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.

Comments

smart

[cascadingstylesheet]

Maybe they are too smart to want to attend "elite" colleges?

Re:smart

[alvinrod]

My guess is they don't bother to apply because those elite colleges are expensive as hell and the sticker shock turns people off even if they could receive financial aid that doesn't involve debt hell afterwards. I suspect another reason is that those colleges tend to attract a lot of students from the upper class part of society and they don't feel as though they'll fit in with someone who spends winter break at their uncle's place in the Hamptons or going on a European ski trip.

The fact is that you don't really need to get an undergraduate degree at an elite university. Most students will do just as well by a state school at a much lower cost. If they're really good they'll have the grades to prove it and I believe that the graduate programs at those elite universities offer a lot more value.

I also wouldn't be surprised if those elite colleges are under-recruiting from this segment because they've been trying to push a more culturally diverse recruitment policy for a while now. If you're recruiting goals call for for more students from some category, you'll wind up with fewer from some other category by definition.

Re:smart

[ShanghaiBill]

People who attend Ivy League schools earn more than their non -Ivy counterparts

C!=C. Students that are accepted by Ivy League schools but choose to enroll elsewhere, do just as well as those that do enroll. So the evidence is that these schools are not better at educating, but just good at attracting applicants and filtering admissions.

Re:smart

[sexconker]

Realizing that the "value" of the education from these institutions is bullshit?

The ivy league is about already being connected, and nothing else. The rest of the big players are all about selling the lie that college is for everyone and college guarantees success. More and more people are realizing that's bullshit. So higher education is increasingly being marketed to the dumb and poor as a path to financial success. It's about as truthful as marketing cigarettes and beer to the poor as a path to social status.

Re: smart

[haonlladdis]

Can confirm for the American tech industry, at least anecdotally. Having talked with both private and public employers prior to choosing a higher education, the message I received was this: It's better for an applicant to be a big fish in a little pond [i.e. graduate with an IT degree in the top 10% of your community college class], than a little fish in a big pond [spend the same amount of effort, more money, and end up middle-of-the-pack with an IT degree in an "elite college/university"].

Re:smart

[dgatwood]

This. Similarly, the graduation rate doesn't tell you how good the school is at teaching. It just tells you what percentage of bad students they filtered out before admission. The higher the percentage of weak students, the lower the graduation rate. Each drop of one point in high school GPA corresponds with a 2x reduction in graduation rate.

In other words, this program doesn't give people a chance to attend the best schools, but rather gives people a chance to attend the most expensive, most elite schools. The burden of proof for whether the schools are "best" or not is whether the people brought in by this program end up with better graduation rates than similar students who attend other schools that didn't make the cut.

Re:smart

[erice]

People who attend Ivy League schools earn more than their non -Ivy counterparts

C!=C. Students that are accepted by Ivy League schools but choose to enroll elsewhere, do just as well as those that do enroll. So the evidence is that these schools are not better at educating, but just good at attracting applicants and filtering admissions.

Not necessarily. The students at Ivy League schools tend to come from wealthy, well-connected families. If they do just as well by not attending an Ivy League school, it may just mean that coming from a wealthy and well-connected family is sufficient advantage that going to an Ivy League school doesn't change much. The students that stand to gain the most from an elite education may very well be the very poor students who don't generally apply.

That makes them elite?

[HornWumpus]

70% graduation rate in 6 years can be achieved in two ways:

1. Only admit qualified students.

2. Pass everyone.

How about 70% graduation rate plus 70% get jobs, in field? Yes I know, they'd just corrupt the definition of 'in field'.

I'd say that their current method has produced a list of 'elite schools' plus 'diploma mills'.

Affordability

[BrookHarty]

There's a reason Colleges are called billion dollar hedge funds. The saying is Harvard is a hedge fund with a college attached.

College tuition keeps going up, the colleges know they will get paid. Kids cant file for bankruptcy if they cant pay their loans because they can't find work.

Go to a local community college, its the same price of buying a car for 4 years, and people can generally make car payments. In state online 5k, in state 10k, out of state 20k, Private 30k, Harvard 45k (starting). While everyone wants a Tesla, some can only afford a Prius. Costs matter.

The whole thing is a racket, overpriced, scam.

Re:Hmm

[slew]

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...

Re:Need more information

[sexconker]

You're a clown.

It's not about diplomas or lack of diplomas. It's about jobs, stupid.
If everyone has a high school diploma due to no child left behind, then you've got more competition. Better get that 4.0 GPA to get a good job to differentiate yourself from the people who would have otherwise flunked out.
If everyone has good grades due to grade inflation, then you've got more competition. Better get a 5.0 GPA instead to differentiate yourself from the people who benefited from grade inflation. ... Better get a college degree to separate yourself from the "basic" losers who only graduated high school. ... Better make sure it's from a $$$ 4-year "institution", not your perfectly respectable state/city/vocational college because that's worthless now too. ... Ivy league or bust. ... You're 28 and aren't yet working on your post doctoral research projects!?! How are you going to move out of your square foot studio???

Employers simply see a wider market - of dumb and complacent fools. A bigger stone to wring more blood out of.

Eventually society pays the price as we realize that churning out degrees for the sake of churning out degrees devalues the degrees, results in stupid people being in the same group as competent people, and ultimately gives oligarchs more control over everyone. Education is fine and dandy, but requiring people to take 4 years of a foreign language, 2 years of performance arts, etc. to get a basic job is absurd. As is making them spend 4 years of their life taking on debt and learning pretty much nothing applicable to the bleak job market they'll enter 4 years later into life than they need to.

Higher education is marketed as a path upward. But for the vast majority of people, it's simply a path downward into debt and shitty job prospects. Most people would be better served entering the job market earlier and skipping the cost of college, or by joining the military, or by learning a trade (such as plumbing, carpentry, welding, etc.).