@NYDad513 are you talking the elite colleges? I think basing a prediction of an applicant’s home income is a bit ludicrous unless it’s an expensive private school or located in “bad areas” but for the average high school there are many mixes. My school as an example has a good of number low income students with many high income students as well despite being located in a generally financially stable area.
Thanks everyone for the replies!
I’ve always thought low income as of a “hook.”
I thought low income was a tip not a hook at elite schools but if they’re need blind how would they even tell to begin with. Unless they can see if your application fee was waived
The admissions process has two steps:
- the Admissions Committee decides whether or not to admit you-- they don’t look at the money aspect; therefore, they are “need blind”
- a subsequent review is performed by a separate financial aid committee to determine whether to give you any money. At this step the process becomes “need aware”
@GMTplus7 I meant during the admissions process to accept you or not when I asked how they would tell. Not after acceptance. My apologies for not clarifying
@Lif35
Most schools have need-blind admissions. The Admissions committee could approve an applicant for admission, but then that approved candidate gets eliminated in the financial aid allocation phase of the process. That candidate would then not get an offer of admission, even though the admissions committee gave the green light.
If a school wants u but doesn’t have ADEQUATE money to give u and thinks it’s unrealistic for u to afford it, they might reject u just to protect their yield.
Most are need-blind for admissions. Think of all of the open admission community colleges, or the less selective public and private universities that admit purely by stats. However, being need-blind does not necessarily mean that the school will give good financial aid. Only a few schools claim to do that for all students; some of these are need-blind while others are need-aware.
Of course, a school with need-blind admissions can tilt its admissions process and criteria to more strongly favor applicants from high income families, without explicitly looking at an applicant’s financial aid status. I.e. the process and criteria can be used to tilt the admissions class wealthier (or less wealthy) without having to look at financial aid status of each applicant. For example, the following tend to tilt the playing field in favor of applicants from high income families:
- Require recommendations.
- Require SAT subject tests.
- Use interviews.
- Consider legacy preference.
- Consider level of applicant's interest.
- Give strong weight to standardized test scores (versus high school courses and grades).
- Give strong weight to expensive extracurriculars.
- Give less weight to working to help support one's family.
- Require CSS Profile and non-custodial parent finances for financial aid.
@NickFlynn you keep “hinting” at the fact that colleges don’t accept full pay students for the tuition revenue. So why do they supposedly favor full pay over everyone else?
Also, the methodology you use in reaching your conclusions is confusing. I don’t understand how the procedure you outlined could possibly give you the result you claim.
That income range is, at the very least, the upper half of the middle range in the US.
While they cannot afford the advantages that the “no financial aid offered or needed” can offer their kids, they are much less likely to have their kids face the barriers that the lower half of the middle range or the actual poor face.
How much does it cost to get involved effectively in your community? (I don’t mean the occasional walkathon or collecting pennies at school.) Or in your religious or cultural groups? Do only rich kids interact brightly with an interviewer? Do only poor kids hold jobs?
Do you believe poor kids can’t have impact in their communities, that it’s only rich kids and the non-profits their parents help then form? That lacrosse really tips an app or that taking a SAT prep course ensures some high score?
An applicant who does not exhibit upper-middle to upper class norms of behavior to a typically upper-middle to upper class interviewer may not get the best interview report. While the applicant from the upper-middle to upper class family naturally displays such behavior, one from a lower class background may have to actively train for such behavior for the interview.
The one from the lower class background may be more likely to have more ordinary jobs (retail, food service, etc.) that are available, rather than having the connections and opportunities to get a job that is more impressive (skill wise) to an admissions reader. In any case, if the admissions reader is more impressed by the applicant on the expensive traveling club sports team than one who works a retail or food service job, that tends to advantage applicants from higher income backgrounds.
Ucb, there’s a lot of “may not” or “can’t” that floats among CC opinions. But many kids of all SES are able. Lots of non-poor kids take jobs bagging at the grocery store or bussing. Or they mow lawns, scoop ice cream, or watch children. There simply aren’t that many kids who get jobs based on some hypothetical higher skill level. It’s rare. (And even a higher level job isn’t the tip CC assumes.)
At the same time, lots of driven STEM kids without wealthy families are pursuing internships- or having them facilitated by their schools, mentors or other community programs. (These range in level and length.) Consider all the Asian American kids out there accomplishing much, without wealthy parents.
Adcoms are not impressed more by expensive traveling sports teams. That’s another CC notion. Instead, one distinction they’re looking for is the drives and follow-through, along with grounding and perspective. That’s so much more than president of a club.
And among those higher SES kids we assume are getting so very much pre-college support, the bulk still don’t have any more ability than the next kid to pull together a solid app that covers the bases well.
People tend to stereotype.
I get the impression that you are taking the terms “need bind” and “meets full need” to be synonymous. There’re not.
@nickflynn: I’m quite intrigued by the results of your analysis. Would you mind sharing more details about your model? What predictors did you include, and how did you choose which stayed in the final model? Did you look at two-way interactions. What were the beta coefficients for the final set of predictors?
Are you planning on publishing or releasing this for others to take a look at? I think your findings are fascinating and helps explain a lot.
School adcoms can be “need-blind” but at the same time be able to pick and choose the best balance of kids to maintain a fixed financial aid budget each year. The use of statistical and probabilistic modeling is outlined in this Forbes article quite nicely:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/maggiemcgrath/2014/07/30/the-invisible-force-behind-college-admissions/
@Brathia Post #68 “…you keep “hinting” at the fact that colleges don’t accept full pay students for the tuition revenue. So why do they supposedly favor full pay over everyone else?”
Ok, first of all, the vast majority of schools (including most of the top 20) definitely are interested in tuition revenue. I made the comment in reference to people bringing up Harvard and claiming that their endowment means that they don’t have to worry about revenue. As I pointed out on another thread, using Harvard as a example is ridiculous because there are only a handful of schools in the country that have those kinds of financial resources.
Top 10 universities by endowment (USNWR - 2014 numbers)
Harvard University (MA) $36,429,256,000
Yale University (CT) $23,858,561,000
Stanford University (CA) $21,466,006,000
Princeton University (NJ) $20,576,361,000
Massachusetts Institute of Technology $12,425,131,000
Texas A&M University—College Station $10,521,034,492
University of Michigan—Ann Arbor $9,603,919,000
University of Pennsylvania $9,582,335,000
Columbia University (NY) $9,223,047,000
University of Notre Dame (IN) $8,189,096,000
So, there’s your HYPS, and that’s pretty much the total population of schools that you could say might be totally indifferent to the income generated from undergraduate tuition. And, in fact, two of those schools (Harvard and Princeton) do have significantly less full-pay students than the average Top 20 school.
However, by my estimation, full pay students are over-represented at ALL of the top 20 schools, ranging from a low of +2% at the University of Chicago to +29% at Tufts, and by an overall average of +13.5%.
If you have no faith in my estimates, and that’s reasonable enough, look at the raw numbers:
The percentage of full pay kids at these schools is 48.6% Given the published information on financial aid, it’s pretty reasonable to assume that these kids come from families with income of at least $160k and that’s right around the 90th percentile of household incomes. So, the upper 10% of families provide almost 1/2 of the students at these schools. Now, of course, those kids have lots of advantages that will give them a leg up in the admissions process - we certainly wouldn’t expect them to not have a big edge, and that’s what I am trying to compensate for with the methods I used.
Ok, back to your original question - which was what am I hinting about when I say that some of these schools aren’t necessarily interested in just tuition revenue?
Long story short, I think it is “class” more than “wealth” - these schools have historically been where the elite send their above average children to be educated - that is the source of their prestige and position at the top of academic food chain. They are no doubt dramatically more egalitarian than they once were, and they all devote considerable resources into making their student bodies look more representative of the country as a whole, but their main mission is to educate the elites of tomorrow - and to a very large degree, the elites of tomorrow tend to be the children of the elites of today. And of course, for the most part, these elite families tend to be wealthy, so that skews the numbers, even if “wealth” is not the variable being selected for.
What are the factors that get mentioned after “outstanding academics” when describing these schools? “Prestige” and “networking opportunities,” right? And that’s not wrong, and it’s why people fixate on these schools, to the point of unreasoning madness.
And that’s also why the common tropes on this board, about “children of famous people” and “If your parents donate $20 million dollars”) come up all the time. They are largely a bunch of BS - that’s not really how it works - but it does reflect the underlying reality that some kids do have an inside track because of family connections and their membership in a certain strata of society. But, we never like to discuss class in America, so it gets expressed in the crassest possible terms.
Obviously, all this stuff down below the dotted line is just my opinion, not at all really related to the merits or lack thereof of whatever observations I have regarding the admitted student data.
For some schools, the full pay threshold is probably greater than $160,000 annual income, based on their net price calculators. Try https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/net-price-calculator , for example.
Re: #72
Sure, some lower and middle income students do manage to find ways to impress admissions readers at super-selective schools, and most upper income students are not successful at that. But admissions processes and criteria do seem to matter in terms of how many lower and middle income students enter each school. See http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities/economic-diversity-among-top-ranked-schools , where 30% of Columbia’s students receive Pell grants (= lower to middle income, according to https://fafsa.ed.gov/FAFSA/app/f4cForm ), but only 12% of Yale’s students receive Pell grants.
Also, it is not just the criteria used, but also the process that matters. The more things an applicant needs (e.g. SAT subject tests, recommendations, interview, CSS Profile), the more ways that a student in a situation where these are not on the radar (e.g. first generation parent(s), attending a school where hardly anyone aspires to colleges that need these things) is more likely to not have all of this stuff ready by the deadline. Also, the CSS Profile with NCP finances screens out most applicants with single or divorced parents, who are probably more heavily concentrated in the lower income ranges.
76 Agree that the actual full-price threshold might be even higher than that, but that would only make the case stronger that full-pay kids are over-represented at these schools.
As for the number on Columbia’s Pell Grant students - something odd is going on there. They (USNWR) claim that is from the 2013-14 year, but the same year over on IPEDS shows the Pell Grant % at Columbia as 21% of undergraduates and 16% of incoming freshman. The rest of the numbers on the USNWR list look consistent with IPEDS, but that one sticks out like a sore thumb.
(And just a side note - where you draw the lines between classes in America is always a contentious issue, but I think eligibility for Pell Grants is pretty good indicator that we aren’t talking about the “middle class” anymore - almost all the Pell Grant money goes to kids with family incomes in the bottom two quintiles.)
@sgopal2 If you have questions, feel free to send me a private message. Honestly, I did this research for my own edification - I really wanted to dig a little deeper into some of these issues to see what could be learned from the publicly available information. As such, my burden of proof is substantially different than it would be if I was trying to produce a publishable paper and I am not super-excited about getting drawn into a series of debates over the more contentious stuff…not saying that I won’t do it at some point, but for now, I’m not comfortable with putting it all out there publicly.
Yeah, I know that’s a cop out, but if you (or anyone else) is interested, I’m fine with answering questions over private message.
This is from an NYT op-ed from 2014 about legacy admissions:
“When the Harvard Crimson surveyed this year’s freshman class, 14 percent of respondents reported annual family income above $500,000. Another 15 percent came from families making more than $250,000 per year. Only 20 percent reported incomes less than $65,000. This is the amount below which Harvard will allow a student to go free of charge. It’s also just above the national median family income. So, at least as many Harvard students come from families in the top 1 percent as the bottom 50 percent. Of course this says nothing of middle-class families, for whom private college is now essentially unaffordable.”
Full article link: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/25/opinion/end-college-legacy-preferences.html
The truly shocking aspect, in terms of the discussion here, is that Harvard is by almost any measure one of the MOST egalitarian schools in the Top 20.
If someone were irredeemably cynical, they might begin to wonder whether “need blind” and “holistic” were more marketing terms than high-minded principles.
Quick back of the envelope style calculation:
Assuming applicants to Harvard have roughly the same income distribution as the population of SAT test takers, a kid from the top 1% is roughly 60 TIMES more likely to be admitted to Harvard than a kid from the bottom 50%.