@Center All good points…I’ll add a little nuance to some of your points.
I think as a society we all agree that there should be a reasonable degree of equal opportunity. Finland takes the American notion of equality of opportunity to its logical conclusion and they have essentially outlawed private schools. There are no elite boarding or private day schools in Finland. Rich kids go to the same schools as poor kids. And in a system like that everyone gets a good education. Finland can’t equalize everyone’s home life but they level the equality of opportunity playing field reasonably well.
What we are doing in the US is arguing over how much we can tilt the playing field to our kids advantage and still sit on a moral high ground and call it fair.
If your kid is at a school like PEA you’ve already tilted the playing field egregiously in favor of your kid. I stand guilty as charged.
My numbers may be off a bit but HADES schools typically spend around $80K per student per year. Tuition is supplemented with endowment income. The top exam schools like Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Boston Latin are in the $12K/year ballpark. That’s about a 7x differential in spending per student.
@Center I think what you are saying is within the elite private school system legacies, URM, and athletes get even more of an edge. I’ll agree that each student should be judged on his or her own merits. I don’t see how Dad going to a college increases the “merits” of the child applicant. Though schools see better ROI on alumni donations across multiple generations so I understand the financial incentive.
As for the other two categories, URM/athlete. URM students bring important perspective to dorm life and classroom discussion that cannot be had from a majority class student. Hard to put a price on that value but I personally would rate it high. Yes, a white kid won’t get that spot but the white kids who do get spots will benefit from the diversity. It’s a calculation. And please remember white people had an affirmative action program at Harvard from 1636 to about 2010. My freshman year at Columbia the senior class was still all guys. Columbia went coed in 1983.
The morning after the superbowl my Facebook feed tells me society still values athletes. Athletes put effort into their craft that takes away from academics. Teams fill stadiums and give a campus a sense of pride and community. There’s value there. And I personally value the idea that education should address physical health as well as intellectual health. Again it’s a calculation, a moral choice if you will, but if I sat on an admissions committee I’d select an athlete with slightly lower intellectual credentials over someone who only contributes intellectually to a multifaceted community.
To me the legacy system feels like affirmative action for white people. As these schools built their endowments it made sense. When the endowments get so high they no longer need to charge tuition to anyone hopefully at that time we can do away with the legacy system as it won’t be needed anymore.
But if we are honest, those of us here in the boarding school parent thread, we are substantively tilting the playing field for our own. I feel we have already lost the moral high ground and have little leg to stand on when we complain someone else is tilting it even more for their kid.
Back to the original point of this thread…private schools not performing well in this year’s EA/ED round…the colleges may have finally decided to stop giving 50% of their spots to the private school 1% and the other 50% of the spots to the public school 99%. Time and the RD round will tell.