Extreme poverty is definitely a hurdle but how in the world is a college going to distinguish between a family making 80k where the the mother chooses to say home and another with two workers making 160k. It just is a complete waste of time for schools to be weighing this in applications. In truth very few URM admitted to the top schools come from truly disadvantaged backgrounds. Everyone knows this is true but yet well off URM are routinely admitted ahead of truly low income or low middle class Asians. This is un-American and the SCOTUS needs to strike this down. Over and over the academics weigh in on political issues and to demand that the laws they favor are followed and enforced. The exact same standards should be applied to how they run nonprofit entities that receive public money. There can only be one legal standard.
There, fixed it for you!
@Postmodern Very good point made more eloquently than I stated. Harvard could say that they would only take the top 2000 students who were full pay. There would be many who would think that is unfair. Harvard could go the other way and state they would take the top 2000 students who are also underprivileged and could not pay and their would be others that would think that is unfair.
@SAY Discrimination based on race is wrong (Easy for me to say as an African American man). Asian Americans have been not been fairly treated when it comes to elite college admissions. (Also easy for me to say based on objective data). You speak of injustices done to dead people, yet they are not all dead (Grandparents educational opportunities were almost impossible in late 1940’s Mississippi and they are still alive). My parents went to inferior segregated schools into the early 1970’s. The horrors of the past still affect people in the Black community. The insensitivity to some of the wrongs faced by others is what is worrisome to me. One thing that I hope you see from my comments and that I speak to my family often about: Life is not always fair and the world may not treat you the way that you want to be treated, but you should still fight for people and for things that are right. I hope I live long enough to see the day that forums like this thread are no longer needed because my people have completely caught up economically, academically, and in spirit (Nightmares of the past, passed down from generation to generation have finally been released).
Why do people with money buy a Mercedes instead of a Honda, when both can get you to your destination?
Changethegame I agree with you and meant your grandparents no disrespect. I am of mixed race myself but my experience in life is that complaining is non-productive and that the only solution is to go out and prove yourself.
Colleges are already massively overpriced and have many issues providing degrees of value to students when they graduate. Spending time trying to equalize out the world is far beyond their capabilities. Colleges that accept any federal money should be admitting students based mostly on pure merit without regard to race. That is the law. Why would the country ever just rely on the judgement of unknown administrators. If colleges accept any federal money the admissions process should be open for a clear review and analysis. Across all economic levels races should be gaining very similar admission rates when GPA/SAT scores are compared. As we have seen with Facebook and Google a monolithic ideology results in a system that reflects the views of the people making the rules. I don’t suggest that these are bad people or trying to discriminate but the result is going to be ruled illegal both in the Harvard Case and a number of additional cases that are headed to SCOTUS.
@ucbalumnus and @roethlisburger
Might not be the point either of you were trying to make, but the parents that decide to spend the money on the more expensive town and therefore “better” schools might be hurting themselves in the end when it comes to college admissions because it will be harder for their kids to shine.
My personal observation is that the stand out kids in the 2nd rung public schools do better than the pretty close to the top kids at the better schools.
We were in a very competitive town/school system and moved a town over to build our house (there was new construction and we wanted to take advantage of the opportunity). Fast forward 20 years and my two daughters got into great schools…my second daughter was valedictorian and got into an Ivy (she chose not to attend). I’m not sure either of them would have done as well as they did if we had stayed in the “better town”. My older daughter also got NJSIAA Scholar athlete (a state award, only one per school is given)…she was a gymnast and many of her teammates from her private gymnastics club lived in the more expensive town we used to live in. Many of them were a lot better than her. But since she has less competition in our high school, she was one of the stars on the team.
From what I can tell, both of my girls did better than similar kids at the more competitive high schools when it came to college admissions.
So as a side bar to this conversation on race, since the question was raised, living in the lesser town with lesser schools isn’t always a bad thing…and it can save you money.
Spending the money on a well known prep school, however, I think might be worth it if the end goal is admission to an elite college. Different conversation.
college mom you might be right and that is my exact point. There are millions of people making all sorts of decisions on how best to gain(game) admission. There is just no way except in the case of true extreme poverty for the schools to ever figure this out. I favor some holistic adjustment for kids of all races that grow up in extreme poverty but those kids represent a tiny fraction at elite school if you really know the true story. For everyone else the system should be fully transparent and equal.
In terms of K-12 schools, there are plenty of reasons that parents find themselves in “good” school districts or pay to send kids to private schools. First, though, it should be recognized that most parents don’t really make any choice at all. They live in as nice an area as their SES will allow and just send their kids to the public school that happens to be there.
For some parents who appear to choose “good” schools, and these tend to be the ones in my experience who most loudly proclaim the value of “diversity” when college rolls around, they simply choose an area without a high percentage of blacks and Hispanics. A hard fact to admit to, but the dramatic segregation by race of many suburban school districts (sometimes by school even within districts) really speaks for itself. It’s also worth noting that much of the “good school” paradigm grew up concurrently with the white flight that accelerated in the 1970s and 1980s. Sure, there were causal factors other than race involved in the outmigration, but only the blind failed to note the acceleration following the integration and busing battles of that period. For this group, school choice really represents choice based on race. This conclusion is bolstered by the anecdotal observation that many parents flee “diverse” school districts immediately prior to the middle school years. Here is a very recent interview with a sociologist who studies these issues that appeared in the Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/09/white-kids-race/569185/
A corollary to the above description are families who increasingly avoid certain high performing schools because they have become “too Asian.” One sees this now in some parts of Silicon Valley as well as in, say, the NYC specialized schools. Often these families have multiple choices (they are not limited in resources), and yet seem to choose “worse” schools - sometimes local parochial and private schools, and occasionally mid-range boarding schools. To my mind, this is a rational choice based on an implicit understanding that their children are simply not smart enough to compete, rather than from any “racism” (whatever that term means) against Asian people. That Atlantic interview also hints at this phenomenon.
As noted above by other posters, some parents simply see a private school as a luxury good. Some would rather drive an Audi than a Toyota. I fit into that category. I don’t think my kids will particularly learn any more (for instance, my 10th grader has already exhausted the mathematics curriculum at the private school but would have exhausted it at almost any high school in the country anyway), but the experience will be altogether more pleasant, more like a country club. I don’t see why that isn’t a valid reason, frankly. But it is not related specifically to any belief that school choice will increase baseline intelligence, and might even harm college choice down the road, as also noted above.
Last, there are no doubt many parents who are ignorant of the research. They actually believe that choice of school is going to make a big difference in terms of the education obtained. Perhaps that is valid for the lower range of the highly intelligent kids; that is, those kids who are smart enough to benefit from a rigorous education and yet lack the ability to self teach or the curiosity to explore. I wouldn’t second guess these parents, but I would note that it is a relatively small group (compared with all parents in the United States) and I wouldn’t infer from their choice any strong evidence that choice of school matters a whole lot in the end for outcomes.
@SAY No hard feelings at all. I do disagree that complaining is always non-productive (this discussion disagreeing on race based admissions could be described as a form of complaining). As long as there are limited spots to the top colleges and universities in the country, there will be someone trying to game the system and there will be complaints about how students are selected. The UCs have not used race in selecting students in years and I have seen a long thread bemoaning the fact that top notch California students are not getting into their top UC choices. Meritocracies have some big advantages (no question how people are selected and that they belong) but could miss out on late bloomers. But I don’t think that an university can even truly equal the playing field. If I donate $10,000,000 to a school, they are probably going to let my children attend that university. If my name is Bill Gates, or Barack Obama, or Beyonce, they are going to let my kids in (even with a 3.3 GPA and 1000 SAT score). A student whose family makes $100,000 per year is in the top 30% of all households, but they would have a hard time holding a candle to someone whose family makes $1,000,000 a year as far as access to opportunities that could be the difference in being selected verses being rejected. I completely believe in the transparency part of the equation, but I believe that they will never find the equation that makes things “equal”. I still think that things can be done better and your holistic adjustment for poverty and removing race as a criteria is a good start…
Changethegame we mostly agree but your last point is clearly wrong. The Asians have defintiely proven that kids from familes at 100k and below can most certainly compete with mch wealthier children. Most of what is required to get into college is not that expensive. Everyone talks about the cost of,fancy SAT courses but 95% of that info can be obtained by reading the comprehensive books which are under 100$. What’s as kept the Asians out of Harvard is a very subjective criteria about their personality that is unrelated to income.
@SAY I didn’t say that students couldn’t compete and ultimately get into elite schools anyway, but I would not call that starting on equal footing. Money and access does have its perks/advantages and can skew things at the starting line of the college admissions process (and the years leading up to it), but their is nothing like a brilliant, resourceful, and hard working student to overcome those obstacles, no matter the race. When I see that 19% of a particular Ivy League school’s student body has household incomes over $630,000 per year or that the average household income of another Ivy League student body is approaching $200,000 in the news, it is hard to argue that money doesn’t help (I know you aren’t say that). I am not mad at all about those numbers (I am trying to get to those numbers too).
Asian Americans include a high percentage of immigrants who initially came in as PhD students or skilled workers, so that about 50% of Chinese and 70% of Indian immigrants have bachelor’s degrees (much higher than that of non-immigrant Americans generally, or in China or India). Since parental educational attainment is probably the strongest factor in kids’ educational attainment (and probably accounts for apparent differences in educational attainment by SES or race), it is not surprising that the kids of these immigrants tend to do well in school.
However, not all Asian ethnic groups’ immigrants to the US are so heavily skewed toward highly educated people, so it is not surprising that some Asian American ethnic groups do not have educationally overachieving kids overall. Also, the state of Hawaii, which has a very high Asian American population, does not have a reputation for elite educational achievement in high school or college, and the University of Hawaii is generally not seen as an elite among public universities. But the explanation is that Asian immigration to Hawaii historically has not been heavily skewed toward high educational attainment people.
Note that the reverse is the case for immigrants from Mexico, who have relatively low educational attainment compared to non-immigrant Americans or Mexicans generally. African Americans have had educational attainment lowered by generations of educational suppression (e.g. inferior de jure segregated schools that some alive today attended).
It does. But I suppose you are talking about schools that use the standard pedagogic methods which are a vast majority of schools.
But legally none of this matters. The law is the law and it should be just as rigorously enforced at colleges as the work place. Colleges have completely lost sight of their primary mission and have mostly become fund raising and construction companies. Go walk on the campus of any major university and you will find two things1) large parking fees 2) endless massive construction projects. I live near UCSD and it’s as hard to park there as SF and they are rebuilding everything yet they claim poverty. It’s a total scam and they need to be held accountable. The students now are an afterthought for the massively bloated administration.
I heard there was a decision on the lawsuit. Is that correct or was I misinformed?
Considering the obsession among some about Harvard and some other schools, that belief, whether true or not, continues beyond K-12.
Of course, by college time, parental decisions (particularly financial) still have considerable (commonly limiting) influence on where students may attend college, independent of the students’ own achievements.
@ucbalumnus
Don’t conflate the belief in the value of the education itself with a belief in its signal effects. For instance, I do not think the education received at HYP is better than that which could be obtained at any number of other universities, but I do think that others believe that. Thus, the credential has special value, not the education itself.
Bryan Caplan in his The Case against Education makes this general point. That is probably why we have seen such a rush for prestige; people implicitly understand the signal value of an elite school. Now, whether they are right or wrong, who knows? (The Dale and Krueger research would suggest that they are wrong.) But certainly the belief remains, and that is enough to drive the “obsession,” as you put it.
So much truth to this. In some ways the education I received in grad school at one of the HYPSMs was inferior to the State U honors program I attended for undergrad. But the career opportunities from grad school were much better.
Yes, perception is reality, isn’t it?? I agree with all of the comments about the prestige factor, and that the education received isn’t necessarily any better at the elite than many other schools.
I have said before that I think a lot of this is driven by the parents. I think if we stop obsessing, the kids will.
I have said this before but it’s relevant to repeat. My daughter turned down Dartmouth because she wanted to be in a city (she’s at Georgetown) and didn’t like the quarter system. She gets a lot of bewildered looks when she mentions this to people…so many of them think she was crazy to do so. When she made the decision, we honestly thought they were on par and didn’t expect to get this reaction (we still think they are on par!). In fact, when we looked at some indicators like average salary after 6 years, Georgetown was way ahead.
You would think with all of the other great schools out there that the Ivy prestige would start to melt away a little…but it hasn’t. But as far as quality of education is concerned, there are so many great options out there that are NOT ivies.