Here’s the Bouchard viewpoint: intelligence is at least 70% hereditary and being adopted has a negligible impact on adult IQ.
http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Genetic-influence-on-human-intelligence-Spearmans-g-How-much.pdf
http://www.bio.utexas.edu/courses/kalthoff/bio346/PDF/Readings/14Bouchard(1990).pdf
Here’s another study that’s finds high hereditability to intelligence and a low impact to a shared environment.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2889158/
It’s worth pointing out that even MZTs don’t have a perfect correlation, indicating there’s some component to IQ that isn’t easily explained by nature or nurture. Not all of the variation unexplained by genetics, can be explained by identifiable environmental factors. Some of the variation just appears random.
Top colleges are very expensive. Poor students cannot afford them. Colleges subsidize those students with funds from their endowments. Funds from endowments are donated mostly by wealthy graduates who have children who eventually want to go to top colleges. Endowment administrators know that poor people are unlikely to be big contributors. Simply running poor people through college graduation does not turn them into wealthy donors to the endowments. Of course they are going to have a skew. The same is true of other luxury brands. If they give away too much for free, they diminish the brand.
@WISdad23 said it more eloquently, but bottom line is, rich people are funding the way for others to attend (along growth and improvements to the university), so I don’t see the problem. In the end, some people don’t pay that really should, some get the help they need, others pay way too much (generally the middle class) and some can easily afford to pay and give more. That’s life.
Actually, you’ll be surprised to find out you’re completely wrong.
“Look at the remarkably relative flatness of the colored lines below. An affluent student who attends one of 12 “Ivy plus” universities (the Ivy League colleges, Duke, M.I.T., Stanford and the University of Chicago) ends up around the 80th percentile of the income distribution on average. A lower-income student who attends one of those colleges ends up around the 75th percentile. Lower-income students who attend less elite colleges also have outcomes similar to others from the same college.”
@roethlisburger How is all of that stuff about IQ heredity relevant to the post? IQ may be hereditary, but When you start saying rich people have higher IQs which means they have a better high school GPA and SAT scores which means they’re more likely to get admitted to top colleges, that starts becoming a pretty shaky argument.
Some colleges claim to spend considerably more per student than their list prices (e.g. http://www.■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/search1ba.aspx?institutionid=243744,186131,130794,166027 , click “Funding and Faculty”), so every student gets a subsidy, funded by endowment (from past donations, profits/surpluses, and/or income from non-student sources) earnings.
If these numbers are true, then the only true full-payers are those who either had large past parental donations, or will make large future donations after graduation. “Large” is not quite development-level amounts, but probably considerably larger than typical donations over one’s lifetime.
Test prep is everyone’s favorite punching bag, but the advantages of wealth go much deeper. Some people spend $10k+ on college consultants. They may spend hundreds of thousands so their kid can attend elite privates for k-12. Usually, but not always, people reaching the top levels of sports had their parents spend a lot of money on private lessons, coaching, camps, and traveling teams. A student not expected to work a job during the school year will have more time to devote to homework and ECs. Then, there are the legacies and dev admits.
“That’s for a myriad of reasons from exposure to environmental hazards like lead paint, school quality preK-12, parent education level, safety of neighborhood…factors that disadvantage poor kids long before the first SAT test taken or high school GPA.”
I agree that there are a huge number of reasons why parent’s education level and income will influence the child’s likelihood of going to university, or to a top university.
If parents are well educated, this will influence the child’s upbringing from a very young age. I can remember reading to our children almost from birth. I recall going through every Dr Seuss book and every Robert Munsch book and a LOT of other books with both kids, probably at least hundreds of books in total. I also recall there always being puzzles around the house (and there still is, even as my youngest gets ready to leave for university).
Tutor’s and study skill coaches are quite normal in the suburbs. The vast majority of students in suburban high schools assume that they will go on to university or college. SAT preparation is expected. This leads to high achievement but at a cost in stress-related illnesses, which have become endemic in suburban America.
There is an old saying that the apple doesn’t fall to far from the tree. Tall parents are expected to have tall kids. This probably applies to other characteristics also.
A lot of this is set long before the freshman student shows up on a university campus. The universities do need to admit students that can do well once they show up, and don’t have the luxury of sitting in the bed rooms of every 6 year old kid and reading them Dr Seuss.
I think your post is true, but if you’re responding to the original post, you’re straw-manning a bit here. We both know the elite colleges are not admitting students at such disproportional rates only because of “readiness.” Before you deny that, note that UCLA seems to have no trouble finding such students and it’s a better school than WUSTL.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/university-of-california-los-angeles
The SAT/ACT is not even that indicative of readiness and college GPA. It’s mostly garbage. At WUSTL, 22% of the students come from the top 1% and 6% come from the bottom 60%. I’m sure they could find plenty from the bottom 60% that would excel academically. I think the issue also has a lot to do with affordability, elitism (rich parents donating money to the school, political influence), and colleges perhaps not taking into account the socioeconomic circumstances of the applicant and giving them a fair shot.
Don’t bow down so easy to the gods of statistics.
And:
“I personally know a high school senior now who got waitlisted at one of the Ivy League universities, and his dad cut a check for a lot of money, and he was suddenly removed from the waitlist.”
No. Those big money relationships don’t start on Ivy Day.
@lookingforward yes, I know the student
I doubt you have the full and correct version. How much do you think he gave?
It takes quite some time to work large contributions through the system and involves complex navigation and legal docs. That is, large enough to sway. At an Ivy.
“I think the issue also has a lot to do with affordability,”
Yes, that is also definitely a factor. Even for schools that meet “full need”, the schools definition of full need does not necessarily match the parents.
I wonder how many spots in top universities are taken up by the children of large donors. I haven’t seen stats on that.
Another possible factor is the ability of students and parents to understand the rather convoluted game needed to gain admissions to elite US schools, and the willingness (or lack thereof) of students and parents to play the game. I am sufficiently repulsed by the game to be perfectly happy to see my kids willing to go to a very good university that does not require much of anything other than straight A’s in high school (or not even quite that) and great SAT scores. Clearly many parents do not agree with us on this point. However, for students whose parents never went to university, “not wanting to play the game” may be replaced by not knowing the rules of the game enough to even try to play it.
I think that it is probably not possible to get sufficiently accurate and detailed information to fully understand how much each of the many factors influence the result, but I am sure that there are many factors that contribute.
How many HS seniors from poor families and neighborhoods are ready for elite college education? This is a pipeline problem. Yesterday I listened to NPR and writer Sherman Alexie talked about the math textbook that he used in his reservation school was like 30 years old with his mother’s name on it; his mother used the same book when she was young. To pursue his professional dream, he left the reservation and attended a white neighborhood high school that is like 30 miles away from the reservation. At that tender age, he knew that without enough public financial resources into his education, he would not be ready.
Being “college ready” for elite colleges is no easy task. It requires preparations and lots of financial supports ($$$), and that is the reason why many school districts are willing to pour into so much property taxes into it. When school districts, for whatever reasons, are not able to adequately fund public education, wealthy families have resources to make up the gap by hiring tutors or simply sending their kids to prep schools, whereas poor families have no means to do so.
This elite education inequality is not unique in the US. It is far severe in South Korea, China, Taiwan, you name it, where educational competition for elite spots is even more intense.
Clearly kids from wealthy families often have benefits that help them succeed but there seems to be a presumption that most or many other kids would do equally as well if they had the same opportunities and this is probably not often true.
DS likes math and we have been able to help him by paying exorbitant fees for math summer camps, AOPS, etc but he has worked very hard. We live in a relatively expensive area and most of the families have more money than we do and none of them would consider a summer academic camp which is fine as they are not interested in it and their families feel differently about education.
I do not think the achievements of some of these kids should be so quickly written off to having had more opportunities…
@DadTwoGirls:
I agree that the American elite college undergraduate arms race is crazy and somewhat capricious.
The interesting thing is that there are paths in to elite programs just by doing well in classes.
You are guaranteed to get in to Columbia engineering through their 3-2 program if you hit their requirements (granted, they aren’t easy to meet, though they also aren’t extremely difficult). WashU 3-2 doesn’t have that guarantee but you are very likely in if you hit their requirements.
And of course, fully-funded PhD programs pretty much only care about academic prowess while even top law schools (outside of YLS, SLS, and maybe HLS these days) admit almost solely on LSAT and GPA.
BTW, the rules of the game are different for everyone, and elites do take in to account that those from lower-SES tend to have a worse understanding of the contours of the game. If you’ve noticed, the percentage of first-gen college students at elites is quite high these days and something the elites tout. The bigger problem is that those kids may not even know about or consider those opportunities.
My kid goes to an elite college. We’re not elite people.
In fact, my kid gets a lot of aid and scholarships.
Can only speak for our experience, and it’s just anecdotal…but I have asked her about encountering “mediocre rich kids” whose parents bought their ticket in. (this conversation came up, I confess, after seeing Madonna on campus, because her daughter is in the same graduating class mine is in)
My daughter says…emphatically…that this situation really doesn’t exist at her school. (or is so rare that she has not encountered it).
Everyone she’s met has been pretty brilliant. They all seem to live up to the high scores and gpa’s that are universally required for admission.
She says an average kid would crash and burn with the rigor of the courses. It would be nearly impossible to fake your way through. And pretty much everyone she’s met has believably earned their place.
Once again…this is just one student’s observations…and I should disclose that most of the classes she takes are fairly serious STEM classes, so she might not have a lot of exposure to someone trying to fly under the radar.
(Madonna’s daughter is in the school of music, theater and dance…which is a bit trickier to quantify…but far be it from me to judge artistic talent.)
But no…she has not observed kids who do not have the required talent in her program.
Yearstogo:
“Clearly kids from wealthy families often have benefits that help them succeed but there seems to be a presumption that most or many other kids would do equally as well if they had the same opportunities and this is probably not often true…I do not think the achievements of some of these kids should be so quickly written off to having had more opportunities.”
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It’s equally presumptuous to assume that “most or many” students wouldn’t do as well as students from upper income families if given equal opportunity. This attitude makes it very easy to retain the status quo. Why spend money if it won’t help them anyway?
Refusing to take advantage of opportunities isn’t the same as not having access to them. The families in your community may not care to participate in summer academic programs, but perhaps the level of education your wealthy district provides makes those programs unnecessary. Or maybe their children’s interests aren’t math centric. I’m not sure how you know the reasons why all the other families in your community aren’t participating, but I wouldn’t assume that their lack of participation means they don’t care about education or that they reflect society as a whole if education isn’t important to them.
Students whose families can pay “exorbitant fees” for summer academic programs should have a different level of achievement than low income students whose districts don’t have access to current books, adequate lab supplies, or appropriate technological equipment. If your son could have succeeded equally well without access to the summer math programs, why did you pay the exorbitant fees to enroll him?
@MaryGJ I’m friends with some people like that. They’re usually a communications or similar major, join a fraternity/sorority and party all the time. I’m not talking about Harvard, more like top 30.