@makemesmart - “but if Harvard did as you have said, then they would be declaring their own “guilt” of discriminating against a large group of Asian applicants, which their witnesses and lawyers are working hard to prove otherwise now.”
That didn’t happen after the DOE inquiry in 1990, which saw the jump in Asian-American student enrollment, and that’s not going to happen now.
While college attendance generally skews higher SES family background than the general population, elite private college attendance is SES-skewed upward to a far greater level than college attendance overall.
You will probably get general public agreement on the concept of better K-12 for all (while most of those who disagree will not publicly go against it head-on), but actual actions relating to the subject, whether personal (e.g. white flight and rich flight) or political (school reorganization leading to resegregation and defunding of schools with high poor or minority enrollments, or opposition to funding equalization) suggest that a lot of resistance against the actual implementation of such a thing needs to be overcome.
My brilliant 15 AP (almost all 5’s), top .5% SAT, straight A white girl was rejected by Harvard.
She ended up at Vanderbilt and LOVED her experience…probably, to be honest, more than she would have loved Harvard.
Just a mom’s opinion.
You quoted someone else’s. But regarding, “SES diversity at Harvard mismatches that of the US to a far greater extent than racial/ethnic diversity does, but gets far less attention.”
True, but I’m quite impressed with the direction not only H but its peers are heading in trying to diversify the student body from all SES backgrounds. Today, H and its peers have about 20% of their student body from poor backgrounds, and that percentage is only going to become larger. Just a couple decades ago, that was unheard of. We couldn’t have afforded enrolling my son at Princeton a decade ago.
https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=harvard&s=all&id=166027#finaid indicates that 57% of Harvard undergraduates get no FA grants or scholarships, while only 11% have Pell grants (though for new students, it is 44% and 15% respectively).
Since no FA grants of scholarships at Harvard means family income in the $2xx,xxx range based on its net price calculator, while Pell grant approximates the lower half of the family income distribution, that shows the extent of the upward SES skew, despite recent changes in FA policy. (Overall, college attendance does skew upward in SES, but not to the extent that it does at Harvard; about a third of undergraduates in the US get Pell grants.)
No denying the upper SES skew. My point is that, for those admitted, H and its peers are affordable for all SES backgrounds. It’d be interesting to find out if there’s been any secretive quota set based on SES or SES “balancing.”
No actual quota is needed. Legacy preferences accomplish that nicely.
There is probably an unstated target SES distribution in order to (a) meet the FA budget, and (b) maintain a high SES environment that is probably desired by the elitist employers that recruit there (so that the students being recruited are either from high SES backgrounds, or those few from middle and lower SES backgrounds have been socialized in a high SES environment for four years).
However, reaching such a target SES distribution need not require being need-aware, since adjusting various other knobs in admission criteria and process that correlate to SES can be done. How much legacy preference to use is one of the most obvious ones, but other admission policies regarding early action, test scores, recommendations, CSS Profile, CSS Noncustodial Profile, the number of different admission items to require, etc. can be adjusted in ways that affect the SES distribution.
Note that, even if a college goes completely race/ethnicity-blind in admissions, such admission knobs and others (e.g. geographic region) can also (either intentionally or unintentionally) affect the race/ethnicity composition of the admitted class.
If you define “poor” as having less than the median US household income of $60-$65k. In the lawsuit, Harvard uses a similar definition by applying their their “disadvantaged” label for families with “very modest economic means” to families with an estimated income below approximately this threshold. If you look at families who are truly poor, such as in the bottom quintile of median income, such families are grossly under-represented at almost all highly selective private colleges. For example, the percentages in the bottom quintile household income, as reported in the NYT linked study are below.
Harvard – 4.5% in bottom quintile (67% in top quintile)
Yale – 2.1% in bottom quintile (63% in top quintile)
WUSTL – <1% in bottom quintile (84% in top quintile)
2/3 of the class is comprehensive. I agree that it isn’t perfect but it is the best source available.
Again, 1990 data cannot be used in 2018. There have been multiple, major revisions to the SAT. The admissions rates have plummeted since then. There were ~12,000 applicants in 1990. There are ~42,000 applicants today.
SAT scores were very close in your source article:
Integration isn’t the same as equalizing education. The only thing integration does is change the skin color of the student body. The levers to change would be school funding, curriculum, school support and teachers (all of which can be changed without changing the student body).
And ‘good’ education is not the same for every student: gifted schools may be a good fit for gifted students but a bad fit for poor, inner city youths while the opposite may be true for inner city schools with teachers and counselors who routinely deal with poor under-performers (and have the experience to effectively handle and help them).
…or the similar advantage enjoyed by male applicants to Vassar or Brown or a few dozen other elite colleges and universities. I suspect that’s because most people are on-board with the idea that a gender ratio not to far off 50/50 benefits all students, including those who have a harder time getting in as a result. The colleges know it does as well, from a business standpoint - apps drop when ratios skew far off 60/40.
This could be made into a civil rights issue as well, I suppose. But as overall women suffer form it more than men do (schools with a “tech” emphasis being the exception to the rule), I rather doubt it will.
My understanding also, and it would indeed be interesting.
The 1990 case docs included an admissions file with:
Except that (re)segregation makes it easier for the school board to defund and otherwise reduce quality at schools that mainly serve whom they consider undeserving people.
Don’t Title 1 schools get extra funding? The sensible solution would still be to just increase funding at the state or federal level even if that is the case.
In the NYC school system with some of the most segregated schools:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/05/segregation-now/359813/ describes how the resegregation of schools in Tuscaloosa resulted in greatly inferior academic opportunity for those in the most segregated schools.
I tried reading this. Too much narrative too few numbers. I couldn’t find anything substantial after skimming it for quite a bit of time.
Note that “those in the most segregated schools” = those in black majority schools
Children in segregated white or Asian schools don’t suffer from segregation. In fact, average standardized test scores / academic ability of Asian majority schools (notably in California) increase as they become more segregated.
I now know why my non athletic, non musical, non legacy and non academic super star Asian American kid was accepted via Stanford REA: He must have received a very high score on the personality mark unlike most Asian American applicants. Lol. smh
Definitely, the personality rating depends on the person doing the review because all the boring kids I met at Stanford receptions were white athlete kids. Lol
For black and white segregation, that result is the intention from the point of view of those promoting the segregation – by segregating black and white students, the local school system can more easily neglect black students while focusing its resources on white students.
Asian majority schools vary in performance by parental SES and education level, as expected.
Recent Asian immigration has been heavy with graduate students and skilled workers, resulting in a high educational attainment bias, which is strongly associated with their kids’ educational attainment (similar can be observed with immigrants from Europe and Africa, but they tend to go unnoticed because they are few relative to the number of other white and black people in the US). So it is not surprising that some places with a large influx of highly educated Asian immigrant parents see good school performance from their kids.
…who were, because they might have been Hooked athletes, probably admitted in the Early Round under different criteria than how non-hooked students are evaluated in the Regular Round (on many more, and on much more competitive factors, including subjective assessments such as “personality” – which covers a wide range, by the way).
what I meant to say here
was
how non-hooked students are evaluated in both rounds.
Harvard has a “personal” rating category (not personality). Stanford does not. Stanford does rate applicants in categories like Intellectual Vitality and Character/Self Presentation. . There are guidelines about what these categories mean and how to rate applicants. However, it’s still a subjective process that will vary depending on who is doing the review.