<p>“I wonder if what I see as a heightened concern about elite college admissions is somehow tied to increasing concerns about economic disparity between classes in this country?”</p>
<p>To me, they are linked. With the focus on world class extracurriculars and college level courses at kindergarten, the rich obviously have an advantage. With the emphasis on holistic admissions and recommendations from the right school, the same exacerbates. To call a trip to a foreign country an “enrichment experience” paid for by rich parents (or strugglig middle class/poor parents) is obscene in my book. </p>
<p>The more the elite colleges focus on that instead of just plain high school academics (as, for example, the more socialist Europeans do, with standardized tests across the country) the more the middle class and the poor will fall back further. This in turn is a vicious cycle which further widens the income inequality and education gap. I worry about it.</p>
<p>Since I’m not good at socratic method and didn’t study logic, I’m just jumping ahead to ask:</p>
<p>Why then does it even make sense for the doughnut hole class (full pay to privates but with great economic hardship) to spend their kids’ childhood prepping for elite college admissions. What happens if they all decide tomorrow to only send their kids to their state flagships? What sorts of opportunities do their kids lose? Do they lose any? Does this change the state flagships?</p>
<p>eta: I see a difference between educating a child and prepping a child for elite college admissions. There is some overlap, but depending on the individual child maybe not a whole lot.</p>
<p>I think the answer is that they don’t know until a few years before college admissions how unaffordable it is going to be. They think their 7-year-old will be a star soccer player, or their preteen will be a future math olympiad winner, and they do their best to give her whatever advantages they can.</p>
<p>But again, there is regionality to this. The smart kid in Oklahoma may grow up knowing he is going to spend time as a Sooner on his way to whatever success he may achieve.</p>
<p>It depends on area of study and calibre of the flagship. Someone graduating in computer science from Georgia Tech probably doesn’t have a lot to worry about vis-a-vis someone graduating in theater arts from Yale, as far as future earnings potential is concerned (assume similar educational performance for both). However, someone graduating in mathematics from Harvard probably has an edge over someone graduating in mathematics from UMass Boston.</p>
<p>But then earnings potential is not everything.</p>
<p>Also, just to clarify, you do believe the Ivies should be trying to find and recruit low SES students? Should they be held to the same sorts of admissions standards as the high SES students? Or should they get some sort of mentoring and special help because the potential is there, it just hasn’t been nourished?</p>
<p>“you do believe the Ivies should be trying to find and recruit low SES students? Should they be held to the same sorts of admissions standards as the high SES students? Or should they get some sort of mentoring and special help because the potential is there, it just hasn’t been nourished?”</p>
<p>I do believe that elite colleges (and not just Ivies) should aim for a proportional distribution by SES. However, I do not believe that they should lower admissions standards to achieve that. Which means that I don’t know how they can solve the problem of low-SES representation, as SES is the #1 marker for K-12 academic performance. I hope, however, that social and political scientists do find a solution to this problem, hopefully in my lifetime.</p>
<p>Could you please explain what you mean when you say “I do not believe they should lower admissions standards”? How are you defining “admissions standards” especially since they are holistic?</p>
<p>ETA: I used “admissions standards” first and didn’t define them. I think you probably understand my question, though, and can elaborate and explain your thoughts. Thank you in advance for taking the time to answer.</p>
<p>I was not talking about the current admissions system, which does take into account SES, and handicaps academic and extracurricular performance by that. I prefer the Caltech system (never went there, never had a relative there, completely unbiased) where race or gender or SES doesn’t matter. I would like all US colleges to adopt such a system. But at the same time I would also want a proportional distribution by race, gender, and SES. These two personal goals as US demographics stands now are incompatible. Hence my dilemma. </p>
<p>Social science problems are hard, very hard to solve. I guess for the time being I prefer the holistic admissions system, but I also know the level of dropouts is extremely high among those that came in through that route. Can colleges solve that through additional coaching? May be, but as case examples show, it doesn’t seem to make much of a dent. Once you are behind you are behind. Perhaps a 6 year undergraduate is the answer, with the first two years of college being the remedy for a disadvantaged K-12 system.</p>
<p>Truth be told though, I don’t know the answer.</p>
<p>SAT is useful to some extent, I think. But if we are talking about using it as the academic qualification for screening applicants for the very top colleges, its ceiling is just too low, assuming that we are talking about top 5 colleges in the US News and Report ranking here. The difficulty of getting into a top-5 could be quite different from that for a top-20. This is where the admission criteria are becoming opaque and hard to decipher - thus, the saying: they are the lottery schools.</p>
<p>BTW, my child grew up in S and we always thought he would go to some good college in S when he was growing up. We did not “prep” him intentionally for any NE elite college - we even purchased pre-paid public college plan for our in-state public. But he ended up attending a NE school. We are neither a low SES family nor a high SES. With only one income, we actually are in the lower range of donut hole. It has been a challenge for us to send him to a NE school. A CCer said that we were “crazy” to spend so much money to send him there. It is still not easy for us to “explain” to ourselves or others clearly why we chose to do this 8+ years ago - his post-college education was in NE too. (Maybe for us, the NE school does have some unexplainable “fatal attraction.”)</p>
<p>^ Maybe too many Asian Americans there? Those students tend to fare not as well if the evaluation process is more holistics. There is a chance that many of their parents are new immigrants and a quite high percentage of these parents have not learned the rope of the college application yet so the students need to rely more on test scores, GPAs, rather than “catchy” ECs.</p>
<p>Well…some may argue that the Asian American students are obsessed with STEM majors, just like their similarly aged students who still live in Asian countries (look at the Olympaid results for US teams, especially the chemistry ones, in recent years!) so this Caltech naturally has a higher share of them.</p>
<p>Another reason why southerners are underrepresented
H is a southerner who went to college in the NE. He said the main reason southerners don’t leave the south is that they dislike the cold. If a kid said he was going to college up north, or someone talked about taking a job and moving to Chicago or NY, the first response from southern friends was always: “Oh, but it’s soooo COLD up there!”
(. . ".and sooo full of LIBERALS! " )</p>
<p>I live in the midwest and no one feels at all disadvantaged or missing opportunities by going to our top two state universities. They are best for local connections, have honors programs which regularly recruit top students, the price is right and close to family. Many of their parents went there and are very successful. </p>
<p>Some of the alleged advantages of elite private schools have to do with networking. A high concentration of talented, affluent, geographically diverse students could be said to make a college a better meet market. If all those talented, affluent kids suddenly shifted to a state flagships, some of those advantages would move with them. So too would their pushy, affluent, well-connected parents, who presumably would advocate more strongly for more funding to state schools, smaller classes, better facilities, etc. But then, the state schools would become more selective. More of the doughnut hole class would be prepping their kids for elite state college admissions (as some of them must already be doing in places like Northern Virginia.) </p>
<p>regarding #844, I am agreeing with the basics of the argument to advance the discussion. In real life, I know young people whose earning potential seems unrelated to course of major or study, since they aren’t in the fields they majored in and sometimes are in jobs which didn’t exist when they started college. They are doing very well financially. These students are elite college graduates but that is mainly the young people in this age group I know well. Those I know well from state flagships (my many cousins) study to be doctors, lawyers, engineers and stay in those fields. I find it difficult to believe state school graduates aren’t also doing well-paying jobs which didn’t exist a few years back. Or that some in either group don’t end up working in jobs they didn’t directly train for, but which did exist. JHS frequently gives examples of this for elite school grads among his acquaintance.</p>
<p>I do agree “earning potential isn’t everything” - emphatically. But have had the luxury of never having had to worry about a roof over my head or where my next meal will come from. </p>
<p>I don’t know how you define “liberal” but there are many, living in the south, who self-define as “liberal” and spend the majority of their time working for political and/or social change. Being an “out” liberal in the south and just interacting in a good neighbor sort of way with your local community has the potential, right there, to create change. I am running into more and more liberals of my generation who felt they had to leave and are now returning. What would the south be like now if none of us had ever left? I am certainly not faulting those who left because of death threats or fear of violence or lack of economic opportunities due to race, gender, sexual orientation. But the south is different now than in our childhoods, and we let someone else do all that heavy lifting. I am increasingly grateful to those who stuck around.</p>
<p>I understand we may mean very different things by “liberal” and I surely don’t want to get into politics and close the thread. I don’t think I have anything else to add anyway. This has been a very enjoyable and enlightening thread to me. </p>
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