That contains the following about 10th graders and what degree they earned within the next 10 years.
@Leigh22 I think many people are keenly aware of the benefits of a good school system. It’s why the apartment buildings in our school district are crammed full of families who can’t afford to buy a home there but want to send their kids to the public schools. If the schools are using the adversity score to figure out who is low SES why not just ask it as part of the common app, although it seems to me those same schools which claim to be need blind still figured it out before this score was introduced.
Princeton has indicated before that it used certain information from its financial aid office to increase the admission of PELL-eligible applicants, even though it’s technically a need-blind school. The availability of the Adversity Score will make the awkward process (of passing information from financial aid office to admission office) unnecessary and will be applicable to more applicants (than just PELL-eligible students).
Will subject tests alone have adversity score if you are not taking the SAT?
Yup, @ucbalumnus. Very compelling statistics in that article showing the relationship between academic success and SES. Glad someone read it 
Thanks.
The top Ivys have always been expensive for full pay, but one wonders how much of that type of policy contributes to Princeton’s '19-'20 Cost of Attendance being $73,740. Yikes!!
That’s 99% of what we do here on CC!
One of the main reasons college has become so expensive and out of reach of lower income and even middle income people, is the huge demand for it. The greater the demand, the higher the price. This is a law of economics. Throw in massive student aid, and the problem is just made worse. So reducing the numbers admitted to colleges would make it far more affordable for the ones who are truly qualified to be there.
Low SES is not just something that a community has completely thrust upon it. Communities are to a large extent responsible for their SES. Giving people from low SES communities “adversity points” has the potential to penalize people of middle class or lower middle class SES who nonetheless live in stable communities. Remember, SES is not just about economics. And this adversity score is NOT just about economic background.
The problem needs to be addressed at the root. Communities with negative aspects need to work on improving their SES and we can help them, but at some level, they have to make the cultural changes necessary to improve. Government too often gets in the way of that process with poor incentives, causing the root problem to never go away.
When I wrote that un pc word, I did it to emphasize my point. Using “mentally challenged” somehow is more ambiguous. I wanted to emphasize that the Bell Curve is real and the reality is that many in college do not have the intelligence to be there and benefit. They would be better helped learning a trade. Now students like Cedric can go to junior college for very little money, prove themselves, and then go to more elite schools once they have proven themselves. But Cedric is the exception to the rule.
Egalitarianism is a feel good ideology, but it is rooted in a fairy tale. Equity will NEVER be realized. We need to face that fact and figure out the best way to manage that reality.
I figured that identifying Pell eligible apps would be an important goal for the colleges (for US News rankings). To be blunt, it seems ridiculously inaccurate and inefficient to use the adversity score to identify Pell eligible applicants rather than the actual, accurate info in the financial aid documents that the colleges already possess, albeit behind the financial aid wall. To the extent that the adversity score is accurate, does using the adversity score for such purpose render “need-blind” a farce?
I do wonder if the adversity score reflects percentage of population in an area that is addicted to opiates, or the percentage that has lost a manufacturing job, or have lost a parent in a war. If not, why not?
Isn’t it interesting that the elites NEVER suffer from these “fixes” but the middle class most certainly will?
How is it fair to give a student from a lower income area a boost to their score, but not a lower income student from another lower income area, with say, less crime? Not every lower income group has a high crime rate. They should not be penalized.
How do you propose that they do that starting from fewer resources, opportunities, and power, especially when higher SES communities do their best to hoard opportunities using their greater resources, opportunities, and power? Indeed, a common theme on these forums is resentment from higher SES posters against anything that colleges (or anyone else) do for students from lower SES backgrounds (whether financial aid, or any type of admission consideration).
Trades and other non-bachelor’s-degree professions require intellectual skill and post-secondary education, despite your apparent disdain for them. Would you want low intelligence people to become the police officers, firefighters, and paramedics in your community, or do the electrical, plumbing, and HVAC work in your house, or fix your car?
This adversity score will not be “fair”, it will try to cut with an axe what needs to be cut with a scalpel. Still its better than saying that its an equal playing field because it is not.
@vpa2019 BTW it was a Harvard AO that told me they had profiles on all the high schools that they had applicants from (which is about every one in the U.S and a lot outside) FWIW.
Someone else said it earlier…“this is the CB’s way of staying relevant.” When you are a test administering company you have no reason entering this issue. They are trying to get more relevant considering their tests are being leaked, taken by adults in a bribe scheme, recirculated from foreign countries, and mastered by test prep companies. The whole company needs to get back to its core and figure out a way to stop the cheating and don’t worry about this issue. Like others said, the demographics can be obtained on the common app and school profiles.
ucbalumnus wrote: “Trades and other non-bachelor’s-degree professions require intellectual skill and post-secondary education, despite your apparent disdain for them. Would you want low intelligence people to become the police officers, firefighters, and paramedics in your community, or do the electrical, plumbing, and HVAC work in your house, or fix your car?”
On the contrary, I don’t have disdain for them. I would have thought YOU and others here have disdain for them. I value them and think many people in college belong there, for that is where they will learn to earn a good income, without accumulating so much debt. We need plumbers far more than we need more political science grads working at Starbucks.
For the record, I am from a lower middle class family, and my parents did not go to college. My mom did not even graduate from high school.
And if you noticed in my last post, I am not fond of much of our elite. Again, their “fixes” always penalize the middle class, not them.
How exactly do lower income Whites and Asians manage to do better than upper income Blacks on the SAT? Does that not destroy this theory of privilege that we hear so much about?
I have such mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, yes, the objective is noble. But there are so many individualized factors it doesn’t/can’t account for. Does this student have learning disabilities? Are there health problems? Abuse in the home? Substance abuse in the home? Mental health issues? Does the student have to care for his or her younger siblings, a parent, or a grandparent? Knowing what a person’s background is is only part of the picture, and it may not even be accurate.
The College Board has enough of a grip on the industry. We don’t need any more “standardization” of college applicants.
Looks like I’ll be taking the ACT instead.
That’s the post of the day @squ1rrel!
You took the words out of my mouth. ACT! ACT ACT! at least until they come up with their own nonsense.
All I can say is that one down and one more to go. This summer, it will be my last go around in this cruel, ridiculous process. When I hear my sons frustration about how half of his class seems to have accommodations for these test as well as AP exams. Many of these kids simply (I am careful here by noting some are legit) take advantage of the process to the fullest. Some of these kids are scoring 34-36s in the ACT and have straight A’s, etc. Ridiculous.
I really predict that one of these days the bubble will burst. Money dictates the process and sooner or later, the bubble will burst. The majority of our society can not afford College. No school is worth the money that they are charging. NONE. OK maybe (A REAL MAYBE) and Ivy might make a difference based on name alone and the connections which can be worth the price of admissions. Can you imagine? .“Hi I am Jonathan. Hi I am Malia Obama” Real priceless for sure. But then again you either have to win the lottery, know somebody, or buy yourself a ticket to get in. But seriously, anything outside of a top 20, I do not think it would be worth it. .The first two years of school are pretty much prerequisites wherever you go.
I am sorry if I am venting here, but I just remember the good old Barrons book and 2 to 3 applications and that was it. None of the stupidity and cost we are seeing today. The majority of my friends found a way to make it work and we were all happy wherever we all ended up. In some cases, we never even visited the schools. Now you have all these expensive college road trips. Endless prep cost. AP this and AP that… Both of my kids are doing much much more than I ever did at this age. The funny thing (or the sad thing depending on our own personal view), they will end up at the most logical and cost-effective option. One is thriving at OSU and the other ???. Just glad, it will be over. I just feel for the next group of kids.