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<p>For the love of God. We rank cities on the basis of “eliteness” now? I hate to break it to you, but some of the most educated cities are nowhere near the coasts (Boulder, Ann Arbor, Madison).</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.usnews.com/news/best-cities/slideshows/the-10-most-educated-us-cities/1”>http://www.usnews.com/news/best-cities/slideshows/the-10-most-educated-us-cities/1</a></p>
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<p>You’re right, of course, though I don’t think I could be doing any better than I’m doing right now. 
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<p>rebecca, you are presumably in high school, or perhaps are just starting college. What is your experience with elite colleges, or in-between schools, or flat-out poor institutions? You have a lot of confidence in your beliefs for someone so young. :)</p>
<p>@oldmom4896:</p>
<p>$5K state grant + Pell grant + direct loan + work-study gets you to about 20K. Plus, didn’t the SUNY’s (at least some of them?) have a policy of drawing on their own funds to meet need for their poorest students? I thought I read that somewhere on CC. They are tuition-free to the top 10% of the class who go in to STEM, in any case.</p>
<p>True, it’s not like the old days (of 20 years ago) when Pell grant + direct loan + work-study (& whatever state grant) was more than enough to cover in-state tuition at even the most expensive state school.</p>
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I think this is a key point, as well. I don’t think outreach to low-income high performers is easy to do at all, because they are spread around randomly. It’s easy to find concentrations of high-income high performers–some high schools have dozens of them. You can have an info session in a major city, and those high income (and high information) families will show up without a lot of personalized communication. I suspect that’s much less true for low income folks–who may be relatively low information as well.</p>
<p>And a question: how many really high performing but very low income students are there each year in the United States? Are there enough of them for all of the most selective colleges to substantially increase their numbers without lowering stats requirements significantly? Harvard can get as many as it wants, of course, because it will get the cream of the crop, and can spend lots of money on personalized outreach.</p>
<p>@Hunt:</p>
<p>Another question is whether they truly want to. All the private elites kind of require roughly 50% full-pays for their current financial model to work (well, maybe not Harvard and a handful of others with silly big endowments, but you can literally count the number of schools that can subsidize all undergraduate education for free on one hand). Take the example of Vandy. 5% of their endowment is $183M. That’s a little more than their current spending on fin aid + merit aid. They really can’t become more generous than they are now.</p>
<p>It’s been said more than once that schools without huge endowments have a choice: they can give a discount to many middle- and upper-income students via merit awards, or they can give big enough financial aid to a smaller number of poor students so that they could actually attend, since it’s impossible for the families of those students to cover the gap. Most take the first choice.</p>
<p>@Hunt “Are there enough of them for all of the most selective colleges to substantially increase their numbers without lowering stats requirements significantly?”</p>
<p>“low income folks–who may be relatively low information as well.”</p>
<p>I suspect that there is a low percentage of low income students who have been prepared for the level of competition that happens at a top 25 school. I went to a small town high school and I did well in college, but if I had been put directly into a top 25 college environment, I would not have had the level of knowledge or study skills to compete at that point. It would have been a disaster. </p>
<p>There are not many public schools in low income areas that are able to provide the high level courses and challenges that prepare students to compete at the highest level. This is a big problem, but I do not think that this aspect of the problem can be fixed by the top colleges. Admitting students who are years behind their peers and unprepared for the level of work is unlikely to end well.</p>
<p>On the other hand, there are some low-income students who are ready for that level of challenge and can compete at the highest level. In these cases, often the student, and or the parents do not see any benefit in attending a top college and may not bother to apply. It is fashionable to say that the college you attend really does not matter, and to some extent I think they are correct that the most important thing is what you learn, and that a top student can be successful no matter what college they attend. However, I do think that the skills that students learn from being around other top students, and the relationships they build at a top college provide advantages that may make future success easier. </p>
<p>I do think that top colleges can and should do more to reach out to low-income students and families, and that they can do a better job getting more of them enrolled, but the number enrolled will always be lower than it should be until public education improves significantly in low-income areas, and until low-income parents put more of a premium on the importance of making sure that their children are getting a good education.</p>
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<p>I have lived in gentrifying but primarily low-income neighborhoods for many years. I have found that starting in daycare and pre-k and Kindergarten, low-income parents didn’t have the experience themselves to recognize a “good education.” Their first priority is that school should be a safe and orderly environment because often it is not in low-income neighborhoods. But for sure they are way out of their league once their kids get to middle school and high school.</p>
<p>All the more reason for quality guidance counselors who are not totally bogged down with various social problems of families of students in school and can spend time helping students and their parents plan for the future.</p>
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<p>I am not sure about other states, but NY has a program called EOP (for SUNY schools) and HEOP (for private colleges and universities in the state). From the HEOP webiste:
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<p>EOP and HEOP students have stats below the middle 50 percent of students admitted to a college. They are supported throughout their undergraduate years. HEOP schools include Columbia, Colgate, NYU, Skidmore, Barnard and Cornell. Here’s the list:
<a href=“http://heop.org/roster/”>http://heop.org/roster/</a></p>
<p>Yep. A private elite is most beneficial for a smart high-achieving kid from a disadvantaged/URM/immigrant background far disconnected from upper-middle-class (or even middle-class) society. Also the brilliant slacker types (assuming that the lightbulb turns on for them later; at sink-or-swim state schools, they may sink out before they start swimming). For a bright motivated upper-middle-class kid, it usually doesn’t matter where they go (outside of a few career paths, and even then, there are ways to get on that path later).</p>
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<p>That’s my question. The studies assert that the high academic/ low-income kids are 50% underrepresented at elite schools, but I don’t believe it. Partly because they can go to HYP for free. I’d like to see what their definitions are when they produce these studies.</p>
<p>Further, I come back to the fact that it is easier than ever today to learn about opportunities that you might have. No way around it. </p>
<p>The biggest barrier to talented kids is likely to be the culture of “no one from here ever amounts to anything and you won’t either” (peddled in no small part by those who want to sell “the system is rigged” pablum). It does take remarkable people to believe in themselves when no one else does. </p>
<p>Do low-income kids take the PSAT? And if they do, do they know to check the “send me information” box? While I agree that it’s easier today to get information, there is still a threshold to get over–you have to know that there is something to know.</p>
<p>When I was in high school (a long time ago, now), there was nobody in my high school to tell a high stats kid to consider colleges beyond the very good state flagship. The guidance counselors never said a word about it. The only reason I applied to some selective private schools was because a friend of mine from the class ahead had gone to Princeton. (Ironically, he got the information somehow–even though he was a low-income URM in a small town in the South–while I didn’t, although my family wasn’t low income and I wasn’t a URM).</p>
<p>“Are there enough of them for all of the most selective colleges to substantially increase their numbers without lowering stats requirements significantly?”</p>
<p>No, at least not on the test-score side of stats. My guess would be that students scoring over 25/in the 600s will generally do all right academically at the Ivies, though they are much less likely to be A students. So I don’t care that much if the numbers go down a little.</p>
<p>Also remember that it is much, much less likely for a student from a poor family to get any effective test prep for ACT/SAT.</p>
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This is a good point. It isn’t that poor students aren’t smart enough (although many aren’t). Even a kid who is really smart may not have good test prep, may not eat breakfast before taking the SAT, may not get perfect grades because of absenteeism or other social issues, may not be able to afford to participate in ECs for financial or family reasons, may not take the most rigorous curriculum because the school didn’t track him properly, and on and on.</p>
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<p>dadx, that’s pretty harsh, and obviously you are looking at it through a certain prism. In families where no one has ever gone to college, the discussion is not “should I aim for the most elite schools in the nation?” but rather “wow, maybe I CAN (and should) go to college!” If these kids are in schools with poor counseling services, and their families know nothing of college, who exactly is telling them about free rides at HYP? Why would it even occur to them that that is possible? For a lot of these kids, going to a four-year college at all (as opposed to trade school or a CC) is a radical thought in itself. It has nothing to do with thinking some system is rigged. College, even today, is just not on the radar for a lot of poor kids. There probably are parents with a gloom-and-doom view on things, but heck–we have people here thinking all will be lost if their kids don’t get into a top-20 school.</p>
<p>@Hunt are you saying that all rich kids are smart? Is being dim witted exclusive of poor people only?</p>
<p>One thing that I noticed about the OP’s article is that while it may be true that there has not been significant progress, it is also true that elite colleges have gotten significantly more difficult to get admitted to over the same period.</p>
<p>Additionally, it seems to be fashionable to say that which college you attend does not matter. Concurrently, it is becoming fashionable to say that elite colleges need to do more to increase their percentage of poor students. I am having difficulty understanding why low-income enrollment at elite colleges matters if where you go to college does not matter. </p>
<p>“That’s my question. The studies assert that the high academic/ low-income kids are 50% underrepresented at elite schools, but I don’t believe it. Partly because they can go to HYP for free. I’d like to see what their definitions are when they produce these studies.”</p>
<p>Um, HYP are a drop in the bucket. </p>