Sigh.
You know, I sometimes say on CC that I warned my kids not to fall into, “Ii think it, so it must be true.” Nor it’s sister, “I read it somewhere, so it is.”
@NickFlynn To your point 1, you cannot say with any degree of certainty. Some high income people like doctors are not known for being financially oriented and many very successful business owners have never gone to college. Many low income families get a lot of professional help so don’t discount that.
The premise of your logic is faulty. Schools don’t view financial aid as something that should be proactively minimized. There is no financial incentive to do so. It is in all schools’ interest to promote it whether it is for ethical, moral or financial reasons. Does any college President get a bonus for doing what you say is common practice?
What alumnus, corporation or foundation would give to a school knowing it gives preference to wealthy students??
There is simply every financial reason to be as generous as possible. There are limits of course but that is not your point.
I did mention that I have been researching the question using the published data and that’s the conclusion I have come to.
Now, what I’ve done so far is not exactly in publishable condition, so I don’t expect anyone to just accept what I am saying at face value, but just dismissing it as “that’s your opinion, man” isn’t exactly a definitive rebuttal.
Here’s your quote:
“And many lower SES kids are out there doing far more than their wealthy peers”
Strangely, however, they aren’t represented at anywhere near the same levels at the top schools as kids from the top of the income distribution.
Published data doesn’t reveal how admissions actually works. Remember the frequent CC advice to mind correlation vs causation.
Not good enough to relate my experience with adcoms? Ok.
Exactly, your numbers are fine but they cannot explain one simple fact. Choice.
If you sit with a high stat child in Camden or Trenton with a single mom younger than your children and you say these Liberal Arts colleges would be perfect for you and they will pay for your visit with your mom for three whole days, they will stare at you and not say a word. They have no frame of reference, no life experience that helps make the decision. What they know is their friends can’t get in and that makes them worry about going so far from home. I have lived this.
I use this example because these schools tend to have lower numbers on FA and its not their fault.
It’s the same reason why Catholic schools are predominantly Caucasian when they literally beg for minority students.
Look, for every anecdotal piece of evidence you guys want to produce to claim these schools don’t consider ability to pay at all, I can find a credible person (admissions counselors, former adcomms, etc.) saying the opposite.
What I found from looking at the published data was that there does seem to be substantial evidence that full-pay applicants do have an edge. I wasn’t even looking at this question specifically - I was looking at disparities in racial/ethnic admission numbers and attempting to see what impact family income had on those numbers. This thing about full-pay kids just fell out of the that data.
I’ve really got no particular ax to grind here - it’s something that I think is true - not because it’s my gut feeling, but because I see it in the data I’ve looked at. Take it or leave it, basically.
Well, someday, it will be interesting to see, what colleges, when, then do a little vetting.
TT makes an interesting point: what is often seen is matriculation data, not admit details. There are many reasons some kids will choose to stay local or pick another college. That leaves the freshman class as it is, not as adcoms designed it.
But I don’t see that the kid in Camden who doesn’t know is representative. There is a lot of good mentoring out there. And many inspiring, solid performing, low SES kids working towards their futures in the best ways.
I don’t see how we get any further with this thread.
Nick, no information exists granular enough to come to your conclusion. And if it did exist, you would not be able to get it.
The published data are for the accepted students, or in some cases for the matriculated students (the latter have lower stats than the former, which is why some schools only publish data on the former). What you don’t know are the stats of the applicant pool. Schools don’t publish that. Without those data, you can’t draw any conclusions on the impact of family income on admission.
It’s a safe bet that yes, there’s a higher percentage of applicants at selective schools with higher family incomes. That’s for all kinds of reasons, some of which you’ve touched on. One reason is knowledge of the system. Kids from households in the top 10% of the income distribution have to go somewhere for college. The parents in these households are generally college graduates. They expect that the kids will go to college. They have more substantial resources to pay for college bills–even if some can’t afford to be full-pay, there are certainly enough who CAN (and who have high enough stats) to fill every freshman slot at the top 20+ colleges in the US. These students are going to apply to those highly selective colleges because they KNOW to apply to those colleges. Meanwhile, students from lower income families either don’t know about the colleges, or think they couldn’t afford them, or think they’re not qualified, so they are underrepresented in the applicant pool.
So the applicant pool is already heavily stacked with full-pay applicants. It’s no surprise that there are so many more full-pay students. But without knowing about the percentage of full-pay students in the applicant pool, you can’t say anything about how adcoms are selectively choosing full-pay applicants.
Another bit of unpublished data you’d need: the percentage of full-pay applicants in the ED (or (SC)EA) pool. Again, it’s a very safe bet that this is a higher number than in the RD applicant pool.
A couple of quick points, although I’m sure I will convince absolutely no one.
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I’m working with a data set of the top 20 schools in the country - the average yield rate across the whole set is 50%. The idea that the admitted class is substantially different than the enrolled class is hard to support.
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Of course, I don’t know the statistics of the applicant pool - how is this different than the many studies regarding minority enrollment or any other demographic category? It’s something that you have to take into account, but it doesn’t mean studying the actual matriculants isn’t a decent window into what the admissions people are choosing.
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With regard to ED/SCEA pools - almost all the schools in the data set offer some variant, and all available evidence is that those pools are much more affluent than the RD pools. Are these schools really that concerned with yield protection? Or does ED offer other advantages in enrollment management that might include managing your financial aid load?
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Just as a general point - if you really think that the adcomms at these schools don’t have a very precise statistical picture of what their incoming class is going to look like, I think I would like to sell you a bridge, or at least invite you to my weekly poker game.
This depends entirely on the college. Lots of kids will chose to matric at Harvard over somewhere else. This alone will pull off a percent of top kids of any SES.
Many low SES kids, the sort activated and attractive to top schools and who do get an admit, may choose to remain local or go to a regional powerhouse, for various reasons. In some areas of the country, this is quite prominent. And for many kids, it’s not the stereotype of staying near home to babysit. It’s the final opp that’s right for them.
My experience is that FA is set in advance, generally starting the previous spring. For many kids, needing FA is not a bar to applying ED. You get the offer in December. Granted it’s finalized later, but for families whose details didn’t change substantially, it remains pretty constant.
So go research, but where i work, need-blind means need-blind.
On a more general point, the very high standards for admission at these elite schools absolutely means that the “academically qualified applicants” are going to skew very heavily towards the higher income applicants. I don’t think that can be even slightly controversial. The real question is “Does that fully account for how heavily the matriculants are skewed in the same direction?”
To look at that, I looked at various breakdowns of SAT scores and modeled the predicted percentage of various demographic groups exceeding a given SAT score, and then compared it with the demographic breakdown of the enrolled students - I did this for race, class and gender. My agenda here was simply to try to measure the various effects of these variables, to get a rough idea of how those factors impacted admissions.
With regard to full-pay, my model predicts that about 35% of applicants with SAT scores over 2100 will be from the Top 10% of families by income (>$160k / year)…this is roughly equivalent to the group which doesn’t receive institutional aid at these schools, which is about 48% of enrolled freshman.
That disparity (48% - 35%) is as large as any disparity I found in any other income / gender / racial category. That’s why I think it is reasonable to assume that ability-to-pay is a considered factor in admissions.
I realize I’m not really sharing enough information to make an iron-clad irrefutable argument here, but I also am not just pulling this out of my butt either.
Let’s consider two different situations. In one, 15% of the applicant pool is high income (meaning full pay). In another, 50% of the applicant pool is high income.
If 50% of the admitted students are full-pay, then the latter case would be strong evidence that admissions is need-blind. Of course, you still wouldn’t know anything about the stats (meaning rigor of courses, GPA, and test scores) of the admitted full-pay students as compared with those looking for FA.
Conversely, the former case would make any claims of need-blind admissions slightly suspect. Again, you wouldn’t know the stats of the lower-income students.
As we don’t know the composition of the applicant pool, you can’t do a study about the benefits of being full-pay as it pertains to adcom decisions. You can say that upper-income students are overrepresented in the student population, but you cannot conclusively identify admissions policy as a factor in this.
I could turn that right back around and say that the actual matriculants are a decent window into the actual admissions pool. Which you could then rightly say is nonsense–in which case I’d agree, and say that’s why your argument above is lacking.
You are correct about the ED pool being more affluent. So keep in mind that a significant fraction of the incoming class at many schools is drawn from ED/EA–1/4th to 1/3rd is not unusual. That is going to juice the fraction of full-pay matriculated students.
Well, if the average yield is 50%, then half of the admitted class is going elsewhere. Maybe they’re going somewhere that isn’t as highly ranked but offers more money. Maybe they’re going somewhere with equally high yield (e.g. choosing Harvard over Stanford). Or maybe they’re trading “up” in selectivity (e.g. Yale over Berkeley or Cornell). There are cross-admit stats and studies on what choices students make in these circumstances–it’s been a long time since I’ve read them, but I’m sure you could ask and someone would direct you to the right place.
Of course they have a very precise statistical picture. It’s going to look like the previous year’s class. Because things don’t change that rapidly.
Nick, no it doesn’t mean academically qualified skews to full-pay. Not at all.
SAT score is not everything. A kid needs to show he can do the work expected during the 4 years and the bar is both lower than you feel and it’s the components that most matter. Eg, for an Ivy, math SAT scores for STEM. Have you never looked at Brown’s applicant detail? It’s the only one I know of that presents this. And it still doesn’t say a jig about wealth.
You can’t make an iron-clad argument when I sit here telling you that what you tell me is NOT how my college operates. You’re not looking at all the variables (among them, the desire to spread the admits across some range of regions, localities and individual hs. That includes, sure, the preps. But even then, there are scholarship kids and many of them.)
“You can say that upper-income students are overrepresented in the student population, but you cannot conclusively identify admissions policy as a factor in this.”
Well, you could say EXACTLY the same thing about URMs or legacies or any other demographic category that everyone thinks are important factors to consider.
Hell, you don’t even need to limit it to demographics - maybe test scores have no impact on admissions decisions, it’s all based on how magical the essays are, and it’s just a big coincidence that those people have high test scores.
To my way of thinking, if a particular category is “over-represented” in the population, that is an indication that it might be a criteria that is being considered (at the very least). Maybe that’s too simple, but it works for me.
“You can’t make an iron-clad argument when I sit here telling you that what you tell me is NOT how my college operates. You’re not looking at all the variables (among them, the desire to spread the admits across some range of regions, localities and individual hs. That includes, sure, the preps. But even then, there are scholarship kids and many of them.)”
I don’t even know what school you are from, so obviously I am not making an ironclad argument about exactly how your schools operates.
I am looking at an aggregate of 20 top schools, and looking at what the data on those schools tells me. Based on that, I see evidence that very high income kids are going to those schools in numbers that seem substantially higher than one would expect if no one was taking family income into account as a factor in admissions. (And there is substantial variation in this, even within this group.)
Look, most of these schools make huge efforts to enroll low income kids, and are quite generous in supporting those kids when they enroll them. I’m not taking anything away from that behavior, but I also am not buying that they are completely disregarding “need” as a consideration when building their classes.
You’re taking very few variables and then weighing that short list to come up with “over-represented.” And from that, assuming it provides a universal key to the rest of the review or the real goals.
Carry on. But your results might improve if you didn’t assume you have the one true view.
Yeah, and the same right back at you.
All I have said is that there is, within the population of the very tippy-top elite schools, some evidence that ability-to-pay is a factor (NB, just a factor, not the “universal key”) that impacts admissions. That’s it, no more, no less.
That was the question asked at the top of the thread. And that’s why I posted here.
Obviously, not everyone agrees. LOL.
Look at the Common Data Set for these schools. They explicitly say if they do or don’t consider racial/ethnic status, or legacy status, or first generation, etc etc etc. Ditto for test scores. So yes, we KNOW that these are factors. The admissions offices state upfront that they are.
So how about for full pay? Look at the school’s policy on admissions. Do they state that they are need-blind? Need aware? Then that is admissions stating the policy.
It bears repeating: correlation does not equal causation.
For example, the Harvard CDS states that they do not consider religious affiliation. Jews make up just over 2% of the population in the US, but (per Hillel) are 25% of the Harvard student body. This does not mean that religion is, in fact, a category that is being secretly considered. It means that there is a strong correlation between being Jewish and having other attributes that are admissions boosts.
Harvard also doesn’t consider class rank at all…yet I’d bet that you’d find a heckuva lot of vals and sals in Harvard Yard. Let’s repeat the refrain: correlation, not causation.
I’m picking on Harvard here because their CDS has always amused me (everything is “considered”), but also because they have enough money to the point where they could have a few developmental admits, give everyone else full rides, and be none the worse for wear. Saying that their admissions department is concerned with ability to pay is like saying that Mark Zuckerberg scopes out Black Friday deals.
@NickFlynn And by the same logic, virtually every top LAC and Catholic school has a policy against Asians because that is what the data shows. You have to assume that because they are highly ranked schools so high stat Asian students must apply there.