It depends on the “prestigious college.” At HYPSM… type colleges, tuition and donors are often only a small portion of revenue. For example, MIT was mentioned. Their operating revenue sources are listed at https://web.mit.edu/facts/financial.html . The top 3 revenue sources for 2020 were:
Research Revenues: Lincoln Lab -- 27%
Investment Return -- 22%
Research Revenues; Campus -- 19%
A report for Princeton is at https://finance.princeton.edu/financial-facts . If I am reading the report correctly, Princeton’s investment returns have exceed their entire operating budget in recent years (endowment payout was less than investment returns, allowing endowment to grow even higher). Princeton could theoretically make the college free to students, without any tuition charges, and still have a healthy budget.
College “prestige” is far more correlated with endowment revenue than it is with tuition revenue. The not as elite/prestigious colleges with relatively lower endowments tend to be the ones for which tuition revenue is more critical, and changes in the portion of students who are full pay can have large consequences on budget.
For example, Northeastern has a $1 billion endowment for 27k students. That’s peanuts compared to HYPSM… type elite/prestigious colleges. Their revenue sources were as follows. Tuition and student fees make up the vast majority of their revenue. If Northeastern doesn’t get enough full pay kids, they could have financial struggles. It’s not surprising to me that Northeastern is need aware and does not meet full need for all students.
The SES distribution at highly selective private colleges in no way resembles the SES distribution of high stat HS students. For example, the report at https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2013a_hoxby.pdf lists the following portion of “high achieving students” by income quartile. They define “high achieving” as A- GPA or better combined with top 10% scores.
Top Income Quartile – 34% of high achievers
2nd Income Quartile – 27% of high achievers
3rd Income Quartile – 22% of high achievers
Bottom Income Quartile – 17% of high achievers
In a random distribution, there would be 25% in each quartile. Instead, there were 17% in the bottom, rather than 25%. That is indeed a significant difference. Nevertheless, no selective private college I am aware of has anything resembling the SES distribution above. Instead they all have far more high income kids and far fewer low income kids.
The reasons for this distribution are multifaceted and discussed in the linked report. A key part of high SES distribution among students at highly seletcive private colleges is that high achieving low SES kids don’t tend to apply to highly selective private colleges, even if they are less expensive options than the less selective colleges to which they do apply. The abstract states,
I find it interesting that SES groups seem to favor colleges that are more expensive, rather than less expensive. Wealthy kids seem more likely that typical to apply to “elite” colleges, which often cost them upwards of $70k/year, even though there are probably far less expensive options, including some that are near $0 expected cost to parents via academic scholarship. Lower income kids seem less likely to apply to “elite” colleges in spite of them often having near $0 expected cost to parents, and are instead more likely to choose closer colleges, with a far higher expected cost to parents/sudents.
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There are many thousands of high schools in the US that haven’t sent a single pupil to an Ivy League school in the last 3 years. And you could likely also identify a very small number that account for 5% of HYPSM admissions. The question is how many of those students from (let’s say) Sidwell Friends or Georgetown Prep are getting in because of their parents‘ wealth and prestige.
I’ll spell them out for you. I’m in favor of a system similar to what Oxbridge use. Fairness isn’t about enforcing certain outcomes. It’s about giving everyone as close to the same opportunities as possible.
Just to add to this and pick up on @Data10 ’s point about higher SES students being far more likely to apply, the efforts from Oxbridge to be more inclusive are focused very heavily on outreach to underprivileged schools to encourage their students to apply and not to think about Oxbridge as somewhere only posh kids attend: https://www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/find-out-more/widening-participation
There’s very little done to tip the balance in the actual selection process (the only difference is that minor allowances are made for prior exam grades from schools where teaching standards are lower) and the interview is designed to identify the most talented students.
That’s the opposite of some of the ideas presented by @bludbulldog and currently being pushed by some US colleges (such as becoming test optional or even test blind), that involve deliberately avoiding any attempts to find the most intellectually able students. I find the US interviews by alumni particularly odd, since they are mostly designed to persuade the student that they should attend, not to winnow the field.
“I find the US interviews by alumni particularly odd, since they are mostly designed to persuade the student that they should attend, not to winnow the field.”
Perhaps that is what some interviewers do, but it is certainly not the direction given by Yale (and I am sure most other schools that have alumni interviews). We are asked to provide a qualitative assessment on 7 defined categories and to provide a conclusory quantitative score. My reports are generally 1 page single spaced and take some time to write.
I agree that taking away reference points to evaluate applicants, like test scores, for “social justice” purposes, does no one favors and tends to have unintended consequences because all that you have done is magnified the inequities/flaws existing in the other criteria and increased subjectivity. Fact is that college admissions is a zero sum game, so eliminating or magnifying certain elements is going to favor certain students over others. We obsess on this board over very narrow slices of the applicant pool, predominantly the students who are academically qualified for selective schools but for one reason or another are denied a seat because of some perceived disadvantage or the advantage of another. The real game is improving the quality of public education K-12 and public universities, including those that offer vocational training.
Some are confusing “merit” with a ranking based on highest stats. That’s on you. You’re looking at it hierarchically, not holistically. And resenting what you think is privilege to the undeserving. Then getting all worked up.
Completely agree. Going to the Oxbridge system may have merit but it definitely wouldn’t change the “privileges and influence of the rich and powerful “ as INJParent advocates. It would reinforce the advantages of the high SES
Well, in an economy which requires money to make money, intelligence will have little to do with wealth. Moreover, our society does not reward genius with high salaries. University researchers make far less than college football coaches. I am sure that the CEO of any of the Fortune 500 makes a lot more than Einstein ever did, and that is including the money he got from his Nobel Prize (most went to his ex wife, BTW).
Paris Hilton makes more than the people who invented the microchip ever made, and the only reason that Bill Gates is so rich is because his genius was financial, not engineering. Windows was developed by other people, Gates just acquired it and marketed it.
How much money was made by the different people who developed the radio, the people who developed penicillin, the person who solved Fermat’s last theorem, the people who figured out continental drift, the people who found the first exoplanets, etc, etc? There is arguably the greatest mathematical genius ever, Erdos, who lived out of his suitcase in people’s guest rooms.
Yet you insist that making money is the primary evidence evidence of intelligence, and worse, that the lack of ability to make money demonstrates low intelligence.
Oxbridge is part of system in which low income kids are out of the running for elite universities by the time they are in high school. By the time most low income students graduate high school, they are so behind that they have no chance of passing any comprehensive exams.
In the UK, perhaps even more so than in the USA, poor kids and rich kids get different levels of education, and the national exams are mostly a test of how much money was spent on a kid’s education. So it does not create a meritocracy, it continues to enforce the class system that still exists in the UK.
The UK doesn’t need legacies or special lists, since their entire K-12 education system is a system which provides an easier path to Oxbridge for the “upper classes”, AKA Oxbridge legacies.
@Data10 MIT has far fewer kids from the highest SES than other, similarly selective colleges likely because it doesn’t have special lists and legacy boosts. MIT is probably a good basis by which to measure the benefits of wealth in preparing students for admissions to highly selective colleges colleges.
Many of the successful tech companies of today started from basically zero, and many of tomorrows successful tech companies are hard at work in garages and small offices in Si Valley.
We live in a capitalist society, so it should be of no surprise that CEOs make a lot of $$. They do so because their companies make magnitudes more.
Not sure about your microchip claim. Robert Noyce had a net worth of over $3 Billion and spawned an industry that has employed probably millions. What’s the total worth of that?
I could go on, but let’s just say not everyone feels as @MWolf does
The lack of legacy preferences and relatively smaller preferences for other predominantly high income groups is part of it. The engineering/tech focus is another.
For example, the Chetty report lists the following “elite” private colleges had the smallest portion of students form top 1% income. “Elite” means either in Chetty’s “other elite” grouping or his Ivy+ grouping. There appears to be a stronger correlation with being primarily an engineering/tech school than there does with lack of legacy preferences. Case Western appears to be the outlier, which has ~40% of bachelors degrees in engineering/CS. The others have vast majority in engineeirng/CS.
“Elite” Private Colleges with the Smallest Portion of Top 1% Income Students
In any meritocratic or partially-meritocratic system like college admissions, it is expected that parents with money will deploy it to purchase opportunities for their kids to earn merit and remove barriers that their kids face. The kids still have to earn merit (unearned advantages like legacy can only go so far, unless the parents have development-level donation capability or similar levels of power/money), but having more opportunities and fewer barriers means that they have substantial advantages in being able to present a meritous college application compared to kids of similar ability from a poor family.
My bad - I was thinking about Jack Kilby, not Noyce. It still does not contradict the facts that I stated above.
Pointing to ONE error does not invalidate my point, and pointing to one error, and writing “I could go on” doesn’t mean that you actually can go on.
There are also a few major flaws in your claim:
Most of the successful any of the tech startups were not some crazy genius original engineering idea. Most of the rest are the result of the successful use of existing technology to produce something marketable. Very few are Google or Netscape, most are Amazon or Facebook. Many extremely original and genius ideas went nowhere because of lack of money-making skills. In fact, most of the startups went belly-up very quickly.
Most of the people who started successful tech companies came from upper middle class families. Who else had the education and the ability to spend a few years developing their website?
Do you think that only the tech world has any geniuses? .
While I may have misspoken about one of the inventors of the microchip, you have not said anything about the scores of other scientific ideas which I mentioned.
How many millions did Erdos make?
Compare the worth of Andrew Wiles and the worth of Alice Walton.
For most of his life, Sir Alexander Fleming lived off of the salary of a medical researcher.
Have you ever even heard of Marie Tharp? Dale Frail? Jack Horner? None of them are super wealthy, so you’re saying that they are all dumber than Kim Kardashian?
Again, are you going to tell me that Paris Hilton is smarter than Erik Demaine (PhD at 18, McArthur award, youngest professor at MIT at age of 20, etc)?
Are you going to claim that college football coaches are smarter than any of the professors at the colleges?
The highest paid people in the USA are people who inherited their money, people in finance, top music and film performers, and about 6 owners of very successful tech companies.
You know who isn’t among the top 1% of the USA by net worth? The vast majority of the awardees of the science and literature Nobel prizes*, in fact, the vast majority of the awardees of the top prizes in science and humanities.
There is very little overlap between the 1% of the USA population with PhDs and the top 1% of the population by wealth.
To make lots of money, especially if one hasn’t inherited a lot of money, a person needs to spend most of their time working on making money. Most geniuses are not interested in spending any time, much less most of their time, in making money, because that is not what interests them.
A person spending 10 hours a day on medical research, physics, natural resource research, mathematical research, social science research, literature, etc, is not able to make the $350,000 a year to put them in the top 1% for income, and cannot acquire the $10,000,000 required to put them in the top 1% by wealth.
Yet these are the vast majority of top 5% of the world by intellectual talents.
net worth required to be in the top 1% by wealth is over $10,000,000. The Nobel prize is about $940,000.
I guess you can define “crazy genius” in many ways, but limiting it to academic originality is missing the point if you want to then lament the money that people may or may not realize due to their “genius”. Just because someone has, what they believe to a be a “genius idea”, does not mean that it will succeed in the market. What are the genius ideas that went nowhere because of lack of money? I can list a few that went nowhere even though they had tons of it.
Successful tech founders typically have a great idea coupled with the drive to seek funding. It’s as simple (or difficult) as that.
There are “geniuses” in many domains and there are wealthy geniuses in many domains.
It would be better to look at the actual data, which show that your assertions are nonsense. In the UK system, the spending per pupil is very similar right across the country at around 5000 pounds ($6500) per pupil, with no more than 15% variation between local authorities (see Table 8 in the linked spreadsheet here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/la-and-school-expenditure-2018-to-2019-financial-year ). Compare that to the US, where spending per pupil varies from $7000 to $23000 between the different states (https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/per-pupil-spending-by-state ). And in the UK, the level of parent donations is far lower than in the US, which gives the best US schools an even greater boost in their ability to fund extras for students (for example parent donations pay for the Latin classes at our NorCal high school, which would never happen in the UK).
If you are thinking about private schools, then 7% of students in the UK attend private school (https://www.isc.co.uk/research/ ), compared to 10% in the US (https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cgc.asp ). Looks to me like more wealthy US parents are able (and want) to buy their way out of state schools compared to the UK.
There are bad schools and good schools in the UK, just as in the US, and parents try to buy houses within the catchment area of a good school if they can afford it. We do the same in the US. Some of that is down to school leadership and teachers - you can get good schools in poor areas and bad schools in wealthy areas. But much of the worry in the UK is about poor white kids being left behind, due to lack of parental support, whereas poor children from ethnic minorities actually outperform on exams (https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/apr/04/white-children-falling-behind-other-groups-at-gcse ). That has nothing to do with “how much money was spent on a kid’s education.”
Fairness in life is elusive. The topic comes up a lot on CC, especially as it regards top tier schools.
I can tell you as a very low income ses student in the 1980’s at one of (HYPSM) on full scholarship, I thought the world was pretty unfair to me. I looked at everyone who had so much and I relied on my part time job to pay for incidentals. I grew, I learned that the gift of my education was an awesome gift that I could use. I later made quite a bit of money in multiple careers ( so did my non HYPSM) spouse.
We now pay full freight BS and would fall into your category of the unfairly advantaged full pay parent. Yep, and like most high SES we’ve earned it in our lifetime.
What you aren’t considering is this. The colleges are looking for something intangible in a student. In return, they hope the student will pay it forward and give back. Many of the most generous donors at these schools are first generation or they invented an industry. I know a few who were in my class. They are exactly what the school hopes for.
They want poet laureates and artists and Cellists but they also want people who go into business and bio-tech etc. They state and they get people who become leaders in every field. That’s why kids want to go there. The school needs all of these kids.
The money pays for the life of the mind, which isn’t cheap. Those ivy walls and specialty services cost a lot. Be thankful that someone pays for them.
BTW, none of these schools have ever been fully need blind. Ever. If someone can donate a large sum they are adding something that often extends to multiple students and teachers. Sometimes donations result in amazing achievements or specialty programs. These would not exist with just tuition.
The elite LACS and private institutions are by their nature trying to create a residential college experience where there is a diverse student body in terms of ECs and academic interests. This is part of the “added value” of attending these institutions, its about the people you meet and learn from as well as the academics. Many of these institutions take pride in shaping an incoming class of different types of scholars, future academic, business and political leaders from across the globe.
At some commonly believed to be ‘prestigious’ LACs or privates, where the yield is relatively below average, I really wonder whether the ‘shaping’ is worth it. Meaning if the yield is below 30%, why spend all this time ‘shaping’ when you don’t even have a good handle on who is going to enroll?
There are a number of ‘prestigious’ schools with yields below 30% (IMO that makes them per se not prestigious, but I am cranky at the end of a long week). Here are some select Class of 2023 yields:
Bucknell 28.6%
Emory 29%
BU 27%
Lehigh 28%
NEU 26.7%
Reed 17% (what?!)
“Self-made scores” of 8 (“Self-made who came from a middle- or upper-middle-class background”) are fairly common in this list. However, scores of 9 (“Self-made who came from a largely working-class background; rose from little to nothing”) or 10 (“Self-made who not only grew up poor but also overcame significant obstacles”) appear to be much less common. There are also many with lower scores, corresponding to significant inheritances.