Sorry, misread your post. Highly selective school applicants skew more affluent, but I am not aware of this data at the school level. @data10 is there data on this at the school level?
Iâd argue that much of these data arenât relevant for admission purposes at need-blind schools. If they want to identify FGLI students, itâs be much more efficient with a separate checkbox/section as I suggested above. On the other hand, if they want to use it to identify full-pay applicants, well, then they arenât truly need blind if they have a preference for full-pay students!
Itâs difficult to tell. I guess it would be a little surprising to me that ~50% of applicants could be full pay, but maybe the number of applicants in the grand scheme of things is so small and skews so affluent that this is the case?
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No we didnât.
Since a lengthier response here would be off-topic feel free to DM me. Your profile is hidden so I canât initiate a DM.
The common app data thru March 15 shows that 56% of applicants reside in the highest income zipcode quintile (31% of the population lives in these zipcodes), and 6% of apps came from the lowest income quintile.
These data arenât perfect because
-not everyone from high income zipcodes is full pay
-in some of the highest income zipcodes there is lower income housing (which is true of my HSâs district)
-this isnât the yearâs complete picture yet
-common app doesnât get all the college app volume (maybe 65%ish or so).
Common app could cut this data by school, but I imagine thatâs low priority.
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That high? Or do you mean just as a percentage of applications to private colleges?
No, that was to all schoolsâŠpublics including CCs and private, but I donât have a reference. It might be on common appâs site somewhere. Some schools have their own apps as we know, and there was coalition app (now dead, at least in its previous form).
No need. I didnât mean to be nosy about anyoneâs personal circumstances. It doesnât matter. I just didnât understand the point that you were trying to make with your example. Financial aid offices can only process the applications that they receive so I canât imagine they really need the checkbox. As far as I know none calculate aid packages for applicants who havenât actually applied for aid. That would truly be a waste of their time.
I think some donât even start to process aid packages until the paperwork is complete so if an applicant forgets to send some needed documents, they may be not get their application reviewed until after the applicant is admitted. Upthread someone said that cal tech doesnât even want the financial documents and aid application until after admissions decisions are made. I didnât know that, but that seems great in some ways and truly need-blind. On the other hand, doesnât that delay a studentâs ability to compare packages between colleges in April (unless cal techâs aid office calculates them very very quickly assuming they have the same April 1st notification date)?
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At most colleges it would but Caltech is very small. The incoming freshman class size is about 240 so with a yield rate of approximately 50% theyâre making less than 500 offers. I donât have the data but Iâve heard that about half are full pay so the FA office only has to process about 250 applications.
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Why would an open admission community college use The Common Application?
Also, donât many state universities use only their own applications?
https://www.commonapp.org/explore/ says that 978 colleges use The Common Application (not necessarily exclusively).
No idea, but some do.
Donât know the number off the top of my head which state schools have only a self app option. CA UCs and CSUs, UWashington and UT Austin are some of the schools historically not on common app. UCs had 210k apps last year. UT Austin and UDub will be on common app starting this year.
Also note that those app numbers on the common app update report linked above only include data from schools who were members for all three years that comprise that report. So, the data is undercounted and doesnât include schools who switched to common app in the last 3 years, like the Illinois publics.
You can PM me if you want to continue, as this is off topic.
Incredibly helpful and useful. Understand all of the caveats, but this makes a lot of sense.
In the U.S. at least, it just seems strange to me that ~50% of applicants would be full pay. ~18% of households earn $150k+. But I guess it is not hard to believe that half of all college applications come from within that group.
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Thatâs not a good excuse for larger schools, because their admissions and FA offices are proportionally larger.
Caltech doesnât want to waste its very limited resources in its FA office on applicants who arenât going to be admitted. Once acceptance decisions are made, some of the personnel who work on admissions can be shifted to work on financial aid without creating any conflict.
I donât think itâs safe to make that assumption at all.
AO after AO, counselor after counselor, and anecdote after anecdote tells us that legacy is at best a tie-breaker. T25 / <20% acceptance colleges reject the vast majority of their legacy applicants. Legacy alone is not going to get it done for an applicant who isnât qualified. A development or celebrity kid, sure. A standard-issue legacy? It just hasnât been like that for a long time.
Anecdotally the handful of legacy admits I know with confirmed stats were as qualified as anyone for the reachiest colleges. They chose their parentâs alma mater out of familiarity and tradition, not as an admissions strategy per se.
Granted, when there are 20 or 30 well-qualified applicants per seat, a potential tie-breaker is a huge deal, and it is well within reason to question why legacies deserve that boost. But I think anyone who believes ending legacy is going to lead to a new era of fairness in admissions and better-qualified student populations is going to be surprised by how little things change.
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Seems that Harvard weights LDC more than that, and more than URM that lots of people complain about.
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No two applicants are identical, so their claim that legacy is just a tie-breaker (as if two applicants, one legacy and one non-legacy, were otherwise identical or interchangeable) simply cannot be true.
No one denies that many legacies are qualified. Itâs just that some of them (they just may not be among the ones you know) arenât and they needed their legacy boosts.
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This doesnât disprove the tiebreaker theory (the 3% rate in the below-average range is likely development kids).
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That data in #26 is in the context of one specific scenario that was runâŠthe elimination of all hook preferences along with an increased preference for low-ses.
Harvard has already increased preference for low-ses, and has changed their admission eval process and criteria since the lawsuit too, most notably going test optional.
Needing the legacy boost to get in â unqualified.
The schools are rejecting 85-90%+ of their legacy applicants; there is just no reason for them to accept unqualified ones.
Needing the legacy boost to get in = less qualified than someone else who doesnât need it.
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