How many white middle class non-alumni child students are there at Harvard and other Ivy League schools?
Just wondering.
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2015/04/harvard-college-admits-1990/
Implied in the above figures is that the remaining students admitted to the school are white, so that would be 51.6%. How many of those students are middle class (which you haven’t defined) and non-alumni is anyone’s guess.
If you look at the financial aid information, you’ll see that a huge number of students are wealthy enough to afford the full whack.
About 60 percent receive need–based scholarships.
OP, I’ll go ahead and make a guess about the number of white, non-legacy, middle-class kids at Harvard. Taking the info @Gibby provided that racially it’s approximately 50% white, and defining “middle-class” as kids that are receiving FA (not a perfect definition, I know, since Harvard FA would extend to those living below the middle class) I would guesstimate that 15-20% would fall into the middle-class, white kid group.
If I look at my kid’s freshman year housing block, 2 African American, 2 Asian, 1 Legacy and 1 middle class white kid - that tiny sample was 16.7% middle class white kid. I’d guess that’s a reasonable estimate.
I would further speculate that a significant number of the mcwk (middle-class white kids), are recruited athletes.
I am pretty certain that there are plenty of people who would not be eligible for financial aid at Harvard who would nonetheless consider themselves “middle class.” I also think that there are plenty of (a) nonwhite recruited athletes and (b) recruited athletes who do not qualify for financial aid. 15-20% middle-class white students means ~300 or fewer per class; that seems very low to me. I don’t know why such a group would have a significantly disproportionate number of recruited athletes.
Considering the total number of white kids per class at Harvard is around 840 according to the stats Gibby gave, I don’t think I’m too far off after you subtract legacies and those from families making over, say 150K (my arbitrary middle class cutoff). Care to venture a guess of your own?
How much does being wealthy even help? Why not just include all white, non legacy, non born-with hook kids. With the exception of the SUPER rich kids.
Just wondering? OP joins CC to ask one inflammatory question, but it’s all just wondering? Pfffffft.
Still. I can contribute. The only current Harvard student I know is my kid. And she fits your description perfectly.
Wonder how the 10% international kids fit into this equation.
I’d say the admissions committee has a good idea of probability of acceptance of admissions offers based on income and demographics.
Maybe a lot of white middle class accepted applicants who aren’t eligible for financial aid are more likely not to enroll, which would make the committee more reluctant to make offers to that demographic.
Seems logical that such an approach might be what they follow anyway. They want to maximize yield. They also seem to try to keep that 60% on financial aid number fairly constant year to year.
Five kids applied to Harvard EA at my high school this year. Surprisingly (or not), three kids got accepted all of which had legacy and were VERY wealthy. As for the other two kids, one was deferred; the other, denied. One was statistically smarter than all three admits, was not socially awkward at all, and had better extracurriculars. The denied kids was statistically the same as the admits, but with great extracurriculars.
n.b. everyone I’m speaking about is white
You might ask: how can you be sure about the statistics? Well, it’s easy to compare stats when you’re friends with the five applicants.
What I’m telling myself as I prepare to apply RD: We’re all playing a game, and can’t complain if we lose. Let’s not forget this America, the land of “opportunity,” and the place where money and privilege talks.
Harvard readily acknowledges that legacies are admitted at about a thirty per cent rate. Being wealthy doesnt matter with legacy admits.
We may never truly know how much income is considered for the 40ish% of students who do not receive financial aid.
Knowing how important yield is to these schools, if I were an ad com officer, my first question on full pay students would be “what is the probability she/he will attend if offered admission?”
If the committee’s prior 10 years of data suggested that nearly 100% of full pays in the million dollar and over income bracket accepted admission but only 50% of those just scraping the $250,000 a year threshold did, then I would imagine they would be more likely to admit the richest applicants just in terms of protecting yield.
This is a strictly hypothetical - hopefully I am wrong - but there it is.
thank you for the replies, sorry for no earlier response.
It may be an ‘inflammatory’ question but, well, its standard now to ask organizations for their racial and social makeup, and organizations promote themselves by selectively disclosing numbers as well.
I asked because I believe they are double counting a lot of students–there may be a lot of whites but they are rich or alumni or athletes, there may be a lot of middle class but a lot of them are minority. So they may not be admitting many really underprivileged minority students, or middle class whites.
There is information available for these things, although I am not sure ( I will research this further) as it relates to ethnicity. There is demographic family income information for recently admitted classes. Googling Harvard demographics class of ---- should get you there.
Whether someone could winnow down to the information you are specifically looking for is uncertain to me.
There is no doubt a lot of students from affluent families and a lot of students from families who may have the perception of being in the middle class but who are actually in the top 5 or 10 percent of income earners.
Googling the Harvard Crimson and doing a search for a specific class years demographics may get you there as well.
I look at the matriculation lists at the high schools in my city. By far the elite private schools are sending more students to the Ivies than the public schools, even when the public schools are top notch. Sure, middle class kids get into Harvard, but I think the wealthiest families can provide the best SAT prep, the best extracurricular acitivities, they have connections for great internships, they often have college counselors who have fewer kids and can provide better guidance than at large publics and Harvard doesn’t have to give them money.
African American. 11.6%
Asian American 21.1%
Hispanic or Latino 13.0%
Native American or Pacific Islander 1.5%
International 11.6%
Then subtract white legacies and you have covered 70% of the class approximately.
So of the final 30%, lets guesstimate that it’s equally distributed between rich, middle class, and poor.
So at the high end 10% of the Harvard class is middle class white, non legacy.
If you look at the Crimson articles the last few years, over 60% of entering students identify themselves as white. That includes people identifying themselves as mixed-race, with one of them white, or as a white Hispanic.
Not that that tells you much about how many are “middle class.” It has been pretty well documented that elite colleges have comparatively few students from the 75th-25th income percentiles, with the top quartile (which starts approximately at a household income of $100,000) vastly over-represented and the bottom quartile somewhat less under-represented. But the definition of “middle class” on CC (and, indeed, in my real life) includes lots of families who are in the top income quartile.
About 29% of surveyed Harvard freshmen reported a family income of $40k-$125k, which is a reasonable “middle class” range. 33% of the class reported an income of $250k or more - which is likely underreported given that a higher percentage of the class is full-pay.
Interestingly, legacies made up 43% of students with $500k+ incomes and 25% of those with $250k-$500k incomes. Only about 5% of the $40k-$125k “middle class” range are legacies.
http://features.thecrimson.com/2015/freshman-survey/makeup/
(College Costs → Family Income)