I have been reading through older threads about NESCAC schools and am consistently taken aback by the shifting reputation of Amherst College. Entering the college process, Amherst stood out for the sheer extent of its focus on diversity, its lack of a legacy preference, etc.
However, reading through threads that are relatively recent (9-10 years), I am seeing it referred to an “old boys club” and I recall hearing it, either here or somewhere else, described as “a school for Thurston Howell.” As recently as 2017, the New York Times found that 21% of Amherst students were from the top 1%.
How did Amherst’s reputation seemingly turn around entirely this quickly? How much is either aspect true (i.e., would the 21% number still be accurate and/or was the focus a less sudden change than it seems)? How has this changing climate shifted Amherst? It feels as if I am reading about two different colleges at times, and I am curious about the sociology of how this all occurred.
The 21% portion of the student body belonging to the top 1% of household incomes is down to 17% (I just looked it up.) However, what’s highly likely is that you can’t get rid of 200 years of tradition overnight and “old” Amherst and “new” Amherst are - at the moment - existing side by side. There is so much more to diversity than just adding lower-income groups and changing the school mascot. It means diversifying the rich kids, too.
In terms of popular sociology across decades, you may want to consider a best-selling book from 1980, The Official Preppy Handbook, in which references to Amherst appeared as much as those to nearly any other college.
This is a complex topic but to throw out an interesting background consideration: around the same time the NYT and others were criticizing many famous colleges for having such an upper-income/upper-class skew, these colleges were also discussing among themselves the looming demographic problems they were facing. Basically, the US native-born population was slipping well below replacement rate, and the college enrollment rate was plateauing, and so chasing after the traditional multigenerational mainstays of elite US college enrollment was looking like it was going to turn into a negative-sum game.
So a lot of college admissions insiders began talking about the need to diversify, to reach out to new international pools, to recent immigrants, to more first-generation candidates, and so on. Of course they wanted to be careful about maintaining their standards, but there was a broad consensus there were a lot of great potential candidates who simply were not aware of all their US college opportunities, including the financial support available, and so were not applying.
OK, so colleges began more aggressively marketing to these various pools, and also in many cases made their financial support even more generous. Amherst is actually not at all alone in these efforts, but it is certainly one of the very well-funded colleges which has moved the needle meaningfully over the last 10 years or so, with plans to do even more in the future.
I am pointing all this out because while it is nice these colleges are getting more diverse (at least in some ways), it is also somewhat being forced on them by these background demographic issues. And it is generally important to understand they are still balancing all sorts of institutional goals, so the process is pretty incremental.
Still, these colleges are long-term thinkers. And every time they succeed in recruiting a student from one of these new pools of interest, and that student succeeds in college and then after, they then become a part of an expanding alum network than can be tapped to recruit even more new students. And in fact the multigenerational effect is probably not going to go away, so much as be expanded in scope outside of where it was a generation ago.
I think all of the above is absolutely true and something my kids have thought about a lot (especially coming out of private secondary schools that may look very different than 100 years ago but still exude an aura of exclusivity). At the same time, numbers do matter. My daughters were thrilled to see more African Americans walking around Amherst’s campus and in the town of Amherst than almost any other college they visited including some colleges in much more urban areas. The visible presence of other black kids made them feel more “at home” and thus more interested in attending Amherst.
I am sure that all of these schools need to do a lot more work to really become socioeconomically more diverse, but Amherst’s choice to get rid of legacies has probably helped increase diversity on campus. Also, according to the college advisor at D24’s boarding school, fewer prep school kids have been attending(? admitted?) to Amherst in recent years than ten or twenty years ago. While it may ultimately hurt D24 if she chooses to apply there, if the college advisor is correct, the decrease in the prep school population is probably a good thing for diversity overall --assuming Amherst is not just replacing those prep school kids with equally wealthy/privileged public school kids .
100%. Forward-thinking colleges and universities have a strategic imperative to diversify – in every way, from geography to SES. Smaller, more remote schools in particular find getting started in this very hard because of the difficulty in attracting “pioneers”. But once they have built enough of a cohort, they become attractive to that cohort. Amherst has done this better than many. It helps to have $ as well!
Since I started looking at colleges nearly ten years ago to now, I don’t think there’s any question that Amherst has changed for the better.
It has the money to do whatever it likes. They have clearly made huge efforts to increase diversity of all kinds. I love that they have done this. They have managed to maintain their reputation as one of the very best LACs. Good for them.
It sure does! When you look long-term at the history of the “top” colleges and universities, over and over you see how they had to adapt to changing circumstances. And having financial resources–not just cash on hand, but the ability to get more gifts, get more tuition, get more research funding, get more state support (for publics), and so on–has obviously helped the institutions we see as consistently top institutions maintain that status.
And from my perspective there is nothing wrong with that.
Although it creates a wealth divide that is a challenge when 24/7 dining halls and state of the art athletic and academic facilities are table stakes. Some that have $ have much more than they need. Others do a TERRIFIC job educating students but don’t have an alumni base to support gargantuan gifts.
Yes, I probably should have said something like there is nothing wrong with that, at least as long as we have a capitalist system where consumers with more wealth can buy nicer things.
To some this is cynical, but to me we might as well be talking about the competition between luxury car brands. If these brands adapt to changing markets over time, they are doing what they are supposed to be doing in a competitive economy.
Of course BMW doesn’t offer need-based subsidies. But the degree to which that is even possible for these colleges is tied to them doing what it takes to stay wealthy colleges, and so there is a real balancing act there.
Interestingly, in some ways, the independent private schools in our area are typically more diverse than at least most of the “top” suburban public high schools. In part that is just a function of “top” being defined in reference to uncontrolled test scores and such. But of course these private schools also deliberately target diversity as a goal in admissions, offer scholarships to enable a more economically diverse pool the practical opportunity to attend, and so on.
And in fact, they are typically engaged in very similar discussions about the changing nature of our regional demographics and what they need to do to position themselves well for the future.
So, yeah, at a high level these sorts of private schools tend to track (if not lead) wherever the highly selective colleges are going. Because really, that is sort of their whole deal.
Amherst is on the leading edge of making these changes. But it isn’t accurate to say they did it because changing demographics necessitated it. Amherst could probably fill a class with white males in a dozen affluent zip codes if they wanted to.
That may have been a driver of schools lower on the food chain, but the highly rejectives are doing it to try to build a diverse student body and to provide opportunities to kids who aren’t necessarily starting life on 3rd base already.
Changing demographics presumably has something to do with it, since a college wants to market itself as being desirable to all demographics of potential college students, rather than a demographically limited subset. A college that is seen as being a college for White students from rich families may struggle to get students from other demographics to apply and enroll.
There are a bunch of colleges which fit UCB’s fine description. A handful of VERY obvious “minority” kids on campus (they are obvious because there are so few of them), a few professors who end up acting as mentors in the absence of a formal commitment by the administration to support these kids, and a LOT of rhetoric on the website and in printed materials about the colleges commitment to DEI. But merit aid for upper middle class kids who don’t need the money but love the bragging rights.
It was more about changing values, not changing demographics.
The earlier comment was pointing out that essentially there weren’t enough wealthy white kids to go around, so colleges had to find more of their students from other pools. Which is true. That shortage of full pay students is definitely hurting many colleges, and why we have seen some colleges close.
But the ones at the top of the pile aren’t diversifying because they have to in order to survive. If every top 20 school announced that they were only taking full pay students next year, there would be an uproar. As there should be. But there would still be many more qualified full pay kids apply than they can take.
That was my point. They have both the desirability (evidenced by acceptance rates) and money to be able to choose to look for bright kids from backgrounds that traditionally were not in that pool. So it was a choice they made voluntarily, not one they were forced into.
I can tell you that it was a very conscious choice, and one that they are very proud of on campus.
That is interesting! An update to the data after 6 years. What school takes the top spot this time in percent of students from the top 1%? I was surprised to see Colorado College at the top of the 2017 one.
But I think if you are thinking long term, if your competitor colleges are expanding out to, say, the ever-growing number of well-educated students in other countries possibly interested in US colleges, and you are not, eventually you may find you are not in fact going to be keeping up with the highest standards for such colleges. This is what I would call a two-way market, where you offer something to the top students, but they also offer something to you. And if your competitors are targeting the growth areas for top students, and you are not and sticking stubbornly to a shrinking source of top students, to me that sounds like a pretty bad long-term strategy.
At least that is how I would vote if I were on the board of one of these colleges and the issue was our long-term strategic plan.