<p>Hanna, a guidance counselor in McKeesport or Chester Pennsylvania or Camden NJ may see one kid in a decade that is Harvard material (and I’m not disparaging the kids in these places… just that they face SO many challenges even getting to senior year of HS). Isn’t it a better societal solution to take the money you want to use to feed and entertain the guidance counselors to actually use the money on… let’s say, instruction?</p>
<p>At the tippy top you’ve got a handful of kids who are Harvard material who don’t know that they can afford Harvard. And then you’ve got the huge number of kids who are reading at a 5th grade level by the time they complete HS. And you’re worried about which end of that pyramid?</p>
<p>Go to a conference on workforce readiness. Hear the heartbreaking stories (they are really heartbreaking) of companies opening a warehouse or manufacturing facility in a rural area or small town (anywhere USA) and running week after week of job fairs in depressed areas and not being able to find enough young people who can read well enough for entry level jobs. Hospitals opening satellite clinics in those small towns and inner city neighborhoods you write about and they need to bus in their staffs because someone needs to know that 1 mg. is not the same as .1 mg in order to get a job as a clerk in the pharmacy department.</p>
<p>Yeah, sure, I get upset that not every poor kid in America knows that Princeton or Harvard would be free. But I am more upset that kids graduate from HS not knowing what a decimal point is so they can’t get a job which pays $15/hour so the only alternative is flipping burgers.</p>
<p>Hear, hear. Instead of the bogus Ivy bashing that started the whole thread, this should be our real concern.
For the $115,000 that we spend per student for his/her K-12 education, the outcome is abysmal.</p>
<p>But for this to have any real impact (and by that I mean an increase in the admission of qualified, lower-income students), wouldn’t each of the Ivies need to expand the size of their freshman classes? The reality is that we’re talking about just way too few seats for all the qualified/deserving kids out there. And these schools have their own institutional needs that they can’t afford to completely eliminate, things like full-pay students, legacies, athletes, etc. </p>
<p>All these schools have HUGE endowments; there’s no lack of money there if they want to spend it on increasing their class sizes, which would benefit every segment of applicants. But then they wouldn’t be able to tout those single-digit admit rates, would they? And it appears to me that maintaining that level of “selectivity” is priority no. 1 for a lot of them.</p>
<p>Hanna: What do you think HYP’s goal should for percentage of lower SES level students? Middle? Upper middle? Top 1%? Do you agree with the idea of increasing class size?</p>
<p>What do you think about the idea (which I’ve read other places) that SES levels of the student body should perhaps more closely reflect those of the nation?</p>
<p>“[Benefiting] every segment of applicants” and worsening students’ experiences. Five to seven-thousand undergraduates is already too many. If these schools expand their studentries, their pretenses of offering intimate and cohesive experiences will become delusions.</p>
<p>@alh and @moonchild. Both Stanford and Yale are planning to increase their undergraduate class sizes as noted in the recent Washington Post article…and I don’t believe they are doing it purely for “altruistic” reasons either…</p>
<p>I think if the Ivies substantially improved their outreach, they could probably increase the proportion of low-SES students by a couple of percent, without increasing class size. This assumes (and I think this is true) that there are low-income students who would be accepted at those schools if they would apply, but they don’t. In order to get even more low-income students, I think they have to lower academic standards (which I don’t support), or perhaps invest in remedial high school academies for promising low income kids.</p>
<p>As far as what kind of improved outreach would work, I’m not sure. I think it’s probably true that flying in GCs might have low yield. Perhaps they could hire more state/regional outreach officers. Perhaps they could join forces and send people around to high schools on behalf of multiple selective colleges.</p>
<p>Also, Hanna said:
I very much agree with this. It can be particularly stressful if you are a naturally competitive person (my daughter is like this–I keep telling her that she doesn’t have to “win Yale”).</p>
<p>Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I spent a summer as a teaching assistant/dorm assistant at a summer program at one of the US’s best boarding schools. The teaching assistants, etc. were all going into their senior year or had just graduated from top colleges. </p>
<p>Instead of having some cash-cow summer program, this school had a free summer program for students at public and parochial high schools in the state in which it was located. It was highly selective. Many of the students were the <em>stars</em> at rural high schools. Now, for the first time in their lives, they were in classes with lots of other kids who were just as good academically as they were. Everyone had English and writing instruction for a couple of hours a day. You also studied your favorite subject in depth. The teachers were all faculty from top boarding schools. IIRC, the top 2 students in each subject at the end of the program got awards. Getting one virtually guaranteed you’d be accepted at a least one school in USNews’ top dozen or so. It’s hard to tell sometimes whether the “big fish in a small pond” can swim with the sharks. Winning one of those awards meant you really were a good size fish. (Lots of kids who did NOT win awards also got into top colleges.) </p>
<p>At the end of the summer, there was a college fair. Over 300 colleges flew in reps. They knew that in one day, they were going to be able to see at least 90% of the best students in that state. (I suspect they were also a bit worried that if they didn’t come, the college adviser at that boarding school wouldn’t be recommending them. ) One thing was interesting…many of the kids wanted to find out more about the colleges the teaching assistants/dorm assistants they liked attended. My year, the most popular teaching assistant was from Wesleyan U in CT. The line to talk to the Wes rep was VERY long. Almost none of those kids had EVER heard of Wes before meeting this young man. In fact, I doubt most of them had ever considered attending a LAC before.</p>
<p>I had applied for the position in part because one of my closest friends in college had attended it. She always said that it was the best experience of her life–and she selected our alma mater because of her interaction with its rep at the college fair. </p>
<p>A generation later, I talked my kid into applying to teach at another summer program for high school students run by a boarding school. Most of the kids who attended were UMC. However, a local LAC paid for a group of low SES students who were going into their freshman year at the LAC to attend it–and made admission contingent on doing so. One girl really, really impressed my own kid. She really struggled in the English course, but in class discussion–she was a superstar. My kid felt that the program did this girl a world of good because…well…lets just say she didn’t have a heck of a lot of experience interacting with white people. By the end of the 6 week program, she had figured out how to be a lot less “scary.” She was really, really motivated and her writing was vastly improved after the summer program. </p>
<p>So, personally, I think one of the best ways to get lower SES kids interested in top colleges is to let them meet people who attend top colleges. And I think we have to face the reality that many of the best and brightest URMs don’t have a heck of a lot of experience dealing with white people. Giving them the chance to do so BEFORE college can really help. </p>
<p>Again, it seems they can’t win for trying. If it’s the right thing to do they get no credit because they also benefit themselves? I call this a win/win.</p>
<p>“Isn’t it a better societal solution to take the money you want to use to feed and entertain the guidance counselors to actually use the money on… let’s say, instruction?”</p>
<p>I’m pretty generous with Harvard’s money in this hypothetical space. Unlike every other budget in the world, theirs is almost bottomless when we’re talking about this kind of peanut expenditure. (I mean, this would cost what, $3 million? That’s if you had hundreds of counselors and put them all up at the Charles.) You can’t endow one chair for that much. If they wanted to spend more on instruction, they could do that at the same time. When my a cappella group was scrounging for $2000 to finish mixing our CD, we would joke about how many seconds’ worth of endowment interest it represented. </p>
<p>Totally agree that it’s a national crisis and disgrace that our kids’ average academic skills are so low. But I don’t know that HYPS are the right fixers for that problem. They operate at the other end. And their money isn’t fungible; you can’t just allocate it to raising literacy rates in Camden when that’s beyond the scope of their mission. Finding the genius in Camden, though, is at the heart of what they are trying to do.</p>
<p>Harvard, like Stanford and Yale, intends to build more undergraduate housing and increase its class size. This is mainly about admitting more engineers and internationals without reducing the number of non-engineers and domestic students, but it might make room for some more economic diversity, too.</p>
<p>I think they could do more to nurturing those geniuses in Camden (or Appalachia). For example, you could have a program like that described in post #188 as part of Harvard’s summer school. Or you could have kids accepted to a five year Harvard program where the first year was remedial. But I also think they could do a better job of getting the word out that if you are poor Harvard may be your cheapest option.</p>
<p>If we’re talking more broadly about what society should do, as opposed to what HYPS should do, I’d LOVE to see a bunch more publicly funded colleges (and boarding high schools) on the Berea College model. Bring the top-notch education to motivated underprivileged kids right in their own backyards, for free. HYPS should take care of reaching the valedictorians in that group. Society as a whole should work harder on reaching the capable students in the next tier.</p>
<p>There may be some public universities that are doing a good or decent job at this. Does anyone know of some standouts? Mine (Illinois) are not even trying.</p>
<p>This thread should be about whether Ivy League admissions turns parents into depressives.</p>
<p>This thread has gone totally off into left field, especially the stuff about the chinese imperial system.</p>
<p>People talking about how the schools should change their systems. They are private schools so the beauty of the thing about that is supposed to be that they can do what they want to do, how they want to do it and the only opinion that really matters is that of the marketplace. As of now, the marketplace is beating on their doors in huge numbers trying to good into these school regardless of the price or process in place. </p>
<p>These schools care what their alumni think. A lot. They have changed enormously over time in ways that were not necessarily market driven, but mission driven. There’s no market reason for these schools to make themselves free for families making less than $60k. They could easily fill not just with full pays, but with really gifted and diverse full pays. They may make all kinds of philosophical shifts in the future. Whatever they are, they will start with alumni and other stakeholders thinking about the change we’d like to see.</p>
<p>"But I also think they could do a better job of getting the word out that if you are poor Harvard may be your cheapest option.</p>
<p>That is undoubtedly true, but I also think you have to convince these people that there is benefit in going to Harvard in the first place. I think people on CC sometimes really, really underestimate how these schools just aren’t on the radar screen in some parts of this country. Harvard isn’t seen as the unattainable dream, it’s seen as “what’s that again - I’ve vaguely heard of it.”</p>
<p>@Pizzagirl: I find it a little concerning that in some parts of the country, the “Harvard caliber” kids don’t know Harvard. Unless they have made a conscience choice that they don’t want to go to Harvard for good reasons, I think it’s only natural for an ambitious teenager to dream big even if it might be an “unattainable dream”. I’m surprised by what you have described how people in other parts of country are just “unaware” of these world famous institutions. Ask any high schooler around the world, I bet 9 out of 10 have at least “vaguely heard of Harvard”. </p>
<p>^^^^Or “yeah, I’ve heard of it, but no way am I living all the way across the country away from my family, friends, and local culture.” Or “I’ve heard of it, but I’ve always dreamed of going to State Flagship to be a Tarheel, or a Longhorn, or a Wolverine.”</p>
<p>And maybe they’ve heard of Harvard, but they haven’t heard of Brown or Cornell, and they think Penn is Penn State. And they are not interested in learning about them.</p>
<p>All this is true, but I’d like the guidance counselors to have the tools to explain to those students why they should take a look before closing that door. I don’t think every valedictorian should apply to Ivies/elite LACs, but I do think they should all look into it. </p>
<p>Also, there are generous-need-based-aid elite schools in many regions of the country outside the Northeast. If the GCs knew how to explain Chicago/Duke/Vandy/Stanford/Wash U to these kids instead of Penn, that would be great in my book.</p>
<p>“And maybe they’ve heard of Harvard, but they haven’t heard of Brown or Cornell, and they think Penn is Penn State. And they are not interested in learning about them.”</p>
<p>Exactly. Maybe Harvard’s the wrong example because it’s sort of to colleges what the Mona Lisa is to paintings, but Brown? Cornell? Penn? Dartmouth? huh? <em>Maybe</em> Duke and Stanford for sports success.</p>
<p>Benley, seriously, when you move away from the northeast, things change. I know. I grew up in the northeast and I get where you’re coming from completely and it was culture shock for me out here. But you have to understand for a lot of kids, dreaming big <em>is</em> state flagship. Or maybe Notre Dame if they’re Catholic. </p>