<p>^^ englishjw (post #106),</p>
<p>No, a need-blind admission policy doesn’t really address the question of opportunities for kids from “poor and lower middle-class homes.” I mean, it helps up to a point, but there’s a lot more to it than that. Need-blind admissions is one thing, but whether a kid from a lower-income family can afford to attend depends on the adequacy of financial aid, which varies a great deal from school to school even among those professing to meet 100% of need (which is a very small handful of schools). Schools define “need” differently, base their FA awards on different budgeting assumptions for things like travel and incidental expenses, and award different mixes of grants, loans, and work-study. Travel can be a deal-breaker for low-income kids, especially at schools that are difficult/expensive to get to, which may be a factor in schools like Middlebury and Colgate having very low percentages of Pell grant recipients in their respective student bodies. Whether low-income kids even consider an elite school depends in part on how aggressively that school markets itself to low-income HS students. Whether low-income kids can attend also depends partly on admissions policies. Elite schools that make legacy a “hook” are generally giving an admissions edge to affluent students, and making it that much harder for low-income students to gain entry. Schools that recruit for preppy sports like crew, lacrosse, golf, skiing, and squash are also tilting admissions in favor of the affluent, because those are sports you just won’t find in predominantly low-income urban or rural high schools, but you will find them in elite prep schools and some affluent suburban public schools. Giving a heavy weighting to extracurriculars also tilts the playing field in favor of kids coming out of schools that offer lots of ECs (generally more affluent schools), and from families that can afford the fees and extra expenses that sometimes attend ECs. Some schools value work experience as much as ECs; some don’t. Those that do are generally going to provide a more favorable admissions climate for lower-income applicants who often need to work to earn their own spending money or help out their families. Admissions policies that place a lot of emphasis on the rigor of the applicant’s HS and on things like AP classes are going to effectively screen out kids from poorer schools that don’t offer a rigorous, AP-laden curriculum. Heavy reliance on standardized tests also disfavors kids from low-income backgrounds; it’s been said that SAT scores are a better predictor of family income than of academic success in college. The traditional practice of relying on old reliable “feeder” schools–almost invariably elite prep schools and affluent suburban high schools–heavily advantages the affluent. In my area, every Ivy League and elite LAC admissions officer assigned to the Midwest visits the top private day schools, Blake (in Minneapolis) and Saint Paul Academy (in you-know-where), every year, sometimes more than once, but they almost never set foot in our local Saint Paul public high school, even though the top students at the public school are every bit as smart as the kids at Blake and SPA. Guess which schools will land more kids at Yale and Williams? My guess is heavy reliance on early decision (ED) to fill up a large fraction of the entering class also would tend to skew the income distribution upward, because full-pays can apply ED without needing to worry about FA, while many kids with need want to be able to compare FA packages before locking themselves into any particular college.</p>
<p>I’m not suggesting that elite schools should throw all their admissions standards and practices out the window, but there are real differences among elite schools with respect to how sensitive they are to these kinds of income-based biases in their admissions policies, and how far they’re willing to go to recruit lower-income kids with obvious and demonstrated academic talent, but without all the bells-and-whistles that a kid coming out of a more affluent school will have. There are also, IMO, real differences among elite schools with respect to how much they even care about creating opportunities for social mobility. That’s why there’s such a huge variance in the percentage of low-income kids attending various elite schools.</p>
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<p>Yes, but with the kinds of admissions policies I described above, the elite colleges don’t really need to worry about maintaining a high percentage of full-pays. They’re effectively screening for them already, even while remaining nominally need-blind. At many elite colleges, students from families with household incomes up to $180,000 or so are eligible for need-based FA. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, a household income above $180,000 puts you in the most affluent 5% of the nation’s population. Yet at a school like Northwestern, only 43.3% of undergrads get need-based FA, which means well over half its student body comes from that top 5% of the income scale. And I’d be willing to bet that another big slice of the 43.3% getting need-based aid come from households earning between $100K and $180K, which puts them in the top quartile of income earners (and also means the amount of FA the school needs to give them is limited). At the other end of the scale, only 7% of Northwestern students are Pell grant recipients, coming from the lowest-income households. That’s less than half the rate at crosstown rival the University of Chicago, where 15% are Pell recipients. Could Northwestern afford to support a few more Pell grant recipients? Yeah, probably. If they cared to.</p>
But, at the risk of highjacking this thread into another endless exegesis of the USNews poll’s drawbacks, let’s just say, that it’s hard to take seriously a ranking system that basically functions as a proxy for institutional wealth these days when its almost impossible to judge how wealthy any of these colleges really are, due to the fact that so much of it is invested in illiquid assets. If