LOL this thread is the most privileged piece of BS I’ve ever seen. The SAT and ACT are inherently racist and prejudiced systems built to keep the elite at the elite and suppress opportunities for marginalized communities. I’m attending a school in the fall with no additional essays, tests, or fees because its the right thing to do to increase access to higher education for all… yall need to get your heads out of the gutter and think about how standardized tests are built to favor one kind of person. Not requiring them opens more doors and gives people who otherwise wouldn’t have the chance to study at “elite” institutions that chance. Man people on this website are crazy elitist and privileged it boggles my mind! It’s not “getting easier” its getting more equitable…
I hate to be one of those people who posts links to things which don’t work. It’s just that when I googled it matched exactly. There is a common misperception that the American dream has gone away and that there is no chance to become the 1% ( if that’s even something one wants). That just isn’t borne out in facts.
Pikkety is one of the worse economic “thinkers” around but thats beyond this thread. And yes, wealth concentration can be increasing while people in the top 1% are in the majority self-made. One doesn’t preclude the other. In fact, they are unrelated.
The baseline idea is that more people earn it then are born to it.
I just think the folks you are citing are leaning very much one way. And their theories can be mathematically debased. But you likely know that. And I personally don’t consider a billionaire to be generous by deciding to give away his capital before s/he dies esp. if they have to write about it and join a club.
I don’t think the economic diversity at the schools you mentioned would have changed. These are places where the 1% often go. For multiple reasons. Let’s hope with all that wealth that they can also bring on more students with low income needs.
(I cited these three economists because they were cited in the only paragraph of the Bloomberg article I could read, which is why it seemed perplexing).
I copied from my i-phone. You can likely look up the article based on its title and date. Sorry for the confusion. Pikkety and that article have nothing to do with 1% and the Self Made.
OOOH. That makes more sense. 
Thanks.
Parental SES and social capital DOES make it easier. Though most of these folks still made it work, and that’s NOT easy. It’s rare.
And the good news, the article cited that things are getting better all the time.
Given that I agree with you more than I disagree with you, and not only have I been an active participant on this thread but some other active participants are on that same side, I kind of wonder how much of it you’ve actually read in your rush to dismiss us all…
There is plenty of information from the hundreds of colleges that has gone test optional in previous years, although previous years of test optional is obviously not the same as this year for a variety of reasons.
I’m still missing something about your view. Harvard had a large 42% increase in applications (combined total between early and regular) over last year. Most other highly selective private colleges also had large increases this year – many in the >20% range. In general, the more selective the college, the greater the application increase; although there are many individual outlier colleges for a variety of reasons, such as your earlier Colgate example.
I expect that switching to test optional was a key reason for the large application increase among highly selective colleges. With the score barrier removed, more kids apply to “reach” colleges that they would normally not attempt because the applicant believes their score is too low . I’d expect that the kids who would apply as test optional and would not as with test required tend to be kids with lower test scores compared to the college to which they are applying, particularly kids who do fairly well in the rest of the visible application except for their score. I’d expect URMs, first gen, lower income and similar groups who average lower scores (particularly lower scores than predicted by grades) are overrepresented among this score holding them back group.
Why do you expect these traditionally lower average scoring groups to have smaller % increases in applications than traditionally higher average scoring groups, among the newly test optional colleges?
YES. You are correct. And I’m a mom of a white privileged student. I railed on this a couple of hundred responses ago lol. Best of luck to you!
I came back out of boredom to see the CC infighting on this subject. This really is one of the most offensive threads on this website. For those who don’t understand what I’m talking about, I really kind of hope your children are more open-minded than you are, or that they end up at a different college than mine. Seriously, some of this is insane. Please be a little introspective.
So we’ve got people on this thread who have strong opinions, trying to work through what the value of standardized tests is or isn’t.
And yeah, it’s kind of an eternal topic, but given the admissions era we’re in, it seems an important one.
So I don’t get what’s do “offensive” about it. Care to unpack your objections a bit?
Calling somebody “self made”, because they moved from the top 2% from the top 1% or the top 0.01% is ridiculous.
S0mebody whose parents make 400,000 a year has almost all of the advantages that somebody whose Parents make $1,500,000 a year has by way on education and opportunities.
The only people who should be considered “self made” are people who started out without any of the advantages provided by wealth.
Moreover those counts are quite disingenuous, since the majority of the top 0.1% are not the 200 wealthiest people. They are the kids, grandkids, great grandkids, etc, of the self made people of the 1940s, the 1960s, the 1980s, etc.
Again, there are 16,000 families which make more than $7,000,000 a year.
However, that is how much they make. That is not their net worth. The top 0.1% are worth $40,000,000 or more, and there are 160.000 families like this. The top 0.01% by income make over $7m million, but the top 0.05% by wealth, about 34,000 families with the most accumulated wealth, have $100,000,000 or more accumulated wealth. The vast majority of these are not self-made.
The vast majority of the very wealthy are people who have inherited $100,000,000 or more, not people who made %10 billion or more in their lifetimes.
It is simple math, really. There are only 16,000 families making 7 million of more a year, but there are almost five time as many families who have five times as much as that in accumulated wealth. A person who is making 7 million before taxes is taking $4 million home. How long would it take tu accumulate 35 million if a person is taking $4 million home. It takes a family making $150,000 up to 30 years to pay off a $350,000 home (about 3x their take home salary after taxes). So consider that it would likely take a family which makes $7 million a year about the same time to accumulate about $12 million (or about 3x their take home salary). If they were savvy, it may take them a shorter period, but still, most families will not have an annual income of $7 million for long enough to accumulate over $100 million - a person can only work, earn and save for anbout 30-40 years.
So the only way that there can be 5x as many people with over $100 million as are earning $7 million, is if they mostly inherited that money from parents or grandparents.
Therefore, the only way that there can be so many more people with 100s of millions of dollars in wealth is that they have inherited it.
Thus, the large majority of the wealthiest 0.5% of the families likely have inherited their wealth, despite there being 100 or 200 self-made billionaires. The same math actually works for most of the top 0.1% by accumulated wealth.
So claiming, using Bezos or Soros or Oprah as proof, that the wealthiest Americans are mostly self-made, is disingenuous.
Does it strike anyone that there is something inherently ludicrous in the term “bottom 99%”?
Simple. Those who already possess, or think they possess, other elements (except for a good test score) of good applications to “top” schools are the ones who can take advantage of TO policies at those schools. Most of them aren’t from the underrepresented groups. I wouldn’t prematurely jump to a conclusion based on faulty logic or sketchy data.
I thought the same thing… coupled with what @MWolf was saying that earnings are completely different than accumulated wealth.
But with the “bottom 99%” there’s such a huge difference that earners are usually divided into quartiles or quintiles when I’ve seen it - and it’s tough to go from the bottom to the top for the masses. It can be tough to rise one for the masses, but college often helps.
In addition, someone can land in the top 1% by selling a family business or farm owned for years/generations. IMO, the terms top 1% and 99% were designed to get a visceral reaction. and they do. I think they came out in the last 10-15 years.
I don’t remember them ever being part of economic studies when I was in grad school.
Not everyone agrees with who is self- made. Personally I wouldn’t confuse wealth and income. I also wouldn’t include folks who inherited companies, or came in at CEO level.
But the guy/gal who thought it up, bootstrapped it and had a college degree and came from a family making 1-200k. In fact, there are cases where families don’t give a dime to their kids. And the kids still make top income. Yep.
If someone borrows $ from family, assets that’s not exactly self made either. IMO.
Lumping everyone together based on accumulated wealth further confuses the issue.
Saying that anyone with any advantage can’t be self made is simplistic. I think most people can agree that Oprah and the Walton’s are in entirely different categories.
I know of at least one. Someone who failed our state testing in Math got into a top school. Very few honors and I’m not sure if they took any AP. That person would have never applied last year. I could not believe it when I heard it and saw the posted admissions packet. I really felt bad for those top kids who got deferred or rejected form this school.
This encompasses at least three levels of Forbes’ self-made score:
8: “Self-made who came from a middle-class or upper-middle-class background”
9: “Self-made who came from a largely working-class background; rose from little to nothing”
10: “Self-made who not only grew up poor but also overcame significant obstacles”
The upper edge may touch the following:
7: “Self-made who got a head start from wealthy parents and moneyed background”
Among the Forbes 400, 8 was the most common self-made score, even though “middle-class or upper-middle-class background” is probably less common as a starting point than the backgrounds of scores 9 and 10. 7 is also greatly overrepresented compared to the prevalence of such starting point backgrounds.
In a college context, higher parental SES certainly allows for purchasing opportunities (e.g. finding test locations, expensive extracurriculars, better K-12 schools) and removing barriers (e.g. getting disability accommodations). That can give someone a head start in becoming “self-made” wealthy.
Whether most of them aren’t from underrepresented groups or not is irrelevant since we aren’t talking about whether the majority of applicants are from underrepresented groups. We are instead talking about % increases. The relevant comparison is instead which group is most likely to have the largest % increase in portion that believe they are more qualified under a test optional system than a test required system – traditionally lower scoring groups or traditionally higher scoring groups (compared to rest of application).
For example, suppose 1% of a hypothetical underrepresented group that traditionally has lower test scores (compared to rest of application) believes they are adequately qualified for Harvard under a score required system. And 2% of that group believes they are adequately qualified for Harvard under a test optional system. Only a small portion believe they possess all elements except for test score… probably a much smaller portion than wealthy White kids, yet If all of the above apply to Harvard, then Harvard will see a huge 100% increase in applications from this hypothetical underrepresented group upon going test optional. The increase from 1% to 2% is quite small in absolute numbers, but is a large percentage increase.
There are plenty of things to criticize in the many referenced studies, but I don’t think the reporting of % applicants from underrepresented groups is one of them. This seems like simple reporting of facts, rather than using “faulty logic or sketchy data” .