="http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_09/b3973099.htm%5B/url%5D">http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_09/b3973099.htm</a></p>
<p>While I am very happy to see Amherst continuing or reviving its effort to enroll a more diverse set of students, I still believe that the real debate should be about the Pell grantees OUTSIDE the most elite schools. Inasmuch as I applaud Amherst vision that could change the life of 100 students, it remains that we have well over 5,000,000 Pell grantees in the country or about 1 out of every 3 student attending college. </p>
<p>Of course, Amherst cannot be expected to change the systemic deficiencies in the countries K-12. Their contribution to demonstrate that students can overcome lower SES is a small step in the right direction. However, that does not change anything to the fact that we will need giants steps to accomplish the complete overhaul of everything below tertiary education and allow the country to recapture our education from the greedy and inept hands that currently strangles our best minds.</p>
<p>Xiggi:</p>
<p>Thanks for the study. I am again struck by the closed-loop regional nature of defining what we think about college admissions. Specifically, we give undue weight to New England high school and prep school students choosing New England colleges because they are close to home. The sample in the study (with extreme over-representation of Massachussetts high school students) is a glaring example. The same over-weighting occurs in the USNEWS peer surveys, the grad-school feeder reports, and so on and so forth.</p>
<p>From Carolyn's link:</p>
<p>Larry Summers says, ""I'd like Harvard to look as much like America as possible."</p>
<p>I wonder if he means having science professors look like America, too?</p>
<p>As a Smith student who's taken two Amherst classes, I was really glad to see these articles. I'm incredibly proud to go to one of the most socioeconomically diverse (one point not mentioned in the article was that 19% of Smithies are in the first generation of their families to attend college) highly selective colleges in the country.</p>
<p>There are definitely tradeoffs--financial aid requirements mean less for other things, and I wish our ranking were higher--but I think I've been well-prepared for grad school (and have gotten into places I really want to go) and, more importantly, for working with a wider variety of people than I had been exposed to growing up in an affluent suburb or I would have met at most other schools.</p>
<p>Based on the multiple and very vocal accounts of parents and students, Smith demonstrates that the quality of education and the quality of the school experience cannot be expressed correctly in a ranking system. As niche players, the non-coed schools respond to different dynamics and should not be subject to the same measurements nor should "built-in" corrections or excuses be used to compensate for their lower selectivity. </p>
<p>The biggest disservice the US News report does to schools such as Smith, and to a lesser extent Wellesley, is maintaining them in the same category as the coed LACs.</p>
<p>"I still believe that the real debate should be about the Pell grantees OUTSIDE the most elite schools."</p>
<p>Hear, hear!</p>
<p>(But I think the all women's schools can stand up quite well ranking-wise - just not in USNWR. 14 undergraduate Fulbrights, 8 of them in research, compares quite favorable with AWS, HYP, Chicago, etc., and compared with the women at these other instititutions, there is barely a comparison to make. And these are judged by the faculty at other institutions - in other words, "peer assessments".)</p>
<p>There really is no reason why a prestige institution "should" resemble the society as a whole, or take on the burden of equalizing opportunity. Which is why I think what Amherst is doing is a terrific thing, even if I agree with Xiggi that this is not where the real battles need to be fought.</p>