are colleges lying about being need-blind?

Parents Forum
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<p>love columbia,</p>

<p>If you want to go to Columbia, apply to Columbia. Your need for financial aid will not work to your disadvantage. </p>

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you need to learn the difference between statistical significance and practical significance.

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newmassdad- Again with the shooting of the messenger. I will not respond to the ad hominem, or the patronizing tone. </p>

<p>In response to the substance, I suggest you read Equity and Excellence. It addresses the pools of students with Ivy-level academic credentials, and their family income distributions. </p>

<p>The academic credentials that predict college GPA- SAT I, SAT II, GPA, AP participation- ALL are corellated with SES, not just SAT I. You may not like this, but it is a fact. Colleges could ignore all of predictors, but doing so would produce classes with lower academic success. The authors of Equity in Excellence suggest they should tilt away from need blind and toward favoring those from less affluent backgrounds, but there is not evidence that this is what they are doing now.</p>

<p>It would be nice if equal academic credentials (with or without considering SAT 1) predicted higher performance from students with relatively lower incomes, but it does not. Before you open fire again, read the data.</p>

<p>Mini- If you look at the data you will see that, given equal application strengths, the need blind colleges do not favor the wealthier students in admissions. The problem is that there are far more wealthy than middle class or poor students who meet these standards. This is not my opinion, it is fact.</p>

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<p>"The academic credentials that predict college GPA- SAT I, SAT II, GPA, AP participation- ALL are corellated with SES, not just SAT I...Colleges could ignore all of predictors, but doing so would produce classes with lower academic success."</p>

<p>There you go again. </p>

<p>No one disagrees with the first sentence. But the issues are more complex than your simplistic sentence. The Issues are (i) to what degree are the measures correlated with SES and (ii) given a measure equally predictive and less correlated with SES, what additional predictive value does the more correlated measure have? Indeed,even the CB's own research shows that the ADDITIONAL predictive value of the SAT over HSGPA, for example, is virtually nil.</p>

<p>Regarding your second sentence, this is a conclusion that, again, is not well supported by the evidence. See, for example, the experience of colleges that dropped the SAT requirement. Because higher education does not tell us how they really make admissons decisions except for those schools making a radical change, such as dropping the SAT (or state schools with formula driven policies), we don't KNOW if they've done the experiment or not. </p>

<p>Geesh, afan, your arguments are starting to sound like Washington. Select only the data that fits. Repeat the theme frequently, whether or not it holds...</p>