So, to continue….</p>
<p>Again, I don’t have a particular ax to grind with these numbers (unlike the Pell Grant share numbers, where I did – I think schools would be better schools if they had greater economic diversity.) I am just finding a way to quantify that portion of campus “feel” that might be attributable to students’ feelings of entitlement (which, as previously, makes itself felt in everything from cars on campus, to winter and summer vacations, to sports played, to expectations of being able to afford expensive professional schools upon graduation.)</p>
<p>Entitlement (“preppy”) Index for 50 “Top” (according to USNWR) National Private Universities</p>
<p>First number represents percentage of enrolled students who came from private schools. Second number represents percentage of enrolled students who receive no need-based financial aid from the institution. Tie-breaker is the second number. Numbers taken from most recent edition of Princeton Review:</p>
<ol>
<li>Georgetown 53/59 112</li>
<li>Notre Dame 50/60 110</li>
<li>Yale 47/60 107</li>
<li>Vanderbilt 40/62 102</li>
<li>Tufts 43/59 102</li>
<li>Univ. of Penn 43/58 101</li>
<li>Johns Hopkins 40/60 100</li>
<li>Brown 40/60 100</li>
<li>Princeton 45/54 99</li>
<li>Duke 34/64 98</li>
<li>Boston College 40/58 98</li>
<li>Emory 35/62 97</li>
<li>Washington U. 39/55 94</li>
<li>Dartmouth 38/53 91</li>
<li>USC 39/51 90</li>
<li>Georgia Tech 18/71 88</li>
<li>Harvard 35/52 87</li>
<li>Northwestern 27/56 83</li>
<li>Stanford 28/54 82</li>
<li>Brandeis 30/52 82</li>
<li>Lehigh 31/46 77</li>
<li>NYU 31/44 75</li>
<li>Case-Western 30/45 75</li>
<li>Univ. Chicago 30/44 74</li>
<li>CalTech 19/43 62</li>
<li>MIT 28/28 56</li>
<li>RPI 21/29 50</li>
</ol>
<p>Schools for which I have incomplete data are Rochester, Tulane, Cornell, Columbia, Rice, CMU, and Wake Forest.</p>
<p>No huge surprises in the data here. The Catholic colleges have relatively high percentages of students from private catholic high schools, but note that they are also high in percentages of students receiving no financial assistance. Unlike in the liberal arts index, the southern private universities do not show particularly high levels of private school kids (there goes that hypothesis) – their high entitlement indexes are based on the fact that fewer than 40% of students receive financial assistance – in other words, parents are well-heeled. Yale has a very high preppy index – there’s just no two ways about it. The tech schools are at the bottom of the list – they take a large majority of public school kids, and they give them lots of money.</p>
<p>As in the previous note on liberal arts colleges, I modified the index to reflect the percentage of low-income (Pell Grant recipient) kids on the campus (subtracted from the entitlement index), to see if this made any difference. It does – the differences between schools become more pronounced (Pell Grant share information from Mortenson, Postsecondary Educational Opportunites):</p>
<p>Modified Entitlement Index (Reflecting Pell Grant Shares) for 50 Top Private National Universities:</p>
<ol>
<li>Notre Dame 102</li>
<li>Georgetown 101</li>
<li>Yale 97</li>
<li>Vanderbilt 92</li>
<li>Princeton 92</li>
<li>Tufts 92</li>
<li>Penn 91</li>
<li>Johns Hopkins 90</li>
<li>Brown 90</li>
<li>Duke 88</li>
<li>Boston College 87</li>
<li>Washington U. 86</li>
<li>Emory 82</li>
<li>Dartmouth 80</li>
<li>Harvard 80</li>
<li>George Tech 74</li>
<li>Northwestern 73</li>
<li>Stanford 70</li>
<li>Brandeis 68</li>
<li>USC 66</li>
<li>Lehigh 64</li>
<li>Case-Western 61</li>
<li>Univ. Chicago 61</li>
<li>NYU 57</li>
<li>CalTech 47</li>
<li>MIT 44</li>
<li>RPI 31</li>
</ol>
<p>A couple of things immediately stand out – first of all, besides having very high levels of entitlement, the top 3 schools on this list also have very low commitments to low-income students. The tech schools have very high commitments to them. </p>
<p>I think this list would likely mirror quite well the experience of students on campus, or a careful observer/applicant visiting. There would, however, be one exception – USC. Someone on another forum asked how it could be that USC could have such a high Pell Grant share, and yet it seemed like ‘everyone was driving a Beemer’ (or some such)? The answer is here: while USC gives financial aid to a relatively small percentage of students (49%) more than half of it goes to Pell Grant recipients – meaning very, very large grants-in-aid to more than a quarter of the student body. In other words, it is likely a bifurcated campus – with very high levels of “entitlement”, and also a very large percentage of low-income students. It might make for very exciting classrooms!</p>
<p>Again, data is just data. Make of it what you will.