<p>MoWC,</p>
<p>My daughter at an elite LAC-like university and my son who attended a similar school are amazed at the rowers, squash players, golfers, figure skaters, tennis players and kids from obscure sports at their schools. The wealthy outnumber those of modest means in athletic recruiting by a huge margin.
Please see “The Price of Admission”. The author had to pull me along on this one, but my daughter’s experience has confirmed the book in spades.</p>
<p>My experience with the kids I’ve met interviewing for my Ivy has been that the athletes come from the same privileged backgrounds as most of the other applicants. Since my kids all do sports, I know a lot of “sports parents”, the lower income parents tend to see sports as a possible ticket to a college scholarship, the higher income parents see sports as a hook at a selective college.</p>
<p>Mitchell Stevens is an excellent academic reporter.
I wouldn’t put Hamilton among the few schools with the endowment and the motivation to actually prefer applicants of modest means.</p>
<p>Agree completely with danas and muffy333 above. As noted,“The Price of Admission” and “Creating a Class…” both provide ample backup and detail for the above assertion. As danas said above, my S also observes the same thing at his school. At all the top schools, there are a very high amount of “hooks” and partial athletic scholarships going to athletes in patrician and high-dollar sports.</p>
<p>That book above is way out of date. The two books that deserve to be read carefully that answer virtually every stat question in this thread are:
Color and Money – Peter Schmidt
The Power of Privilege – Joseph Soares</p>
<p>They are very well done and go into much more detail than any summary I could provide. Highly recommended!</p>
<p>How can a college set up a level playing field? Move an entire extended family to Cambridge, educate them, get them job training, teach them the behavior nuances & speech patterns of the upper class, set them up with mind-expanding vacations, in many cases brainwash them to renounce the public teat, indoctrinate them into the capitalist way of thinking & acting…the list is endless. For some of the limitations low-income kids face, it is not possible to wave a magic wand & turn over a wad of cash. Some kids will be resilient enough to tough out the culture shock; others have no desire to do so & may need a less steep climb to prosperity spaced out over a few generations.</p>
<p>Michelle, thanks for the clarification. Why aren’t these facts highlighted in yours and most books? I think many people would change college strategy if they really understood these facts. I did after reading Price of Admission. My son, very high stats successfully applied ED to the ivy school I went to. He maybe slightly prefered Princeton, but Asiasn with no hook from a strong school where others had hooks, good luck to him!</p>
<p>As for athletes, of course it is the wealthy and poor ones at ivies because of no athletic scholarships. Many people I know who coud afford top colleges psh their kids to the schools with scholarships.</p>
<p>I’d say they ARE highlighted in my books – A is for Admission was the first book to give specific acceptance RATES by prep school for example-- so sure, lots of kids APPLY from top prep schools, but again, the numbers show that for most top schools, the admit RATE is lower from top prep schools. In fact, I’m in the process of doing a 10th anniversary edition/update of A is for Admission, so more recent facts and figures will be included by the most interesting thing about rewriting the book has been how little has actually changed! Sure, more kids apply and fewer get in, but accept for minor technical details, the major numbers have not shifted. Recruited athletes will get into the Ivies at 60%, even higher than minority students for example. None of the 40% of tagged kids has changed either - so another decade, some superficial changes, a shift towards attracting lower/middle class and disadvantaged kids, but colleges can’t just level the playing field by throwing money at applicants!</p>
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<p>Isn’t the operative word here “recruited”? Isn’t the issue that a great (compared to schoolmates) but not walk-on-water athlete should not consider himself or herself a shoo-in at top schools?</p>
<p>One of S’s friends was both swim team captain and science team captain and school val. It was the combination of the three that got him into Yale.</p>
<p>I said “a number of sports”. My son was a recruited athlete. I am familiar with the cross section at the elite universities and LACs. You have to look a little bit beyond the Ivys, because most (not all) athletes looking beyond college for their sport aren’t going to the Ivys.<br>
Two words- DUKE BASKETBALL
One more word- STANFORD</p>
<p>Two simple moves that will have the greatest impact on getting your child into an elite school. Move to a state that provides geographic bump (Ark, Iowa,Lou, etc), convert to Judaism.</p>
<p>It’s probably just me, I needed my paper, the WSJ to loudly announce the facts! Let’s face it, their goal is not a level playing field now. Maybe it will be when endowments hit the stratosphere. I’m thinking never though. Where else have the wealthy lost power in America?</p>
<p>Windy-Why would you say that converting to Judaism would get anyone into a school?</p>
<p>Roughly 25-30% of students at most Ivy’s are Jewish, I can’t explain it but it’s true.</p>
<p>I can explain it, though I’m not a Jew: Jews have throughout the millennia, had a deep respect for education. It was in fact fear of being swamped with well-educated Jews that led the Ivies back in the 1920s to institute Jewish quotas, so that the sons of wealthy WASPS would still get into Ivies where they’d be happy with their gentlemen’s C. The end of quotas not surprisingly has coincided with much higher standards of excellence at these schools. Converting to Judaism alone won’t do it, unless one also embraces the whole tradition of reverence for scholarship.</p>
<p>Michelle,
Thanks for adding the names of the other two books. The Power of Privilege was the other one I was trying to recall. </p>
<p>I’m curious though–you mention that one of the books in post #144 was “out of date”. Then, in your post regarding the update of your book, you state “…the most interesting thing about rewriting the book has been how little has actually changed.” So, if the earlier book is out of date, do most of the items noted in them still ring true?</p>
<p>“I can explain it, though I’m not a Jew: Jews have throughout the millennia, had a deep respect for education.”</p>
<p>That’s just silly as a reason for the percentages, even though it is true. Respect for education is not a genetic trait nor can it be passed from generation to generation, nor it is unique to any ethnicity. If you are suggesting that one ethicity is genetically smarter than another I would like to see the science behind that.</p>
<p>Marite got it just right. Respect for education is not a genetic trait. It is, however, a core value, one that Jews have passed on from generation to generation.</p>
<p>Actually, being Jewish, by itself, doesn’t give an applicant any edge at all in applying to Ivy League colleges; it’s like being from the Northeast, there are a high percentage of kids from the Northeast at Ivies, but it doesn’t mean a prospective applicant should move there!</p>
<p>No one was suggesting anyone is smarter genetically; some cultures just traditionally have a deep respect for scholarship above other things.</p>
<p>Thanks, wjb. Someone who is anchored in a tradition that deeply respects education is more likely to receive a good education than someone who is not. Nothing to do with genetics. Windy brought up conversion to Judaism as a means of facilitating entrance to top schools but also mentioned genetics. I was not aware that religious conversion altered one’s genetic make-up.</p>