@privatebanker Your daughter is certainly a great student and I wish her best of luck. However, as you said there were around 3.5 million high school graduates in 2018. Top 5% of this is 175 thousands. I believe all the Ivies accept around 20,000 students every year. This is less than top 1%. And of course kids who are not top 1% get in by not only being athletes or legacies, but also having some kind of a cool story.
@ucbalumnus, as I pointed out in the “How did colleges get to be so expensive?” thread, that was the price per bed for two new residential colleges, not simple dorms. The new RCs look like Yale’s others and have the interior features found in the other RCs, such as dining halls, libraries, and meeting and recreation spaces. You’re comparing apples to oranges.
Somebody upstream mentioned geo diversity and I believe that’s a bigger deal than usually imagined. In a thread last year on the hardest-to-get-into-college profile (with everything being equal), it was a white middle-class girl from suburban new jersey with no hooks who would have the hardest time. And then it kind of went down from there. Conversly, the “same” girl, say, placed in Wyoming might find herself better courted.
All to say, there are many variables when building a class.
Instead of making some pay for others, government and colleges need to bring cost of education down for everyone. Our current model heavily discriminates against hard working and frugal living middle class parents and their children. No college should be allowed to demand $80K per year from an 18 year old.
They do, it’s called in state tuition, or shall we just slash professors salaries, let the facilities become run down, and so forth. No one is happy with rising tuition but no one has to pay $80k either. Lots of good options under 30k total cost.
@privatebanker Thanks for starting this thread, and for talking about your change of heart. I used to get exorcised (Euphemism for p#$%%d off) about college tuition going up every year, usually twice the rate of inflation, and rant about tenure, climbing walls, etc. But like you I have changed view 180 degrees - I actually think the top private schools should raise tuition to get more from those who can afford it, and give that extra money in financial aid. To your points:
Full Pay - actually there aren’t any of these at the top colleges. Williams recently put up a video which said they spend $100K per student per year, so the $70k max cost of attendance is seriously subsidized by the endowment. Why not make the “Full Pays” (disclosure - I am one) actually pay the $100K, and then give that to students who need more?
Development admits - The money they bring in to the endowment probably helps a lot of lower income kids, so I am ok with those.
Legacy preference - I think this a bad idea. MIT and Cal Tech give none, and their endowments seem to be doing fine. As Warren Buffet said about cutting the estate tax, “It’s like choosing the 2020 Olympic team by picking the children of all the winners at the 2000 Games.” Until the Colleges actually provide data to show that Legacies give significantly more $ to their alma mater, I am really skeptical of this practice.
I’m dealing with this myself. I live in a very wealthy county and many people I know have subpar SATs, extracurriculars, etc, OR have good versions of those things bc they could afford a private tutoring company, had connections to the governor’s office, etc, AND will get into Harvard bc their parents bought a building or both went there etc. Being on food stamps in this county, I feel a great deal of anger about how rigged the whole thing seems. It’s not completely, but there are legs up that my wealthy classmates have that I don’t. It hurts.
States have been slashing support for public schools ever since the baby Boomers finished college and no longer needed their own college tuition to be paid. So they only voted for state representatives and state senators who promised to cut taxes and ignored the disappearance of well paying jobs that didn’t require a college degree. Many Gen-Xers also joined this bandwagon. At the same time, Baby Boomers also supported the gutting of most federal student loan programs.
There is no possible way that tuition or fees can be reduced without states raising their taxes, and an increase in federal income taxes. Good luck with that in today’s USA.
Dorms not specially labeled as residential colleges typically have dining halls and additional rooms for meetings and recreation. Of course, it could also be argued that the additional features of a residential college that cost extra are a luxury feature that is not really essential to getting a good college education.
Here is an article about Yale’s new residential colleges:
https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2014/04/04/faculty-defend-new-college-expenses/
The article also notes Princeton’s Whitman [residential] College, built at a cost of $272,000 per bed.
What makes Yale’s new residential colleges cost more than ten times (adjusting the national average number for inflation since 2008) that of an average college dorm, or more than twice that of other elite college housing?
@ucbalumnus. construction always costs way more than it should. Villanova just built new dorms for 1100 students with a $200 million dollar price tag. Location and labor costs are also very expensive in the NE.
$200 million for 1,100 beds is about $182,000 per bed, far lower than what Yale spent.
The rich always have a leg up in EVERYTHING. They just have more resources to use on whatever they want. Get into trouble they will get the best lawyers, have a medical issue they will pay for the best doctors, so forth and so on.
Well, isn’t the point of making more money to have better goods, services, and legal protection? If not, why would anyone bother?
My son is a legacy and not full pay.
@privatebanker I’m sorry to say this. But your representation in post 45 only offers part of what top colleges look for. I understand. She’s tops. But you’re noting hierarchical aspects- top hs, top place as val, head of shs (which tops founded pie club,) more years at the hospital, etc. That is not the “it.” And as full pay, if you had donated 25k, that’s not “it,” either.
A few posts mention “merit.” All should know meriting an admit is much more than stats and obvious bullets. Holistic looks at the whole, as caught by the lengthy app. Every piece matters. That’s why I keep advocating a deeper look at what that is. The point in every category referenced in the app/supp, the sorts of questions asked, and how one chooses to answer, which shows thinking, etc. Not just the bones of the resume, the minimums presented on a Chance Me thread.
And then institutional needs- geo diversity, balance in majors, gender balance, as the first three.
A kid blows the Why Us. I’ve read more bogus than people realize. What do you all think merit is? Just the grades and opportunities in your hs, your titles?
And the icing, somthing many have pointed out over my years on CC: you don’t know who got “your” spot. You don’t know it was a rich kid or a dirt poor first gen. Or an athlete. Or some white middle class kid from a less special school district who knocked him/herself out and nailed the whole app. And so on.
@hebegebe absolutely!
The practice of giving preference to (potential) development and legacy students should be discontinued. If a wealthy student with every advantage (and access to tutoring, the best schools, all sorts of activities, summers free of jobs, lower financial stress on the entire family, etc) can’t muster the grades, scores and academic records that their less wealthy peers need in order to be admitted to a school, the student should not be admitted. That’s because the student isn’t really just a bit below par. That student is even further below peers than may seem on the face of it. All that advantage and still couldn’t come out significantly higher (in terms of credentials, scores and grades) then peers? School expenses and covering scholarships have nothing to do with legacy admits at all. Those schools that don’t give legacy preference, such as MIT, don’t suffer fewer donations. And the scholarships and the like don’t come from legacy admits or from tuition from full pays. They come from endowment interest, etc. And, in fact, the need for posh dorms and climbing walls are driven by the assumption by administrators that wealthy students expect such accoutrements. The scholarships come from interest from endowments.
How do we feel if businesses or government agencies also give similar types of preferences?
@lookingforward Merit as in merit awards.
As to my own d, I was only saying that legacy preference didn’t help her as legacy for H as a really strong candidate.
And worked against her at some other schools.
So I was pissed and now I am not. These programs and preferences actually help ses and urm get a chance to break the cycle.
That was the genesis of this thread for me.
And obviously based on pure stats she was a strong candidate.
That was the only point.
But you must feel thst you are the only one aware of the holistic nature of admissions and I am not nuanced enough to understand the whole person concept.
I’m not going to bore the world with her specific esssy topics and execution.
Or the interlacing storyline of work and passion intersecting in an interesting way.
Or the significant obstacles she overcame to do so.
Could you just trust a person with some modicum of experience to let you you know she was a top candidate.
I gave you the basic profile as a baseline.
And yes that’s not enough but it didn’t end there.
But can we please get back to the point of the broader discussion
@1NJParent we do not feel good about that. But unfortunately you see that all the time. I don’t love it, but I realize there will always be people with more money (and yes, opportunities that that money brings) and people with less. What I can’t stomach are the people with more who have that nauseating sense of entitlement and a lack of gratitude for what they have that often was due to dead relative being successful and making good fiscal choices–they were lucky enough to be born into this advantage.