According to the Chetty study, MIT had the highest social mobility index among the group of Ivy+ colleges in the study.
The value of donations from alums is small relative to the mega donations these schools receive every year. Unlike Harvard, MIT gives no admission preference to these donors, however. It doesn’t seem to make much of a difference to these donors.
I don’t know re Harvard but Yale is definitely at a point at which donations from upper middle class alums don’t account for much of their revenues (would be surprised if more than 1 percent) in view of their hospitals and research business and endowment returns. I think open no-legacy statements will go beyond MIT very soon, into Yale and maybe Harvard.
It would look relatively close to the UC’s since they don’t do legacy, race or socioeconomic status. They still recruit athletes but that’s a very small percentage. And they bias toward CA admissions.
SES (lower) is indirectly favored by admission readers looking at achievement in context to opportunities (or lack thereof). Hence the relatively high percentage of Pell grant students at UCs compared to other colleges of approximately similar selectivity.
Race and ethnicity demographics at UCs are affected by the demographics of college-bound high school graduates in California, which are somewhat different from the demographics in many other parts of the US, or the US as a whole.
Because most campuses are more selective than the higher minimum standard for non-California residents (3.4 HS GPA instead of 3.0 HS GPA), it is likely that the main factor limiting non-California resident enrollment is the high non-resident cost and lack of non-resident need-based financial aid.
It is correct to note that, with mostly large campus sizes, recruited athletes make up only a small percentage of the student population, unlike at (for example) NESCAC LACs.
All of the above differences indicate that if some other highly selective college kept its same admissions policies but dropped legacy and URM from consideration, it would not necessarily end up with UC-like student demographics.
That is a pretty low bar to set. USNews has MIT at #179 for social mobility, versus Harvard’s #211, while Collegenet has it as #1142, versus Harvard’s #1310. At the same time, Howard University, which DOES consider legacy, is at #15 by USNews, and #419 by Collegenet.
Other colleges with legacy preference which do better at social mobility than MIT according to USNews are:
St Johns University (NY) - #41
IIT - #82
RIT - #100
U San Francisco - #113
Syracuse U - #127
VCU - #127 (tie)
NYU - #132
Clark University - #139
Brandeis - #143
Emory - #153
Brown(!) - #169
USC - #169 (tie)
Fordham and Rochester tie with MIT for #179.
Some Colleges and Universities which rank higher in social mobility on the Collegenet list than MIT and have legacy admissions are:
Georgetown - #1132
CMC - 1127
USC - #1106
UMichigan - #1040
CMU - #1030
Lehigh # 969
Rochester - #933
Harvey Mudd - #930
Amherst - #891 (the data came from when they considered legacy)
RPI - #880
VTech - #741
U San Francisco - #678
IIT - #481
Howard - #419
There are more.
However, this really means very little. The “elite” private colleges are almost all between Tulane (#1496) with a score of 2.986 and CMC (#1127) with a score of 12.745. Considering that the highest score is 379.128, this range is pretty small. So saying that MIT has a better social mobility index that Harvard is like saying that 20 degrees Kelvin is warmer than 18 degrees Kelvin…
Since when did USNWR become an authority on anything, particularly on social mobility? It started to include a measure that it calls “social mobility” only recently. Like everything else USNWR does, the measure it incorporates is as simplistic and misleading as any other. The “social mobility” ranking USNWR uses is based on the 6-year graduation rate of a college’s Pell recipients. If anything is a low bar, it must be the 6-year graduation rate, particular at schools that pretty much everyone graduates (MIT may be one of the exceptions, which may explain why it ranked lower on that measure by USNWR).
I think there should be a handful of universities where we do not care one bit about social mobility. We need colleges like MIT and CalTech to advance our knowledge in science and technology and it would be nice for those to be pure merit based.
My college has no legacy preference but very active engagement with alumni, including reunion dinners, regular get togethers in all parts of the world, a newsletter, email list etc. And an active fundraising effort amongst alumni, including special events for large donors.
There’s no need for a legacy preference to make all this happen, in fact I don’t know anyone whose kid attended the same college, since it is so much harder to get in nowadays. The fundraising pitch is all about benefitting the most talented kids, not your own. Isn’t that how charity is supposed to work?
With respect to social mobility, Washington Monthly’s social mobility rankings seem a bit more robust than the USNWR methodology. WM’s methodology (source) looks at graduation rates for all students (not just first-time full-time which skews toward the more economically advantaged), including how the graduation rates differ from what would be expected based on the student characteristics. It also takes into account the percentage of a student body that receives Pell grants (as commitment to serving an economically diverse student body), the price for families earning less than $75k, whether students earn at least 150% of the federal poverty line after graduation, and how much of their student loans they’ve been able to repay.
The social mobility rankings from Washington Monthly for some of the most mentioned national universities on CC (source):
Stanford # 2
MIT #4
Duke #10
U. Penn #12
Notre Dame #13
Northwestern #14
Lehigh #17
Yale #18
Princeton #19
Cornell #21
Dartmouth #33
Georgetown #35
Harvard #38
Some of the other schools in the top 20 for social mobility were:
U. of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign #1
UC-Davis #3
Rutgers-Newark #5
U. of Florida #6
UC - Irvine #7
Texas A&M #8
National Louis University #9
UC-San Diego #11
U. of Wisconsin #15
UNC-Chapel Hill #16
Missouri Science & Tech #20
As far as the liberal arts colleges, here are some of the rankings (source)
Harvey Mudd #1
Berea #2
Washington & Lee #3
Williams #4
Wesleyan #5
Pomona #6
Claremont McKenna #7
Gustavus Adolphus #8
St. Olaf #9
Amherst #10
Middlebury #11
College of Saint Benedict #12
U. of New Hampshire-Manchester #13
Lafayette #14
College of the Holy Cross #15
Carleton #16
Hamilton #17
Vassar #18
U. of Richmond #19
Grinnell #20
The Minnesota liberal arts schools seem to do remarkably well for social mobility. It’s also interesting that the top 20 liberal arts colleges is filled with more of the “big” names than the corresponding category for national universities. I’m not sure if there’s a correlation between the social mobility effectiveness and the number of legacy admissions a school has.
Different social mobility rankings may produce very different results depending on the relative emphasis on:
Less selective and public (especially non-flagship) colleges are more likely to do better on 1, but worse on 2, while the reverse is true for prestige private colleges.
For an individual student from a lower income background who does get admitted with financial aid (i.e. does not have uncooperative divorced parents), a prestige private college has probably a very high upward mobility potential compared to various other colleges. However, prestige private colleges enroll relatively few students from lower income backgrounds, so in aggregate, their effect on upward mobility for students from lower income backgrounds is small compared to many other colleges which enroll far more students from lower income backgrounds.
I agree with this.
When kids have parents who take education as a high priority, to me it seems like “legacy admissions” is perhaps the least important advantage that they get.
A much bigger deal is that they are coming from a family culture where education is important. Just reading to our kids every single night when they were 1 and then 2 and then 3 years old was very important. Then having our kids read to us every night when they were 5 and then 6 years old was similarly important. This is an advantage that kids get very early. Similarly logic puzzles was something that they were doing early. I remember at one point I was reading a report from day care saying that our kid didn’t do jigsaw puzzles. The problem was that the day care had boring puzzles. Literally while I read the report my 4 year old daughter started and finished a puzzle listed as being for 8 to 10 year olds. By the time that our kids started first grade, they expected that they would keep ahead in all class work. This continued for the rest of their lives (at least so far).
By the time that kids get to kindergarten kids have already learned a lot.
I do not understand how anyone will do well at an academically tough university such as MIT or Caltech (or a DVM program) unless they grow up with this culture from a very young age.
Our kids do not need legacy admission. If it were up to me I would do away with it.
However, I would not expect this to make much difference in terms of which students end up at the top ranked universities, or which kids go from putting together jigsaw puzzles at age 4 to putting together a horses intestines (assisting with surgery) 20 years later.
You want Chetty? Well here you go. MIT is ranked by Chetty as #1288 of the 2,137 colleges on his list, with 13% of the students moving up at least 2 economic quintiles.
Let us compare that to Harvey Mudd which, as we know, has legacy admissions, and we see that they are ranked as #1276, with 17% of their students moving up, or NYU, ranked as #1136 with 18% of their students moving up, or USC, ranked #832, with 20% of their students moving up, while IIT is Chetty’s #301, with 15% of their students moving up two quintiles. As elsewhere, Boruch is up on top, Chetty’s # 3, with 49% of their students moving up at least 2 quintiles.
You are also quite blatantly ignoring my data from Collegenet, which demonstrates exactly the same trend as USNews, and now you can see that Chetty’s own data, which you yourself used, also demonstrates my point.
I’m surprised that you seem so fascinated with rankings! I only brought up Chetty because you mentioned social mobility index and Chetty is commonly recognized as the most reputable study in that area. As we all know, these rankings (on social mobility or anything else) produce very different results. I wouldn’t make any argument that college A is better in X than college B because it happens to rank higher in X according to one or more such rankings.
The purpose of legacy preference in elite college admissions (no one really cares about Podunk U offering legacy admissions, right?) has always been, since its initiation a century ago, about stopping, or at least slowing down, the “undesirable” changes in the composition of the elite college’s student body (the opposite of social mobility). It’s ironic that it only exists (in modern time) in a country that self-proclaims to be the champion of non-discrimination against anyone and equal opportunities for everyone.
Ummm, you originally brought up the ranking.
Besides, I was also providing the actual data, which is far more important than ranking. In fact, the ranking is problematic, since it obscures the actual difference, and the 12 place difference between HMC and MIT represents a 31% increase in the number of students who move up, while the 140 rank difference between HMC and NYU only represents a 6% increase. So the ranking creates the illusion that HMC is closer in social mobility to MIT than to NYU, while this is not at all true.
It’s because the nationally recognized universities share the same category with numerous public universities that, as you can see, pretty much occupy the field. LACs have only each other to compete against when it comes to social mobility. One notable exception is the case of UVA which probably has a socio-economic profile closer to Wesleyan than it does to UCLA.
Instead of graduation rates, wouldn’t income be a better measure of social mobility? That’s ultimately the bottom line here…
Could be, although the student’s choice of major has a significant effect on that independent of the college, and colleges that are heavy with in-demand majors will get boosted if the income consideration is not adjusted by major distribution. That is why typical financial ROI rankings of entire colleges tend to have lots of engineering-focused colleges near the top – which does not help a student who is (for example) a biology major.
Yes, but then what is social mobility if not crossing income levels?
If you’re first gen, but family has prosperous business and your income is less than your parents 5-10 years after college is that a good thing?