<p>The full pay students in a sense do help subsidize those on financial aid, but not directly, but rather, that if a student doesn’t need aid, then another student who does will get more money. Almost any private school will tell you that the tuition doesn’t represent the full cost of tuition, and they are correct (this is true of private secondary and grade schools I will add), the operating costs of a university depend on interest from endowments to help make up the difference, or from current donations and such. </p>
<p>Aid in a school generally comes from the interest on endowments, they have pools of money (both need based and some merit based, though these days most aid is need based) that they can give out, and that can vary, depending on how their endowments are doing as well. </p>
<p>As far as the whole argument for legacy admissions, that this in turn generates donations to the schools, that has been blown out of the water, every study out there indicates that whether or not schools give legacy preferences, the amount of giving does not change, that the alumni of those schools well off enough to give that kind of money, do so without the implied strings that legacy admissions advocates claimed. Still, a kid who can pay full freight can get access to a school that a kid not needing aid might, the days of truly need blind admissions went out the door a long time ago, if for the basic fact that the cost of college has gone up so much, that interest on endowments can’t always keep up.</p>
<p>Malcolm Gladwell in “outliers” talked about the differences of opportunities in various groups and how it affects even gifted students. For example, for kids coming from middle/upper middle income families, where the parents are college educated, the parents actively encourage their kids to do things, they search out opportunities for them, have them try new things, whereas with kids from working class or poorer backgrounds, besides the financial limitations, because they themselves never experienced that kind of help, they can’t make the effort because they don’t know to (again, these are generalities, and they aren’t meant as a knock on anyone, far from it). It is funny, I grew up with college educated parents, my mom was not working class (her father worked for the controller of Union Carbide), my dad was (my grandfather was a stone mason from Italy) but got his degree, yet neither of them understood that you don’t sit back and let kids tell you what they want, that you need to encourage them, have them try new things. Kids don’t understand, and often, for example, they feel badly asking for things that take time and money commitment from the parents…and having parents who understand that is huge, Gladwell profiled two students, both gifted, one from an upper middle income family, one from a working class family, and the contrast was glaring.</p>
<p>Likewise, poor kids get screwed with schooling, not just because of bad schools but also the summer break. Well off kids have their school work re-inforced over the summer break, they have educated parents who are talking to them or in front of them about things, they have access to books in the house, computers, and as a result don’t lose what they have learned, whereas with poorer kids the minute those doors close in June, they start losing it, and even if they had caught up to better socieconomic level kids by the end of school, by fall they were behind. </p>
<p>Part of the problem quite honestly is this is often cached in racial terms, and that is a big problem, because while race/ethnic group plays a role on what level someone is at, it also has left the perception that somehow that all people who are white, for example (or Asian), no matter their economic situation don’t need help, that it is ‘automatic’ for them, and that is ridiculous. There are a lot of kids growing up to white and Asian families where their story isn’t that much different from a black or hispanic inner city kid, parents not particularly educated, low family incomes (especially true in rural areas), not great schools and so forth.
The big mistake has been IMO making it racial, it rather should be socioeconomic. The black kid whose father is a doctor shouldn’t be getting the preferences over a poor white kid living in rural Alabama, because socioeconomically the black kid probably has had a lot more resources and shouldn’t need them. A lot of working class white families, struggling to survive, see this and resent it, because they aren’t exactly floating in wealth, and very few people go out of their way to help them, either, the emphasis is on poor black and hispanic (or other ethnic minorities) not on working class/poor/rural whites. I think as a country we need to look at socioeconomics a lot more closely when looking at what to do and put less emphasis on race. I don’t think that is going to happen, because I think for one thing it is join to make some of the Ayn Rand type conservatives a little nervous, when it shows what kind of privilege having money really does, that claiming all it takes is ‘hard work’ and ‘pulling yourself up by your bootstraps’ is a load of malarkey. It is funny, not long ago I read a superb biography of Andrew Carnegie, not exactly the most socially enlightened person, and yet even he, the epitome of the 19th century capitalist, said that the idea that people got ahead strictly through hard work and perseverance were mistaken, that without opportunity to enlarge their minds, without opportunity to improve their situation, all the hard work in the world won’t help. People in the higher socioeconomic groups, upper middle income and above (I would say middle, but that is fraught, for a number of reasons) simply have opportunities that are so common to them, they don’t realize it, it reminds me a lot of when straight couples will talk about how they get no benefit from being legally married and how they don’t make a big deal about ‘their sexual orientation’, which is hogwash, but because it is so part of the backdrop of their lives, they cannot even see the benefits or how pervasive their ‘orientation’ is manifested. I have heard the arguments, that the kid who goes to Andover or Phillip’s exeter or Choate have to work hard to get good grades, etc, and what that leaves out is a)not as hard as someone not going there and b)that going there they know, thanks to the old boy network, what they have to work hard at to get into an ivy league school or whatever, they already have learned the social networks and whatnot from mums and dads and family and friends, something a poor white kid from the Alabama backcountry wouldn’t even dream of knowing.</p>