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100 Top Colleges Vow To Enroll More Low-Income Students (npr.org)
Research shows that just 3 percent of high-achieving, low-income students attend America's most selective colleges. And, it's not that these students just aren't there -- every year tens of thousands of top students who don't come from wealthy families never even apply to elite colleges. Universities are taking note -- and banding together under something called the American Talent Initiative -- a network backed by Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Aspen Institute and the research firm Ithaka S+R. To join the club, schools have to graduate 70 percent of their students in six years -- a qualification that leaves just under 300 schools in the U.S. eligible. Nearly a third of those schools -- exactly 100 -- have signed on. Their goal? Enroll 50,000 additional low- and moderate-income students by 2025. From a report: Each school has its own goals, too -- many want to increase the number of Pell Grant students on campus, others aim to improve graduation rates -- but they're all on board to share strategies, learn from each other's missteps and provide data to monitor their progress.
While I think that increasing opportunity for undeserved communities is laudable, I do think that you should be honest about the issues in poor communities. From TFA:
I'm 100 percent convinced that talent is distributed uniformly across society. There's no data to suggest that if you happen to be born into a less well-to-do family you are somehow less intelligent.
This is just not true. SAT scores are or were roughly an IQ test. They show a clear correlation to income, as outlined in this article:
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
There may be any number of causes of this, but denying the facts will likely lead to under prepared students starting and failing at college.
Interestingly, high SAT scores have not been shown to be correlated to student achievement in college. In face, many colleges are moving to test-optional admission strategies after a 2014 study involving 123,000 students at 33 colleges showed virtually no statistical difference between GPA and graduation rates between students that did and did not submit standardized test scores.
Unfortunately a different study has also concluded that it is unlikely that adoption of test-optional admission policies would will boost enrollment of underrepresented minority and low-income students. The study examined 180 selective liberal arts colleges, 32 of which had adopted test-optional policies between 1992 and 2010. It compared colleges with test-optional policies against colleges that required test scores. The 32 test optional schools did not see any statistical increase in enrollment of low-income or black, latino, or native american students compared with the larger group of 180 schools. This result was unexpected, but the report authors hypothesized that this might be due to the fact that by de-emphasizing standarized tests, more weight was put on extra-curriculars and AP/IB coursework which continue to have unequal opportunities/access across income and minority status.
Sadly, from my history of admissions work with my alma mater, the two highest correlating factors for academic success were: 1. parental income; and 2. one-or-more parents graduating from college. You might say #1 is probably highly correlated with #2 so a large driver of college success is a student fulfilling the expectations of their college educated parents, which sort of perpetuates the have vs have-not split.
Next on the list that showed correlation is adjusted (i.e., no-extra points for AP/IB classes) High-school GPA in core-curricula classes (A's in underwater basket weaving don't count). The main complication with adjusted GPA comparison between applicants is normalizing them across schools (different grade inflation factors in different schools). In a highly selective school, it doesn't matter too much (most of your applicants will have mostly A's), but it's much more difficult to normalize the middle of the grading scales between disparate high schools to compare applicants.
The SAT II (subject test) showed a reasonably correlation to college GPA, but not graduation rates.
The general SAT score correlations to college success ranked below sustained (e.g., over 2 years) extracurricular activities, and coming from a well-known "feeder" school (a HS where lots of people apply to a specific college), but both showed weak-to-no correlation that varied from year-to-year like the generic SAT. The "feeder" effect seemed to indicate that groups of students that have a history of academic success tend to do better than isolated individuals (which indicated the advantage of support groups in college leading to higher college success).
Your mileage may vary, though...