<p>Thanks for the response. I was originally interested in documentation for the discussion in your second link and haven’t found any yet, but that’s not important. I don’t think Harvard’s FA policy sells out the poor so I don’t care whether it courts the rich ;)</p>
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Why wouldn’t a family earning 100k not have need, when a 60k COA is equivalent to 90k in gross income.</p>
<p>It is personally understandable that a family of 4 with a total 100k income would not be able to pay a full 55K to 60K or more cost of attendance, even if they were consistent savers. </p>
<p>In the same situation, a family with a $150K or so income could have a hard time paying that bill if they lived in a high tax/high cost of housing/high cost of living area.</p>
<p>They still are hardly needy.</p>
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<p>At Harvard (and dozens of other selective, expensive private schools)?
Yes. It’s called “need-blind” admission.</p>
<p>[Need-blind</a> admission - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need-blind_admission]Need-blind”>Need-blind admission - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>Barrons, I think we have to ask ourselves what has happened to the upper class over the years; they used to be identified with the officer class, with horse back riding, cold showers and Chapel in the morning. Now, they’re identified with the likes of Donald Trump.</p>
<p>Neither Harvard nor Amherst are doing an outstanding job of taking care of the poor compared to some of the better womens colleges in part because their meticulous attention to the care and feeding of the super rich helps drive costs to the point where even the affluent middle-class (whose parents may have fond memories of cinder block dormitories and “mystery meat” Tuesdays) now qualify as needy.</p>
<h1>89 Agree with you GMT; every income bracket is being taken in this broken system. Wealthy students/full pay are subsidizing the financial aid students and the loan system has created an education bubble not unlike the housing bubble.</h1>
<p>The question is: when will it burst?</p>
<p>And being “need blind” still yields a mostly wealthy class. Because college prep is closely aligned with having more money. The only thing that they are blind to is that simple fact.</p>
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<p>Oh, I think they’re perfectly well aware of it, barrons. Even rich old Harvard couldn’t afford to meet full need for a class that mirrored the SES of the 18-year-old age cohort they’re drawing from. But they know they don’t need to worry about that, because their selection criteria systematically favor the affluent. High SAT scores correlate better with household income than with college grades. The kids with the most polished resumes and thickest portfolios of accomplishments are heavily skewed toward the affluent, who prepare their kids for the Ivy League from birth, if not before. On top of that, they give bonus points to legacies (whose parents skew heavily affluent), and recruit athletes for the traditional New England prep school sports–sports that you and I and they know perfectly well aren’t played in inner-city Detroit or rural North Dakota. They know what they’re doing. Then, for window-dressing, they admit a few first-gens and some URMs (largely drawn from the higher SES end of those communities).</p>
<p>I’m not suggesting this is a conspiracy to privilege the privileged. It’s just that serving the privileged is their comfort zone, and what they do best.</p>
<p>It would be interesting to see the family income demographics of those young people attending the most select schools. Seeing proportionately what family income range most students come from.</p>
<p>barrons: I don’t think elite privates are giving money to families of over 100 or 150K because they consider them needy. They’re doing it because they want the best class, not the best class composed of people making over 200 or under 80 thousand. That is a reasonable priority to have, and at the most elite schools, there’s enough money to fully subsidize the genuinely needy and also give a lot of help to middle-class families who can pay a portion of the cost, but not 50-60K.</p>
<p>I don’t think that the fact that high SES students are disproportionately represented at elite privates is a sign of some nefarious classism on the part of admissions boards. It’s an indication of a variety of social ills, especially the deplorable reality that way too many kids don’t have access to an adequate, let alone high quality, public education system. But I don’t think the Harvard admissions committee is the place to make up for this disparity. </p>
<p>The top schools already consider one’s achievements in the context of opportunities, to an extent. When I was applying to college close to ten years ago from a very good suburban public, there was an understanding that you pretty much needed at least a 1500 SAT to get into HYP, even though the published 25-75 range was something in the ballpark of 1380-1580 at the time. And that’s fair - aside from the advantages our education had given us, we pretty much uniformly had access to prep courses and tutoring, making it reasonable to expect high scores. </p>
<p>Conversely, for a kid from an underprivileged background, a much lower score may be far more impressive, and more indicative of intelligence, drive, and potential. Harvard may well decide that that kid is a student they want, and rightly so. But there’s no precise rubric for determining the “correct” achievement to opportunity ratio. If a kid from a family on welfare going to a failing school gets a 1300 (old scale, of course), that’s frankly a remarkable achievement, and he should pretty much be able to go to whatever school he wants. But what if that same 1300 student comes from a working-class family making 60,00 and goes to a mediocre public school? He’ll still have achieved well beyond what demographics and the school profile would suggest, but I’m not sure Harvard has any kind of social obligation to accept or vested interested in accepting him. </p>
<p>Or what if the genuinely poor kid from the inner city gets an 1150? Again, given that he may attend a school where only 50 % of kids even graduate, that’s a rare and commendable achievement. But say what you want about the validity of the SAT, I suspect that once you fall below a certain point, there is a drop-off in level of ability and/or preparation. It may not show up in statistics, because once in college students can pursue academic programs of varying degrees of difficulty: if students lower down on the Academic Index are avoiding engineering and hard sciences and gravitating toward the easiest humanities majors, they may indeed do just as well, on paper, as students with higher scores going in. That may be fine for them, but it doesn’t mean they are at a level at which it is necessarily worthwhile for Harvard to have admitted them, and I don’t think Harvard is perpetrating an injustice by not doing so. There are a lot of other schools, including “lesser” elites, that might be happy to have the high-achieving poor kid that hasn’t quite made the cut at HYP. And if not - or if those schools can’t make it affordable for him - it is no horrible injustice if he winds up at flagship state U, which will also give him lots of opportunities to wind up in a much different socioeconomic position than the one he’s coming from.</p>
<p>The problem -for poor and, increasingly, middle class kids - comes in when high quality public universities are also unaffordable.</p>
<p>Apprentice-- I agree with everything you’ve said but I would add that the problem is not just that high quality public universities are unaffordable; even middling quality/low end public U’s (which typically don’t offer aid to a low income student beyond the Pell and any other Federal money to which the family is qualified) are out of reach.</p>
<p>I wish all the folks here who spend so much time getting aggravated about the elitist policies of Harvard and Princeton would spend half that time getting aggravated about the elitist policies of our public U’s. No, those policies are not intended to systematically exclude low income students. But when they have the practical impact of doing just that??? Who you calling an elitist? Harvard, which offers zero merit aid, or a public U which offers just enough merit aid to populate the campus with middle and upper middle class students which is “cheaper” than having to ante up the bucks to pay full freight for a poor kid?</p>
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<p>State government policy seems to be rather variable here. For example, the in-state need-based financial aid policies of CA, WA, MI, VA, and NC (at least the flagships) seem to be quite a big different from those of PA, IL, and TX.</p>
<p>There will always be advantages to be wealthy. That’s life. </p>
<p>Some people will be able to send their kids to private high schools schools with small classes, while other students are packed into large public high schools that are full of discipline problems. </p>
<p>Some people will be able to fluff up their essays with expensive mission trips and consultants helping them write their essays. </p>
<p>Other people will need to work during the school year, and are on their own as far as essays. Some people will be able to do many unpaid internships during the summer to build up their resume, while other people will need to work at boring jobs during the summer for food money. </p>
<p>Some students will be able to rely upon extensive good ol’ boy college networks in their job search, while other students are on their own.<br>
In fact, I saw one recent study that said that many more white college students got many of their job interviews and internships through family contacts (and family friends in high places) than did African-American students. </p>
<p>One person wrote that one of the main differences between expensive and cheap colleges is that the expensive colleges typically put a great deal of effort into refining a student’s writing and communications abilities in small classes, while the cheaper colleges may rely upon multiple choice tests in huge classes.</p>
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<p>The difference in need-based FA policies for in-state students isn’t necessarily a reflection of differences in state government policy. The University of Michigan and UVA get very little aid from their respective state legislatures, and at least in Michigan (not sure about Virginia) the state contributes next to nothing in state-sponsored FA. Those two universities depend heavily on quasi-private sources–large endowments and annual giving–to generate institutional funds that go into FA. The state governments, which have been merrily de-funding these institutions for years, deserve close to zero credit.</p>
<p>Here’s one measure of the difference:</p>
<p>Endowment, FY 2012 (from NACUBO)</p>
<p>University of Michigan $7.7 billion (rank #7)
UVA $4.8 billion (rank #17)
Penn State $1.8 billion (rank #36)
University of Illinois $1.7 billion (rank #39)</p>
<p>At a standard 5% payout, Michigan’s endowment should generate about $385 million annually. Illinois’ payout on endowment works out to about $85 million. The state of Illinois actually funds the University of Illinois more generously than the State of Michigan funds the University of Michigan, but the latter university has the stronger finances because it started long ago (and out of necessity) on the path to quasi-privatization.</p>
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<p>At the low end of the socio-economic scale, the problem is largely that the high achieving students don’t even apply to the most generous schools:</p>
<p>[The</a> Missing “One-Offs”: The Hidden Supply of High-Achieving, Low Income Students](<a href=“http://www.nber.org/papers/w18586]The”>http://www.nber.org/papers/w18586)</p>
<p>[Elite</a> Colleges Struggle To Recruit Smart, Low-Income Kids : NPR](<a href=“Elite Colleges Struggle To Recruit Smart, Low-Income Kids : NPR”>http://www.npr.org/2013/01/09/168889785/elite-colleges-struggle-to-recruit-smart-low-income-kids)</p>
<p>It’s difficult to admit students who don’t apply.</p>
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<p>Which is probably why they drool over students like Lloyd Chen (low income single parent family, 4.0 HS GPA + community college courses in high school, 34 ACT), who applied to 9 colleges (HYPSM + 4 UCs) and got into them all plus the Gates Millennium Scholarship.</p>
<p>[Elk</a> Grove teen goes 9 for 9 in elite college admissions - Education - The Sacramento Bee](<a href=“http://www.sacbee.com/2013/05/30/5457373/elk-grove-teen-goes-9-for-9-in.html]Elk”>http://www.sacbee.com/2013/05/30/5457373/elk-grove-teen-goes-9-for-9-in.html)</p>
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<p>And the moment they don’t admit “enough” high SES students, you’ve got all the wailing that it’s not fair that they admitted some URM when Billy got 2350 on his SAT’s.</p>