Ok, so you are explicitly saying it has nothing to do with the quality of the education, because that quality is readily available.
Instead you admit that it is a prestige effect based upon the Harvard College name. But you don’t realize that this prestige effect is due to past accomplishments by Harvard alumni, not the Harvard college label.
People who say it’s a lottery don’t understand the numbers. At the top end there are certain awards (e.g. RSI, TASP, MOP) where the award recipient typically gets multiple HYPSM admittances, and slightly lower level awards like USAMO that by itself typically leads to admission at one of the HYPSMs or CalTech. The overall admission pattern for my son and his math buddies was highly predictable, even if admission to any particular college was not.
On the humanities side, getting a history paper published in the Concord Review has a similar effect.
Once you get past the hooked students, the award winners and the David Hoggs, there are more tossup cases. But that’s true of any ranking system, whether it’s job interview candidates or the NBA draft. There are very few major surprises at the top end, but more at the bottom.
Let’s now hypothetically expand Harvard to triple its size. You don’t have many more of the top award winners to choose from, as that’s a limited pool that’s largely spoken for. There is only one David Hogg. Your new pool has all the tossup people Harvard refused to take earlier. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t great, or that some won’t be successful, but it’s not the same as the original accepted pool.
There is a vast swath of very mart and capable students beyond your son and his math buddies. Try to step outside your bubble, where everyone knows what the Concord Review is.
I think it may be elitist to say that the only path forward for academically inclined students is through a handful of schools. I also think it is unrealistic to believe that a handful of colleges should (or can) expand their class size by multiples without changing them for the worse.
It’s nice that they at least tried to control for group of major, but this type of ROI analysis is still near useless because it doesn’t control for any student qualities. That is, it assumes that the driving force in salary is purely the college name rather than being an outstanding student and being interested in fields of study associated with high earnings. This is particularly true when looking at students who graduated decades earlier, rather than early career earnings.
Another key issue is sample bias. The sample is composed of the small subgroup of humanities majors who choose to self report their salary on Payscale without external verification of accuracy. It’s a safe bet that Harvard (or other college) grads who are satisfied with their career and particularly focused on a high salary are more likely to self-report their salary on Payscale than the overall population.
If you look at reports with less sample bias, the results look quite different. For example, the CollegeScorecard sample which is based on tax reported early career earnings lists the following for Harvard. All students who are in the federal database (usually relates to FA) are included. The humanities majors in this sample don’t appear to be have especially high early career salaries, with only a bachelor’s, although I realize that career trajectory changes over time. The CollegeScorecard sample also shows huge variation in earnings by major. It suggests the college major is a key driving force for earnings, even among Harvard students. It’s not just a matter of anyone being able to write their ticket for high earnings, so long as they have the Harvard brand name.
Harvard Grad Early Career Earnings
CS majors (sample = 238) – Median Earnings = $129k
Economics majors (sample = 345) – Median Earnings = $79k
History majors (sample = 163) – Median Earnings = $50k
English majors (sample = 88) – Median Earnings = $38k
As @Rivet2000 mentioned, the idea that elite schools are the only way for someone to get ahead is exaggerated. Many students have done well at non-Ivy League schools and many have done badly at Ivy League schools. It just depends on the person. Personally, I do believe that it can be a lottery since, when you compare students who are almost identical for those few spots, it really comes down to chance(and the officer’s opinion). I want to think that elite schools may begin to accept more students in the future. But I know this is a huge stretch to actually consider
I greatly appreciate that you understand and care about control groups and bias! This is no slam on the lay public, but very few can distinguish correlation from causation, including the media.
My only complaint about CollegeScorecard is that it only assesses Pell Grant recipients. I’m also not clear on how they get salary data. They refer to “completors.” Does that mean those who reported salary data? If so, that’s problematic for the same reasons PayScale data is.
This is largely a function though of going to a school that prioritizes said competitions. My son for example went to a prep school in a smallish community. They did the local and state math competitions and did well, but never did anything beyond that. They didn’t know about them and neither did the school. As an engineer interested in Fluid Mechanics, he went through pretty high practical maths (numerical methods and tensor calculus) at a well respected university, never struggled, and never got a grade other than A (in a math department that averages 20% transcript Fs). I have no doubt that he would have fared well in upper level maths competitions. He just never had the opportunity.
Earnings are based on federally reported tax earnings. They are not self-reported. “Completors” means completed the degree, as opposed to students who started the degree, but did not graduate. Students in the federal database are included, which includes Pell Grant recipients, as well as other federal grants, federal loans, and a few other categories. 21% of Harvard CS majors fell in to these groups and were included in the sample, and 26% of Harvard English majors fell in to the groups and were included.
Much of the Stanford campus land is in unincorporated Santa Clara County (some of it, like the hospital, is in Palo Alto), although Palo Alto and other nearby cities certainly are interested in any Stanford development plans.
Stanford also owns land in Redwood City and Menlo Park, and has built and is currently building additional commercial space as well as residential units.
Stanford also opened a brand new hospital in 2019. SLAC has had a new building built not too long ago too. And there’s plenty of other construction taking place right now on campus. Is it specifically for undergraduates? Dunno.
“Rice plans to grow 800 students in 4 years. That’s a large increase.
Will it increase access or favor the wealthy and well off?”
Cost will not be a reason why admitted students from poor and middle class families don’t attend. “Rice Investment” funds free tuition for students with family incomes below $130,000 and half tuition fir students with family incomes up to $200,000.
Yale implemented a similar enrollment increase between 2017-2020 when enrollment grew from 5400 to 6250. At the same time, they expanded their First-Year Scholars program by 20%, designed to provide support in a variety of ways to first generation and low income students.
What is an elite college? Is it just the Ivies + MIT, Stanford, Chicago, Duke? Newsweek’s designation of the “new Ivies” in their article 15 years ago made the point that elite is now a larger group of schools than it once was.
If selectivity defines elite status in the 21st century, then it has just gotten insane. 30 years ago, Harvard accepted 15% of the pool of 14,000 applicants. Compare that to this year’s 3% admissions rate from a pool of 57,000 applicants.
Two years ago there were 50 colleges which admitted 15% or fewer if their applicants. And the number has only grown since then.
So is “elite” a moving target? Or are there simply more and more elite colleges. All depends on you POV.
