<p>Hey Warblers:</p>
<p>Does that include the "swimmies"?</p>
<p>Not picking on Duke, but NCAA basketball recruiting standards nationally are a total sham right now. There are recruits who can barely read and write and a lot of funny business on eligibility. Do a Google search on "basketball academies". In fact, the word "sham" could probably apply to most NCAA standards.</p>
<p>WUSTL does a great deal to boost their application numbers, so they look more competitive.</p>
<p>This is interesting...tells us which schools are pure merit based, which ones give a mild one to affirmative action, and which ones go overboard</p>
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This is interesting...tells us which schools are pure merit based, which ones give a mild one to affirmative action, and which ones go overboard.
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</p>
<p>That's a fair assessment. However, there is an interesting correlation: the schools that go the most "overboard" with affirmative action tend to be schools with the highest overall median SATs. For example, four of the top five "overboard" LACs (Swarthmore, Amherst, Williams, and Pomona) are also the four most selective LACs in the country, all with 75th percentile SATs well above 1500.</p>
<p>The same is true of universities with schools like Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, and MIT at the top of the list in terms of going "overboard".</p>
<p>One of the reasons for this is that these are also the schools with the largest per student endowments. Diversity is expensive. On average, a white kid with 1550 SATs costs a lot less in terms of price discounts than an African American kid. These are also the schools that are spending a ton flying URM kids in for campus visits.</p>
<p>One of the reasons that schools like Vanderbilt have done an about face and begun aggressively recruiting URMs is that they started to see lack of diversity as a perceived negative among their target customer base.</p>
<p>
<p>The same is true of universities with schools like Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, and MIT at the top of the list in terms of going "overboard".
Could this be why these universities mentioned above are not responding in full to the survey?</p>
<p>Actually, I'm surprised that so many LACs and universities provide full data to the JBHE. African American acceptance rates provide ammunition for anti-affirmative action lobby groups.</p>
<p>It would be interesting to see similar statistics for the entire student bodies of public, urban school systems. It seems that we are still failing our young people in our large cities. Who runs these schools?</p>
<p>According to data submitted to the NCAA, UCLA has 470 students on athletic scholarships. This includes 110 black student athletes, 72 of whom are on the football team. Allowing for attrition, this implies about 20 per year on scholarship in the football team. Of course, others might be admitted without football scholarship money due to their ability to contribute to the team.</p>
<p>The truly shocking statistic to add to the stomach-churning mean SAT scores of football players ID cites, is the horrible graduation performance of the football players at these schools. For Berkeley, the AVERAGE graduation rate for scholarship football players (likelihood of graduating within 6 years, averaged over the most recent 4 years of enrolled classes) was 37%. This at a university with an overall graduation rate of 83%. The notion of academically prepared is thrown out the window and set on fire when it comes to building football teams. That is the scandal.</p>
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That is the scandal.
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<p>The scandal is that the NCAA and the colleges continue the Orwellian ruse of calling these players "student athletes" and not paying them.</p>
<p>Just acknowledge that the teams are professionals, hired to represent the school just like the Patriots and the Red Sox play for New England. Pay 'em decent money. Stop with the sham eligibility "rules" that you know they are not meeting. </p>
<p>BTW, this is essentially how college football started, with itinerant hired gun players moving from college to college based on offers from alumni groups that ran the teams.</p>
<p>Football is a squeaky clean compared to basketball. Wow. Read about the basketball academy "high schools" some of these kids go to and the scandals quietly swept under the rug on that topic.</p>
<hr>
<p>On SAT scores, I have read that Duke (and others) do not include recruited athletes when reporting their SAT scores to USNEWS, because the recruits are considered "special cases". True? Widespread practice? I don't know.</p>
<p>"The truly shocking statistic to add to the stomach-churning mean SAT scores of football players ID cites, is the horrible graduation performance of the football players at these schools."</p>
<p>Not so clearcut as first appears. Athletic graduation rates at Ohio State are HIGHER than those of the student population as a whole, and tracked for socio-economic status, graduation rates are MUCH higher.</p>
<p>Where African-American grad rates tend to be a little lower than the student population as a whole, are places (such as ID and my alma mater) where African-Americans tend to be much LESS likely to be athletes than white students.</p>
<p>"One of the reasons for this is that these are also the schools with the largest per student endowments. Diversity is expensive."</p>
<p>Socio-economic diversity is expensive - but it is not as clear that attracting African-American students is. My d's school has the highest number of African-American first years in the country among the LACs, but the big difference is in the proportion of them on Pell Grants. The expense is not so much on the scholarship end as on the recruiting one, for qualified low-income minority students.</p>
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Socio-economic diversity is expensive - but it is not as clear that attracting African-American students is.
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<p>It's clear from the data. Last year at Swarthmore:</p>
<p>6% of the students were international
6% of the financial aid students were international</p>
<p>7% of the students were black
12% of the financial aid students were black</p>
<p>10% of the students were Latino
14% of the financial aid students were Latino</p>
<p>15% of the students were Asian American
18% of the financial aid students were Asian American</p>
<p>47% of the students were white
40% of the financial aid students were white</p>
<p>14% of the students were unknown ethnicity
10% of the financial aid students were unknown ethnicity</p>
<hr>
<p>White and unknown were disproportionately full pay customers. Black, Latino, and Asian-American were disproportionately over-represented in the financial aid cohort. Internationals were proportionate: the same percentage of aid students as the proportion in the overall student body.</p>
<p>Clearly, URM students qualify for need-based aid discounts at higher rates than white (and unknown) students. I hardly think this is unique to Swarthmore. Ready any college's strategic planning on diversity and financial aid. I don't have data, but I strongly suspect that the same difference are magnified by the average need-based discount for aided students in each group.</p>
<p>Diversity is expensive. This is no big revelation. Heck, one of the primary reasons that URM students tend to have lower SAT scores is that URM students tend to be from less socio-economically advantaged backgrounds. As you have pointed out, there is a strong correlation between family income and SAT scores.</p>
<p>It's not just Pell Grant students. It is the whole range of need-based aid ranging from full-ride on up.</p>
<p>BTW, diversity is not just expensive on the revenue side. If you want a successfully diverse campus community, you need to have administrators who serve as advocates for each group on campus. Colleges have found that you can't just stick a bunch of black students or a bunch of Latino/a students into a lily-white institution and expect things to go smoothly.</p>
<p>Swarthmore has seven deans working in student affairs (one for every 200 students). Three of these deans (two African American and one Latino) are specifically charged with issues and programs related to diversity on campus...i.e. they serve as specific interface conduits between ethnic groups and the institution and give the ethnic groups a voice in the administrative policy. </p>
<p>If you want to become a diverse institution, you have to change the institution in ways that go beyond admitting a few students. That change has costs associated with it.</p>
<p>"It's clear from the data. Last year at Swarthmore..."</p>
<p>I look at the same data, and see no such thing. I simply see fewer students who are full-pay, and it could be those in the $110-$160k range, precisely those that LACs and Ivies like Princeton are aiming at attracting. </p>
<p>It's the Pells and near-Pells that cost the big bucks. But even there, the big bucks are probably less in the scholarships, and more in the long-term effort and commitment to find and enroll them.</p>
<p>I don't have Swarthmore data, but I do have Harvard data. Outside of the Extension School, fewer than 6.8% are on Pells; yet more than 10% of the student body is African American. If even half of the Pells were granted to African-Americans, it would mean that barely a third of all African-American students came from the bottom 40% of the U.S. population.</p>
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it would mean that barely a third of all African-American students came from the bottom 40% of the U.S. population.
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<p>That's not the question.</p>
<p>The question we are discussing is whether the average African American enrolled student costs the college more in tuition discounts than the average white student. The answer to that question as outlined by every college diversity report is a resounding "yes".</p>
<p>The Swarthmore data shows that the percentage of Af Am students on financial aid is double their percentage of the student body. Now, is it theoretically possible that all of the black students are $150k per year incomes receiving $500 a year in work study aid and that the white students are Pell or near Pell? Yes, that's theoretically possible, but it runs counter to everything written by every college about financial aid and tuition discounting, every book ever written on college admissions, and so forth.</p>
<p>So does a Black or Hispanic not needing aid have a better chance?</p>
<p>W&Ls has a lower Af Am acceptance rate (22.2%) compared to their over all acceptance rate (27.5%). Their non Af Am acceptance rate is 27.8%. This seems counterintuitive? Their percent of Af Am students is the same as Grinnell, Vassar, and Hamilton, but 25.3% of W&Ls apps were from Af Am where as only 16.9% (Grinnells), 18.8% (Vassars), and 12.9% (Hamiltons) apps were Af Am students. The Af Am student acceptance rates were 36.3, 41.3, and 41.8 compared to W&Ls 22.2. </p>
<p>I think W&Ls higher apps rate may be the result of the overwhelming number of letters and brochures they mail out to Af Am students. My D is only a junior and she has received at least biweekly mailings from W&L for a year. The only other school that comes close to the same frequency and consistency of mailings is U of C.</p>
<p>What does she think of W&L so far?</p>
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If even half of the Pells were granted to African-Americans, it would mean that barely a third of all African-American students came from the bottom 40% of the U.S. population.
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</p>
<p>Well, it would mean that barely a third of all African American students AT HARVARD came from the bottom 40%. This is easy to believe. Remember, we are talking about a place with an extremely low percent of Pells, and extremely high SAT scores. It would hardly be surprising to find that this is a relatively well off group financially. There are enough high income black families to provide Harvard with a black student body not that dramatically different than the rest of the students. Without seeing the data, I would be surprised if anything close to 1/3 of the African American students at Harvard were from the bottom 40%, not many Harvard students are.</p>
<p>But that is Harvard, and Princeton. Few other elite colleges are as far out on the extreme. Most colleges do expect to pay for diversity.</p>
<p>Tutu:</p>
<p>Also, keep in mind the large African American populations in Virginia, N. Carolina, Georgia, and so forth. Most college students go to college within a few hours of home. W&L is well-located to tap into the large affluent black population of northern Virginia.</p>
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But that is Harvard, and Princeton. Few other elite colleges are as far out on the extreme. Most colleges do expect to pay for diversity.
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<p>Harvard and Princeton expect to pay for diversity, too. There's a lot of territory between a Pell Grant and a family who can make the mortgage payment and write $40,000 a year checks for a couple of kids in college.</p>
<p>If anything, Harvard and Princeton are two of only a handful of schools that could enroll a full freshman class of full-fare customers and not see their "stats" drop one iota. In fact, their "stats" would probably increase. The reason Harvard and Princeton no longer choose to do that is that they believe, rightly or wrongly, that diversity improves the education they offer.</p>