Absolutely true. But where this thread started was OP being disappointed at the outcome of her D’s college application process and the implication that her own college was incapable of doing a decent job of educating her because of insufficient funding.
I think we’ve meandered through a lot of interesting diversions about the problems in US society, but all that’s done is further convince me that there are no easy answers, and that lack of money is far from the only problem. More importantly, simply adding more government money almost certainly won’t solve these problems. And wishful thinking that we can ignore new technology and shut off ourselves from competing with the rest of the world is even less helpful.
Nevertheless I’m hugely grateful that OP has chosen to devote her life to helping uplift disadvantaged members of society. One of the best things I see in US society is that individuals do choose to devote themselves to helping others, giving to charity etc, and don’t just assume it’s the government’s job to address these problems as is so common in places like Europe. The US is a very different place to Europe, an individualist not a collectivist society, and that has many consequences, some good and some bad. Trying to graft a European-style reliance on government largess onto the society we have, is very unlikely to succeed, and I suspect would cause more problems than it solves.
They probably aren’t concerned about getting sued given how much money is at stake (or if they’ve taken legal advice simply couch their tests in financial markets examples). But Supreme Court precedent says otherwise {{meta.fullTitle}}
My son interviewed with a number of HF/HFTs this past year. Everyone had their own style. Usually lots of probability questions that got progressively harder over multiple interviews. One actually gave him a timed mental two digit multiplication test. A number of on-line coding tests as well.
Course correction: while yes, I’m concerned about the ed quality, that’s a thing that can be overcome. The kid can read, we do have real if exhausted profs here, and lapel-grabbing and saying “pretend I’m a grad student” is a skill these kids can develop with little coaching. (Ask me how I know!) The larger concern is the sclerotic pipes leading out to the world. When elite Us essentially commoditize better/top opportunities for grads – these companies recruit exclusively here, our network does this or that – and sell it to parents anxious to give their kids a leg up (which, let’s be real, that’s what’s happening), that comes at the expense of the kids who, for lack of cash, can’t go to those schools. That’s the “gating” I was talking about earlier.
To forestall: yes, there are superlative people who do make the leap from Average State U. However, if that’s what your “everything’s fine” argument rests on, you’re also fine with women having to be Ginger Rogers, not only having to be as good as Fred, but having to be as good dancing backwards in heels: obviously discriminatory. A less analogic view: in reality you get a lot of very able, bright Average State U kids with no money who aren’t also able, at 18-22, to coach and mentor and promote themselves while also being terrific students so that they can make up for the lack of parental hit-it-big guidance, an elite school’s commoditized job pipes, and the handholding/training/coaching they’d get at that elite U. So to say that the door is open for them if they just try hard is frankly not honest. The door’s also open to you to go push your car up a hillside, but if that’s not a reasonable or realistic thing for anyone but Clark Kent, you don’t really have that opportunity. (Unless you are in fact Clark Kent.)
As has been posted, the “elite” privates are almost always need blind and tend to be lower cost to parents for families that aren’t high income than their state flagship. So I don’t not being able to afford cost of admission is a key direct driver. At many “elite” privates, the few lower income kids who do apply tend to do well in admissions compared to typical applicants. For example, it’s been previously noted that lower income applicants to Harvard had a slightly higher admit rate than the overall average across the full applicant pool.
I think the biggest barriers instead occur far before the actual application. Often attending lower quality K-12 schools contributes, as does often not knowing anyone who attended an “elite” private or encourages them to do so. If a student grows up in an environment where their peers (including high achieving ones) who apply to college rarely apply to anywhere that is not local, they probably aren’t going to be big on attending an “elite” private college thousands of miles away, even if it may be lower cost to parents after FA. There are also often other reasons why it may not be practical to attend a college far away from home.
I’ve previously mentioned one of my relatives grew up in a rural community in which most kids worked on the family farm after HS. When kids applied to college, they chose local ones in the area. It wasn’t that everyone thought they’d be rejected from an “elite.” It was more, that wasn’t what anyone they knew did. Nobody in the community seemed to care about attending an “elite” private. Why should they? My relative was the first person in the history of her HS to apply to a highly selective college. She got in to all 3 that she applied to, which included an Ivy. After seeing her apply, some other kids from her HS applied to highly selective colleges in the next class.
I attended a basic public HS in upstate NY – not especially wealthy or especially poor. The overwhelming majority of students applied to public colleges in upstate NY – either one of the nearby SUNYs or the nearest CC. Cornell and RPI were also fairly popular, but few applied to colleges outside of upstate NY. A large portion of high achieving kids did not apply to elite “privates” and instead applied to and attended SUNYs, and all the high achieving kids that I personally knew well who did this had excellent outcomes. For example, one of my high achieving friends was a CS major at SUNY. He was far more high achieving than many of his CS classmates at SUNY, which led to a lot of special opportunities, a best in department type award, etc. He went on to get his PhD at CMU and now works at Google. Another of my friends started at community college to save money, then transferred to a SUNY. He had a similar story about having special opportunities and awards due to his relative success compared to classmates. He did his PhD and post-docs at Ivies and is a tenure track professor at a top college in his field. I could name many others with similar stories, and you can find many other similar threads on this forum about outcomes for high achieving kids who didn’t get in to their reach for undergrad and instead attended their safety.
The examples above are annecdotal and do not specifically focus on low income kids. If you look at the larger sample size in the Chetty study, then at the flagships in which lower income kids are most likely to be high achieving, the majority of lowest qunitile income kids who come from families living in poverty become wealthy highest quintile income adults. The Chetty study does not suggest notably difference chances for a lower income kids who attends a high selective public vs a similarly selective private. The outcomes were also very similar between low income kids and wealthy kids at the respective colleges, often only averaging ~3 percentile difference income as an adult and again not showing notable differences for publics vs privates. For example, if go by USNWR starting at UCLA (highest ranked public), the percentages are:
Portion of Lowest Qunintile Income Kids who Become Wealthy Adults #20 UCLA – 55% #21 Emory – 50% #22 Berkeley – 55% #23 Georgetown – 56% #24 Michigan – 50% #25 USC – 55%
If I instead start at the highest ranked SUNY, then again, it doesn’t support the idea of the low income kids who attend publics have little chance of becoming high income or are worse off have less chance than kids who attend privates. Instead it seems to more follow major distribution . Colorado school of Mines (public) had the highest portion of low income kids who become wealthy adults among the listed colleges, as well as among all but 2 Ivy Plus colleges. Colorado School of Mines grads (of all incomes) had a higher median income at age 34 than Harvard grads (of all incomes). The vast majority of Colorado School of Mines kids majoring in tech no doubt is a key factor.
Portion of Lowest Qunintile Income Kids who Become Wealthy Adults #88 SUNY Binghamton – 54% #88 Colorado School of Mines – 64% #88 Elon – 31% #88 Marquette – 42% #88 SUNY Stonybrook – 51% #88 SUNY Buffalo – 42% #88 UC Riverside – 41%
I’ve also previously posted my opinion about job opportunities. When you do anything resembling control for student quality and major, the career outcomes rarely show stark differences between flagship vs selective private in measures like salary. In the survey of hundreds of employers posted earlier, employers as whole said they favored grads from public flagships to “elite” privates. There are a few exception industries such as “elite” management consulting and banking, but those are the exception, not the rule. If you want to pursue “elite” management consulting and banking, I’d agree that “elite” privates may give you a good leg up, but in other fields, I’d expect much smaller differences, and the reports I’ve seen seem to support this. Yes, this doesn’t specifically address “elite society defining jobs”, but it addresses the jobs that typical grads have and can expect from the respective colleges.
One of the biggest barriers to “elite private college good financial aid” is that they (except for Chicago and Vanderbilt, and Princeton if the custodial parent has remarried) require both parents’ cooperation and expect a parental contribution based on both for financial aid purposes. Since about half of kids see parental divorce, and many divorces result in the opposite of any desire to be cooperative, these kids are shut out of financial aid from colleges that require both parents’ cooperation.
This assumes that the non-cooperative divorced parent is wealthy. My post stated, “cost to parents for families that aren’t high income” For example, suppose you have 2 parents with a well above average 2x $75k incomes + typical assets. One refuses to contribute anything towards college. The other does not. The kid applies and is accepted to Harvard. Harvard’s NPC suggests a $15k cost to parents in this situation. I’d expect Harvard is still likely to be less expensive than the flagship (ignoring merit and other scholarships). That said, I agree that there are a variety of exception situations.
The barrier is that the divorced parents are often uncooperative about doing the financial aid forms at all. It is fairly common on these forums for high school students with divorced parents to have non-custodial parents who refuse to do the CSS Noncustodial Profile, or are likely to be unreliable about doing it in future years even if they can be convinced to do it the first year.
Also, even if the amount that they would have to pay is relatively little, they may still be fighting their divorce over who pays how much of the net price.
I don’t see how you can make this work in practice. John Henry didn’t stop the steam drill from taking over, and I would argue that that’s a good thing. Do you really think hiring people to turn big rocks in to small rocks by physical labor is a good thing? And the US isn’t the only country in the world. If we outlaw innovation here, innovation will happen elsewhere. And then those jobs will be gone anyway. I don’t see how stagnating like the old Eastern Bloc actually helps this country much. Productivity increases are what betters the human condition in the long run. Now, you could try to maintain a 2 track economy with world-beating sectors providing the innovation and subsidizing inefficient (nontradable) sectors that provide jobs. But I doubt trying to slow down innovation everywhere actually would make our children better off.
There are also plenty of divorced parents who are willing to provide FA info. And I’m sure there are also some kids 2 parent families who are not cooperative with filling out FA forms, as well as various other unique situations that may cause FA to differ from typical. However, these are minority situations. I expect only a slim minority of the potential applicant pool chooses not to apply because they expect/learn a divorced parent will be unwilling to provide necessary FA info. The post said “tend to be lower cost to parents for families that aren’t high income,” not that it was lower cost for all families.
I expect the bigger issue is perceived cost, rather than actual cost. Many are not aware of the FA and instead assume you must be wealthy to pay for an “elite” private, even among posters on this forum, who are probably far more knowledgeable about FA than the typical applicant.
Well, your tomatoes also were grown in a specific environment. I’m actually not much of a believer in the “superhuman” theory of human advancement. The US had tremendous growth at a time when the top tax rate was about 90%. For that matter, so did Japan for decades even though it was essentially suppressing the compensation of its most elite performers.
I mean, that is redistribution. Every first world country is currently some form of a capitalist democratic redistributive welfare state (for good reason; the other alternatives tend to be worse/unsustainable over the long term). We’re just haggling over the details.
To me, this sounds like blind faith that isn’t based on empirical evidence. The New Deal, the rise of unionism, and yes, WWII, changed the rules drastically. Did that lead to companies moving and the US becoming poorer compared to 1930?
Now, we’re not going back to any period in our country’s past, but it’s not as if “the rules” never change. FDR changed the rules, but so did Reagan. In fact, every single administration in our lifetimes has.
Yes, this. We have a high potential economy but it leads to a society where even the 95% don’t feel secure (much less those below).
To be sure, the European model has major problems too and I won’t say it is better in all aspects (I’ve heard from Europeans I know who talk about the insane work laws and the freeloaders who take advantage of them; which is why some of them end up in the US), but it does lead to a less stressful society in general; and those who’ve thought about it think uni costs in the US are outrageous.
BTW, Scott Galloway touches on a few topics in this thread in NYMag. The younger generation and their parents are anxious because they have good reason to be. In the very near future, for likely the first time in American history (outside of possibly the generation that came of age during the Great Depression, though maybe not even that one because the ‘20’s really roared), more than half of 30 year-old Americans will be making less money than their parents had at the same age (in real terms). It’s just at 50% now and trending downward.
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