Colleges have been under pressure to admit needier kids. It’s backfiring.

Applying to College
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"Pressure has been building on colleges to stop chasing the same small subset of privileged, highly test-prepped applicants and start admitting needier kids. But new research suggests that the particular form this pressure has taken — including popular rankings based on Pell enrollment — has been at least partly backfiring.

In fact, at some of the schools most celebrated for providing opportunities for poor students, admissions and financial aid offices appear to be worsening their neglect of the low- and middle-income kids we want them to help." …

Opinion.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-just-a-few-dollars-can-keep-many-kids-from-going-to-college/2019/01/24/9264c5c2-201b-11e9-9145-3f74070bbdb9_story.html?utm_term=.d6ffa4610805

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Oh they’re gaming the system to increase rankings and keep rich kids and high scores? Shocker.

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https://siepr.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publications/19-001.pdf is the actual paper.

https://fafsa.ed.gov/FAFSA/app/f4cForm can be used to estimate the Pell threshold.

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It’s not backfiring, since it hasn’t actually changed the number of low income families they’re accepting. Colleges are simply learning to circumvent a new form of pressure for them to accept any more riffraff than they used to.

It’s similar to the way that claim that they’ve substantially increased the number of URMs, and it turns out that they’ve simply heavily recruited from a very small subset of wealthy minorities. or they claim that they have 47% “PoC”, while most of these are rich Asian kids whose stats far exceeded those of their typical White students, or kids who are the children of international billionaires. They want to keep their enrollment at 60% from the top 20% and 20% from the top 1%, so they’ll figure out ways how to continue doing so, while still scoring high on rankings.

The title shouldn’t be, “Colleges have been under pressure to admit needier kids. It’s backfiring”, it should be “Colleges have been under pressure to admit needier kids. Instead, they game the system”.

It’s not surprising that the Washington Post would create a headline which implies that the people who are fighting for a more equitable world are the ones to blame for the Colleges efforts to avoid doing this. The Washington Times has a long history of pretending to be fighters for egalitarianism and an equitable world, while actually doing their best to undermine the efforts towards this goal.

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Holistic admissions will always be used as a smokescreen to hide insider preference.

I can’t imagine why anyone would think otherwise.

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@SatchelSF It’s called “Legacy”, don’tcha know? Makes it sound classy. “Insider Preference” sounds so crass, and you KNOW that elite colleges don’t do crass.

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Wow, @MWolf — Low income students are ”riffraff”? I’ve advised many low income students out here that I thought would be fine students at top universities. Low income doesn’t = dumb, you know? It does mean they haven’t had a lot of the same advantages many other kids have had.

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@intparent I was using the term sarcastically (no sarcasm font here, unfortunately).

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Holistic Admission, Insider Preference, and Legacy much more on the Private end compared to Publics although most of the UC Schools in California also use Holistic Admission, but no Legacy.

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@Fisherman99 plenty of public Us use legacy. There’s a list floating around on a thread ucb started, it says 30% of them (vs 57% for privates).

Public Us are generally less selective than private and of course have a mission to serve students (and taxpayers) of their states, so there are differences. I was a little surprised they considered legacy also, but the really selective ones probably have no choice as they compete with the top privates for students. I’m thinking of UVa, Michigan, UNC-CH - all consider legacy. Even Alabama.

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@OHMomof2…saw UCB’s thread. Yes, legacy used at the publics. However, NOT at any UC schools in California. I too was suprised at how much it is still used at the publics nationwide…although much more common at privates.

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I agree that it is good to make college available to all.

But the constant onslaught that all high achieving students from the professional middle class and upper middle class families are test prepped snobs is tough to take.

Even if they test prepped they still had the dedication and effort to do so.

And not every upper middle class home is bastion of tranquility and love. There are a lot of kids in this group who don’t even know their parents very well. They still have fears. Still feel neglected. Still have to work hard.

And not every legacy is bill gates. Intrnsntonal billinnaires are the problem ? Jeez Louise, there are not but a handful of these people in the world.

Some are public school teachers and ministers and soldiers and government employees.

They struggle mightily to make college work and pay bills. Often taking out loans to do so for their kids. Rightly or wrongly.

Maybe they were first gen and impoverished and caught a break. And now they give time and talent to that school. Why not a little extra look at the application all things being equal. It’s a private school. At public unis I’m not so convinced it’s their mission.

And private schools are trying to grow endowments so they can fund growth and money for kids who need it. Who do you think gives them the money to give away? Grads.

And they do in some cases to have the legacy preference.

A school like Harvard has enough to not be worry. But many great schools do. You would be surprised at how little some have in comparison.

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Upper middle class kids are very, very well represented at top colleges, @privatebanker . Way more of them than low income kids.

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My mother likes to say “tacky” :wink:

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It’s not the percentages. Sure there is work to be done. My issue is the desparaging commentary. It’s unnecessary to make the point by tearing people down.

I’m all for helping everyone. But no one chooses their parents.

I prefer to judge people as individuals. .

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@privatebanker The fact that Universities did very well for 200 years, and only started adding “Legacy” into consideration when Jews started entering these bastions of the elites tells you something about the practice. It’s true that it didn’t work, but that was because the years between WWII and the 1970s were years of extremely high social mobility, and Jews were one of the groups in which it was highest.

There is no real moral or ethical justification for the practice of legacy preference, despite many attempts, using extremely convoluted logical, and many logical fallacies. The entire reason for this is to preserve a large population of high income students from powerful families. It is very good for the endowment and prestige of a university, but not the best thing for the quality of the student body. Fact is that MIT, which does not have legacy preference. does not suffer from this fact.

I can understand that smaller schools need that money that legacies provide, but that is practicality, not a higher sense of morality.

While it is true that a good student who get in to an Ivy is likely to have kids who are also good students, this ignores the fact that most legacies had parents or grandparents who got into the Ivies when competition was much lower, and the stats required to be accepted into the Ivies would barely get people into moderately competitive schools nowadays.

“Maybe they were first gen and impoverished and caught a break.”

The chances that a legacy is the child of a poor parent who “caught a break” is so very low as to be negligible. Today, fewer than 5% of all students at elite universities are low income (places like Harvard it’s about 3%), and it was much lower in the 1990s, when the parents of today’s students were going to college. Of course, you also have to take into consideration that even an Ivy league education isn’t enough to raise the income of a kid from a poor family to the economic level required to afford entry into a private elite university. So at best, maybe 3% of the legacy students are kids whose parents’ “caught a lucky break”.

So, to claim that legacy is ethical, because of these 3%, is ridiculous. I’m speaking as somebody who would have fallen into that category. My father was the child of immigrants who came with nothing, managed to do well, but still wouldn’t have had the money to send my father to a private university. But, because he was brilliant, he was accepted into Columbia University for his PhD. I’m sorry, but the legacy system wasn’t created and isn’t maintained for people like me.

I accept that the legacy system isn’t going away, and as long as it’s limited to private schools, there is nothing to do about it. But I’m not going to make believe that it is ethical.

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I understand your points and don’t disagree with many.

My point is simple. Argue the practice. Not the people. The students themselves are not the problem.

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Because legacy is not an obvious or visible characteristic generally (unlike gender, race, ethnicity, celebrity status, athlete status, etc.), legacy students are much less likely to be subject to social stigma along the lines of “only got in because of ____” that students in the other groups may be subject to (regardless of their actual academic performance or whether they actually benefited from an admission preference), even though legacy preference in admission (when used) looks more like unearned privilege of inherited aristocracy than any other except for the much less numerous celebrity and development ones.

So do not worry about the legacy students (whether or not they actually benefited from an admission preference) being discriminated against by being seen as the problem (as opposed to the policy).

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It is pretty commonly accepted by the students at HYP that legacies are weaker, at least in theory. For that reason it is downplayed and rarely advertised. I have been surprised, looking through donation lists and the occasional article highlighting notable gifts in my alumni magazines, how many of my classmates it turns out were legacies. They hid it well because I had no idea at the time we were all in school. Fortunately, I was more diplomatic in those days, so I probably didn’t go around saying that legacies were weak. Well, at least not too often :slight_smile:

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These schools are clearly businesses. I think the middle-class, unhooked are in the worst positions when applying to private schools.