<p>Earning 60K in NY and owning a home on Long Island will get you squat at Amherst!</p>
<p>
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Earning 60K in NY and owning a home on Long Island will get you squat at Amherst!
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That's bull. As I pointed out before, Amherst uses consensus methodology and caps home equity at 2.4% times income -- so a maximum of $144K for the $60K earner. That means that the family can live in an inherited mansion and their house only adds $8000 overall to their EFC. </p>
<p>$8000 is nice chunk of change - as I noted before, it will cost the family $100/month to borrow that with a PLUS loan..... but the bottom line is that anyone who owns a home on Long Island is better off than a renter.</p>
<p>Any one with a serious interest in making college and university populations more representative of the country as a whole has to oppose the use of legacy preferences in admissions. To do otherwise is totally hypocritical.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Only 7%? Why is this category not applying to Amherst?
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First of all, less than 50% of Amherst students even qualify for aid. So we are talking 14.5% of the financial aid recipients. Mini doesn't cite his source for the income distribution -- but assuming his numbers to be correct we have:
That means, using Mini's numbers, 14.5% overall of accepted students are in the middle to upper middle quintile. </p>
<p>However, I think Mini is making a false assumption about the income level of Pell grant recipients. My daughter has a Pell grant, and I earn more than $40K. How can that be? Two kids in college simultaneously. Is my EFC/halving strategy of having multiple children close in age rare? Probably not -- I think we can safely assume that at least a quarter of the Pell grant recipients actually have middle incomes, along with 2 or more college-age kids. So then maybe it's more like 18% overall of the Amherst student body in the 2nd & 3rd quintile -- a 3rd of financial aid recipients. What is really rather amazing, I think, is that Amherst can give half of its financial aid to families earning $92K and above, and still be giving incoming students average grants of $33K -- that looks to me like you would have to have some generous aid policies overall to come up with those numbers. </p>
<p>However, if you look at the COFHE colleges overall- of which Amherst is 1 college of 28 - the stats don't support an assumption that the "upper middle" group are getting squeezed out - rather it seems from those stats that among the lowest 4 quintiles, the enrollment of the 2nd & 3rd quintile is almost twice that of the bottom 2 -- (10% overall in the bottom 2, 7% of students coming from the $41-$61K range, and 11% from the $62-$91 range). See Table 2 at <a href="http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ff0615S.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ff0615S.pdf</a> </p>
<p>Mini for some reason has included top quintile earners above $91K in the financial aid group -- I guess because Amherst is generous with aid to high income families -- whereas my chart doesn't show who gets aid, so basically we see that 70% of students at elite colleges are from the top quintile of earners -- and only by extrapolation do we conclude that 15-20% of those families get some sort of financial help from their colleges, depending on overall percentage of aid recipients. </p>
<p>So now we have a different picture entirely. It's damn difficult for people in the lower 4 quintiles of earners to get into an elite school -- but among the group that does --- 62% of them come from the two middle & upper-middle quintiles Mini identified. </p>
<p>So what is "wrong" with the picture again? The way I look at it, the financial aid system still isn't doing enough to bring in bottom quintile groups -- for those with incomes above $41K, the higher the income, the more likely the student is to take up the offer of admission to a COFHE school. Or maybe they just don't get in a the same rate -- Table 1 of the report I referenced shows SAT scores as correlated to income. </p>
<p>(Table 1 would also indicate that if COFHE schools accepted kids by their SAT scores alone, then there would be a significant fall off in upper income kids --20% of the overall student body now in the top quintile group would shift to lower quintiles. I'm figuring that's where ED comes in at the "need-blind" schools -- it attracts and locks in the full pay kids.)</p>
<p>Anyway, looking at those numbers I just don't see the same picture. The difference between my numbers and Mini's, at this point, is that I have provided the source of mine.</p>
<p>I have lost track - does anyone have clue as to what the percentage of <em>applicants</em> is at the 40-90K level?</p>
<p>"That's bull. As I pointed out before, Amherst uses consensus methodology and caps home equity at 2.4% times income -- so a maximum of $144K for the $60K earner. That means that the family can live in an inherited mansion and their house only adds $8000 overall to their EFC."</p>
<p>Putting all this aside, what Amherst and other colleges do that require the Profile is not take into account what a parent does for a living. When a parent has a job that requires a great deal of physical strength, how much longer are they going be able to do that job especially if they are requiring them to borrow HUGE amounts of money to pay for college? I can tell you one thing if you are a fin aid officer or teacher or someone who has a job that you can sit on your a** all day, you can work up til the age of 65 or older. But others doing work that is more physcially demanding, will have a harder time.</p>
<p>"Those kids wouldn't be going to the elites in any case, but I can see why they might wish they could go to a Fordham rather than a SUNY."</p>
<p>I am sick and tired of people knocking SUNY schools when they know diddly about them.</p>
<p>"Unfortunately, that really isn't much different than the problem faced all along, when the option was sending kids to the local public school with all its ills rather than the nicer, cleaner, more attractive private school over the hill. Private education is essentially a perk of being well-to-do; the exceptions are almost always based on some sort of merit (with merit including athletic prowess) that is sufficient to motivate the private school to subsidize a certain percentage of its students."</p>
<p>You see, I have had to hear from the many in my town of how their kid goes to this private or that private putting down the public schools in our area. Well why these people were paying their kids way through private HS, my kid and all their friends were kicking their butts on the AP's, SAT's etc. These kids were boasting of their rankings and GPA's in their privates but when that SAT rolled around not one could get over an 1100!</p>
<p>Calmom used Hill and Winston's article to support the claim that the upper middle group are not getting squeezed out. However that is not Hill and Winston's position. This is clear if we look at a more detail paper on the same subject by the same authors.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.williams.edu/wpehe/DPs/DP-69.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.williams.edu/wpehe/DPs/DP-69.pdf</a></p>
<p>If we considered the super high ability student, those scoring 1600 in SAT, they claimed “it is the middle and upper middle income students who are markedly under-represented while those from the highest income families are over-represented at these schools.” (p 8). Using a more reasonable figure of SAT cutoff of 1300, it “shows that all but the highest income students at that ability level are under-represented.”</p>
<p>Page 22-23 includes tables showing what the distribution should be vs. the actual distribution in COFHE schools. The lower middle, middle and upper middle incomes students are always under-represented regardless of how high ability students are defined (as long as the cutoff point is above 1100).</p>
<p>Janesmom, I don't know what your problem is -- I was not "knocking" SUNY schools, I was merely responding to another post about the affordability of colleges for families where the kids were unlikely to get into Amherst or an equivalent school. I mentioned Fordham as an example of a highly regarded but not overly selective private college where a B+ student might reasonably expect to be accepted but probably would not qualify for a significant amount of merit aid. </p>
<p>My kids went to public schools and my son is currently attending an instate public university. My daughter happens to be at a private college with very generous financial aid. Between the time that my son went to college and my daughter applied, my income went down by about $15-$20K annually, but my assets increased dramatically due to a small inheritance. But my EFC for my daughter is far less than it was for my son. It is very obvious to me that the financial aid system is weighted toward current income and not assets, so there is no penalty or downside whatsoever to saving and trying to accumulate as much as possible in the years preceding college.</p>
<p>..........</p>
<p>Bomgeedad, I don't understand what your point of disagreement with me is. We both agree that richest fifth of students is over-represented -- I was taking issue with Mini's claim that the 2nd and 3rd levels were under-represented as compared to the bottom 2 levels. Mini's stats are not reflected in the data in my chart - so either Amherst has a very different statistical profile than the average, or Mini mistakenly misread the 7% that applies to the 3rd quintile as including the next higher quintile as well, accidentally overlooking the other 11%. </p>
<p>The report you cite confirms that overall, the bottom 4 groups are under-represented, and the claimed underrepresented of the upper middle group comes only with a somewhat tortured use of SAT scores, setting an artificially high cutoff score. The article you cite goes into some detail to dispense with that argument - basically showing that the majority of COFHE schools do in fact accept many students with lower scores. </p>
<p>The article you cite ALSO claims that affordability is not a factor as to enrollment, mistakenly assuming that the financial aid given to all students is adequate:
[quote]
Most of these schools practice “need blind admission with full need financial aid” with the result that the price actually paid for tuition, room, board and fees by students from the poorest families (those earning under $24,000 in 2001 in our data) was sometimes less than $1,000 a year despite a mean sticker price of $33,831. On average, over all 28 schools, their net price was $7,552, before considering loans and jobs – less than the average price of a public four-year college.... So the affordability of these schools is not likely to be an important reason for their meager proportions of low-income students .... At these wealthiest schools, it is generally true that a student who can get in, can afford to go.
[/quote]
That statement is obviously an erroneous assumption -- the measure of "affordability" is not what public colleges charge to full payers, and I think that most families with under $24K income would find $7550 a very daunting figure. If anything, the system favors middle class homeowners over lower income families simply because we have better credit, more assets, and therefore stronger borrowing power. (The complaints on this board from upper middle class posters about the financial aid system always seems to come down to unwillingness to take on debt). </p>
<p>However, I was looking at the chart for the raw data -- not the arguments that might be framed as to how it got that way. The data shows that as between the four lower quintiles, enrollment is highest at the upper end. Mini was suggesting that there was some sort of fall off or gap at the middle, with more low-income enrollees -- but the stats I'm looking don't show that.</p>
<p>I still don't get it. I own my home outright, am in that magical 7%, and Amherst used the same figures that all the other schools did for my EFC. They added things I would never have considered in their list of expenses. And we received 10K per year more last year, than any other school D applied to, and this year, the amount increased. I still say that the reason the amount of middle class students attending is so small is because they are simply NOT APPLYING. And the reason they are not applying is because of this urban myth that the FA at Amherst is terrible. Well, you couldn't tell that by me. D even received a full tuition merit aid scholarship from American, and that would have cost me more than the FA offered by Amherst. At the new student orientation we attended last year, the Dean said that they do everything to avoid having to use federal funds, because if they did, then the school would be locked into the FAFSA EFC, which he said was antiquated and hadn't been updated for many years. The only students they get federal funds for are the students who qualify for Pell grants, because their EFC is so low. All others they use Amherst scholarhsips and grants. Yes, there are loans, but they keep those to a minimum. If D didn't have a couple very small scholarships, she would have left Amherst with about 12K in loans, which is much less than most people here talk about. And her loans at the state U would have been around 40K. So, please, let's not keep this urban legend going, and let the kids apply, see what their FA is, then make their decision.</p>
<p>Can anyone tell me if there is a web site that will give a reasonably accurate estimate of the EFC using the "consensus methodology" that many of you have referred to?</p>
<p>Like others who have mentioned this, I cannot quote statistics on the subject, but my daily experience over the last 5 yrs. gives me the sense of ejr's post #73: the lack of application to expensive privates because of perceived FA & qualification for that. But I think it's also a little beyond that; I think it may depend on the ratio between the options for an "affordable" public and the effort assumed to apply for F.A. for Privates.</p>
<p>When you live in any State with an excellent University system, combine that with middle income, combine that with whatever mythology makes a family assume unaffordability: these can deter from choosing a Private route. The belief that "it's really, really hard" to qualify for aid (& do the necessary paperwork) is another hurdle. It would be interesting to know application numbers (not raw numbers, but percentages of h.s. seniors, from CA,VA, Mich, & TX in the middle income ranges being discussed) vs. students from other States.</p>
<p>It's so nice when people put LINKS to the article!!!</p>
<p>calmom--</p>
<p>I've been away while this thread came back to life :)</p>
<p>When you say that the institutional methodology caps the home equity available at a multiple of income, do the calculators at finaid.com do this? That could make a huge difference for us.</p>
<p>Some here got the impression that I thought schools such as Amherst should subsidize my kid's education because I don't want to spend down my assets. Believe me, I understand that I am making a personal decision about how much to spend down, and my kid has plenty of choices that don't involve more than $25 K per year. I'm not expecting anything--my point in contributing here was that one can have a lower income level and a high EFC.</p>
<p>The reason for our high EFC, without going too personal, is that we have savings that are for our retirement but are not in retirement plans. DH's job moved, and there was a severence package, and our income reduced substantially.</p>
<p>In addition to the NPR piece on Amherst, the article in Business Week, (link provided) that appeared in February, 2006 is well worth perusing in its entirety. Despite some flaws, the main points iterate the issues at stake in Amherst's efforts to broach the class divide.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Elite U.S. colleges such as Amherst ... are perpetuating deep inequalities in American society. They equate success with serving the privileged elite and have largely abandoned talented youth from poor families, he charged. This deepens the country's growing class divisions and exacerbates the long-term decline in economic and social mobility. Feeling he had nothing to lose since he hadn't sought the job, Marx exhorted the trustees to tackle the problem head-on. "I'm not interested in being a custodian over a privileged place," he remembers telling the gathering of wealthy alums and academic stars that day.</p>
<p>As it turned out, Marx's radical message was just what Amherst trustees wanted to hear. Over the past two decades the college had committed to increasing minorities to a third of the 1,650-student campus, up from 13% in 1985. But while this brought in more low-income students, Amherst remains an incubator of the elite. More than half its students come from families prosperous enough to pay the full $42,000 annual tab out of their own pockets. Many shell out thousands more for cars, meals out, and other extras...</p>
<p>Marx is challenging everything from an admissions process tilted toward affluent students to social customs that divide rich and poor students on campus. Essentially, he has set in motion a new affirmative action initiative, this time based on class rather than race...</p>
<p>Boosting socioeconomic diversity is already a front-burner issue on the campuses of elite colleges. Everyone from Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers to William G. Bowen, ex-president of Princeton University, is grappling with a deeply troubling fact of American life: that 30 years of inequality have all but shut off top colleges to the poor.</p>
<p>Kids from the lowest socioeconomic quartile represent a mere 3% of students at the 146 most selective U.S. universities, vs. 74% from the top quartile, according to the Century Foundation, a New York think tank. It's not just a problem at elite schools, either. By age 24 only 8% of these bottom-quarter students have earned a BA from any U.S. college, vs. 46% of those from top-quarter families, according to Stephen Rose, co-author of the Century study. As educated baby boomers retire over the next 15 years, they will be followed in the workforce by more minority youth who are poor and less likely to have a degree. Says Harvard's Summers: "Social mobility is a central challenge for our country."...</p>
<p>Marx may not have been looking for a job as a campus revolutionary, but in some ways he has been preparing for the role ever since college (yes, an elite: Yale University, class of 1981). He grew up in Manhattan, where his parents settled after fleeing Germany during Hitler's rise to power in 1933. Marx's mother worked as a physical therapist after graduating from the University of California at Berkeley; his father never got a degree but earned a comfortable living as a middle manager at a metals-trading firm...
Right now, Amherst ranks each of the thousands of applications it receives every fall on an academic scale of one (outstanding) to seven (inadmissible). Most students admitted for academic reasons alone are ones, meaning they were at or near the top of their high-school class and scored 1520 or higher on the SAT. Such over-the-top performance typically aligns with affluence. In fact, only 11% of U.S. kids scoring that high on the SAT come from the bottom 40% of family-income brackets, while 75% are from the top 40%, according to a study by the Williams Project on the Economics of Higher Education.</p>
<p>To lessen the social dissonance, Marx has set out to get the whole campus talking. He holds meetings for students to discuss class differences and invites smaller groups to come for "fireside chats."... In his talks, Marx discusses ideas such as beefing up an already generous financial-aid program. At Amherst a "full ride," which about 15% of students now receive, includes tuition, room, and board, plus up to $5,000 extra a year to cover travel, books, and other expenses. Marx wants to add more aid to help poor students buy computers or bring their families to the campus for parents' weekends.</p>
<p>Marx also is talking with low-income students about how to integrate the campus better.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I am not following the discussion between calmom and mini. As a matter of fact I cannot find mini's original post, so I cannot take a position to agree or disagree with either.</p>
<p>I was reading the linked article, and my immediate reaction was that I have seen that. Both the article and the Williams report are by the same authors talking about the same research. The article can be considered to be a summary for the public on the research information on the report. That is why I linked to the report.</p>
<p>The report clearly shows that the lower 4 quintiles are under-represented and only the top quintile is over-represented. Calmom and I are in agreement on this as she said in her reply.</p>
<p>The middle and upper-middle class are being squeezed out, not by the lower and lower-middle class, but by the upper class.</p>
<p>The lower-middle (and also the lower class depending on definition of high level student) are being squeezed out, not by the middle and upper-middle class, but by the upper class. The enrollment of the 2nd & 3rd quintile is higher that of the bottom 2, but the 2nd & 3rd quintile also has a large pool of high-ability students and the number is large enough to justified their higher enrollment, in fact they are still under-represented at this level of enrollment.</p>
<p>The upper class also has a large pool of high-ability students, in fact more than any other quintile. However, the number is not large enough to justify the 70% enrollment.</p>
<p>I repeat, this is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Most low income people do not know or care about Amherst, Wesleyan, Williams, Swarthmore, et. al. They know the Ivy League and their local schools, as well as national sports powerhouses. Increasing financial aid to the relatively small number of low income, highly aware academic stars is not going to change anything. They are probably going to succeed anyway.</p>
<p>More importantly, my understanding is that the data shows that it doesn't matter where you go to college, but rather that you go to college. I'm sure that Marx means well, and that all this brouhaha makes him feel good. But it simply diverts attention from the real issues--how are we going to fix the problems with our inner city schools and make community and public colleges more affordable for the less advantaged members of our society.</p>