I’ve got a couple of grandkids playing club soccer, but regardless of cost, the better kids get scholarships if their families have a problem paying the fees. Money is not an object for kids who have the kind of talent which will eventually make them the target of college recruiters.
Several of the reports I’ve seen highlight soccer as one of the more SES diverse college sports. I don’t doubt that higher income kids can have an advantage, but it’s not as bad as most other other college sports. Examples include fencing, golf, swimming, water polo, skiing, ice hockey, tennis, squash, etc.
I rowed at Stanford. Rowing is interesting in it is one of the few sports that students at several “elite” colleges can pursue with no high school experience. I had no exposure to rowing during HS, yet still had the opportunity to row in college. Nevertheless, kids from wealthier backgrounds who have the opportunity to row during HS obviously have a strong advantage over walk-ons.
I obviously can’t speak for everywhere in America, but around the SF Bay Area there are plenty of clubs competing from lower SES areas as well as the wealthier clubs offer scholarships.
If you have talent, then the money aspect works itself out. And the wealthier clubs, as you would expect, poach players no matter the youth’s SES.
Isn’t the appeal of Ivies based solely on their selectivity? To expand capacity means the same as if Chanel or any other luxury brand lowered prices and produced more of their handbags – an antithesis to their business model and public image.
You don’t need to go to any Ivy to get an outstanding education, and that should be taught first and foremost before attempting to expand enrollments at expensive private schools.
2 Likes
The appeal of the Ivies goes beyond their selectivity. It has to do with their resources. My granddaughter spent the summer after freshman year studying in Italy, fully paid for by Harvard. And that’s not uncommon either at Harvard or most of the other Ivies. Then there’s the appeal of studying some place where world class scholars and other experts are teaching. Even if you don’t have one in class, it creates a different kind of buzz. Not saying that other schools don’t have world class scholars, but I don’t think in the numbers that Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc do in proportion to the size of the student body. The whole residential college system at Harvard and Yale, each with its own Dean and faculty member in residence is expensive to staff and maintain. And part of that package is 4 years of guaranteed housing. Then there’s the small class size thing. When my son’s friend went to Columbia, every class was a small seminar with discussions. No large lecture halls.
There are other percs at these kinds of schools. Both January Semester and its tutorials are expensive extras at Williams. Each of the Ivies+ and the Little Ivies offer these kinds of extras. For example, a student can study abroad from any college, but the well endowed programs often have their own study abroad programs that they run themselves and/or have access to top foreign institutions like London School of Economics or Sciences Po that a student elsewhere can’t access.
I agree that the appeal of Ivies goes far beyond their selectivity, and the increased resources per student is a key component. HYPSMC… type colleges have an endowment of >$1 million per student, get huge gifts, get lots of sponsored research, etc. This allows them to spend hundreds of thousands per student, while only collecting a small fraction of that in tuition. Furthermore USNWR type ranking criteria are usually well correlated with endowment per student, which helps them stay on top of rankings and feeds in to the selectivity. It also follows that if such a college were to dramatically increase students without increasing endowment, it would dramatically hurt endowment per student… hurting the resources available to students and their USNWR ranking. With Ivies in particular, there are numerous other important factors, including the centuries long history.
However, I do not agree that these high resources are reflected in nearly every class being small, at any Ivy or similar, including Columbia. According to USNWR, 9% of classes at Columbia have 50+ students . Columbia has some classes with 200+ students. While it’s only a small minority of classes with this size, they are popular classes, so a large portion of Columbia students see the popular large classes. Students in popular majors are usually most likely to see larger classes. Columbia does a little better than most other similar colleges, which probably relates to Columbia making an active effort to keep its core classes small. For example, Harvard and Stanford show 11% of classes with >50 students, compared to 9% at Columbia. If you want small class sizes, LACs tend to do a better job at this than Ivy-type colleges.
I attended Stanford. I regularly had intro freshman classes with hundreds of students. Some CS classes have 500+ students, a few even approaching 1000. The idea is that everyone has the opportunity to attend a lecture taught by a well known expert in the field, then later you break off in to sections of <~10 students that are led by a grad student, giving students a chance to ask questions and discuss.
Some surprising colleges may have much smaller intro freshman classes. For example, I took my most of my intro math/science classes at a SUNY, which only had a couple dozen students per class. They kept math classes small by allowing PhD students to teach the class, rather than a well known professor in the field. This seemed to work well in my experience. I don’t need a well known expert in mathematics to teach my intro calc class. I need someone who is good at teaching. And the PhD student who did teach seemed really enthusiastic about having the opportunity to teach a class, without any signs of burnout.
3 Likes
Many of the Ivies/equivalents do have special programs/resources, though these are also accessible other ways.
For instance, McDermott Scholats at UT-Dallas get:
- Living stipend (for non-tuition expenses)
- $1,000 yearly textbook stipend
- $12,000 fund for scholar-designed study abroad
- $3,000 fund for individualized professional development
- Travel expenses for cohort trips to Santa Fe, Austin, and Washington, DC
- Travel home twice yearly for domestic students, and once yearly for international students
- Exposure to and mentoring from faculty members
- Close acquaintance with and access to the University’s administrators
- Introductions to Dallas leaders and organizations
- Tickets to the Dallas Symphony, Dallas Opera, Texas Ballet Theater, Dallas Theater Center, and other cultural events
And all that completely free (full ride scholarship). Actually, the free tickets to cultural stuff is accessible to all UT-Dallas honors.
NMS at UT-Dallas get (besides a full-ride):
One-time study abroad stipend up to $6,000 to support an international education experience
The UT-Dallas honors college features a bunch of small seminar classes.
(So does CS^2, the UTD CS honors program)
The UTD management honors program has heavily subsidized cohort trips abroad, to DC, and NYC.
BTW, if you’re referring to the General Course at LSE, that’s actually open to students at a bunch of colleges. If you’re referring to something else, let me know, but I’d be surprised if you’re talking about something different.
2 Likes
I was an engineering major but my very favorite class at Texas was American History with George Forgie. There were 300 kids in the class. If I had skipped the class due to its size, I would have missed an amazing experience. He was an incredible story teller and made history come alive. He assigned lots and lots of reading and picked great books that I still remember, such as Path Between the Seas about the building of the Panama Canal. I could talk to him during office hours whenever I wanted. He tried to convince me to switch my major to history. I was very proud of the A I got in the class because there were only a handful.
In my major, my classes were always small, like 30 at the most. I had a wonderful education at UT.
2 Likes
I was referring to Columbia College. Never mentioned LSE.
Yes you did. Let me copy your quote:
Thanks. I was confused and didn’t realize you were referring to that comment. Now I understand.
No worries.
There are 102 CEOs represented on that list. The number of CEO’s in the Fortune 500 must be around…um…carry the five…500. So ~80% of the CEO’s went to schools not in that list.