"This takes my breath away for its broad understanding of some of the distinct differences in how students are challenged, called upon to meet the challenge, and, (likely to be) received. Not news, but a cold and sobering reminder of the chasms that exist.
Not looking favorably at work experience or caring for a relative? No human value to valuing the humans nearest to us? So the kids must care for the ailing across the world, but not the old grandmother at the back of the apartment?"
Of course elite colleges value the student who had to work at McDonalds and use the money to help pay the family rent, or watch seven siblings and grandma while mom does the night shift at the diner. Why would you think they’d be naive about life?
"No to mention that sometimes these activities require transportation not accessible to these students. "
Frankly lots of ECs require transportation options that not everyone else has. Not every suburban kid has his own car or a stay at home parent to play chauffeur either. Let’s say my kids had gotten an opportunity to work at Fermilab or Argonne in the Chicago area. They couldn’t have done so without their very own car or a parent with no life who could chauffeur them back and forth. It’s blindingly evident only the very privileged can do some of these things.
Article is poorly written & researched. The author uses the issue of a student needing a fee waiver for the application as evidence that colleges know if students will get FA… A LOT of students will get FA that do not qualify for a fee waiver.
Luckily the alumni interview is probably the least important part of the application.
I also believe that Admissions Committees definitely value work experience, and probably value caring for a relative though they may need to be sold on it. This is certainly where a kid should not be shy about making sure the GC knows their family circumstances. I have a friends whose daughter’s essay was about what she learned from scooping ice cream at the local Carvell’s.
^^working retail is a wonderful character builder, and can be particularly helpful to admissions if there is family need – worked to help the family pay bills - as opposed to working retail so the student could earn the in-store discount to buy more ‘stuff’.
My kids needed financial aid. Borderline Pell-eligible. My daughter had excellent grades, middling test scores, and a quirky high school record. White kid, both parents have law degrees - so no affirmative action boost. She applied to need-blind reach colleges in the RD round, and was accepted to several where her test scores put her at the bottom quartile (1200 SAT, 27 ACT). Two that accepted her were Barnard and Chicago; Barnard was a preferred choice and offered better financial aid, so that’s where she ended up. If the schools had been weighing or considering need… well they must have really liked her to be willing to throw all that grant money in our direction.
The need-blind schools have other ways of controlling who they admit. Many accept a large proportion of students via binding ED, a process that most students with financial need wisely shy away from. SAT scores don’t tell the colleges a damn thing about the student’s abilities that wouldn’t be readily apparent from other information - but they are an excellent rough proxy for income levels. There are all sorts of holistic factors that are highly favored by colleges but also tend to be tied to family wealth – attendance at expensive private feeder schools; long-term participation in expensive sports or hobbies, etc. They also can be “need blind” during the regular admissions round but very much need-aware when going to their wait lists.
The schools want full pay students AND they want students with need. If their stats show that 45% of their students have need and that their average need-based grant is $30K - the number crunchers want to take in that 45% just as much as they want the 55% who are full pay. To the college, the financial aid budget is a line item on the budget that needs to be spent just as any other item.
Yes, I’m well aware of the Chicago Scholars program. It’s a great program for the students who benefit from it. A few other cities have similar programs. Most don’t. It’s the kind of showcase “feel-good” program that elite colleges can participate in to salve their conscience because they manage to recruit a small handful of low SES students without putting much effort into it, and without putting any real dent in the affluent skew of their own student body, or in meeting the unmet need of low-SES students.
Look at the numbers. According to its website Chicago Scholars has placed about 1400 Chicago Public Schools graduates in colleges since it launched several (3?) years ago… That sounds impressive, but it is probably somewhere between 1 and 2% of CPS graduates over that time (about 20,000 per year). Concededly, many CPS graduates aren’t college-ready. I don’t know how many CPS graduates end up in college without going through Chicago Scholars (the Chicago Scholars website itself says it’s 14% of CPS graduates), and I don’t know how many of those who do go through Chicago Scholars would have ended up in college even without the Chicago Scholars program, but let’s just say, being generous, that relative to the 60,000 students CPS has graduated in the last 3 years, Chicago Scholars has helped at most a few hundred get into college who otherwise might not have had that opportunity. And this is in the third-largest school district in the U.S. Again, absolutely great for those few hundred, but it does little to change the SES profile of elite colleges, and it addresses at best a tiny fraction of the need of CPS graduate, much less low-SES graduates of cities or rural areas that don’t have such organized programs.
And where do those few hundred go? Well, mostly not to elite colleges. Again, according to the Chicago Scholars website, 194, or nearly 15% of participants to date, have gone to Chicago City Colleges, the city’s open enrollment community colleges. Good for them; there’s no shame in it, and many people are able to parlay that into meaningful careers and/or transfer admission to 4-year colleges. But this is hardly elite education. Local 4-year schools have taken a bunch: UIC 96, DePaul 49, Loyola 42, Lake Forest College 22, IIT 18, Northeastern Illinois 18, Illinois State 17, Columbia College-Chicago 16, Knox College 14, Dominican 12, Eastern Illinois 12, Roosevelt 10, That’s somewhere around 330, or about 25% of the total. Again, all good, but hardly elite.
Now to their credit, the local elite privates have pitched in: Northwestern with 40 and the University of Chicago with 26 together account for just under 5% of placements. The in-state public flagship, UIUC, has been a monster supporter of the program, taking 146, or well over 10% of all the CPS grads placed through Chicago Scholars. Several other Big Ten schools have pitched in as well: Wisconsin 21, Iowa 15, Michigan 12.
The Ivies? Not so much. Harvard (7), Yale (6), Brown (6), Penn (5), Princeton (4), Cornell (4), Dartmouth (3), and Columbia (0) collectively accounted for 35 placements. Out of 60,000 CPS graduates over a 3-year period. Again, absolutely terrific for those 35 students, but but this hardly counts as a major inner-city recruiting drive. As I said, window-dressing. And in most inner cities, and in every low-income rural area I am aware of, elite colleges don’t make even this much effort…
The idea that elite colleges are beating the bushes, scouring the nation for qualified low SES students is nonsense. If a low SES application from a qualified student comes their way, it is more typically through the heroic efforts of caring inner city volunterers or the few organizations that try to help these kids, and then yes they will eagerly accept those students.
Colleges engage in heavy marketing campaigns promising amazing financial aid to those in need, and I have seen it claimed that they do this to “reach out” to low income students to encourage them to apply regardless of their financial circumstances. This is BS. By and large, the inner city kids are not the ones getting these glossy brochures. The real purpose of these marketing efforts is to encourage as many applicants as possible to apply - qualified or not- so that they can brag about how they had 100,000 applicants this year! For only 2000 spots! We are so selective, and so generous! We meet everyone’s full need! We can meet yours too…so please apply!
@bclintonk - Regarding the numbers, I do not know if Chicago Scholars includes the CPS magnets schools that shipon off the best CPS kids. Unfortunately, aside from a handful of magnet schools, CPS is an academic wasteland, and the yield rates you describe are not surprising given the poor quality of student and teacher found in the CPS.
However, elite schools desperately want minority kids. Some reports maintain that being AA is the equivalent of adding 250+ SAT points to your applicable, while for Hispanics the figure is around 150+ SAT points. If elite schools did not want a diverse class, they wouldn’t be picking lower quality AA and Hispanic applicants over better qualified Caucasian or Asian applicants. The problem is that there are so few qualified AA and Hispanic applicants to begin with.
I can’t speak to what’s going on in Chicago, but I’m not sure how much beating the bushes you expect from the colleges themselves, on top of what they currently do. And remember, the tippy tops aren’t able to take all kids on some wing and a prayer. They’re looking for the ones who have the potential to succeed, as evidenced. Yes, some of this is a slow process. As is often said, if one is so opposed to Ivy practices, leave them off your list.
"Now to their credit, the local elite privates have pitched in: Northwestern with 40 and the University of Chicago with 26 together account for just under 5% of placements. The in-state public flagship, UIUC, has been a monster supporter of the program, taking 146, or well over 10% of all the CPS grads placed through Chicago Scholars. Several other Big Ten schools have pitched in as well: Wisconsin 21, Iowa 15, Michigan 12.
The Ivies? Not so much"
In all fairness, if you’re a lower income kid in Chicago and you’ve never so much as been on a plane, you wouldn’t be itching to move to Massachusetts or Connecticut or Pennsylvania, which might as well be Mars as far as you’re concerned. Especially because it’s not as though there are opportunities in Chicago that are open only to Harvard/Yale/Princeton grads that are closed to U of Chicago/Northwestern grads.
Aren’t there similar programs in Boston, NYC, Philadelphia and so forth that then disproportionately pull from the elite schools in those cities / metropolitan areas? I know you know that all catchments are regional
Chicago Scholars does not just pull from CPS public but all Chicago schools, including parochial and charter. They state scholars come from 109 different high schools so my guess is that while Payton et. al. are represented, there are many other Payton, Northside, etc. students who are also going to college but not through the program. So this is not a good representation of CPS or even Chicago college admissions.
I do note that 94% of scholars are the first in their family to go to college, so as a proxy for first-gen it seems good.
To be honest, the vast majority of the very low SES, inner city kids I have worked with would have a very difficult time competing at an elite academic college even if all expenses were paid with a stipend to boot. This is very sad to me, because so many of these kids really are “diamond in the rough” bright and want to succeed. We tend to try to focus them on local opportunities and getting their feet wet at community colleges, etc.
I am not blaming elite colleges for focusing their marketing efforts elsewhere. I would not even know how to begin to fix the inner city educational problems. They are vast and complicated.
I’m just saying it’s a bunch of malarkey when such colleges say they are expending great effort to reach out to these kids; I simply have not seen it and so I am calling BS on colleges who claim to be doing so much to find and help these kids. They do seem to love it and embrace it when it falls in their laps, but it’s just “window dressing” as @bclintonk says. I do see enormous marketing efforts targeted at increasing applications to their schools, but in my view this has nothing to do with attracting low income kids.
15% of Harvard students are first generation. I think that is a pretty impressive number.
But recognize that the number of kids equal to 15% of Harvard’s enrollment is miniscule. Programs trying to get extremely low SES kids into extremely elite colleges are always going to be tiny. They are cultivating unicorns.
The diamonds in the rough deserve shot at a college that will empower them educate them, and bring them the skills needed to succeed in life- in general, that is, not making every one of them a surgeon or banker. The whole process is slow because accumulating role models takes time as one generation influences the next, more of them. And there really is no saying which colleges that will be- it may be a community college or directional. Nothing says all kids have to go to an elite to achieve a better future.
But the elites know what it takes to succeed at their schools- and those are the traits they seek. The competition isn’t just for an admit, it’s also about the level of peer prep once you are there, the level of classes and the assumed knowledge a kid brings, and professor expectations. Where do you want them to focus their marketing? Isn’t is on Johnny and Susie who face challenges in their personal and school lives, but have been testing themselves academically and winning and also who have also been out in their communities testing the rest of their mettle? The diamonds who already have vision and plenty of drive? When you’ve got as much as 40k applications from top performers, these colleges aren’t summer programs to “introduce” kids to fiercely competitive academics.
@lookingfoward, this is going off topic to the point of this thread, but to answer your question, I have an aversion to the “arms race” of application-mongering that has been going on for the past few years by many, many colleges with big marketing budgets (this is not particular to elite colleges).
The point seems to be to get every Tom, Dick and Harry to apply with promises in glossy brochures of “we want you!” coupled with promises of wonderful financial aid that is overstated or misleading or subject to holistic review that may or may not serve the needs of many applicants (read: middle class, $75-100k income/low asset, family business, divorced parents, etc.)
Meanwhile, the Common App has made it easier for kids to throw out a bunch of “why not” applications, sending in double digit applications. The colleges’ selectivity rating goes up, which is a valuable metric to many ratings organizations, but now your typical ACT 24-28 applicants find themselves having to apply to an ever-increasing number of colleges because what used to be safeties are now maybes; what used to be maybes are now reaches; what used to be reaches are now very unlikely. I don’t think, today, I would be admitted to the colleges I attended. I don’t even think my oldest would qualify for his college anymore. The numbers keep shifting. To make it all worse, college prices keep going up, financial aid is a shell game where the final costs are not revealed to the applicant until just before decision time (i.e., POST- application), and many applicants are very unsure of how to proceed.
Sites like CC help a lot; but we are kidding ourselves if we think most people out there have ever even heard of CC.
So here’s the malarkey: many elite colleges claim that the reason for some of this marketing is to try to reach out to the poor and underprivileged; to let the less fortunate know that, yes, they too can afford X college because the aid will be fantastic. This is what I find to be so disingenuous. While getting their word out to the common joe may be a side benefit of their marketing, I believe the true purpose is to keep those application numbers going up up up. To feed the arms race, so to speak, which serves nobody but the ratings game. I’d love to see a college just honestly admit, yup, we are sending out all this stuff to increase applications this year!
Rant over. Sorry for disrupting the thread, but…you asked. And, no, I offer no solution. I pessimistically do not believe that anything is going to change these unsavory aspects of marketing higher education to the masses.
Getting back to the thread, I do not think that colleges are “need blind” because I don’t think it is possible for human application readers to ignore the obvious signs of privilege or the obvious signs of lack thereof when reading an application. This has nothing to do with “checking the box” on the Common App.
I do think that the better colleges seek to craft their incoming classes to include a diverse community, which includes rich and poor, and I for one appreciate those efforts. So, to the extent that the better colleges actively seek out Johnny and Susie who have faced challenges and overcome nonetheless, that is a wonderful thing.
@pizzagirl, the margins are tiny, minuscule even, at the top 50 spots. Every little bit helps. There are threads on this very forum devoted to figuring out who might move up or down a whole spot. Selectivity isn’t the only important thing, but it is a metric and it matters to them.
I can only speak as an insider on Brown so forgive me if the comments are not generic to all schools which have experienced a surge in applications/popularity.
Brown actually published admissions stats on their website (I haven’t checked to see if they still do) which had a pretty granular breakdown of who gets in- and importantly, who doesn’t get in. Vals have a higher admissions rate than non-Vals. Yup, makes sense. Kids with 780-800 SAT scores have a higher admission rate than kids with 680-720. Yup, makes sense.
And yet every year when I interviewed (I no longer do) I was flabbergasted by the very marginal kids who “bought their lottery ticket”. Nice kids with good transcripts and lovely EC’s who didn’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell- and this was several years ago before the admissions rates really became insane. But a B average is not an A. And 680 SAT’s after multiple tries is not a 780. And taking piano for a few years is not the same as playing in a highly regarded youth orchestra or composing a concerto which is being performed by a major symphony.
What were these kids thinking? What were their guidance counselors thinking? What a waste of time and effort.
And then- occasionally- I’d interview a kid who was just superlative in every way. First Gen- had never heard of Brown- assumed he’d be going to the local community college and hoped to become a pharmacy tech. It was not my job to probe his SES but it was clear that he came from a disadvantaged family. But he was awesome, and his work ethic was awesome, and his teachers thought he was awesome, and his guidance counselor had received a glossy viewbook and thought this kid would be a fantastic candidate for the accelerated Bachelors/MD program and made him apply.
And he is now a doctor, not a pharmacy tech.
I have a handful of such stories which could make you cry, and really, it validates all the time and energy the volunteers put into interviewing the nice but academically below the bar kids who can’t be bothered to look on the chart and realize that their grades and scores and National Honor Society and playing an ok game of tennis is not going to get them in. And I surmise that the university has done the math, and figured out that despite the public criticism of trying to expand the application pool, it’s worth it if every year you manage to get a couple of these unbelievable, high financial need/extraordinary potential kids to show up in Providence ready to take on the world. The alumni magazine does a wonderful job of highlighting these kids accomplishments and it is so humbling.
So sure. Be cynical. Yes, some of the endless marketing is self-serving, but really- is there anyone deluded enough in Winnetka or Atherton to think that their B+ kid with the 650 SAT scores who volunteers at an animal shelter one day a week is somehow going to get into Brown? And yet they apply- and get rejected- and the cycle continues. But occasionally an awesome kid shows up who has had nothing given to them and has had to work for every single opportunity- and managed to be a voracious intellectual despite growing up in a home with few books and nobody driving them to SAT tutoring. So yeah- then it’s worth it.
