The post asks this: Does family income affect admission?
The answer, as evidenced by a rather lively debate on this thread, is yes and no.
Yes, a doctor earning $250,000 a year or an ambassador can afford $100/hour SAT tutoring for his or her special snowflake. Yes, it’s easier for the snowflake to earn good grades than it is for a kid who goes home every day to abusive parents, whose parents are rarely home, or who goes to bed hungry. Yes, snowflake’s parents can probably pay for summer camps, music lessons, and clubs/activities that are rarely available to the disadvantaged. A white suburban doctor is more likely to be an Ivy League graduate than a minority service industry employee, so legacy chiefly benefits the wealthy.
To the extent that high-income applicants tend to have more competitive portfolios overall, given two kids with equal potential, family income does affect admission.
Will an admissions committee, given two applicants who are similarly competitive, use income as a tie-breaker? Not at need-blind universities.
The admissions and FA offices are often in separate buildings - just as a “Chinese wall” exists between the content and advertising departments at news organizations - and the overlap between the two staffs is close to zero (some administrators move from one to the other over time, but almost never in midyear). No college wants to risk the fallout that would come with the revelation that they discriminate on the basis of applicants’ income.
High-income families can put together better portfolios, and are generally well-informed about the admissions process. Income will not, however, be used to differentiate between two similarly qualified applicants. Need-blind colleges are just that.
There are so many ways that a school without a large endowment can manage things so that they don’t overcommit on financial aid: they can tweak their FA guidelines so that their definition of meeting full need is less generous. Or they can just say they’re not meeting full need. Or they can go to a hybrid need-aware approach where admissions is need-blind until the FA budget is used up, after which they are need-aware, or just state that the first 80+% of the class is admitted need-blind. They can rely heavily on ED, or backfill from the waitlist (where if the school doesn’t guarantee FA for those coming off the waitlist the admissions folks can discreetly look to see if there was a request for FA…and then skip over those folks) .
All of these benefit full-pay students, but do not require any secret admissions bias. Well, except for the waitlist example, but that’s going to be a tiny percentage of admits.
This is all very interesting to read. Why is it then that so many say that low income applicants have a slight advantage over applicants with family incomes between $70,000-$150,000 at the elite, need blind schools? (Not saying I agree I’m just curious)
Low SE status or being the first in your family to attend college are considered hooks at some colleges, including the elites. That gives low-income applicants something of a boost. The trappings of privilege (the ability to afford expensive tutors, shell out several thousand dollars for summer camps, or even - in more extreme cases - donate $25 million to get your kid in) and traits correlated with that privilege (legacy, connections with admissions, etc) ensure that the top 5% will always represent a majority or a substantial plurality at Ivies.
Middle-class families - many of them supporting 2 parents and 2 children on that $70,000-$150,000 income - can’t afford most of the advantages employed by the wealthy, and don’t get the admissions boost accorded low-income applicants. They enjoy, in many ways, the best of neither world, and in today’s admissions landscape - where most applicants have a hook - a white (or, worse yet, asian) middle-class applicant without legacy or athletic recruitment is among the most disadvantaged groups in elite-college admissions.
@citymama9 they generally tend to be the elite universities/colleges because they have enough funds and endowment to be need blind
@NotVerySmart in reference to your first point, but if the universities are need blind, how would you they know your SE status at all? They assume so if you are first generation?
LowSES/1stGen in and of itself is not a hook. It is a mitigating circumstance.
“Need-blind admissions” is not synonymous with “meets full need”.
While a school’s Admissions Office may have an initial need-blind round of admission, the school’s Financial Aid Office can have a separate subsequent round of review to distribute FA, and the school can still tout itself as technically having “need-blind admissions”.
The financial bottom line is that the vast majority of schools do NOT have multi-billion dollar endowments; therefore, they have finite, defined FA budgets every year. When that annual pot of FA money is exhausted, then the balance of slots go to applicants who don’t require FA. Since schools are managing their yield, they will resist offering admissions to very needy cases for whom they cannot offer adequate FA.
At schools that award MERIT aid, the cold, hard math is that it is a better proposition for a school to award four $15k merit awards to “low-maintenance” highSES students, than it is to grant a single $60k FA award to a “high-maintenance” lowSES student.
I actually agree with the first - that these things are more prevalent in wealthier families, but disagree with the second, that colleges favor full-pay beyond the built-in favor granted to them by the first set of advantages. I also think ED, in addition to being a way to up yield, is a decent way to bump full pay kids.
Then again, elite colleges love to brag about how many Pell kids they have, how many kids are on FA, etc. However, I am aware of only one that calls itself need-affirmative, meaning it actually favors low income kids.
I’m surprised some of our “Asians are discriminated against in elite admissions” posters haven’t jumped on this one. They would argue that their stats mean there should be more of them, even though they are over represented at elites as a % of the general population.
“At the University of Scranton we strongly recommend that all incoming freshmen apply for financial aid. Our experience is that families who do not apply for financial aid would often be eligible.”
@OHMomof2 I’m an Asian applicant but I’m not East Asian which may not even matter but still, I don’t really complain that Asians have a disadvantage at admission to the elite schools, because I understand why we have a disadvantage, they understandingly want diversity and if things were based on pure meritocracy, Asian and white applicants would further dominate the student population i would think
@NickFlynn This illustrates how illogical your point is. U of Scranton would be more likely to cherry pick than an elite school if you were correct. It has a small endowment by elite school standards, draws on the wealthy NJ market and gets buckets of applications.
Clearly, whether you plan to apply for financial aid is not a concern in admissions. They recommend that you do.
The tutors and camps don’t necessarily turn rich kids into holistically compelling applicants for elites. In many cases, they just bring a kid’s level up. Then the shiny stats are just lines on the app and transcript.
Even if they do help a kid get to a high SAT and get through rigorous courses, you have to understand there’s more required. Stats are simply a starting point.
Some seem to think rich kids are just diamonds in the rough, waiting to be polished at a high cost.
There are plenty of kids whose parents help them “cultivate” extracurriculars, and do so with more than a little success. Our school isn’t very US-focused, and we still see several kids whose parents do this each year (out of 15-20 US applicants). I suspect the number of parents who can and do pay for the full slate of tutors + camps + SAT prep, but ignore the “holistic,” traits completely, is not very high.
Put another way, I expect a goodly number of parents who’ve shelled out money for all of the above would also have paid for a $3,000 volunteering trip abroad, talent search to find snowflake’s “special talent” to showcase in a college app at age 6, lawyers and donor friends to help register a nonprofit and boost its fundraising totals - the whole nine yards. Virtually the only things these parents can’t arrange is grades/test scores/essays (although there are a few highly publicized exceptions every year) and the presence or absence of actual talents in snowflake’s skillset.
The percentage of parents who do none of these things, either for lack of information about the process or because they can’t afford to, is considerably higher than the number who do some (tutors+camps+prep) but not others.