These results are interesting considering that several elites (e.g. Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Stanford) offer full tuition waivers or even waivers of tuition and fees based on income and Emory doesn’t.
@BiffBrown : Those schools, especially those outside of HYPM with the really high SAT scores use their fin. aid to buy the wealthier/uppermiddle income students with high scores. Emory has always had a high amount of lower income students that get completely covered by Emory Advantage (which DOES cover you if you are below a threshold but the threshold is not as high as those and many other places) since its implementation in 2007. Emory actually spends a lot more on financial aid than one would think, but it is on the lower income students. Emory also increases access by targeting many Questbridge scholars. Many QB scholars have fairly high scores, but would not match in droves to the schools that desire a higher score range. Emory gives these folks a chance and it appears to pay off. It does this and performs solidly among its nearest peers which are a bit more selective score wise, even by metrics in that report, especially considering that Emory was hardly relevant when most people who were 34 at time of the study (2013? So they would be class of 2000-2001). Just shows that Emory is under-rated in many respects especially by those who currently attend (maybe ECAS was “technically” stronger in the 90s right where it got its R1 university status).
Like the article suggested, most elites give great fin. aid, but lack of access is at a premium when playing the ranking games. If you admit more from the bottom quintile or so, your score range and selectivity, used by many ranking metrics, and us (students at these schools and even super elites watch admissions numbers like hawks only hoping for admissions to eventually hit a 0% admit rate so they can brag about exclusivity and what it took to get in, which is usually a lot of luck perhaps more so than the hard work), will take a hit. We must admit that we quickly pass judgement on schools that are very selective but not as selective as peers; Basically, the idea that students at the school fall into range of what any academician would consider “academically elite” but for alum, applicants, etc…not academically elite enough to be taken serious versus peer schools. Emory is definitely that school now…the outcast that makes applicants wonder if it belongs in the elite, but other performance metrics suggests that the undergrad. program likely does and is willing to reconsider what constitutes “elite” students in order to increase access.
Emory doesn’t advertise itself as a school that actively recruits low and middle income students unlike some elites - Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, Amherst come to mind - that do and yet those other schools didn’t even crack the top ten percent.
Why doesn’t Emory advertise itself as such, I wonder?
Several of the schools that cracked the top 10, including Emory, have reputations as schools that cater to the very wealthy. Others that made the top 10 include Barnard, Vassar, Wellesley, NYU, Brandeis, Bryn Mawr. The disconnect between reputation and reality is jarring.
@BiffBrown: When have Americans, even those considering elite schools ever cared about “facts”? Once we look at the admission statistics and rank, when choosing a college, we tend more to go toward stereotypes (we then get on CC to see members of the student body at each confirm or deny certain stereotypes while citing no data and only using anecdotes). This relationship should have been obvious. Notice how all those schools are not the highest on the SAT/ACT latter and are still considered elite. SAT/ACT nicely correlate with income even within these elite brackets. The schools with the highest scores are also getting students from more wealthy families. They can take people’s attention from the latter by offering great financial aid to what normal Americans, or the government, would not consider middle income families (but those attending these schools, would because they are very expensive).
Similar data came out in 2011 as well (but was limited to I think the top 25-30 schools in USNWR. Harvard fared a bit better in that one). Also, Emory appears that it is more likely to mention this in academic circles than use it as a marketing tool. Emory is not HYP, using as a marketing tool is not going to draw more applicants (they are trying to get them from those who mostly have no shot based upon their score range and the like). Also, it is hardly a marketing tool when, still, the overwhelming majority of a student body attending or applying to these types of schools can care less about the odds of others gaining access and being able to pay. Those at the middle or even high end of the distribution at each school typically will care more about their own and the folks they know who will belong to the same or very close brackets. In addition let us be honest in recognizing that at these schools the stereotype on wealth is kind of connected to a stereotype about the ethnic make-ups of these schools. Remember the “JAP” comments and stereotypes about Emory in particular and maybe many of the schools you mention?
@bernie12 - It should be pointed out that the published data is nearly four years old by now. But, your point is well-taken, some of the colleges doing the most crowing about how “diverse” they’ve become are ridiculously wealthy institutions that are late to the game and under extreme pressure to spend down their endowments.
@circuitrider : Yes, this pretty much looks like the 2011 article with much more data being presented (to be blunt I don’t think much has changed in 4-5 years)…I wonder why they chose to compile this data and present it in this way now. The only thing I fear is that this data will be used to inaccurately compare output which may have changed quite a bit, especially at many of the newer elites including Emory. They will be looking at current data and comparing it to very old data. Basically you would be looking at the wealth of institutions and those who attended in 2012 versus those who are now age 34 or had been 34 at some point in time. The demographic and socioeconomic make up of the non-Ivy Plus (and maybe even Duke, though Duke was pretty far along even back then) elites has changed much more dramatically over that period. Some of these schools were not remotely considered among the elite back then (Emory was quite new to the AAU back then).
Speaking as the parent of a public-school-educated, lower middle class, work-study dependent Barnard grad… while a 15.3% enrollment of bottom 40% may be much better than peer institutions – when a student is in that echelon, surrounded by the 84.7% who come from the top 60% - it doesn’t feel like the school’s reputation of catering to the wealthy is at all misplaced. (And that upper 60% group definitely skews toward the richer end of the spectrum – Barnard is generous with need-based aid, but offers no merit aid --the net impact of that policy is to discourage enrollment of middle-class families with EFC’s in the range of 25K+, whose need-based offers at Barnard still leaves them paying well above the cost of attendance at public universities)
I’m glad to read that Barnard has been more economically diverse than many peer institutions – in the sense of knowing that my DD couldn’t have done any better elsewhere – but the financial disparities and the social/cultural expectations that went along with that were very pervasive.
Indeed it is, and I know exactly what you describe (it is what I experienced at Emory). Also, even if there were merit aid. Let us be honest and acknowledge that most merit aid based on incoming ability will go to those at the top of the income distribution. There may be more equity with internal scholarships given after matriculation, but I am still unsure as often lower income students may even face academic disadvantages in these environments for more reasons than lack of ability or motivation.
And yes, basically all of these schools, due to tremendous costs cater to the wealthy by default. In addition, most ranking metrics will facilitate this. Again, much need based aid and merit aid will go toward recruiting more well-off students than it will lower income. This also the disparate impact of the admissions standards and the standards used to measure " academic excellence" which, again, often involves MC test scores (which in some cases, at selective institutions, have been shown not to be very predictive or at least not make much of a difference. SAT optional selective institutions apparently did not see a shift in on-campus performance of student bodies, so there are apparently other ways to measure achievement that may lead to more access in terms of SES, but the ranking agencies and their importance will prevent any inclination for most elites to move toward score optional scheme).
Essentially, this data is interesting and nice, but if folks are truly interested in access and equity, exactly what are some solutions that would allow these places to also remain “elite”. They virtually run off tuition money to just break even (and usually that isn’t enough). To these places, access and equity is merely a PR strategy. Some try harder than others to achieve it, but most sacrifice to achieve it.
In more ways than you might think. For example, USNews uses spending per student as a kind of blunt value when the second biggest line item in most college budgets, after salaries, is so-called financial aid. Financial aid, in turn, is no more than the tuition a college fails to collect after charging as much as it possibly can to its wealthiest customers. It’s an accounting device, really. The higher the official tuition, the higher the college’s “discount rate” and metric boost on the most conspicuous input driven magazine poll out there.
I don’t think the numbers on the chart support the inference that Barnard is better at recruiting or financially supporting middle & low income students --15% is abysmally low, IMHO. Obviously better than many other elite schools… but still low.
I understand that elite schools need to admit a significant number of full pay students, and that is necessarily going to tilt toward wealthy … but I’d think that the elites with stronger endowments would do a better job of it. Barnard has a notoriously weak endowment, so I am not disdainful of Barnard… I’m just wondering why the others aren’t doing better. (It reminds me of the time in high school when my daughter was given an A+ on a math quiz where she only got 28% of the answers right; when I asked why, she told me that the teacher graded on a curve and the next best score was only 15%. So my question wasn’t why did my D do so well, but rather why all of the students collectively were doing so poorly.)
Actually, that page shows Barnard does even better than its peer institutions when you look at the percentage of student from the bottom 5th (the poorest group, family incomes under $20K) – there Barnard ranks second after UCLA, with 6.6% of students at that level.
It is mainly the cultural shock in addition to access to oppurtunities. Being at the elite aids in alleviating some of the latter issue, but there is no doubt that most students, who are much more wealthy, will have more connections. The cultural gap is difficult to close naturally.
“Recruiting”: The schools with super high SATs and use that to an extreme (a decent number of top 10s , namely Penn, Stanford, Duke, and JHU are exceptions because several of them are blessed have huge endowments and faculty compensation to help the ranking and those with weaker endowments like JHU have great peer evaluations/a nice halo effect due to the honest reality that the undergraduate programs are stronger than many schools that are technically more selective and administrators and faculty at peers know it. Still, in the top 10, only MIT does particularly well and I believe it being kind of a niche school that is super elite helps. It will get first pick and high scoring low income students which is how it maintains a super high score range and does “well” in this) in admissions for whatever reason (again, we know what it is) are just much less likely to have those at the bottom of the income scale simply because they are not admitted. They could be academically excellent, but just not enough to protect or enhance the score range (seriously, even some schools below 10 are very close to a 1500/1600 mean M/V! We know who two of them are and one just so happen to top the highest % of 1%ers and the other has the highest mean income I think. It is completely unnecessary to even succeed in difficult STEM majors at most of these places, but anything to give the appearance of meritocracy when the real goal is to boost the rank) so are more likely to be excluded. In addition, they would have to be paid for essentially. They would rather spend their money on those that do and they have every incentive to. Emory takes a risk, likely due to its current position where the selectivity isn’t going anywhere soon, and gladly admits many more QB scholars and Gates Scholars who are not statistical gold but are nonetheless excellent academically. It works for Emory even if it will not enhance its USNWR rank. I do not think Emory was like this before Emory Advantage days where it was faring decently with peers admissions wise in terms of playing the rankings game (which it still is, but I think there is more focus on retention and graduation rate as that is more controllable than say yield when you are in a tough spot popularity and rank wise).