<p>And, if low income students are qualified to do the work at higher level institutions with an SAT of 1000, 1100 or 1200, then, by the same logic, shouldn't those same institutions be making allowances for "middle income" students with SATs in the 1300s? After all, the middle income students don't have the "benefits" that the wealthier kids who scored 1400 do so perhaps that means that they are equally well-qualified. Or, should it just be that schools should prefer students who fall into the same general SAT pool without adjusting much for income? And, how can schools be "need blind" and still group students "qualifications" into pools based upon their income levels, or even, for that matter, focus on recruiting low income students to the potential disadvantage of wealthy students (they're not need blind if they give a preference to lower income students with lesser stats)?</p>
<p>I'm playing devil's advocate here but it does seem to me that there needs to be some sort of limitation on how low a school will go in terms of accepting students who aren't really "qualified" but offer economic diversity. Fair? No, of course not, but what advantage is there to a school like Harvard to accept low income students who aren't realistically in their admissions pool, even when allowances are made for their educational backgrounds.</p>
<p>Carolyn, I look at the numbers and I compare schools. Why does Cornell have 17.1 % of its student body receiving Pell Grants and Harvard 9.8%. Columbia has 15.3%, Yale 10.4?
I have never heard that Harvard and Yale were harder than Cornell and Columbia. (I've heard the opposite). </p>
<p>How come Wellesley, has 17.2%? I've heard that school has a rigorous academic program.</p>
<p>Caltech is 15.5% and MIT is 13%. </p>
<p>USC, that bastion of priviledge is up to 23.2% of its students with Pell Grants.</p>
<p>Of course, all these schools are better than Washington and Lee.</p>
<p>Dstark - we are shooting in the dark if we do not have HARD data on how Pell Grant students at the various students compare to the overall accepted student pool. </p>
<p>Obviously, it's harder for ANYONE to get into Harvard, Yale, Columbia - their median student stats are higher than Cornell, USC and Wellseley. We don't know whether any of these schools lower their admissions standards for Pell Grant or low income students, but in any case, there are simply MORE Pell grant recipients likely to meet or come close to the median at USC than there are for Harvard. </p>
<p>Again, how much should Harvard - or any school - lower their admissions standards to boost economic diversity? I sure don't know the answer to that one. And, if you're a "need blind" school how can you really justify considering income level in the admissions process?</p>
<p>Just playing devil's advocate as I already said.</p>
<p>2004 Data:
For families wo earned less than $10,000, mean SAT score was 872;
$10k-$20k was 897
$20k-$30k was 926
$30k-$40k was 960
$40-$50k was 989
$60k-$60k was 1005
$60k-$70k was 1017
$70k-$80k was 1033
$80k-$100k was 1057
over $100k was 1115</p>
<p>And, as the study I mentioned above reports, the median SATs for PELL GRANT RECIPIENTS are even lower than the overall low income student medians. So, realistically, is Harvard going to get many qualified Pell Grant recipients to choose from?</p>
<p>carolyn - the answer to your "how low" question is...as much as they choose to and as often as they like. Since they are private institutions, they are free to define their mission and then set whatever policies and standards they believe will best facilitate achieving that mission (within the law, of course).</p>
<p>Xiggi, you are looking at the wrong numbers. Harvard has the best yield of any of the top schools.</p>
<p>Harvard can fill its class solely with smart kids with Pell grants. (I don't think they should).</p>
<p>Harvard gets first pick.</p>
<p>Of all the top schools, Harvard would have the easiest task in filling its class with Pell Grant students.
Yet, they have one of the lowest % of Pell Grant students in the country. </p>
<p>If you believe like I do, that smart poor kids can add to an education of a student body, then the school falls short.</p>
<p>The Dale-Kreuger study said it didn't matter which school you went to except for poor students. Then it did matter.</p>
<p>Carolyn, I'd like to see the hard numbers too. I have a feeling Harvard can find another 75 to 150 poor kids each year that qualify for the school . :)</p>
<p>Great, I google a little on the subject and find myself surrounded by references to "The Bell Curve", substituting SAT scores for IQ. That's what I get for not reading the darned book.</p>
<p>Let me leave this with the notion that it will be incredibly hard to attribute this income versus SAT score correlation to any single factor. It's too complex. Correlation and causality are two different things. None of the studies I've seen so far come close to being convincing. </p>
<p>And momsdream's data suggests there's more to this than mere money. Those results alone don't add up to 1200 versus 1400 scores, much less to a 200 point differential that for anything other than the largest difference in income in the comparison.</p>
<p>my oldest attends college that is easily as intellectual as HYP for undergrads, if not more so.
Reed looks at criteria in addition to scores and stats to select students who could benefit from their Parris Island approach to education.
My daughter is very bright and she does test fairly well, but her scores and stats wouldn't get her typically into the Ivies, her resume & essays however might, and they got her into Reed.
While Reed has its fair share of trust fund babies, it also takes students who didn't peak in high school, and turns them into holders of Ph.ds.
I believe that the top schools, if they really believed in economic diversity and in the quality of the education they offer, could easily take more students that showed academic potential and turn them into intellectuals. As it is, turning A students into A+ students, isn't that much of a stretch. ( does wonders for their endowment though)</p>
<p>""Let's be frank here: the students who are smart enough to file an application to Harvard and Mount Holyoke are not that naive. There may be exceptions but the poorest and worst prepared tend to look at other schools than the ones adorning the first pages of the USNews reports."</p>
<p>You are so far off, I'd hardly know where to begin. Most Pell Grant students, while in high school, don't know that Mount Holyoke, Amherst, Smith, Brown, or Dartmouth exist."</p>
<p>Mini, I have tremendous respect for your opinions. If I didn't I would devote a good amount of my time, arguing some of your conclusions. </p>
<p>One subject I find myself at odd with you is the underlying notion that poor HAS to equate to unsophisticated, that underpriviledged HAS to equate with underperforming. I do not doubt that you have experience with Pell recipients in Olympia, but you cannot claim to know what is happening throughout the United States. </p>
<p>Just as you, I have direct and close knowledge of numerous students who are recipients of Pell grants and attend ultra-competitive schools. Those are not "cases" but people I know well. All I can say is that they DO not fit the mold you describe. They are as aware of the admissions policies at Williams, Middlebury, or Bowdoin than at Stanford or Harvard ... and the proof is that they DO attend those schools, in spite of their lower income. To gain this knowledge, they did not have to do more than what they did to compile great SAT scores: spend 50 dollars on a few books or drive to the library AND work at it. </p>
<p>In the district where I live, the overwhelming majority of the graduating students go to the local university or community college, but this has more to do with personal choices than with necessity. Most of them do not want to leave the security of their home.</p>
<p>The premise in a lot of these posts is that SATs matter as a predictor of college success. They don't. They provide a quantifiable measure that helps make the adcoms jobs easier, but they have little to do with measuring whether or not a prospective student is capable of doing college work. The most comprehensive study done to date was released by Bates College last fall. It compiled 20 years of data to find:</p>
<p>The difference in Bates graduation rates between submitters and non-submitters is 0.1% (one-tenth of one percent).
- The difference in overall GPAs at Bates is .05 (five-hundredths of a GPA point); the exact difference is 3.06 for non-submitters and 3.11 for submitters.
- Bates has almost doubled its applicant pool since making testing optional; about a third of each class at Bates enters without submitting testing in the admissions process.
- Testing is not necessary for predicting good performance; the academic ratings assigned by Bates admissions staff are highly accurate for both submitters and non-submitters in predicting GPA.
- Optional testing policies are often assumed to be a device for affirmative action efforts. Students of color use an optional testing policy at somewhat higher than average rates, and Bates has increased its enrollment of students of color and international students. But white students using the policy outnumber students of color by 5-to-1.
- The policy draws sharply increased application rates from all the subgroups who commonly worry about standardized testing: women, U.S. citizens of color, international citizens, low-income or blue collar students, rural students, students with learning disabilities and students with rated talents in athletics, the arts or debate.
- There are very modest differences in the majors that submitters and non-submitters choose at Bates, but some intriguing patterns: Non-submitters are more likely to major in fields that put a premium on creativity and originality.
- There are modest differences in the career outcomes of submitters and non-submitters, with one glaring exception: the four fields where students have to take another standardized test to gain entrance to graduate programs for medicine, law, an M.B.A. or Ph.D. In fields where success does not depend on further standardized testingincluding business executive officers and finance careerssubmitters and non-submitters are equally represented.</p>
<p>For the vast majority of poor kids in our school district, they have about as much of a chance to go to Harvard as they do Mars. This isn't something that can be solved by aggressive campaigns from admissions people, it's an unfortunate side effect of their family backgrounds. The gap starts at a very young age and widens as the years pass. We have one high school, but repeatedly the poorer kids fall to the bottom. The boys dream of being Lebron James, not about going to Harvard. That's not Harvard's fault. Quibbling about whether 8% could be improved to 15% doesn't address the large numbers of kids I wish would at least aspire to our state college system.</p>
<p>....Comforting overall not just in the acceptance, but in reversing some of the expectations listed in some posts here (not enough APs available for lower economic class, higher income assumed for a 1200+ score, etc.) Granted, not a public school did she ever attend. Fin. aid made private school possible. But there are also 2 other extremely poor students in her small h.s. -- one Filipino, one African-American. They have gotten & will get same opportunities as my D, at least in the 4 yrs.</p>
<p>I agree totally MomofFour. Perhaps the more vital issue isn't so much whether low income kids are going to the "top" 4 year schools, but why they aren't going to and finishing up at ANY 4 year school.</p>
<p>Boy, I wish you would all take your energy and outrage and time and research and put it where it belongs.... the failure of our K-12 educational system to fulfill ITS mission, instead of worrying about why Mt Holyoke does a better job with Pell grant recipients than Harvard.</p>
<p>Do I give a $%^& about how a private institution spends its money to attract the kids it wants? Let Williams do what it wants, who cares? Why don't the people on this board get their dander up over our public school systems which fail 10's of thousands of kids (mostly poor but lots of middle class ones as well) instead of getting agitated over the dozen or so poor kids who got shut out of an LAC last year because they waitressed after school instead of rowing crew???? Our school systems are a disgrace given the huge amount of taxpayer dollars that get channeled into a crumbling system.</p>
<p>And don't get me started on the failure of our public universities to fulfill THEIR missions... middle class kids in my state can't afford our flagship U if they want to major in something "popular"-- takes 6 years to be a pre-med, takes 5 years to finish an undergrad degree in teaching, unless you're prepared to augment your public education with summer school at a private U... where apparently, all enrolled students get to take the classes they need-- in order!</p>
<p>I don't think a kid from a poor, uneducated family is going to do any less remarkably in life having made it to Mt. Holyoke or Wellesley instead of Williams or Harvard...so give it a rest, people. My district routinely graduates kids who read at a 6th grade level; my employer can't find entry level people who can add two digit numbers without a calculator; we have the nicest parking lot of any high school in the state. Go figure.</p>
<p>while my daughters school has a large minority population ( but actually with higher income than average in seattle public schools), they still have a large number of students who contribute much to their family. Older students may provide childcare, a second income and emotional support for the often single parent in the household.
Students who have so many demands on them, may not apply to four year schools or if they do, may feel they need to stay close to home, or transfer midway to a school closer to home.
I counseled several students who were applying to four year schools, but needed help to find outside scholarships, and in filling out aid forms. Their parents were really stressed and overwhelmed at the thought of their children going across the country to college, when they needed them here and working.
so frustrating because this high school is a fantastic school, but the students that arrive in 9th grade, have had a very uneven educational background ( like my daughter). Low income populations are also more transient than higher income, and many students have attended 2 or 3 schools in their high school career alone. Hard to get the classes they need, or strong recommendations from counselors when they are only attending senior year.</p>