Sarah Kendzior, one of my favorite critics of higher education, rants about the domination of wealthy kids at Ivy League colleges.
Only 3.8 percent of American families make more than $200,000 per year. But at Harvard University, 45.6 percent of incoming freshman come from families making $200,000 or more. A mere 4 percent of Harvard students come from a family in the bottom quintile of US incomes, and only 17.8 percent come from the bottom three quintiles.
Apt. 11d 
Every time I see these numbers I kind of have the opposite reaction: a majority (54%) of the incoming freshman are from families where the family income is less than $200,000, which means that the school likely is largely populated by the upper middle class. So it’s hard to say that a middle class kid would be lost there, even if some of the more exclusive clubs may be off limits.
And while I am not about to dispute the fact that the rich are disporportionately represented at Harvard, I think these cited data need some context. That 3.8% figure likely includes all families, ranging from 20-year olds on their own to senior citizens. Families with college-age children are typically at the peak of their earning capability, and I suspect that far more than 4% of them earn more than $200,000. But I also agree that it’s far less than 45 percent.
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As with the New York magazine article it cites, and which we discussed here, Kendzior’s article conflates several disparate phenomena under one heading.
She makes one legitimate point. To the extent that college admissions officers give more weight to internships and overseas enrichment programs than to after-school and summer jobs, that is an unfortunate attitude which perhaps disadvantages the working class. I don’t know to what extent that is the attitude in college admissions offices, but it should change. However, in days of yore, plenty of upper middle class kids worked as typists, receptionists, waitresses, motel maids, and dishwashers. (These are all jobs held by my wife, my sister, or I.) If colleges rewarded that kind of experience, they would go b
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I am pretty firmly convinced that Harvard gives significant weight to real after school/summer jobs and not too much weight to “overseas enrichment” programs. On the other hand, the summer spent completing an Intel winning (or a Nature publication) is going to get more weight than the summer spent at McDonalds.
It’s the Intel development/startup company/making a film that separates the 200K+ family income student from the McDonald’s worker (not the overseas enrichment). And, then, of course, there’s the 10M, billion dollar asset family (and the daughters of presidents — interesting, actually that the last 3 presidents all have only daughters and other famous people) who I presume are judged in a different category.
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1) Romanticism’s a trap. There isn’t a misty past in which Harvard was a force for social equality; the further back you go, the more wealthy and male the student body as a whole would be. (See _The Chosen_, by Jerome Karabel, for details.) In the past, prep schools were true feeder schools. There are tales of students putting their name down on lists at the college counseling center for the college of their choice.
2) It would be a good thing if college admissions stopped considering internships, community service, “entrepreneurship,” and athletic prowess. It would give all high school students breathing room to do things which interest them, rather than admissions committees. They might get more sleep, which would be better for their long-term health. I’m not holding my breath.
Mind you, I am also somewhat cynical about what such adventures signal to admissions officers. If you live on the East Coast, but take part in a college summer camp in Chicago, or an internship in Colorado, what are you signaling? Most students can’t afford the airfare, let alone everything else.
3) If one is seriously interested in this issue, rather than just having fun posting rabble-rousers, I recommend Espenshade & Radford, _No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life_.
The authors note: …our results suggest that taking a test preparation course is associated with at least a 50 percent decline in the odds of being admitted to an elite college, after controlling for the SAT or ACT score that a student receives.loc. 1752
in footnote discussing this point: … Briggs (2004) reports that students who are coached on the SAT are more likely than uncoached students to have used a private tutor during high school to help with homework and to have underachieved on the PSAT test relative to their high school GPA in math.(loc. 8543)
4) Joanne Jacobs links to Andy Smarick’s piece on “America and its High Potential Kids.” The public system does not do a good job preparing smart kids without educated, involved parents for elite universities. Improving options in the public system for the top third would be a Good Thing.
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Yeah, but those cases aren’t 54% of the class. Less than 10% at least. Maybe closer to 1%.
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Which cases? There are studies looking at what percent of elite admissions are legacy/developmental/athlete admits and I think they’re higher than 1 % (I think cited in Daniel Golden’s the “Price of Admission”).
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I wonder to what degree the 200,000 dollar families are those with two degree holding professional parents and “one perfect child.” It’s not that the poor kid can’t compete — it’s that it’s harder for the kid with siblings who has to share the parental attention to compete with the one who gets all of the family’s financial and emotional support trained on him; it’s also harder for a kid from a one income home to compete with someone from a two income home. it’s not actually the MONEY that makes it unfair. it’s that the money is a proxy for resources and attention.
Basically, we’re now producing American versions of the 4-2-1- Little Emperor.
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You are quite right about the “one perfect child.” Harvard has a lot of onlies, although I can’t find the stats at the moment.
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“it’s also harder for a kid from a one income home to compete with someone from a two income home.”
I do not agree with this one. I do not think the kid from the two-income home can compete with the kid who has the stay at home parent.
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These analyses typically combine categories, sometimes disingenuously, sometimes confusedly. Depending on the school, there may be a lot of recruited athletes. One can argue about whether colleges should devote so much energy and money to their sports programs, but that isn’t particularly related to questions of privilege. Many elite colleges have a fair number of alumni children, but (i) in many cases, it’s the alumni connection that makes the student choose the college (e.g., I got into Yale, but I also got into Harvard; it was my dad’s alumnus status that made me choose Yale) and (ii) in most cases, the alumni preference is pretty small (e.g., one of our friend’s daughters got into Dartmouth, but not Yale, where the mother is an alumna; clearly Yale wasn’t doing much if they couldn’t reach down to a Dartmouth admittee). There is also a much, much smaller number of people who can and do pay seven figure amounts to get their children into HYP, or six figure amounts for the lesser Ivies. (I know some names, but I don’t think it’s proper to call out my friends.) There can’t be more than 10 or 20 kids in the typical Ivy class of 1500 who fall into this category, so i can’t get worked up about it.
There are also URM preferences, which are statistically much greater than the vanilla legacy preferences, though not as big as athletic preferences at some schools. I doubt that these issues can be usefully discussed in blog comments, however.
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a friend of mine and her husband both make upwards of $500k a year. Their kid attended a “prestigious” prep school as a day student right in their neighborhood. This kid has no stats to speak of, zero APs, played the fool all day, did drama and theater (not at a national or even state level btw, just school plays), and still got into Princeton, in the MATH program. And guess what, the kid gets to stay 5 minutes away from om and dad again. How does that even begin to happen? Money and influence. Meanwhile, another friend whose son did AIME and IMO, did not get in to any first choice college, even with an IVY legacy parent.
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