Here is a “must read” article from 2019 on the state of college admissions. Some have probably seen it before. It’s long. Thoughts?
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I followed a link to this article from a different thread (and found this one while searching for the original one). In reading much of the article it touched on concepts that I felt I already knew, but the ending of the article made need-aware status really hit home for me. I will provide my effort to do a relatively brief summary of some of the main points along with my commentary for those who don’t want to read a roughly 23-page article (per print PDF).
I knew that affluent students and families predominated in the “elite” schools that many families are gunning for and that students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds were underrepresented.
Over the last decade, two distinct conversations about college admissions and class have been taking place in the United States…The premise of this [first] conversation is that inequity in higher education is mostly a demand-side problem: Poor kids are making regrettable miscalculations as they apply to college. Selective colleges would love to admit more low-income students — if only they could find enough highly qualified ones who could meet their academic standards.
This is where I was until reading the article, even though I mentally knew that there were students with high financial need who might be denied admission at a need-aware school because they needed too much money. But somehow 2 + 2 was not equating to 4 in my mind.
The second conversation is the one that has been going on among the professionals who labor behind the scenes in admissions offices … Enrollment managers know there is no shortage of deserving low-income students applying to good colleges. They know this because they regularly reject them — not because they don’t want to admit these students, but because they can’t afford to.
The article went on to describe Trinity’s previous admissions methodology which was to accept high SAT, low GPA wealthy kids who could pay, but Trinity found that the students, “couldn’t keep up in class and weren’t interested in trying,” and it was negatively affecting faculty morale, but then there were high-performing Pell Grant recipients who didn’t feel they fit on campus, and due to the large numbers of wealthy students without the academic chops, the academic environment was deteriorating. Trinity changed its admissions focus to be on high stat LI-FG students which would attract more academically elite students, and thus bring more funds. It also went test optional and found that the students who accepted TO had lower scores but still were successful at the school. Because more than 25% of students were TO though, the university was dinged by USNWR and it dropped from 38 to 44. The faculty wrote to the trustees:
“We perceive in many of these students a refreshing array of qualities that were all too rare in prior years: intellectual curiosity, openness of mind and spirit and genuine will to engage with their peers,” the professors wrote. If Pérez’s admissions policies were “having inadvertent, temporary effects on U.S.N.W.R.’s dubious ‘selectivity’ measure,” they added, “we think this is a small price to pay for one of the most exciting transformations Trinity has witnessed in many years.”
This statement from the faculty allayed a lot of concerns I about people regarding test optional schools or lowering the bar for standardized tests. It appears that not only is there no detrimental effect on the learning environment, but that it invigorates and strengthens the academic environment, when a student is accepted holistically and with care (meaning look at the essays, LORs, etc…not just GPA).
Things are different among the wealthiest colleges. They often advertise themselves as “need blind,” and yet their freshman classes tend to include relatively few students from families with the greatest financial need. Boeckenstedt points out a fact that is somehow simultaneously totally obvious and yet still kind of dumbfounding: Some of the most selective colleges have so much money that they could easily admit freshman classes made up entirely of academically excellent Pell-eligible students and charge them nothing at all. The cost in lost tuition would amount to a rounding error in their annual budgets. But not only do those and other selective colleges not take that step; they generally do the opposite, year after year. As a group, they admit fewer Pell-eligible students than almost any other institutions. Colleges like DePaul, with much smaller endowments, somehow manage to find the money to admit and give aid to twice as many low-income students, proportionally, as elite colleges do.
Why don’t the most selective colleges do more? The answer, in Boeckenstedt’s opinion, is that staying “elite” depends not just on admitting a lot of high-scoring students. It also depends on admitting a lot of rich ones.
This one stings because I think it rings of a truth. For instance, I know of a racially mixed city that is about 58% black, 33% white, 6% Hispanic, and 3% Asian. The city’s public schools are 10% white, with most of those students concentrated in a select number of schools where white students are the majority (this is a place where there are no neighborhood schools…student can go anywhere in the city). I have heard multiple times from white, upper-middle-class (UMC) parents that they will not send their children to non-primarily white schools because “there’s not enough diversity” even if it’s a very high-performing school. I could easily see UMC families, regardless of race, avoiding an institution where 75% of students were Pell recipients because their children “wouldn’t feel comfortable.”
Returning to the article, the admissions team had to send out 1700 acceptances. After reading the applications, they had started off with 3200 they thought were “worthy” and then making successive cuts to get down to 1700. When the ad com team would come up with a list of 1700 to be analyzed they were told there were too many full-need students and not enough full-pay ones to meet tuition targets. And they kept repeating the process to try and get the “right” 1700 to balance everything out.
Early in the process, they had done what they could to protect highly qualified low-income and first-generation students. But at this point, with the tuition revenue estimates still shy of the trustees’ target, every student they were cutting was a full-need, low-income student.
This hit me in a couple of different ways.
- Even if Trinity is not a “tippy-top” college, it had almost enough students to completely replace its entering class with academically qualified students.
- This just stinks for students from low-income families. But, this is a private school, you say; let them go to their local public! But many public schools don’t meet 100% of the financial need of their students, and state governments have been providing less in the way of subsidies to their state schools. And if, as some say, there are opportunities that are really only open to alumni from the “elite” universities, it seems quite wrong that people are being excluded not because they’re not capable of doing the work, but because they can’t afford it. This is particularly true at the big endowment colleges (HYPS) that could afford to accept these students gratis, but that don’t, ostensibly perhaps because they’re trying to maintain their “elite” image. (Whether that is the case is up for discussion, but it certainly seems plausible.)
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Here are Pell grant percentages at prestige universities:
Note that if you click on the liberal arts colleges tab, the Pell grant percentages tend to be lower.
For comparison, probably around a third of undergraduates get Pell grants. But even that is almost certainly lower than the percentage of recent high school graduates who would get Pell grants if they all went to college.
Where do you suggest Trinity acquire the funds to provide financial aid to “meet need” for Pell students, if not from their full-pay kids? A Trinity education is a luxury good. I am glad the school can afford to subsidize at least some needy students, recognizing it can not help them all.
HYPS offer generous financial aid. They could do more, they could do less. They have found the right level for them. There is a recognition that in the interest of " generational equity", these schools shouldnt spend too much of their endowment. One never knows when an extraordinary situation, like a global pandemic, will arise and be costly
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In the 2015-2016 school year, 44% of full-time, full year students received Pell grants (government source). Here is a little further breakdown of the statistics:
- Public 4-year doctoral colleges: 41.3%
- Public 4-year other colleges: 45%
- Private nonprofit 4-year doctoral colleges: 31.9%
- Private 4-year other colleges: 38.7%
- Private for-profits averaged 73.8%
According to the USNWR link you provided, the percentage of Pell grant recipients at those schools is between 10-31% (10-23% if UCLA and UC-Berkeley are excluded). So the T25 are taking between 33-66% fewer students than they should based on their private nonprofit 4-year doctoral category.
The liberal arts T25 have Pell enrollments between 10-24%, so 35-70% fewer students than they should based on the private nonprofit other colleges category.
But let’s look at the UC system’s Pell enrollment data (source).
- UC-Berkeley: 26%
- UCLA: 31%
- UC San Diego: 30%
- UC Davis: 37%
- UC Santa Barbara: 41%
- UC Irvine: 48%
- UC Santa Cruz: 50%
- UC Riverside: 56%
- UC Merced: 63%
There have been many comments about how difficult the UCs are to get into and how it appears relatively random as to which UC campuses one is accepted to or not. People accepted to T10 universities were waitlisted or denied at various UC campuses, not just Berkeley and L.A. But if you go through various threads where people have ranked the desirability of the UC campuses, I’m pretty sure that the list is going to be pretty much in the order I listed above. If a campus isn’t deemed “worthy” enough, the higher-income families go elsewhere which thus raises the percentage of Pell recipients at that campus.
When I was looking at that same graph (source for the UC Pell data) I knew without even hovering over the dot what the one Cal State campus was that was hanging out by itself far from any other Cal State dots: San Luis Obispo with a 19% Pell enrollment, whereas other Cal States were between 29-74% Pell.
There seems to be a correlation between the wealth of a student body and its popularity. Is it because only some institutions are providing the quality education desired by families? Or is it because there aren’t enough people of means who have chosen to attend a university to deem it worthy? I suspect that it’s a bit like gentrification. There might be a few wealthier students here and there, and then it becomes a steady trickle which then gathers speed and once it hits the tipping point it becomes a “hidden gem” and then just a high-demand school. I think this is true for UCs and I think it’s true for a number of other colleges.
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Oh, I have no suggestions for Trinity apart from what they are currently doing. They’re doing the best they can and I agree that it’s not their responsibility to educate everyone regardless of finances.
HYPS are also free to do whatever they want with their endowments. For them, however, I feel less empathy that they are not taking as many students with need as schools in their category (private nonprofit doctoral, 4-year colleges). They’re the richest, by far, and they’re not even doing the average for their category. That I consider stinginess or even just wrong, but they remain free to do so. There may be individuals who decide to spend their tuition money at a school that is more generous, but I’m sure that there will continue to be ample demand for HYPS so they won’t be forced to be more generous. People aren’t required to be generous and charitable, but it’s something that others appreciate about them. The same holds true for “elite” universities.
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There may be an additional explanation. Families with money are more likely to be able to send their kids to residential college, while those with less money are more likely to be limited to sending their kids to a local college, since commuting and living at home costs less than living on or near campus away from home. Yes, some colleges offer financial aid to help with residential college living, but these colleges tend to be more selective and less numerous (e.g. UCs versus CSUs), and may not be on the radar of families with less money (even if the student has a good chance of admission). Of course, students looking for a residential college with the residential college experience are probably not looking for a mostly commuter college.
CPSLO is one of the CSUs in a rural area, so is more residential than most (since it can be a long commute for even “local” students). But it being more residential probably attracted more students with money looking for a residential college experience while not being as inconvenient to get to from major population centers as Humboldt or Chico.
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I just looked at the California publics on the College Board’s website.
All of the UCs were classified as residential campuses except for Riverside & Merced, the ones with the highest Pell enrollments. But Irvine and Santa Cruz are considered residential campuses and each has nearly 2x the percentage of Pell recipients as Berkeley.
Most of the Cal States were classified as commuter campuses. But the following were classified as residential, and I’ve listed their percentage of Pell students:
- Cal Poly – San Luis Obispo: 19%
- California Maritime: 27%
- Cal State – Chico: 37%
- Humboldt State (which I think might be becoming the next Cal Poly?): 48%
- Cal State – Monterey Bay: 49%
I don’t live in California, but my definite sense is that the UCs are much more prestigious than the Cal States. But here are four residential campuses and two of them have 2.5 times higher percentage of Pell recipients.
Are there other plausible explanations for this?
UCR and UCM are still largely residential. UCM is in a rural area without that much population in reasonable commute range.
Of the CSUs you list as residential, all are in low population density areas, except for CSU Maritime Academy, which is a very small specialized campus. The low population density means that they do not have much population in reasonable commute range, so even “local” students may have to live on or near campus.
Besides residentialness of college, another big factor resulting in inverse correlation of Pell percentage and prestige (that strongly correlates to admission selectivity) is that students from families with more money have more opportunities to build good college admission credentials (better K-12 schools, more extracurricular opportunities, etc.) that result in them writing more competitive college applications. Also, the barriers more commonly faced by students from poorer families keep some of them from going to college at all.