The athlete/non-athlete divide is the next frontier as it seems to come up fairly regularly whenever Amherst is mentioned in a CC thread:
Football draws the most fire because of its roster requirements, but there are also a lot of club sports for kids who (apparently) board their own horses, who play squash and rugby, who’ve been golfing since infancy. And every NESCAC college devotes at least a couple of acres of land to field hockey (which IIRC is one of those Title IX exemptions granted to women’s sports because there is no exact analogy to men’s football?) All of these things are baked into Amherst’s demographics as we have come to know it.
I have to say that boarding your horse is next level . . . In all fairness, most NESCAC schools skew wealthy/UMC. It isn’t just Amherst (and I have no affiliation there nor is my kiddo applying).
Oh, yes. There are plenty of other colleges where kids board horses. A woman I know used to board her horse at Mt. Holyoke (I have no idea if this is still a thing).
I note at least relatively speaking, sports like soccer and ultimate (often an important club sport at LACs) require less of an unusual investment by the high school (both being playable on football fields, possibly even practice fields, without much special equipment). But of course usually the recruited athletes in soccer also do travel club soccer, which is then an expensive for the family, and ultimate does not typically recruit as such.
But still, I think the sorts of non-recruited athletes who are filling out the 80% (beyond the 32% varsity) are not necessarily going to a fancy high school or paying a lot as a family for sports. Maybe, but not always.
There is another consideration for colleges to accept lower income kids instead of legacies, especially if there is a good pile of money already in the endowment. Legacy families do donate, but all it needs is one of their scions to be rejected, or there not being a kid who wants to attend, or the family no longer likes the polifictas or the polices of the school and the money dissipates. Money from multigenerational attendance comes with strings.
On the other hand, donations from grateful alumni tend to be more generous and have fewer strings, especially from kids who are from lower or mid income families, who grew up without the sense of entitlement that often comes with generational wealth.
However, that requires a number of highly successful alumni from lower income families, and these are not as common, and take more time than it takes for a kids from a wealthy family to be affluent enough to provide 5 figure donations.
It also takes a well-oiled alumni relations operation to put together reunions, phonathons, glossy publications, newsletters, etc… Small colleges are especially good at this sort of thing because the chances are very good that people will actually recognize a name or a face at otherwise crowded events. I was especially impressed when my family donated a tree to my Little Three college earlier this year; the staff literally rolled out the welcome wagon (anyway, golf carts) to usher us around campus. That sort of individual attention doesn’t go unnoticed.
(1) On Athletics: a NY Times article from 2019 focused on how Amherst intentionally began setting out to recruit a more diverse set of athletes to their school - economically and racially: The Real Cost of Diversifying College Rosters - The New York Times (nytimes.com) . Not directly mentioned in the article, but implied (to me, at least) the much talked about athlete divide at Amherst had become a proxy for a race/class divide as well, with teams that were, in 2019 (and still today,though changing) whiter and richer than the student body as a whole. Note that around that same time (2019 or so) the Princeton review rated Amherst as a school where “different classes/races didn’t interact much.” My daughter (first year, class of '27) has not found that to be true in the slightest, so I wonder if that was part of a growing pain that is now fading away, as Amherst culturally continues to reinvent itself? (And Amherst is no longer showing up on those lists)
(2) In telling the story of Amherst’s change, you cannot overstate the importance of the recently retired Biddy Martin, Amherst’s first woman president, who came there from Wisconsin ( a public school … gasp!). She understood the ways in which clear and aggressive leadership at the top can transform a campus, and she pushed hard for a more diverse campus (in every way) to better reflect the US and the world, not as a strategy to keep market share, but as a moral imperative to shape the next generation of leaders in the US. In this, she reminded me of Vassar’s transformative president, Cappy Hill, who made that campus the leader among SLAC’s in economic diversity (they have since slid back a bit under the current president). Martin retired just more than a year ago, and the new president shows every indication of continuing what she started, but time will tell whether he is as committed to change as she… perhaps the culture has shifted enough that the change is permanent?
As Amherst evolved, it had some stumbles in leaning how to adequately address the needs of a more diverse student body and the rich/poor divide. Anthony Abraham Jack turned his observations from his time at Amherst into the foundation of his academic career.
As an aside, it is interesting to note that Aries’s research has the same results as the Chetty research - the benefits of an “elite” college to low income students are far higher than to upper income students.
That has always made sense to me, that at least in financial terms, the value-added networking benefit would be primarily captured by the lower-income students.
Of course there may be non-financial benefits that flow both ways, but these studies are not designed to capture that sort of effect.
It makes a lot of sense. Wealthy, well connected students are going to be able to call on their connections, regardless of where they attend school, but low income students don’t have that built in advantage so they are going to get a greater benefit from attending an elite school.
In part because so much had changed in the previous half-century. Imagine what it must have been like in the 1960s when there was no blueprint for what Amherst is trying to accomplish. Wesleyan University was pretty much flying by the seat of its pants when this NYT Magazine article was published, chronicling one astonishing Fall in 1969, in the midst of the Vietnam War, urban riots - the aftermath of the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King - as they all collided with the high-water mark of the so-called, “Academic Revolution” (Trigger Warning: this article has been cut and pasted from the original format and many of the words appear with a mysterious space appearing between the letters as well as other surprises. But you’ll get the gist of it): The Two Nations At Wesleyan University - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
Looks like the formatting errors are due to automated scanning in of a printed piece from 1970 from the archives, as described by the sentence “Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.”
Note Amherst’s report that their percentage of legacies just about dropped in half in their first year. Seems it did in fact make a difference (though in raw numbers, for a class of about 480 students, the numbers are small - a drop of a couple dozen students- but that is still a measurable and significant drop).
I think I may have detected a tongue poking in @cquin85 's cheek. The “performative” label - IMO - was a reference to remarks made when Wesleyan made its own announcement regarding legacy admissions. For some reason, the CC peanut gallery loves to downplay the national influence of the NESCAC colleges.
Why do you think the drop in legacy % is significant? What you don’t know is the profile of the students who took the 24 spots or so that previously would have gone to legacies. Likely just went to legacies of Williams, Bowdoin, Dartmouth, etc.