I think being poorly informed is a key factor, including being poorly informed about relative net costs after FA. CC forum members are generally better informed than the overall population, yet a large portion still assume Ivies are more expensive than publics for typical middle income families after FA. However, there are plenty of other important contributing factors besides just being poorly informed about costs. Rather than students feeling they are not worthy of applying, I’d expect its more not seeing the reason to be obsessed with attending an Ivy. The community including friends, family, teachers, GCs, and others also contributes in to beliefs about what colleges are preferred. If nobody in that group has attended or recommends an Ivy and the GC does not have the apply to x reaches and y matches style, then the student is less likely to prefer attending the Ivy over the colleges that their parents, friends, boyfriend/girlfriend, and others they know in the community choose and highly praise. In many smaller towns, it’s also the norm to stay near by the smaller town and often live near/at home, rather than travel thousands of miles away to an Ivy for college.
This relates to some of the differences in which types of low income kids apply to selective colleges observed in the linked study. For example,some of the characteristics associated that occur more often the few low income kids who apply to selective college were lives in city, attends magnet (nearly all low income magnet kids applied to selective colleges), attends a HS that has a history of students applying to selective colleges, attends a HS where teachers attended selective college, and is Asian.
I previously mentioned that one of my relatives was the first person in the history of her HS to apply to a highly selective college. She lived in a rural area where the norm was to stay in the area after graduating, often working at the family farm. I think the biggest contributing factor for her going against the community norm was her parents were highly educated persons who passed on the college educational priorities to their children. After she applied and was accepted, there were several others who applied to selective colleges in the following classes, including siblings.
Yield percentages generally follow selectivity since students rarely apply to more selective colleges as a backup. For example, a NYS resident who prefers Cornell to SUNY is likely to apply to SUNY as a backup in case Cornell rejects him. However, a NYS who prefers SUNY to Cornell is unlikely to apply to Cornell as backup in case SUNY rejects him. As such, I’d expect those who apply and are accepted to both are a pre-filtered group that tends to choose the more selective option, even if it is more expensive. Of course cost is relevant and will also change decisions in some cases
Using the linked study definition of “high achieving”, 66% of high achieving students were in the bottom 3 income quartiles, rather than the 75% that would occur in a random distribution. High achieving students were overrepresnted in the top quartile income (34% instead of expected 25%), but most high achieving students were in the lower 3 quartiles. However, the distribution among college applications was very different. The author writes,
“The pool of high-achieving, low-income students who apply to selective colleges is small: for every high-achieving, low-income student who applies, there are from 8 to 15 high-achieving, high-income students who apply.”
The specific percentage of students applying to privates depends on a variety of factors including how you define high performing students. I don’t know what percentage apply, but I think it’s safe to say that the percentage is far less than estimates of 80% of students applying that were listed earlier in the thread.