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Some Colleges Have More Students From the Top 1 Percent Than the Bottom 60 (nytimes.com)
Students at elite colleges are even richer than experts realized, according to a new study based on millions of anonymous tax filings and tuition records. At 38 colleges in America, including five in the Ivy League -- Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale, Penn and Brown -- more students came from the top 1 percent of the income scale than from the entire bottom 60 percent. From a report on the NYTimes (alternate non-paywall link): Roughly one in four of the richest students attend an elite college -- universities that typically cluster toward the top of annual rankings (you can find more on our definition of "elite" at the bottom). In contrast, less than one-half of 1 percent of children from the bottom fifth of American families attend an elite college; less than half attend any college at all. Colleges often promote their role in helping poorer students rise in life, and their commitments to affordability. But some elite colleges have focused more on being affordable to low-income families than on expanding access. "Free tuition only helps if you can get in," said Danny Yagan, an assistant professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the authors of the study.
The "elite" schools, based on their reputation, generally only attract applicants who believe they can afford to go there. I had exceptional ACT/SAT scores but I was not interested in the financial burden of such schools so I went to a large public research university instead. However people who are living lifestyles that can afford such expenses will consider applying. It didn't matter in my case that there tuition assistance and financial aid; the cost gap at the time was still too enormous between podunk state and Yale to even consider bothering with an application.
Even if the gap has reduced on the tuition level, the cost of living at those schools is still very very high and the students know that.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
If the Endowment is large enough they can give every student free tuition. If there is no endowment, everybody pays. In the middle, they need enough people paying full-boat to subsidize the kids who need a full ride. Look at the economics before you assume ill intent. There is no magic money and locking kids into thirty years of debt is no magnanimous gesture.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I don't think it's even a matter of legacy enrollment.
The elite school I'm acquainted with is MIT as my wife has her degree from there and spent several years interviewing students that had applied as part of their evaluation process. They do not consider money or othewise having an ability to pay when students apply, but on the other hand most students do come from households with means. This happens because students from households with means do better in school than students from households without means.
A specific case I remember was a student that had applied but wasn't going to go higher in high school mathematics than Trigonometry. This student wasn't going to get any Calculus instruction in high school at all. In order to get to Calculus in the school system as a senior, one had to do well enough in mathematics in the fifth grade in order to end up in the Honors Math in the sixth grade, to then take Pre-Algebra as a seventh grader and the first-year Algebra class as an eighth grader, so one could take second-year Algebra, Geometry, and Trig/Pre-calculus in one's freshman, sophomore, and junior years, to have time left one one's academic schedule for Calculus as a senior. Otherwise one has to take one of these mathematics classes, typically Geometry as it ties-in the least with the rest, as a summer-school make-up class in order to get ahead.
So, decisions/involvement/circumstances for the parents and household when the student is ten years old ultimately impact if that student, eight years later, will have the prerequisites to compete at an elite college. Poor parents, single parents, parents that end up with stressors that prevent them from committing the time and attention to their child's upbringing will, on average, harm that child's educational performance and will lead to reduced opportunities simply because the student does not have the academic basis in order to attend these schools.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Overly complicated explanation.
Poor people can't afford top colleges.
You don't even need a feedback loop to explain it.
Also, without education the poor will remain poor no matter how smart they are.
What's the point of making it to the 1% if you can't send your kids to schools that others can't.
These school pride themselves on "diversity" or at least the "right kind" of diversity. They spend all their effort focusing on ethnic and gender diversity with almost no effort for economic or cultural diversity. This is what happens when the recruiters are generally nice, but low functioning collage graduates who could not find careers in their original field. They have their definition of diversity and do not expend any critical thinking skills trying to find where their ideas fall short of the stated goal of creating environment with diversity of thought. You end up with schools where people all look different but think the same.
The far more relevant study would be to determine the earning potential after humans piss away four years and Ferrari money on an investment that isn't paying out these days.
Of course, the Education Mafia selling college degrees wouldn't ever allow that kind of study to happen...
Kids from families with high incomes have significantly higher test scores; highly competitive universities will therefore overwhelmingly select from high-income families even if they exclusively select based on test scores. So, there is nothing particularly surprising about this result, nor does it demonstrate any kind of discrimination of selective colleges against low income kids.
You can now debate about whether high income causes kids to have high test scores, i.e., if you only gave kids from poor families more money, they'd be doing just as well. That is true to some very limited degree: kids who lack essentials (food, clean water, etc.) are held back by that, but fixing those problems can't increase their intelligence beyond their potential.
Most of the correlation is likely primarily caused by the fact that smart parents tend to have smart kids (through a combination of nature and nurture), and that high test scores and high incomes simply result from that.
Exactly.
Also, if your parents are wealthy:
1) They're more likely to be still together providing a more stable two-parent upbringing.
2) They're probably only working one job. They're home in the evening to help the kid with homework.
3) You're going to get a healthier diet. Your brain will develop properly because you have the nutrition you need.
4) Your parents are going to value you getting an education more, because they have one and know how important it is.
5) You live in a neighborhood with high home values- which means higher property tax, which means your school is better funded.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
If you're among the 1-percenters' offspring whose parents either went to these elite institutions or can afford to donate something substantial to get you in, why is it surprising that elite schools have more well-off students? There will always be efforts by the institutions in the form of scholarships and flexible admissions practices to diversify the student body, but the top colleges are definitely a pay-to-play operation.
There's basically 4 factors that determine where you end up in life -- how smart or successful your parents are, how wealthy they are, how much raw potential you have, and usually a whole lot of dumb luck. Smart or successful parents can afford to live in a good school district and provide a stable environment for their kids. Really rich parents can buy their way into the elite prep school track. Really smart students can often succeed enough to overcome a bad environment. Anyone can get lucky and just have things sort of work out for them. In my case, it was a combination of a good home life and a lot of right place/right time luck. I wasn't a good enough student to be in the scholarship bucket, and my parents weren't rich, but I did go to a decent K-12 school system and had involved parents who kicked my butt enough to do reasonably well. My dumb luck was getting a part time job doing tech support for the state university I went to, eventually doing it just short of full time, and using that to get my foot in the door at my first IT job.
The reason the elite schools will always have the lock on the 1% crowd is that once you're in, regardless of how you got there, you don't have to rely on luck. It starts with non-religious elite private schools. If your family can afford college level tuition for a K-12 education, there's a tacit agreement that one of the elite universities will have a spot for you. (Seriously, one school near us charges almost $40K for grade school tuition, but it's in the top 15 or so among elite boarding schools.) If you can get into and graduate from a Harvard, Yale, Princeton or similar, the school and its alumni network will not let you fail. White-shoe management consulting firms exclusively hire from the elite universities, and that's probably one of the most lucrative jobs a new graduate can have. The same goes for investment banking -- going from being a broke college student to making $250K a year is a big change. People who work for investment banks, management consulting firms and other similar employees mysteriously tend to wind up in very lucrative positions at their clients eventually, and the old boys'/old girls' network perpetuates.
This is why I feel states need to invest in public universities. It's basically the only lever the non-elite among us have to get ourselves to a better situation. If you're not smart enough or have a unique enough situation to get a full scholarship to a private university, your best bet in most states is to go to a big public college and milk your time there for all it's worth. I'm socking away money for my kids' college education, but unless they turn out to be absolute geniuses this is going to be the advice I give them too. Life may be a matter of who you know or dumb luck sometimes, but it never hurts to increase your chances. If you work hard and have a good run of luck, it is still possible to at least be comfortable. We'll see what the future holds though.
The top 1% own more mansions than the bottom 99% combined. The top 1% own more Ferrari cars than the bottom 99% combined. The top 1% go to the most expensive schools. Did you also know that the bottom 99% get more grants for education than the top 1% by 100%? How about the amount of "free" tuition from scholarships going to mostly the lower 90%? More assistance programs exist for the bottom 30% than the top 70%.
There is no equality of opportunity at any level when discussing higher education. I don't want rich people to have "free" college any more than I want lower income people strapped with decades of debt for useless degrees. There is plenty of rational dialogue on making sure there is no discrimination and that College is actually useful and not just brainwashing. Those issues are not being discussed. Discrimination is simply assumed all the time regardless of any facts by way too many people.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
AFAIK, schools like MIT (or my alma mater Caltech), are the exceptions that proves the rule. Single dimensional focus on academics (e.g., STEM) might be *one* way to get into an "elite" school that has a narrow focus, but isn't really going to get you very far in an admissions pool at Harvard, or Stanford.
Poor parents, single parents, parents that end up with stressors that prevent them from committing the time and attention to their child's upbringing will, on average, harm that child's educational performance and will lead to reduced opportunities simply because the student does not have the academic basis in order to attend these schools.
Although "academic-basis" is one way to generalize and dismiss, there are so many more "poor" families that 1%-ers that doesn't fully explain the issue. I spent quite a bit of time working and researching college admissions (during and after my time in university) and perhaps one of the big problems qualified students from "poor" families have getting admitted to "elite" schools is that even if they are qualified, they don't actually apply (which makes it really, really hard to attend).
The reasons are numerous, but often are attributable to fear and low-expectations (e.g., of getting rejected, figuring out how to pay, distance from family and support systems, etc). Unfortunately, this behavior is ultimately self-defeating in many ways as it sets a lower internal "baseline" for themselves to judge their future success. Some of these were outlined in the infamous 1999 Dale-Kruger research report summarized below...
There are many estimates of the effect of college quality on students' subsequent earnings. One difficulty interpreting past estimates, however, is that elite colleges admit students, in part, based on characteristics that are related to their earnings capacity. Since some of these characteristics are unobserved by researchers who later estimate wage equations, it is difficult to parse out the effect of attending a selective college from the students' pre-college characteristics. This paper uses information on the set of colleges at which students were accepted and rejected to remove the effect of unobserved characteristics that influence college admission. Specifically, we match students in the newly colleted College and Beyond (C&B) Data Set who were admitted to and rejected from a similar set of institutions, and estimate fixed effects models. As another approach to adjust for selection bias, we control for the average SAT score of the schools to which students applied using both the C&B and National Longitudinal Survey of the High School Class of 1972. We find that students who attended more selective colleges do not earn more than other students who were accepted and rejected by comparable schools but attended less selective colleges. However, the average tuition charged by the school is significantly related to the students' subsequent earnings. Indeed, we find a substantial internal rate of return from attending a more costly college. Lastly, the payoff to attending an elite college appears to be greater for students from more disadvantaged family backgrounds.
http://www.unz.com/runz/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/
captcha: sonata
Overly complicated explanation. Poor people can't afford top colleges.
Not true. Top schools have huge endowments, and way more alumni donations, so they can offer more aid for poor students. Most do not consider ability to pay during the admissions process. If you are talented but poor, a top school is likely more affordable than a second tier school because of the more generous financial aid offered.
News flash: NOT EVERYONE DESERVES OR IS ENTITLED TO COLLEGE.
What's next, reporting that "Mercedes drivers are more likely to be from the 1% than the lowest 60%"
-Styopa
You missed the part where they may have the money but they don't increase the number of seats. So even though they set up programs to help low income students they don't necessarily have the space. When the kids applying have the same last name as some of those grants and a building on campus you know which one is going to get preference.
All true, and for the top 1%:
6) You had part-time tutors, learning specialists, etc come in to help as needed when you weren't getting As in a class
7) Your maid took care of doing the dishes and making your bed so you got to read, play, learn, etc in all your free time
8) You know how to behave around rich people and college professors because you were around them all the time
9) You've been to several foreign countries by age 10, often with an expert guide just for your family
10) You know how to navigate a white-table cloth restaurant, a cocktail party, an art gallery, a meet-and-greet
No one is surprised that kids from wealthier means do better in school. This is well documented. What's the performance gap between the bottom 60% and the top 1% kids? If the gap is sizable, let's look towards correcting that. If the gap in performance is negligible, then I'm going to get more interested in these findings.
Not just that, but those with means have much more opportunity to do the exceptional things so-called elite colleges are looking for. Feeder schools with high rates of getting pupils into elite schools are a thing for a reason. An average kid with means is still much more likely to have an outstanding resume than an exceptional one student from a more modest background.
Apologists will say admissions at these places are money blind, but the reality is they just use proxies. It's the class equivalent of saying 'I'm not racist, but I won't hire people with funny names like Jose, Latasha, or Ahmed.'
The old saying 'Elite schools are where the wealthy launder privilege into credentials' once again holds true, and still no one cares. No one is holding them accountable for their classism. Point it out and some asshole accuses you of 'class warfare.' Far as I'm concerned, their should be an academic boycott of these places until conditions improve. It is baffling to me that, for all the progressives in academia, no one wants to touch this subject.
The application alone is sometimes a barrier for kids who haven't been prepared for the demands of some top schools. It's been a while since I filled out college applications, but Harvard's was at least straightforward - common application, addendum, essay, recommendations, and alumni interview. Anyone can complete it and get rejected. Others were an endless maze of abstract essay questions seemingly designed to keep out anyone who didn't think the right way or have the right strengths and experiences. The further schools diverge from a common application format, the more kids, no matter how qualified, will pass them over.
FWIW, college applications are much more straightforward today. Most schools** use the common application platform with a generally few addendums like the dreaded essays. Today, it is easier than ever to apply to as many schools as you have the time and patience to do. Of course making a 1/2-assed application to a school is probably a waste of time and money, the historical hoops you are referring to are largely non-existent today.
**including all Ivy Leagues (e.g., Harvard), Stanford, etc (with the notable exception of MIT).
For a regular school, particularly state school, then yes it gets stacked a lot by test scores and other academic indicators. The better you do academically, the more they are interested in you and the more money they'll try to give you to get you to attend.
However the "elite" schools have a whole bunch of good old boy shit going on. If you look at admissions in to places like Harvard you find that there are some legitimately top performers who come in, but a whole lot who are not and are instead connected some way. They are kids of alums, politically connected, rich, whatever. They are the "right kind of people" and so get the invite.
That's also the reason why parents want kids to go there is the connections. You don't get a better education at Harvard overall. Any university with a good program will do at least as well, and in plenty of disciplines there are schools ranked far better. However it further gets you in to the old boys club and gets you connections to people that gets your opportunities that would not otherwise be available later in life.
Except some poor and middle class kids get into Harvard -- in fact they get their expenses paid. That's not the case for Bugattis.
And it's for a good (or at least shrewd) reason: Letting the intellectual elite into your exclusive school lends the prestige of their academic accomplishments to the financial elite who attend.
Look at our president-elect, who likes to point to his attendance at Penn as proof that he has a very good brain. Well, I'm not one of those people who think he's actually stupid but he got into Penn because he was rich and had family connections in the admissions office. He's not in the same league as the kids who get into Penn on a scholarship.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Oh, I actually picked five things true of my own kids. But good to know they are in some book.
This just in - Humans with more resources are using those resources to make sure that they and their progeny have more resources. Story at 10!
There's nothing wrong with rich people wanting to give their own kids a leg-up in life and the best chance for future success that they can.
There's plenty wrong when society suppresses social mobility and makes success in life tied to how rich one's parents are.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
high schools with large numbers of low-income students tend to have under-staffed guidance offices
That was my situation last year when my daughter was applying to college. So I spent several thousand on an outside consultant who coached her on SAT techniques, helped her apply, and even co-authored her essays. She got into a very good university that was the best that we could have realistically hoped for. It was money well spent, but not many low income families could afford that.
Using my money to basically buy her way into a good school felt wrong, but when it is your own kid, you do what you gotta do.
The applications are easier, the financial aid applications are ridiculous. After doing FAFSA, many of these top-tier schools are asking for more intrusive information than you can imagine, including what savings we have for other children and having to estimate what our income and taxes will be for the next year and the year after. I was getting infuriated with my son's forms, had to dig out old tax records, my wife is self-employed, but doesn't technically own a company (freelance), but they wouldn't accept that as an answer... the financial aid forms take 10x longer to fill out. This might be a great reason why so few poor people are doing them. One of the forms even wanted my voter registration number and date I applied for it. WTF?
Stupid sexy Flanders.