The 8 Ivy League schools are hardly the only colleges that may be affordable for those from low income families. Indeed, they may be unaffordable for a large percentage of such students (those with uncooperative divorced parents), who must look elsewhere to find affordability.
I never said the Ivy league schools were the only affordable/meet full need schools.
ETA: IME low income families (both parents if divorced) have no problem getting NCP waivers approved if the NCP is uncooperative.
That’s interesting and counter to the usual statements on these forums that mere uncooperativeness is not sufficient to get a waiver. Indeed, the waiver form itself says that uncooperativeness in terms of filling in the CSS Noncustodial Profile will not result in consideration for a waiver: https://cssprofile.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/css-profile-waiver-request-non-custodial-parent.pdf
Now, if there were situations like abuse, complete non-contact, court orders against the noncustodial parent, etc., those are listed as potential waiver situations.
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CC can be an echo chamber.
Suffice it to say that I have never not had a student’s NCP waiver approved in cases where both parents are low-income…there is little point in trying to force a low-income NCP to file CSS Profile just to arrive at the same FA package. Again, I’m talking low-income families.
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In this case, how does the student and custodial parent convince the college in question that the uncooperative (in sharing financials) noncustodial parent is (also) low income? The waiver form itself says that mere uncooperativeness of the noncustodial parent will not be considered as a reason for the waiver.
Often a third party attestation, like a school counselor, or a counselor/staffer at a college access CBO/foundation is enough…which ties in nicely with this thread.
Should Harvard and/or UNC lose their case, the many college access organizations across the country may become more important. Most of these orgs have income maximums to gain acceptance. Some are focused on URMs, some are high academic only…but the common thread is often low income.
Some colleges already have relationships with some of these orgs (such as Questbridge, Posse, Chicago Scholars, ScholarMatch, College Point, etc) and should considering race in college admissions be banned, I expect we may see these organizations grow and become more important pipelines for colleges.
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You may want to start a thread in the financial aid section about how the hard-no / automatic-denial for noncustodial parent non-cooperation that is suggested in https://cssprofile.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/css-profile-waiver-request-non-custodial-parent.pdf is not so hard or automatic, and under what circumstances a student may be able to convince a college to grant a waiver in this case.
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Interesting opinion piece in the NYT about having an honest conversation about racial preferences in admissions. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/27/opinion/affirmative-action-harvard.html
Specifically, it was revealed in the previous lawsuit alleging racial discrimination that when Harvard recruited students from certain areas of the country, it most specifically DID apply racial preferences, in a very concrete way that could be easily quantified.
“In the past, Harvard recruited students from sparse country after they took the Preliminary SAT exams. To receive an invitation to apply to Harvard — yes, some students receive invitations to apply to Harvard — a Black student in sparse country needed to score above 1100 (69th%) on the exams, a white student needed 1310 (92nd%), an Asian female student needed 1350(95th%) and an Asian male student needed 1380 (96th%).”
Those are hard data points that cannot be explained away as being insignificant. The difference between 69th percentile and 96th percentile on the PSAT is ENORMOUS. The fudged "personality"scores also discriminated against Asians. "When you apply the normative definition of discrimination, in which race hinders an applicant’s acceptance into an institution, the case becomes much clearer. The evidence against Harvard on that front is, frankly, overwhelming. Asian applicants to Harvard routinely scored significantly lower than students of other races on their “personal scores,” a metric cobbled together from alumni interviews, essays and teacher recommendations. "
I don’t think that this Supreme Court is going to uphold racial preferences in college admissions for schools that are in any way the beneficiary of public money or tax exempt. Highly selective schools can decide to go test blind, in order to deliberately ignore one of the standardized metrics, but will they also decide to not look at submitted AP scores? Will they decide to ignore National Merit awards? Will they decide to ignore any hard data points, so as to admit a class that reflects the demographics of the US, rather than the highest academic achievers?
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Not to negate any of the rest of your post, but this is pure marketing like other colleges do. It in no way guarantees acceptance. Every student at our school who meets their bar gets the invite. It’s nothing personal at all. Like other colleges, they just want the recipient to think it’s personal to get more applicants to choose from. Then they reject most of them.
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Interesting example, and one that may demonstrate that this issue is more nuanced than simply presuming “racial preference” based solely on disparate impact.
National Merit awards are heavily influenced by geography, because the top one percent in each state makes semifinalist. In some states the bar is quite a bit higher than in other states. For example, for the class of 2021, a California student needed the following index scores of 221 to make NMSF in California, while students from Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, and West Virginia needed an index score of only 208.
But almost a third of Asian Americans live in California, making up about 17% of California’s population. In contrast relatively few Asian Americans live in Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, and West Virginia, by number or percentage.
And it is not just California. Other states with large Asian American populations (e.g. New York (1.9 million), Texas (1.6 million), New Jersey (958,000) and Washington (852,000)) consistently require a relatively high index score for National Merit status. 55% of Asian Americans live in just those five states, and while I haven’t looked up the numbers for every other state, it seems likely that there is a strong correlation between Asian population and required NMSF index score even past these first five.
So, because Asian Americans are concentrated in states where the scores are higher, Asian Americans are generally going to have to score much higher on the PSAT to attain NMSF status than groups/classifications who aren’t concentrated in these high scoring states.
Also, because they are concentrated in these high scoring states, Asian Americans will be likewise disadvantaged when it comes to schools which grant admissions and merit scholarships based on NMSF status.
But is this because of racial preferences? Or is it because geographic preferences have a disparate impact on certain areas which have large Asian American populations? Is it discriminatory against Asian Americans for colleges to grant admissions and merit scholarships based on NMSF status?
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You’re ignoring the elephant in the room, that African Americans who scored in the 69th percentile were being recruited, vs Asians who scored in the 96th percentile. Presumably, the same disparate threshold was applied in the admissions committee meeting.
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My view is that this is a race-neutral policy, meaning that it does not consider race. Like many race-neutral policies, it may have a disparate impact on different demographic groups, and to me that is ok.
Another example of what I consider a race neutral policy is the Texas approach of accepting everyone in the top 6% of the high school class to the University of Texas. This leads to Plano kids being held to much higher standards than say Lubbock kids, but I understand the merit of saying that kids can only be expected to achieve in the context of their local system. Personally I think a better approach would be to accept X% of the top kids in each school and Y% of the top kids in the state regardless of school (where X and Y are adjusted to fill the University of Texas), but that’s a separate matter.
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While I am an opponent of affirmative action, to me this particular action is just cruel to the African Americans. Almost none of these African Americans near the 69th percentile will get accepted whereas some of the Asians at the 96th percentile will get accepted.
Isn’t the objective to get more applicants who they can auto-reject in order to more nearly equalize the admission rates by race? Something that many colleges do at an overall level in order to look more selective, is (was?) apparently being done in a race-conscious way by Harvard.
No, the objective was to recruit applicants from “sparse country”. Harvard doesn’t need to drum up applicants - they’ve got too many already. They wanted a geographically balanced class. The fact that the threshold for interest on the part of Harvard in the student was so much lower for AA students than for Asians and Whites is a reflection of the standards applied to each group as the bar for admissions.
I don’t know that your presumption holds. Marketing for applicants is not the same thing as admitting those applicants.
As for the other “elephant in the room,” does a disparate impact in result (like with the NMSF award) necessarily mean that there is a wrongful racial preference? Or is it that sometimes there is a disparate impact without any sort of intended racial preference at all?
I agree that it is on its face a race neutral policy. But a lot of these facially race neutral policies (e.g. the TX and CA plans of auto admitting a certain percentage of each class, geographic diversity, rural recruitment, comparing students relative performance within high schools) tend to skew against Asian American students (among others in similar circumstances). I think the NMSF example illustrates this, even if not exactly on point. And even the prevalence of hooks like legacy might cut against Asian American students, as they may be more unlikely to have long familial relationships with the “elite” schools.
Further, it is really difficult to sort how other neutral factors might impact the aggregate numbers. For example, there is always a lot of discussion about Harvard’s “personal score” and as I understand it, counselor/teacher recommendations and comments play an important role in determining the personal score. But recommendations are localized, made within the context of an individual high school, and at high performing high schools it is challenging for any student to stand out, academically or personally. In other words, I wonder if the personal score isn’t a bit like the NMSF standard, with a higher standard depending on where you live and what school you attend.
This is (was?)essentially the University of California approach. There are two paths to automatic admission, one local and one state wide. Things get trickier when it comes to entry into particular Universities within the system.
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Yes exactly. Differential marketing for applicants on the grounds of race doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a different standard for admission if the desired demographic mix of admitted students differs from the mix of applicants. Here’s a (hypothetical) example.
Say there’s a uniform “standard” that everyone has to achieve to be admitted. If you want to show you’ve rejected say 95% of applicants of each race and there are too few top applicants of a particular race (so you’d want to admit most of those to get to your desired demographic mix for the class), you’d better search out more lower stat applicants to reject alongside those you are going to admit.
Of course in the context of this lawsuit, the idea that a college should have a particular desired demographic mix (ie implicit quotas based on race or sex) is likely to be regarded as the problem.
Always been slightly puzzled (and annoyed: I am in SoCal) by the way NMSF is distributed at the state level – with vast disparity in thresholds – and had never really considered the idea that the expressed desire for geographic diversity among incoming cohorts at prestigious schools might just be a way of stacking the deck against Asian students concentrated in a few urban areas and a handful of states. Put the way you have here, it’s clear as day. Thanks for the insight.
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Not to sidetrack the discussion but what I also find interesting is that Asian-Americans appear to be designated disproportionately as U.S. Presidential Scholars in states that I believe have low Asian populations. For example, all of the 2021 U.S. Presidential Scholars (academic track) from Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, and North Carolina are Asian-Americans, and a number of others (e.g., AL, DE, GA, IN, LA, NE, ND, TN, etc.) have at least 1 Asian-American among their 2-3 U.S. Presidential Scholar (academic track) ranks.
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