Okay, finally got my lazy ass to work on the Princeton NPC, and here’s the result based on a hypothetical scenario that depicts a middle income to lower upper middle income household of $125K income, $450K investment (including college savings) and one sibling in college:
Princeton Grant: $49K
Campus Job: $3K
Parent EFC: $17K
For those middle to upper middle income households with a similar income and investments (no real estate and no retirement savings are considered in Princeton FA), you can expect to pay LESS than what it’d typically cost at your in-state public university.
“URM got that boost almost certainly for football, not his URM status, as the latter is carefully measured and codified in Ivy athletic recruiting rules.”
Correct. All the football players would get cranked through the AI system.
The studies tells us that URM/African American is about the biggest admissions hook there is. Studies also show that recruited athlete is nearly as big. But you really can’t stack combine/stack those two hooks.
But having either one or the other to use is good hook-ness.
It is not possible to quantify athletic hook because it is a guaranteed admission. For example, the claim that athletic hook is worth 160 points on the SAT is laughable because my child could have 160 points more on the SAT and would still never be admitted to these schools without an athletic hook.
Princeton and others do like students with multiple hooks and accept many of them.
Which studies tell you that? I’ve read more than a few and athletic recruits beat them all.
There is a literal quota for athletes and academic standards are bent for them very deliberately. At one NESCAC that recently completed a detailed report on this - so not even a D1 school - nearly a third of every class comes in as an athletic recruit with about 15% given a significant bump to make up for lower academic stats and another 15% given a boost over non-athletes who are similarly qualified.
I haven’t read of any school gives that kind of preference to URM/AA.
Using the same figures in post #41 above, I thought I’ll also play around with Harvard, Yale and Stanford along with Princeton. As expected, there were no significant discrepancies in grant offer among them. HYP were neck and neck while Stanford offered about $5K less. However, Stanford’s NPC used lower tuition, room and board figures.
Just for comparative curiosity, I also ran NPC for Cornell University using the same figures with the same situation of one additional sibling in college. A huge difference in outcome. While the EFC came to approximately $17K for each of HYPS, Cornell came to the EFC of $37K, more than double! With no other sibling in college? Nearly $56K for someone making about $125K with investment savings of $450K.
They will match very closely. Ivy schools can generate a “Harvard read” for students they really really want. They do not even need to see a Harvard finaid letter.
Basically a stealth merit scholarship (but only effective for applicants who apply for financial aid and have what the colleges see as financial need).
@Dolemite Ivy League is an athletic league with their own regulations. They officially allow recruits to share finaid offers with other schools for the sake of matching. It is on their website. Probably, for the reason you mentioned, to equalize teams. However, from my observations, the “preferential packaging” is not limited to athletic recruits.
@Tanbiko NCAA rules don’t allow for a benefit to athletes that isn’t available to the general student body so they most likely have to keep the numbers at a certain level to demonstrate that it’s not just for athletes.
The Ivy Common Agreement prohibits financial aid matching solely for athletes. I do not believe the NCAA would prohibit the practice in itself. But at the end of the day it is kind of immaterial. The practice is in wide use by recruited athletes at all the Ivys, who can get a financial aid match by showing “demonstrated recruiting interest” from another more generous school. And yes, all schools will apply the more general school’s formula to determining aid. So a Brown award matched to Yale’s aid (for example) would be exactly the same as aid from Yale. On the other hand, there is really nothing like demonstrated recruiting interest for regular pool applicants, so yo are basically talking about matching among kids who were admitted to two or more schools in the conference in the RD cycle.
On every Ivy campus, there are a maximum of ten football players per year who are admitted with stats greater than one standard deviation from the mean of the previous four recruited classes. Eight have to have stats that are within 1.5 standard deviations from the mean, and two can have stats up to 2 standard deviations below the mean. There are probably five to ten additional athletes admitted with similar stats in each class. So if we accept that the normal statistical distribution of a class is within one standard deviation of the mid point, then there are maybe sixty to eighty athletes on campus who have stats which I think could be considered “way low”.
The amount of the athletic bump in the Ivy is way overstated. Yes, there are a relative handful of kids (like the ten football players per year) who would not have a prayer of admission absent the athletic process. But for the most part the athletes in the Ivy have stats in the ballpark of their peer group, and the real benefit of their recruitment is the certitude of admission that comes from the likely letter process. That is what the AI system was designed to bring about.
@Ohiodad51 I think the difference may be more pronounced in the NESCAC…which is interesting given that is D3 and supposedly less important. Yet a greater % of athletes get help with admissions there, because the total # of students is so much smaller than at the Ivies.
In any case my point was that race likely had little to do with this recruited football player’s lower-than-average-stats acceptance.
^ Not to get too far afield but the general consensus is that the NESCAC is willing to bend less than the Ivy on academics. My point though was not about the very few kids who get a clear bump into either conference each year, but rather about the large majority of athletic admits in the Ivy (and the NESCAC for that matter) who have stats that put them in range to be admitted anyway. The real admissions help in both conferences is that it plucks that one kid out of a stack of all those whose stats are in the general range for the school (albeit many on the lower end of that range), and instead of the admissions chance being 5/10/20%, it becomes a virtual certainty because of the recruiting bump.
Only one NESCAC, AFAIK, has done an intensive study of its athletic program and it’s from that one that i drew my numbers in my earlier post. There are 3 groups - one with athletes who would not get in otherwise, one with athletes who are similar to those accepted on the basis of non-athletic merit but jump to the head of the line, and one that just walks on (and that group is very small).
It does not say how much they bend for the 15% they take with low stats.
As far as the African American hook @3puppies and @northwesty insist is “the best one”, this school has only about 12% of them total and if an athlete is also AA, s/he doesn’t count in the athletic hook number given to coaches to use. That’s fewer than just the group of athletes that needs coach help to get in because of low stats, far fewer than athletes who are hooked, period, and I think it’s safe to say that many of the AA group were already well qualified and didn’t need any help getting in at all.
So in the case of this NESCAC, the hook for AA vs athlete is not even close.
^ I am pretty conversant with the system in place in both conferences, along with the system in the Patriot League. I don’t have any idea if the minority “hook” is bigger or smaller than the athletic “hook”. But I do know there are far fewer kids admitted in any of those conferences as athletes with academics well below the general run of the class then is generally assumed.
“Which studies tell you that? I’ve read more than a few and athletic recruits beat them all.”
Let’s not sidetrack the thread. But I’m referring to Hurwitz and Espenshade. Bowen might go the other way.
Here’s Espenshade in so many words:
“The athlete advantage is weaker than the preference for African Americans, but stronger than the preference for Hispanic or legacy applicants. The legacy preference, while substantial, is less than that shown to Hispanics.”
So:
1 is URM/AA
2 is recruited athlete
3 is URM/Latino
4 is legacy
FYI, there’s a quantitative system for tracking the hooks going to athletes, but there’s not such a system for the other hooks. That’s why folks had to study that question.
Well when I see numbers like “12% black students total” and “15% lower stat athletes - specifically NOT black or Hispanic” recruited (also not including another 15% who have the stats but jump to the head of line by virtue of being recruited), then it’s clear. Even if every single black student had lower-than-average stats, which is exceedingly unlikely, that’s still fewer than just the one group of athletes that got in with lower than average stats.
…and this is the NESCAC with by far the most black students.