In today's New York Times, Ross Douthat writes about recent studies of admission practices at elite colleges. These studies show that lower-class whites aren't getting the fat envelope that promises a spot an elite school at the same rate as wealthy white kids.
For minority applicants, the lower a family’s socioeconomic position,
the more likely the student was to be admitted. For whites, though, it
was the reverse. An upper-middle-class white applicant was three times
more likely to be admitted than a lower-class white with similar
qualifications.
While affirmative action programs have helped lower income minority students, there aren't the same practices set in place to help lower income whites. In fact, wealthy white kids have an advantage over less wealthy white kids. Why? Legacies?
Douthat, to his credit, isn't begrudging the minority students their place at Harvard. He calls for a great move to get lower income, white kids into elite schools. There are obvious benefits to increasing the income diversity at elite schools. It would mean less alienation among the working class, and it would deflate the popularity of conspiracy theorists, like Glenn Beck. Elites would stop seeing "crypto-Klansmen and budding Timothy McVeighs
everywhere they look."
Growing up, the lack of help for working-class Americans was a big theme around the dinner table. Both of my parents came from solid working-class families. My dad grew up on the South Side of Chicago and was the third generation to work in the steel mills. He lucked out, had some great teachers at the University of Illinois, transferred to the University of Chicago, and later earned a PhD.
My mom is second-generation Italian and grew up in the Bronx. Despite angry protests from my grandfather, she worked two jobs to get her BA from Hunter College. My brother and sister and I benefited from my parent's struggles. We grew up in a middle class town, where college was mandatory, and SAT classes were the norm. Many of my Irish cousins in Chicago and my Italian cousins in the Bronx weren't so lucky; some went to college, others didn't. At the dinner table, we were repeatedly reminded about how lucky we are and how education was important. There was also lots of mutterings about the cousins could have used a break in life, too.
Instead of college scholarships, we have the guilty habit of MTV's Jersey Shore, where Italian-Americans have been turned into two-dimensional punchlines.
Over the years, affirmative action programs have been expanded beyond their original mission to bring in more minorities to college. Men are now the beneficiaries of affirmative action, as colleges struggle to provide dates for the smart sorority sisters. Like Douthat, I believe that affirmative action should be expanded to increase economic diversity. At the very least, working class kids shouldn't be bumped out of spot at an elite school to make room for the legacy students.
Apt. 11d 
I wonder about change in that over time. I think the age of Sputnik, although not at all enlightened racially, did get some people from the rural poor into colleges, under the provision they study science. I think Johns Hopkins took at least a student from every county in Maryland in those days.
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Isn’t the magic phrase “first generation” college students? Certainly we’re trying to recruit them, and they are in many (most?) of the post-matriculation support programs too… I thought that was true for a lot of private institutions now? Certainly there’s MUCH more of an emphasis than 10 or 20 years ago. (I don’t know how big an issue legacies are for us, though, since our grads mostly don’t make serious money anyway.)
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I wouldn’t conclude that working class kids are being bumped from elite schools “to make room for the legacy students.” For one thing, “legacy,” to me, connotes students whose parents or grandparents attended a college, and the problem is much larger than that. There’s a better summation of the study by Russell Nieli, on “Minding the Campus,” http://tinyurl.com/34wpfpq. Its title reads, “How Diversity Punishes Asians, Poor Whites, and Lots of Others.”
Having money in the family greatly improved a white applicant’s admissions chances, lack of money greatly reduced it. The opposite class trend was seen among non-whites, where the poorer the applicant the greater the probability of acceptance when all other factors are taken into account. Class-based affirmative action does exist within the three non-white ethno-racial groupings, but among the whites the groups advanced are those with money.
When lower-class whites are matched with lower-class blacks and other non-whites the degree of the non-white advantage becomes astronomical: lower-class Asian applicants are seven times as likely to be accepted to the competitive private institutions as similarly qualified whites, lower-class Hispanic applicants eight times as likely, and lower-class blacks ten times as likely. These are enormous differences and reflect the fact that lower-class whites were rarely accepted to the private institutions Espenshade and Radford surveyed. Their diversity-enhancement value was obviously rated very low.
If this study reflects the current state of affairs, I predict an elite institution would accept the child of a wealthy real-estate magnate over the legacy child of a librarian.
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It’s disingenuous here to compare the rich white from the poor whites as if you could “fix” the problem by admitting more of the latter and fewer or the former. The number of rich applicants — where which is defined as “not getting good financial aid” — most of whom are white, can’t change without completely changing the funding mechanisms for colleges. In order to make their budgets, schools only have a certain number of slots for financial aid students. The paragraph below is kind of a throwaway, but it’s also kind of the point:
This may be a money-saving tactic. In a footnote, Espenshade and Radford suggest that these institutions, conscious of their mandate to be multiethnic, may reserve their financial aid dollars “for students who will help them look good on their numbers of minority students,” leaving little room to admit financially strapped whites.
Is Douthat supporting more government money to “elite colleges” to permit more poor kids to attend? Is he supporting price controls? Is he advocating any change away from free market principals in elite-college funding?
Of course he isn’t. And if he is not offering ideas to get more money to colleges from sources other than “the parents of the rich white kids,” then he’s not really advocating the reduction of the number of rich, white kids. He’s just saying that he’d like more poor white kids instead of poor minorities.
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that’s because thei perceived diversity enhancement of lower income *white* students is lower than that of minority students. These schools are enhancing economic diversity– they’re just doing it with twofers, minority students who bring both economic and racial diversity.
I do think schools use the calcs used by those who do the rankings of schools–so diversity that gets counted (race) will be overplayed in admissions compared to diversity that doesn’t get counted (rural/urban?). I’d like to see more reporting of other diversity. I also see this effect when Asians are described – sometimes they’re reported as minorities, other times not ( if only under-represented minorities are counted). The effects end up being different.
Also, which schools were considered? I’ve found that practices vary significantly among the top, elite, and super-elite schools.
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“He’s just saying that he’d like more poor white kids instead of poor minorities.”
Isn’t that the real point of these analyses? a feature, not a bug? My guess is that the article is a reflection of the much bigger view that racial diversity (and more importantly the underlying history and practice of racism) are no longer relevant. In this context, and in Laura’s depiction, though, class is still relevant.
The problem, as ragtime points out, is that economically the only likely result would be to be race-blind, but not class-blind. End result: a less racially diverse, but equally economically undiverse population.
I think that’s ok with some, ’cause they rhino that admission should be both class and race blind. But I’m not sure how big this group is.
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The spell checker/ automatic woes (should be word) substitution on the iPad needs work. Why would my iPad substitute rhino for think? I guess cause the r is next to the t so rhink becomes rhino instead of think. Apple needs to work on that. They’re both one letter substitutions, and think must have a higher usage frequency than rhino.
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I still have such an issue with the term “working class” and understanding what is meant by it. I always consider my family history as low-income middle class. In 1983, my dad was a teacher. Teacher salaries were low then. We rented; my parents did not own our house. I am white. My dad had graduated from college, but he was the only one on both sides of my family to do so. Yet I was able to go to an Ivy League college with scholarships/loans. Thanks to the Cornell Tradition, I even graduated nearly debt-free (only one year of college loans). My dad struggled to pay for room/board, but I had a job on campus and worked during summers. I even had a barely-paid internship ($50 a week?) in Manhattan one summer. (Cornell Tradition helped there–they gave me a stipend or something to supplement the internship.)
I don’t know what it was–luck? Hard work? Intelligence? Something else? An ability to live on next-to-nothing because I never had had much? What it wasn’t was networking, family income, connections, or know-how.
I agree with Ragtime, too. The universities have to enroll full-paying students to pay for the ones that need financial aid. At my university, we’ve been doing great financially. We got our raises the past few years, no employees have been laid off, and only our classroom budget and professional development funds have been cut, really. But how are we doing it? By admitting rich international students. I guess we’re exporting the only commodity we have left here in America–higher education.
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I really should read those studies, instead of relying on Douthat’s interpretation, but it seems that he’s saying that the schools are accepting rich students over working-class students with the same grades. This is really different from accepting the working-class kid, but not offering him/her a scholarship, so he/she has to go to SUNY-Binghamton.
I’m a public college girl. I received my BA and my PHD from public schools and have taught at two different public colleges. I really liked the students at public colleges, and there are some fabulous public colleges that give students great educations. So, in some ways, it’s not a terrible thing for the smart, working-class kid to go to SUNY-Binghamton and not Cornell. But Steve’s been talking about which resumes get sorted to the top of the pile for entry level jobs at his office. Mediocre private schools like NYU get preference over excellent public colleges, because of name recognition. Gag.
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NYU is mediocre? Must be some inside info that us non-academic types are not privy to.
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At the private institutions in their study whites from lower-class backgrounds incurred a huge admissions disadvantage not only in comparison to lower-class minority students, but compared to whites from middle-class and upper-middle-class backgrounds as well. The lower-class whites proved to be all-around losers. When equally matched for background factors (including SAT scores and high school GPAs), the better-off whites were more than three times as likely to be accepted as the poorest whites (.28 vs. .08 admissions probability).
I have difficulty discussing this as a distinction between Poor and Rich. I have friends who are going into debt to finance their children’s educations. It is a result of financial aid decisions, rather than a preference for wealth.
The entire structure would come tumbling down, if the middle class were unable to take out second mortgages to finance their children’s educations.
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“This is really different from accepting the working-class kid, but not offering him/her a scholarship, so he/she has to go to SUNY-Binghamton.”
But many of the really elite (i.e. Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT, Caltech) offer the officially required (i.e. what the FAFSA form says) financial aid to every student they admit. Not all “top” schools (NYU, Johns Hopkins) offer the same guarantee. So, for those schools, there’s no “offer admittance” but don’t offer aide. Of course, those schools also say that they don’t use need in determining who they admit. Some of those institutions also have a guarantee that if you make under a max and have “typical” assets, you won’t pay for school. I’d be interested in knowing whether those guarantees have changed the admission rates among the “poorer” students in the admission pool (especially those who aren’t “twofers”/”threefers”).
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Hey, my dad went to NYU. Of course, that was after he got kicked out of Brooklyn Poly.
Just like we have to complicate the notion of what the working class is, I think we have to complicate the notion of what success is. I just heard that a former student got a promotion to Sales Manager at the hotel she works at. This is awesome for her (especially since she was a poor writer, but …). Maybe Steve’s firm is picking out the Ivy Leaguers, but would a Cornell hotel student have gotten my former student’s job? Or did she earn it through hard work and experience and putting in the time? Did her connections at a mediocre (I love my workplace, but it’s no Cornell) university help her more than the rigorous Cornell education would have? Is location important? Would an Iowa hotel be more likely to hire an Iowan native with a degree from UIowa than an elitist snob from Cornell?
Laura, if there’s one criticism I’d ever have of you/this blog it’s that you seem to see NYC as the Center of the Universe and the jobs that are important to the professional class in the NYC area as the Only Jobs Worth Having and the only measure of success.
But then again, maybe the NYC-centric jobs are where the political/economic power lies. That’s not success per se, but it is power.
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” Mediocre private schools like NYU get preference over excellent public colleges, because of name recognition. Gag. ”
I think name recognition plays a role, but there’s another factor (I’ve noted it more clearly in law schools). The employer is using the college admission process as a stand-in for doing vetting in their own, out sourcing the evaluation of merit among their applicants. If NYU has a more selective application process than SUNY-Binghamton and you believe that the college admissions process picks the “smart”, “driven”, “organization” kids, , then it doesn’t matter what the quality of the education (unless it was actively worse than at NYU).
I think this is a common opinion of people who enter the college admissions race, and that’s why the middle class parents are willing to take out a second loan on their house to send their kids to NYU. The lower-income parent, in addition to not having the ability to take out the second loan, is probably also less willing to do so, as they’re less likely to see it as having value.
And, in law, one of the things that shocks me is adverts you see where people are looking for high level employees, general counsels, even, and still use “top 10 law school” as a criterion, for people who are 10-20 years out of law school.
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NYU is less than the tippy top. The tippy top are Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia.
Some people might throw out a thread thrown out to MIT & Caltech (though a thin thread, ’cause they’re boutique schools, so only really count if you’re science-oriented).
Then you get places like Dartmouth, NYU, Cornell, UPenn, Northwestern, Emory, Vanderbilt. And then, there are the colleges, like Amherst, Rice, Reed, . . .
(Though, of course, Laura might have been talking about the actual evaluation of NYU’s mediocrity, rather than their reputation.)
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Cornell has a “hotel” program?
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Haha, don’t encourage me to get snotty. Oh, too late. Cornell has 7 schools. 4 are private: Arts & Sciences, Engineering, Hotel, and Architecture Art and Planning. 4 are state schools: Agriculture, Industrial & Labor Relations, and Human Ecology. It was not uncommon for private school majors to feel a sense of superiority to the state schoolers: “Well, he’s an Aggie.” “She only got in through Hum Ec.”
The Hotel School was private, but that didn’t stop us Arts and Engineering majors in my dorm from making fun of the hotelies anyway. Over near Sage there was a small bridge over a small creek. One of my friends used to call it the Hotelie Bridge because he said when Hotelies got depressed over not getting an A in “Wines,” they’d jump off there and twist an ankle. (You have to have a lot of jumping off bridge jokes as an undergrad there.) There was also a class they all called Cookies; the only requirement was attendance, and they always served cookies.
(Please note: this was in no way mean-spirited, just my group of friends being jokesters. The real animosity was between Engineering and AAP.)
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Cornell has 7 schools. 4 are private:… 4 are state schools:
Is the math department private or public?
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Oh my, and I thought I was being snarky when I asked if Cornell had a hotel program.
At my undergraduate institution, in the old days (it’s changed now), people used to make the same sort of jokes about the Biology majors.
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LOL, sorry. Editing error. 4 private, 3 state. I had it backwards, then edited, and the rest is a set-up for an MH joke. 😉
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Mediocre private schools like NYU get preference over excellent public colleges, because of name recognition. Gag.
That’s anecdote, but I don’t think the numbers back that up. Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article on this that I think I cited before, that essentially says what college you go to doesn’t matter.
http://www.learntoquestion.com/resources/database/archives/001429.html
“You’ll make good contacts at Penn. But Penn State is big enough and diverse enough that you can make good contacts there, too. Having Penn on your résumé opens doors. But if you were good enough to get into Penn you’re good enough that those doors will open for you anyway.”
Laura, if there’s one criticism I’d ever have of you/this blog it’s that you seem to see NYC as the Center of the Universe and the jobs that are important to the professional class in the NYC area as the Only Jobs Worth Having and the only measure of success.
I agree, but I think it cuts both ways. NYU is ranked #32 by US News, but since it’s only the sixth or seventh best school within a 2-hour drive of Manhattan, it gets demoted to “mediocre.”
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People always forget the other of Pennsylvania’s large universities.
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Indiana University of Pennsylvania?
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Arcadia University? The only institution of higher learning to change it’s name (from Beaver College) to avoid lewd jokes about its name?
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Indiana University of Pennsylvania?
That and “California University of Pennsylvania” confuse me. I’m waiting for Harvard University of Pennsylvania.
Arcadia University?
I had no idea they changed names.
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At Vanderbilt, you can buy ‘Harvard of the South’ stuff. However, in Cambridge I never saw ‘Vanderbilt of the North’ merchandise… Miami U of Ohio was always confusing.
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Confusingly, Indiana University of Pennsylvania is often referred to as the Perdue of the east.
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Anyway, I’ve been thinking about the topic of the post and I think the bigger problem isn’t that working class whites have more trouble getting into elite colleges. I think the bigger problem is the greater significance attached to elite college educations. I want a new elite, but I don’t think the SAT is going to be the best way to pick it.
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I’ve read a lot of complaints about the US News ranking system. It’s been a while, since I knew the Barron’s college rankings by heart, but I believe that NYU is a second tier school. There are many public colleges in the area that are more selective, including The College of New Jersey and several SUNY schools. Not to mention all the excellent public colleges, which a little further away like UVa or Michigan. NYU also has a $50,000 price ticket.
Yes, Steve’s NYU story was an anecdote and NYC-centric. It was just a comment on a blog post. No biggie.
I’m still stuck on why rich white kids are getting more acceptance letters than working class white kids with equal grades and SAT scores. Is it all the extras, likes clubs and enrichment activities? Ability to pay for tuition shouldn’t come into play yet.
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James Nieli proposes a reason:
Espenshade and Radford do not address this conundrum but the answer is easy to discern. The ugly truth is that most colleges, especially the more competitive private ones, are fiercely concerned with their ratings by rating organizations like U.S. News & World Report. And an important part of those ratings consist of a numerical acceptance rate (the ratio of applicants received to those accepted) and a yield score (the ratio of those accepted to those who enroll). The lower the acceptance rate and the higher the yield score the more favorably colleges are looked upon. In extending admissions to well-qualified but financially strapped whites who are unlikely to enroll, a college would be driving both its acceptance rate and its yield score in the wrong direction.
This year, the college outcomes for the graduating seniors from our town was not stellar (at least that was my impression.) It could be that the curricular set-up at the local high school makes it difficult for the bright kids to distinguish themselves. However, it could also be that the children of middle-class parents chose to attend less selective schools, because those schools were more affordable–either the colleges demanded lower tuition, or offered good students merit scholarships (really, discounts on tuition.)
Sure, it could be extracurriculars. As I grow older, and more curmudgeonly, though, I tend to regard the extracurriculars as evidence of parents with money and time to invest in a child’s upbringing. For every prodigy a piano teacher takes on for a reduced rate, there are thousands of Muffies. (i.e., Muffy Crosswire, from Arthur).
National rankings are a good explanation for the differences in admissions outcomes.
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“I want a new elite, but I don’t think the SAT is going to be the best way to pick it.”
SAT prep is dirt cheap if you do it at home and just grind away at practice problems (at least it was back in the day). Far more problematic is the top colleges’ embrace of “well-rounded” students, who tend to be the hot-house product of expensive cultivation.
On the conservative side of the blogosphere, a lot of people are paying attention to this snippet:
“Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student’s chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. “Being an officer or winning awards” for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, “has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions.” Excelling in these activities “is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission.””
http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/07/how_diversity_punishes_asians.html
It would be very interesting if that is true.
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Here’s an article on the Bloomberg’s interns that I saw over at Steve Sailer’s place. (I know you’re not supposed to mention the guy, but what an eye for articles.) What wonderful college application and resume fodder!
“Of course, it is not unusual for young people with connections to win choice internships in all kinds of workplaces. But the records offer a glimpse inside the social and power circles of the Bloomberg administration, which has accommodated dozens of young people with connections to the mayor’s friends, business associates and government appointees for the prestigious, if unpaid, slots.”
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I observed the same thing that cranberry did at her high school and I know that yield is an important number for these schools.
The college enrollment management departments have this all figured out. Who’s more likely to enroll after being accepted – the rich kid with parents willing to shell out $50k per year tuition or the poor/middle class kid who, even with financial aid, would find it hard to scrape together the remaining $10-30k needed to attend?
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And it stands to reason that rich minority kids are a bonus for colleges. These kids help the schools get their diversity numbers up at relatively low cost. I don’t think many people are paying attention to “income diversity” stats.
After all these calculations, there’s just not a lot of room left for poor white kids.
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I’m still stuck on why rich white kids are getting more acceptance letters than working class white kids with equal grades and SAT scores.
Application fees? Self-selecting out of expensive colleges early? Following the rules, instead of applying to multiple Ivies early decision?
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Hey! AmyP! I read the guy all the time. Here is yet another great catch from him: http://isteve.blogspot.com/2010/07/in-new-york-times-popular-principle.html
He is consistently interesting, often right, and somewhat too interested in golf.
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If elite colleges are really not admitting students, because they won’t be able to afford the tuition, that’s outrageous. It’s one thing to not recruit lower income kids. It’s another thing to discriminate against them. Up against the wall, all of you!
My two cents on picking a college for your kid… If your kid is so driven that they can accepted to an Ivy League school, then send them if you can. Not because of the educational opportunities, but because of the old boys club and the name recognition. It will open doors for your kid. However, no other private school is worth the money, when there are equally fine public schools with half the price ticket. The only reason to go to a non-Ivy league private school is your kid needs specialization in a particular area. For example, my sister transferred out of SUNY Binghamton after two years and went to Georgetown, because she needed a better language department. After getting straight A’s at Binghamton, she was able to get a free ride at Georgetown.
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he only reason to go to a non-Ivy league private school is your kid needs specialization in a particular area.
That seems a bit extreme as there are private schools that will open doors in a given region. Looking for work in Chicago is much easier with a Notre Dame. There are school like that in most regions of the country.
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Application fees? Self-selecting out of expensive colleges early? Following the rules, instead of applying to multiple Ivies early decision?
Application fees are commonly waived for lower-income students.
Self-selecting is a possibility IF working class white students actually know that their chances are lower.
I don’t think applying to multiple schools ED is common at all, given how this can create a big black mark against a guidance counselor and/or the high school.
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I will grant you that it’s 20+ years ago since I’ve been in college, but I’m not sure the old boys network or connections ever did anything for me. I know there’s a big network among Harvard people in the entertainment business. I think it depends what kind of career you’re going into.
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I don’t think applying to multiple schools ED is common at all, given how this can create a big black mark against a guidance counselor and/or the high school.
Kids at smaller high schools are pretty much on their own. I was the only person my year to send an application to an out of state school. The only thing our guidance counselor did for me was give me a perpetual pass out of study hall. I had outside advice, but I’m sure plenty of kids in my situation didn’t have uncles who were professors.
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“That seems a bit extreme as there are private schools that will open doors in a given region. Looking for work in Chicago is much easier with a Notre Dame. There are school like that in most regions of the country.”
Yes, I believe University of Southern California is very similar that way (or used to be).
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“I know there’s a big network among Harvard people in the entertainment business.”
The same thing seems to go for Harvard and punditry. Have you ever noticed how many otherwise inexplicably successful young pundits are Harvard men?
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I’m intrigued by the suggestion that ROTC or 4H leadership positions might be a black mark. The conventional wisdom I hear is that those things might make you stand out. 4H programs are getting particularly good points. My inclination would be that 4H is loosing out because the rich white kid won an intel science competition, compared to the national 4H competition.
Did the article say anything about girl and boy scouts? Eagle scout used to be a cv builder, even and perhaps especially for big name schools (Harvard’s search for manly men, as detailed in the chosen). Is it not any more, or is Rotc bad and eagle scout good?
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seems to me that the private public distinction is very similar to making the same decision for public/private for K-12. It simply isn’t a very reliable investment so you have to decide whether you can afford it, not whether you need it (you usually don’t) or want it (fine but then you have to be able to afford it).
I’ll note that for a low income student, really low income, Harvard costs less than a Suny. once you start considering law and medical school the difference between the good publics and privates also starts to disappear.
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ROTC and Boy Scouts can both indicate homophobia or a tolerance of it. Elite universities and Congress have been fighting about this stuff.
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We’ve always suspected that near-moribund heritage organizations would be a good source of scholarship money but this thread is giving me second thoughts about encouraging my daughter to apply with the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
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I’m still stuck on why rich white kids are getting more acceptance letters than working class white kids with equal grades and SAT scores. Is it all the extras, likes clubs and enrichment activities? Ability to pay for tuition shouldn’t come into play yet.
Isn’t the simplest answer a combination of what you said (rich kids have more clubs and enrichment activities) along with the fact that colleges assume (with some good reason) that a kid who got a 3.2 GPA at a high school with rich, white kids got a better education than a kid who got a 3.2 GPA in a white working class high school?
Working class white schools may have more worksheets, and fill in the blanks, compared to more research and essay writing in rich-kid schools. Similarly, many good teachers prefer to work in schools where there is support from parents, and adequate supplies.
And, while many extra-curriculars are intended as “resume boosters,” that doesn’t mean that my years on the Science Team (“This’ll make me look more well rounded, and not just an English geek!”) didn’t also teach me lots of science that I wouldn’t have learned in the classroom.
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Confusingly, Indiana University of Pennsylvania is often referred to as the Perdue of the east.
And yet, I’ve never heard Northwestern ever referred to as “The Northeastern of the North.”
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“Isn’t the simplest answer a combination of what you said (rich kids have more clubs and enrichment activities) along with the fact that colleges assume (with some good reason) that a kid who got a 3.2 GPA at a high school with rich, white kids got a better education than a kid who got a 3.2 GPA in a white working class high school?”
The availability of AP courses is also very different from school to school, I’d imagine.
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If your child wants to go to a local, private liberal arts college, there’s a pretty low cost to the application these days, but encourage her to apply to a similar college in another region of the country, too. College admissions offices are still on the lookout for geographic diversity, no matter what’s going on with their other admissions policies.
(I think the commentariat has covered all the culprits here: admissions offices watching acceptance rates, working-class white kids attending schools with lesser/perceived-lesser qualifications than wealthy kids, the two-fer bonus of Latino/African-American admissions, and the need to admit enough kids to pay the bills. Ratios vary by region, probably?)
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Yeah, we hit on most of the culprits here, Jody. And all of them are disgusting. Admissions offices care more about their rankings and discriminate against working class kids who will accept, but may not be able to pay. Minority students count as twofers?!! That’s insulting.
While it might be harder to get an A in middle class high school than in a working class town, SAT scores are SAT scores where ever you go. This study found that admissions departments weren’t admitting working class kids who had the same SAT scores as rich kids.
The study also said that working class kids were doing extracurricular activities. However, their extracurricular activities, like the 4H club, actually worked against them. I’m not sure what the 4H club does, but I’m sure you learn some stuff about science and agriculture, right? That should count just as much as the science club at a rich school.
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4H is a USDA thing, so it’s your tax dollars at work. I did 4H as a 6th grader, and it was great fun. A friend’s mom who lived in town ran the club (they weren’t farmers–they had an auto parts store). I did the baking group and learned about yeast, how to bake biscuits, and how to make peppermint ice cream by rolling a can on the floor. I think that the various interest groups (bunny-raising, dog care, etc.) would all meet once a month, and the kids would bring in baked goods for the refreshments (I made a molasses cake once). There was a notebook that you needed to keep of your activities. At the end of the year, we were all supposed to do the county fair. I submitted biscuits and muffins and came off with various ribbons. I also did a baking demonstration at the county fair, where you need to prepare something while talking about it to the examiner. Years earlier, my dad and his brother raised vegetables for 4H for the county fair. It’s also traditional for farm kids to raise a cow or sheep for sale at the fair.
4H has a very broad range of options for kids, and this is worth reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4H
I’d eventually like to see what our local 4H offerings are and maybe sign my kids up, or maybe even run a group.
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Yes, membership in the Boy Scouts is widely seen (by players at elite college institutions) as potential evidence of anti-gay sentiment (or, at the very least, a willingness to tolerate discrimination). But, what I was asking is whether that sentiment had started influencing admissions in the “elite” colleges (at least according to the study that we’re all talking about, but not read). Historically, being an Eagle Scout was definitely a boost on a college application. Has that changed?
My guess is that low-income whites do not have the CVs to compete with high-income whites. Low-income non-whites may not either, but that they are admitted because they’re seen as enhancing both economic and racial diversity in the school body. Oh, and the CV competition includes playing elite/expensive sports like sailing and golf, being a legacy, or a faculty child.
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Also, I think that the diversity criterion is an intersting one. The article cranberry linked to said that the schools aim for 5-7% african american students, 5-7% hispanic. I would guess, that, in fact, they try to aim for 5-7% for several diversity criterion (mormon, jews, asians, urban/rural, violin players, artists, mathematicians, lower income white, . . . .). Then, the try to have enough money to keep their program going and their reputation high (i.e. accepting children of alumni, famous people, . . . .). This makes designing the class kind of like casting a large reality show.
I don’t find it at all disgusting that equally qualified low-income students are treated differently based on their diversity enhancing effect on other factors (including their race). But, I would be troubled by equally demanding leadership positions resulting in different treatment (i.e. affirmative action for better off but average high income students). That’s why I’d like to know more about the 4H idea (or church leadership positions — are they also a net negative? They should be if the activities are being used as “red” state markers).
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OK, I haven’t read Espenshade’s and Radford’s book, but I’ve been reading about it. Also, you can find parts of the book on Google Book. I ran a search for 4-H, and what I found is very different from what is suggested here. E&R do not say anything about working class or perceptions about the red-state-iness of these activities. Their phrasing talks about “career-oriented activities” that might suggest students are “undecided about their future.”
Perhaps the Google Book Search only searches the available pages, and there is more discussion of this elsewhere in the book.
Also, the same page says taking an SAT prep course leads to a 50% decrease in the odds of admission.
Methinks the book should be read before we discourse upon it further. When are we going to learn that when right-wing bloggers/tv personalities get all ginned up about something, it’s usually way overstated? (See Shirley Sherrod.)
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I’ve done admissions interviews for my top-5-in-US-News alma mater since I graduated, and over the decade the only two students I’ve had admitted were both Eagle Scouts. I can see that sort of blackballing happening at Hampshire or Reed, but my institution is not that… neurotic.
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Isn’t Reed basically Arizona State for stoners? Or do I have it confused with something else?
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Hm, I was just poking around looking for info on Eagle Scouts in my area and I found out that not only is my Democratic state rep an Eagle Scout, but so is his son, and his son is currently attending Brown, which is arguably the most liberal of the Ivies.
I am increasingly convinced that where you go to college does not determine your career or your happiness. We’ll see how I feel in 6 years when my daughter starts applying, but I was at a parent support group (our kids were having a social skills group thing) today and one of the parents very wisely said, “I don’t think our [ASD] kids will end up doing anything [career-wise] that they’re not interested in.” LOL, so true.
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“Their phrasing talks about “career-oriented activities” that might suggest students are “undecided about their future.””
And yet, pretty much by definition, if you are of non-college going extraction, you are most likely going to be undecided and confused about your future, and there may be a lot of false starts. Even middle class kids do that, but it’s a very essential part of the class difference–not knowing where various doors lead, or what are the keys you might use to open them, and worse yet, not really being able to understand it or take it in if somebody knowledgeable explains it to you. My parents both have master’s degrees, but due to my rural/blue collar upbringing, although I was college bound, I had only the foggiest notions of what you do with a college degree. In fact, when I was a high school student, I was quite sure that I would finish college and then come back and work on the ranch. I wasn’t particularly excited about it, but that’s what I knew, and my parents had come back to farm life after getting their degrees, so I would, too. You don’t know what you don’t know.
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Reed is for pre-stoners who have very high SAT scores. Is that true about Arizona State?
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In SAT format, my question was:
Beer:ASU::pot:Reed?
Apparently not, if Reed is for high SAT scores.
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I find it sad that high school kids are thinking about building up CV’s. I remember that went on at my high school twenty years ago, but I think it’s worse now. I had a nice chat with a high school kid who’s attending my former high school. He was a genuinely sweet kid, but he was volunteering at all sorts of activities, because he knew it would look good on his college application.
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“And yet, pretty much by definition, if you are of non-college going extraction, you are most likely going to be undecided and confused about your future.”
I strongly disagree with this. Our students (at my uni) tend to have very strong ideas about what they want to do, and many of them are first-generation college students.
Some are confused, yes, but I saw that in the Ivy League, too.
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“I strongly disagree with this. Our students (at my uni) tend to have very strong ideas about what they want to do, and many of them are first-generation college students.”
But those are the ones your college let in, who manage to pay the bills, and who stick around, and it’s not clear from what you say that their plans are necessarily realistic or effective. It’s way harder than you might think to know how to get from point A to point B if you haven’t been there before, or if nobody close to you has been there before. However, I suppose it’s somewhat easier in the internet age.
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CV building in high school? I’ve had two conversations with parents of 8-9 year olds about their cv building plans for their kids. It is the parents, and not the kids, but scary nonetheless.
I also think the careerism in today’s high schools is very sad. I hope admissions officers can see through it but that might be my rose colored glasses working again.
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“But those are the ones your college let in, who manage to pay the bills, and who stick around, and it’s not clear from what you say that their plans are necessarily realistic or effective.”
But that’s not what you said. You said if you’re of non-college-going extraction, you’re likely to be confused and undecided, not “if you don’t go to college, you’re likely to be confused and undecided,” which is kind of obvious. I’m pointing out that many first-generation students do have an idea about what they want to do. And I know our students’ plans are realistic/effective because we sort of make it our business here to know. And we’re not very selective here, either. I’m not saying we never have clueless kids who come in and major in general business, but we have very specific career-oriented majors that attract kids who know what they want to do.
I think I’m the person here who has teaching experiences at the widest variety of colleges/universities. I haven’t taught out of the US as you have, but I have taught at many different kinds of institutions: Top 10 university, liberal arts college, community college, state university, smaller private universities in different areas of the country. I’m pretty student-focused, and because I teach writing, I tend to see a lot of different majors and discuss with students their career goals because they insist to me that they don’t need to know how to write. 🙂
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“And I know our students’ plans are realistic/effective because we sort of make it our business here to know.”
“I’m not saying we never have clueless kids who come in and major in general business, but we have very specific career-oriented majors that attract kids who know what they want to do.”
I think that it’s quite meritorious to pay so much attention to guidance, but not nearly as common as it ought to be. Remember that there are many colleges that have a really shockingly low graduation rate.
http://blog.nj.com/njv_bob_braun/2009/10/former_princeton_university_pr.html
One of the NJ public colleges has a 6% 4-year graduation rate. That’s the worst one, but the NJ public college graduation rate tops off at around 68%.
This may sound odd, but I think there is a pretty good analogy here to graduate programs. For a non-college extraction person, the undergraduate terrain is just as confusing and overwhelming as the graduate world is for somebody who hasn’t done a doctorate before or who wasn’t raised in the academic world. Also, there are similar issues with family/financial/real life stuff that doesn’t arise with a “traditional” undergraduate. Even at the graduate level, I think there needs to be a lot more hand-holding than faculty usually deem necessary. The clock (of university support and growing family obligations) is remorselessly ticking away, and it’s very important to make sure that all the time (or as much as possible) is well spent. (My husband works on his department’s graduate program, and job #1 is making sure that as much progress as possible happens during the five years of guaranteed support. The other job #1 is making sure that the job search process is well-supervised. It’s hard to keep track of everybody, but my husband has a big list of graduate students to take to lunch. While you do hear a lot about undergraduates being stiffed in favor of graduate students, in reality, I think that very few professors are good at being advisors. Being in many cases shufflers, disorganized, and procrastinators themselves, they are ill-suited to supervise others and keep them from wasting time.)
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“Remember that there are many colleges that have a really shockingly low graduation rate.”
I’ve taught at a few of them.
Part of the rise in costs in academia came from increasing the number of advisors and support staff. There are people whose job it is to advise these students–a lot of people. I worked for 6 years in this kind of job at one college, and I am aware of the various programs and policies and staff that many universities use.
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“Part of the rise in costs in academia came from increasing the number of advisors and support staff. There are people whose job it is to advise these students–a lot of people. I worked for 6 years in this kind of job at one college, and I am aware of the various programs and policies and staff that many universities use.”
Which ways of doing it work? I don’t recall ever getting much insight from academic advisors during undergrad. When I was in graduate school, the grad academic advisor was a guy that the graduate students called Satan (complete with a horn gesture when talking about him in hushed tones in cubeville). He was supposed to be a very effective teacher, but a high proportion of young women who went in to talk to him seemed to come out streaming tears. I didn’t seek out opportunities to go talk to him, but I expect he could have told me stuff worth knowing–if I could have gotten myself to brave his office.
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“I don’t recall ever getting much insight from academic advisors during undergrad.”
Neither do I. Which is why I made reference to the rising costs and increases. 🙂 This is new, and it’s new because more and more first-generation college students are attending colleges.
Sorry, this was my primary focus for 6-7 years in academic administration at 2 different institutions, and now I’m at an institution (as a faculty member) that has also made a special effort to increase retention.
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“Sorry, this was my primary focus for 6-7 years in academic administration at 2 different institutions, and now I’m at an institution (as a faculty member) that has also made a special effort to increase retention.”
So what is the magic cure? Is it pixie dust? Is it a magic feather? What is it?
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Since race was originally part of this discussion, I will say that anyone who’s not reading Ta-Nehisi Coates is missing out.
I don’t know if this is the best introduction, but wow. (And while the recommendation is topical, it’s a little inopportune in that his place will be mostly guest bloggers for the next six weeks as he does some serious Civil War research. Still, a great blog.)
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Whoever said there was a magic cure?
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“Whoever said there was a magic cure?”
Well, you did say that your college works really hard on this and gets good results, so naturally, I’m curious what you’re doing.
By the by, I had a brief thought of maybe working as a school guidance counselor someday (I feel like a better guidance counselor could have made a big difference at my old high school). Much to my dismay, I discovered that the Texas requirements are something like this for a college graduate (maybe not exactly in this order):
1. Get a teaching certificate.
2. Teach for two years.
3. Get a master’s degree in school counseling.
Not to be unkind, but based on what little I know, the system seems set up to offer an escape hatch to existing teachers who find that they don’t like teaching.
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Ah, well, working hard means there is no magic cure. It was a lot of stuff including research, identifying times when students are most likely to drop, then giving them what they need at that time.
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Isn’t Reed basically Arizona State for stoners? Or do I have it confused with something else?
Among affluent Midwestern high school students 15 years ago, Reed was the liberal arts equivalent of Emory — lots of people apply there, but it’s never anyone’s first choice.
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Snooki doesn’t like Obama: http://www.politico.com/click/stories/1007/snooki_v_obama_contd.html
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