One reason that I am more for SES factors being used more than any race based method is that standardized test scores correlate directly to the income of the students, no matter the race. Once you look at the fact that those of African descent have the lowest household incomes by a significant margin (also ties into some of the other factors like less school extracurricular activities because they are working a lot of hours like I did to pay household bills as a teenager) and it becomes clear. All students are not starting on the same playing field and I think colleges should have a right to take that into account if they would like, but they need to remove race from that equation. I have seen 1st hand that standardized tests are “hack-able”, because good schools, some prep work, and resources can make an average test taker score well and a good test taker become great. Access to those resources are now becoming easier to obtain for all and so I expect URM numbers to improve over time, but those with an economic advantage will always have an advantage (even with colleges using SES as a factor).
I think you will find near universal support for allowing a low SES bump. This will of course help a significant percentage of Black applicants, but will also help poor whites, often from poor rural areas, and Asians throughout the country that qualify for free or reduced lunch programs.
Probably almost universal among those who will directly give their opinion on the subject. But actual support may not be so universal, as evidenced by the frequent posts from the self-described “donut hole” upper middle class resenting that they get less or no college financial aid while poor people get more financial aid (though in reality, still often quite insufficient).
@hebegebe I have to agree with @ucbalumnus that I don’t think it is as universal as it seems. I think it is preferred by some in comparison to race based admissions criteria, but most are more concerned with how their own families are affected on all sides of elite admissions decisions. The one place in our society where being poor may be an advantage (College admissions/costs for poor students at full need schools) will still be assailed by some of every race if they are not a part of that advantage. But I do believe it is less contentious than racial advantages.
Note that the elite colleges that are the focus of most of this discussion still appear to want a predominantly high SES cohort of undergraduate students (35-60% no-FA, only 10-20% Pell grant). There are some likely reasons:
A. Keeps the financial aid budget in check.
B. Brings in students from families more likely to have money to donate.
C. Employers that preferentially recruit at those schools (management consulting, Wall Street) prefer those with high SES socialization. Obviously, those who grew up in high SES environments have that. If the college is predominantly high SES, that means that the few low and middle SES students there become socialized with the majority high SES students and thus become more acceptable / desirable to those employers, thus keeping the college desirable to recruit at by those employers.
Without overtly favoring high SES or being need-aware for individual applicants, colleges can tip their admission classes toward higher SES by doing things like:
- Favoring legacies.
- Recruiting of athletes in high SES sports (although elite / recruitable level performance in any sport is commonly helped by parental resources).
- Requiring more application items that high SES high schools are likely to mention to students, but low SES high schools may not. For example, SAT subject tests, CSS Profile, recommendations.
- Using recommendations, which will favor those at high schools where counselors and teachers have experience writing good recommendations. This is more common at high SES high schools.
- Using greater emphasis on test scores.
- Using CSS Noncustodial Profile, which will screen out a large percentage of financially needy students who have uncooperative divorced parents.
- Using Early Decision.
Of course, they also give some consideration to 1GLI applicants who overcame barriers and limitations and/or use Questbridge, so that their Pell grant student percentage is a minimally acceptable / marketable 10-20% instead of something embarrassingly lower like 0-5%.
No matter the outcome of the Harvard lawsuit, everyone wins from the higher transparency. Here’s some recent news.
Admission rates by race (don’t know exact method but they probably didn’t normalize by applicant quality, so beware of potential selection bias):
Pretty much expected, Black with a huge lead and Asians at the bottom.
Score cutoffs for ratings:
Score cutoffs for interest letters:
It’s not a smoking gun but it’s indicative of their attitude towards the applicant pool. It’s very hard to actually get something like this straight up or in writing. It’s weird that they specifically don’t give a break to Asians in the rural states.
We all know African Americans are highest in the URM oppression ladder. Here it is straight up:
Actually, African Americans do poorly on standardized testing even after accounting for SES:
For SES affirmative action to work, the applicants have to be low SES and meet or get close to the minimum academic bar at the top universities. Because AA do worse academically after accounting for SES, most AA that meet or get close to the academic bar are NOT low SES. Most low SES AA are not anywhere near the academic bar. Many of them are so far away from qualifying that even with a SES boost, they wouldn’t make it.
Low SES Hispanic do score well enough to benefit from the boost though. I remember reading somewhere that low SES boost would increase the Hispanic % by quite a bit.
I’m not sure how low SES boost would affect total Asian representation. Asian income is bimodal. Poor Asians tend to do better than their poor counterparts of other races. Many of them can meet or get near the minimum academic bar.
I saw that same article on the interest letters and it is a damning piece of information. That is an obviously large range difference in the interest letters pool and if those African American kids with those scores were actually accepted, they would have a hard time getting through Harvard. The students who actually matriculate at Harvard showed a different story however and had a much lower gap (I believe the CC poster showed it as 82 points between SAT scores in the Harvard documentation for the lawsuit). Those 200+ point differences for the interest letters are significant, but I don’t know if the smaller score difference of those who matriculate is significant enough. I don’t think the acceptance rates by race was a damning piece of information alone as there is such a smaller amount African American applicants in comparison to other races and African Americans accept admission to Harvard in the lowest numbers of all of the races. I do believe that going after Harvard 1st was a mistake, because it would have been even easier to prove the racial differences in admissions farther down the elite school “flagpole”, as the African American pool of elite standardized test takers is a shallow one in comparison to other races. It would be nice to see numbers on low SES Asians Americans because I do believe that they are getting more opportunities and not being penalized as much as higher SES Asians American are.
African Americans are doing worse on standardized testing than other races when accounting for SES. Those numbers have not changed since they started looking at that data. But I believe there are enough outliers and such a large population of low SES African American students that African American students will be represented. The UC’s, and the elite state schools are in there own little category to me when it comes to representation by African Americans (financial aid only significant for in-state students and African American students from California with the scores to get into the top UC’s can go to top HBCUs for free and top 10 universities for the cost of UCs or less if they make less than $180,000). Not one of the top 5 African Americans in my daughters class chose one of our elite state flagships (UGA or GT) and one didn’t even apply in-state, as they knew the money was out there from the elites (or HBCUs in my daughter’s case) and that they would get in somewhere, and it would be cheaper than our state flagships even with the state paying full tuition (Thanks lottery funds)
One place that we agree on is the boost that African American students from families with higher SES get in elite admissions who hit certain test scores. Over the years I have met or know upwards of 20 African Americans who of have reached scores above 1400 SAT/31 ACT (most of their families are in the top 25% of American household incomes) and all of those students pretty much got into mostly all schools they applied to besides a few elite school rejections (but a good number also did not apply to any top 25 schools like my daughter). But those African American students with really high scores 1480+ SAT/33+ ACT got in everywhere including every elite school they applied to. That super high admissions rate probably has not been the case with any other race. What is tough about that tidbit is no matter how much an African American student accomplishes, it ends up coming back to they got in because of race and that is so sad to me (I know an African American student who had a perfect GPA, great AP scores, 1590 SAT, NMF (Even had a NMSF qualifying score as 10th grader even though it didn’t count), and a high level national recognition that is well known who ended up attending a top 3 school and they got in because they were black was said to this person by several “friends”). I sometimes wonder what is worse, although being discriminated against always wins that debate: Race (Not being an URM) being a possible factor in getting rejected into an elite college or being giving a racial preference that may or may not be the deciding factor in getting admitted to an elite school and all accomplishments are discounted (African Americans in elite college admissions).
My particular area of America (North metro Atlanta) must be one of the top standardized test scoring areas for African Americans in the US so my perspective on all of this is skewed because I see so many African American high standardized test scores and it is the number 1 area of contention when it comes to students of color not belonging at elite institutions.
In contrast, non-URM legacies get to have it both ways at elite colleges: they get a significant unearned admission preference (on top of their already existing advantages growing up in families with elite college graduate parents) but such preference is not outwardly visible to others, so others do not initially assume that they were somehow less worthy due to having such a preference.
https://features.thecrimson.com/2018/freshman-survey/makeup/ indicates that 36.8% of 2018 Harvard frosh had some kind of legacy connection (including parent, sibling, grandparent, aunt/uncle, and other family connection). Note that 46.4% of those with Harvard alumni parents (who are 14.5% of all frosh) came from family income over $500,000, and another 22.4% came from family income of $250,000 to $500,000, indicating these legacies are even more advantaged than Harvard students overall. Of those with Harvard alumni parents, 51.8% attended private (not parochial) high schools.
^Like Chief Justice John Robert’s daughter.
If there is no affirmative action for race, it means you’d be considered under the same terms as all other students. No bump or special consideration. Many minority students meet those standards now so eliminating AA would not change anything for them. The California public schools do not consider race, and there are certainly plenty of Latino and Asian students in the UC and CSU systems.
The California state publics (UC’s, CSU’s) don’t practice affirmative action.
If you are a sharp kid, and work your butt off, you’ll get into your schools.
My kids aren’t first generation, but they kicked butt to get into their top schools.
(BTW: I’m a former low income, first gen, latina)
Would being low income or first gen still give me any bumps or considerations though? Or would they get rid of any advantages altogether? Specifically for schools like HYPS
Affirmative action applies to race. The other factors may or may not give you an advantage depending on the schools.
I believe that top colleges will continue to seek diversity. But candidates need to be top notch. That’s more than stats and a few hs clubs/titles. Try to learn what that is.
Seeing as though it’s not looking too good for affirmative action right now due to the Harvard lawsuit, I’ve began to ask myself what affirmative action being removed would mean for me as a low income, first gen Latino from a very poor area if I want to get the chance to get into a top university such as the Ivy League. Would this ruin our chances even more of being admitted against any much more qualified Asian or White applicants under the right circumstances?
I understand why Harvard severely increased their URM outreach efforts now, even reaching out to URMs with 1100 combined SAT scores. Realistically, these recruited URMs with very low scores don’t have a chance at admission.
Harvard uses these low scoring URM to lower the URM acceptance rate. Since they use a quota, they will accept the same amount of URM no matter the size of the URM applicant pool. If the size of the URM applicant pool is too low, the URM acceptance rate will be too high. The only way to decrease the acceptance rate is to increase the URM applicant pool.
Another gift from the lawsuit: a chart of acceptance rate by race by year. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/10/19/acceptance-rates-by-race/
The URM acceptance rate dropped precipitously because of the outreach efforts.
Arcidiacono’s analysis (the statistician working for SFFA) confirms my suspicions. From Arcidiacono’s report, ~50% of African Americans and ~35% of Hispanic applicants score lower than a 3 on the Academic index. Less than 10% of white and less than 10% Asian applicants score lower than this. Applicants that score lower than a 3 on the Academic index have almost no chance of gaining admission.
On the decile scale, 75% of African Americans and 53% of Hispanic applicants are in the bottom 3 buckets for Academic Index.
In other words, a high percentage of URM applicants have no chance at gaining admission.
Harvard reaches out to and uses a large percentage of URM applicants as numbers to decrease the URM acceptance rate.
@curethevoid17 I would think being low income and first gen would still help. And I agree that colleges are going to still want diversity on campus. As for AA, I read an article last night that says that AA really has nothing to do with this Harvard case, but I’m not really sure I understand that. As for the future of AA, I’m not so sure it’s going to go away. Let’s see what happens. Maybe it will be altered/watered down, but maybe it won’t go away. I do think the lower SES factor will hopefully continue to help, as long as there is a way for the colleges to really determine who is from lower SES communities and truly disadvantaged.
With all due respect, I also am very impressed with kids (sometimes more so) who grew up in rich environments who have their heads straight, don’t take things for granted and are hard workers. From my experience (including myself), there are certain benefits in growing up in financially struggling families that propel you to want to succeed. I have not even once wished in my lifetime to want to trade my own Mom for a family which was a lot richer.
I want to say this because people who think growing up in rich families is a bed of roses but there are thorns also beneath the wealthy exteriors.
Interesting stuff about the Harvard case -
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/10/21/harvard-admissions-affirmative-action-221669
Some bits -