New paper on determinants of college admissions…

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:…to highly selective colleges (8 ivies, Stanford, MIT, UChicago, Duke)

https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/CollegeAdmissions_Paper.pdf

The analysis shows that highest income applicants (top 1 percent) have an admission advantage over the average applicant due to: 1) legacy admissions; 2) athletic recruitment; 3) non-academic factors (e.g., private school extracurriculars). In fact, legacy admissions explain about half of the gap between acceptance rates between highest income and average applicants.

Also, attending IvyPlus colleges does improve earnings and leadership prospects after colleges. The authors do a nice job of identifying the causal effect of IvyPlus attendance.

Putting these findings together, the implication is that more socioeconomic diversity can be achieved without sacrificing academic quality by eliminating legacy admissions and athletic recruitment.

Actually it does not say that. Might want to actually spend some time with it before you type.

OP here. I have actually read the paper. What I wrote above is my summary of the findings (rather than a direct quotation). And yes, I am qualified to summarize an economics paper

If that is the case then your summary is incorrect. And I too read the paper and am qualified to evaluate the results.

Just curious: what are your qualifications?

Graduate degree in applied mathematical economics.

The paper is interesting but the conclusions are not what some here are taking away and there are nuances in the results when certain controls are put in place.

OP here. My qualifications: PhD from top3 Econ program (think MIT, Harvard, etc.) with specialization in econometrics. In fact, I took labor economics with one of the authors of the study.

That’s nice. My statement still holds in its entirety.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m having a hard time believing that eliminating athletic recruitment will change things unless they really mean eliminating most athletics.

Even if they tell coaches they can’t recruit, if they are going to field a squash team or a fencing team as examples, then they will still look for kids with squash and fencing championships who are going to come from the top 1%.

Without the recruiting preference, the demographic of squash and fencing team members would change.

How so? They are already migrating towards more foreign students so what do you believe would change? The families who poured tons into these sports believing that they would get an edge are already getting disappointed.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The Conclusion is on page 45.

“Attending Ivy plus over a state flagship substantially increases students’ chance of achieving upper-tail success both in terms of earnings and non-monetary outcomes. The magnitudes of the treatment effects are substantial: we estimate that attending an Ivy-plus college instead of a flagship public increases mean incomes by $101,000…”

People will cite short term post college outcomes (salary after graduation, 5 year, etc)- but not over lifetime when it really pays off.

For students evaluating the Ivy plus and state flagships as potential substitutes, you'd probably want to study differences only between students with comparable GPAs and standardized tests, because the talent, not the institution, may be driving the outcomes, and the average talent level at an Ivy plus is likely to be significantly higher than average talent at the state flagship.

Or you can compare performance of Ivy plus and state flagship classmates in graduate school, after those admissions essentially clear the etch-a-sketch.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The Conclusion is on page 45.

“Attending Ivy plus over a state flagship substantially increases students’ chance of achieving upper-tail success both in terms of earnings and non-monetary outcomes. The magnitudes of the treatment effects are substantial: we estimate that attending an Ivy-plus college instead of a flagship public increases mean incomes by $101,000…”

People will cite short term post college outcomes (salary after graduation, 5 year, etc)- but not over lifetime when it really pays off.

For students evaluating the Ivy plus and state flagships as potential substitutes, you'd probably want to study differences only between students with comparable GPAs and standardized tests, because the talent, not the institution, may be driving the outcomes, and the average talent level at an Ivy plus is likely to be significantly higher than average talent at the state flagship.

Or you can compare performance of Ivy plus and state flagship classmates in graduate school, after those admissions essentially clear the etch-a-sketch.

The empirical analysis is controlling for these factors.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:…to highly selective colleges (8 ivies, Stanford, MIT, UChicago, Duke)

https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/CollegeAdmissions_Paper.pdf

The analysis shows that highest income applicants (top 1 percent) have an admission advantage over the average applicant due to: 1) legacy admissions; 2) athletic recruitment; 3) non-academic factors (e.g., private school extracurriculars). In fact, legacy admissions explain about half of the gap between acceptance rates between highest income and average applicants.

Also, attending IvyPlus colleges does improve earnings and leadership prospects after colleges. The authors do a nice job of identifying the causal effect of IvyPlus attendance.

Putting these findings together, the implication is that more socioeconomic diversity can be achieved without sacrificing academic quality by eliminating legacy admissions and athletic recruitment.

This is a great paper, and really interesting. Thanks for sharing! However, it does not say the bolded. They do not weigh in on "academic quality" of the student in college. The only measure they use is future earnings of the student. The problem with that measure is that I know many students from wealthy backgrounds who do not chase high-income careers, but choose public service, arts, or research careers instead. This does not mean they were not the engaged or intellectually curious students who contributed to academic quality of the college. It just means that they didn't earn as much later on.

1000%!

Also, there are plenty of kids from wealthy backgrounds that end up in "high income careers" simply because of their connections. connections that would happen whether they went to Salisbury or Harvard.

Many lower income students at T25 schools struggle, to fit in and take full advantage of the perceived perks of being at a T25. They are not spending spring break skiing in Europe or xmas break in Europe with their friends.

The paper looks at other outcomes too, not just income. Public service, etc.

They did not report any public service outcome measures that I can see. If I’m wrong please show me the figure because I am not reading this whole paper. The only outcome measures they listed in their regression figures were 1) top 1% of income 2) prestigious grad program placement, and 3) working at top firms.

Interestingly, being an athletic recruits does seem to correlate well with ultimate high income when compared to non-recruits, but just doesn’t correlate as well as high SAT.

But of these 3 types of outcome the only one I find indicative of the kind of academic quality I admire is 2. However, I would want to see academic research or public service grad programs separate from the sheer number of professional grad programs such as law school, med school, etc.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Why exactly is the goal..for some …social mobility flipping, ie downward mobility for wealthy white boys and maybe girls, and then upward social mobility for other groups? Or is the goal here to make universities 80% Asian with a small portion of seats open to the rest of the country?

Legacy donors are an income stream for universities. Do you really expect legacy families to keep giving money so other kids can attend in place of their kid? If your kid was crushed that he/she didn’t get into the family legacy school despite having top stats and achieving everything they could within their agency as a teenager, would you happily write a big fat check so a kid who was less wealthy but not necessarily more qualified could attend? I don’t think so.

Do you think we are trying to set aside 80% of the seats for asians or are you saying you simply don't want your kids to compete with asian kids?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m having a hard time believing that eliminating athletic recruitment will change things unless they really mean eliminating most athletics.

Even if they tell coaches they can’t recruit, if they are going to field a squash team or a fencing team as examples, then they will still look for kids with squash and fencing championships who are going to come from the top 1%.

Without the recruiting preference, the demographic of squash and fencing team members would change.

How? They would still recruit kids who played squash and fenced and would give added weight to champions much the same they give added weight to a piano player that wins prestigious awards or a Math Olympiad kid.

The squash and fencing champs would all most likely be wealthy.

There's lots of middle class fencers and squash players with great academics.
They might not be as good without the world class coaching available to wealthier kids and they are more likely to be minorities.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m having a hard time believing that eliminating athletic recruitment will change things unless they really mean eliminating most athletics.

Even if they tell coaches they can’t recruit, if they are going to field a squash team or a fencing team as examples, then they will still look for kids with squash and fencing championships who are going to come from the top 1%.

Without the recruiting preference, the demographic of squash and fencing team members would change.

How? They would still recruit kids who played squash and fenced and would give added weight to champions much the same they give added weight to a piano player that wins prestigious awards or a Math Olympiad kid.

The squash and fencing champs would all most likely be wealthy.

There's lots of middle class fencers and squash players with great academics.
They might not be as good without the world class coaching available to wealthier kids and they are more likely to be minorities.

That would be great and actually in line with the authors conclusions in this paper. For this study they were looking at theoretical ways of increasing social mobility.

Their suggestions were in general to give preferences to lower socioeconomic groups at about half the rate of legacy preferences and equal in weight to athletic recruiting preferences. For athletics they did not suggest reducing preferences for athletic recruits but rather making adjustments so that athletic recruits fit the same socioeconomic curve as the class as a whole. Increased emphasis on lower SES recruiting would fit their suggestions.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:…to highly selective colleges (8 ivies, Stanford, MIT, UChicago, Duke)

https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/CollegeAdmissions_Paper.pdf

The analysis shows that highest income applicants (top 1 percent) have an admission advantage over the average applicant due to: 1) legacy admissions; 2) athletic recruitment; 3) non-academic factors (e.g., private school extracurriculars). In fact, legacy admissions explain about half of the gap between acceptance rates between highest income and average applicants.

Also, attending IvyPlus colleges does improve earnings and leadership prospects after colleges. The authors do a nice job of identifying the causal effect of IvyPlus attendance.

Putting these findings together, the implication is that more socioeconomic diversity can be achieved without sacrificing academic quality by eliminating legacy admissions and athletic recruitment.

This is a great paper, and really interesting. Thanks for sharing! However, it does not say the bolded. They do not weigh in on "academic quality" of the student in college. The only measure they use is future earnings of the student. The problem with that measure is that I know many students from wealthy backgrounds who do not chase high-income careers, but choose public service, arts, or research careers instead. This does not mean they were not the engaged or intellectually curious students who contributed to academic quality of the college. It just means that they didn't earn as much later on.

1000%!

Also, there are plenty of kids from wealthy backgrounds that end up in "high income careers" simply because of their connections. connections that would happen whether they went to Salisbury or Harvard.

Many lower income students at T25 schools struggle, to fit in and take full advantage of the perceived perks of being at a T25. They are not spending spring break skiing in Europe or xmas break in Europe with their friends.

The paper looks at other outcomes too, not just income. Public service, etc.

They did not report any public service outcome measures that I can see. If I’m wrong please show me the figure because I am not reading this whole paper. The only outcome measures they listed in their regression figures were 1) top 1% of income 2) prestigious grad program placement, and 3) working at top firms.

Interestingly, being an athletic recruits does seem to correlate well with ultimate high income when compared to non-recruits, but just doesn’t correlate as well as high SAT.

But of these 3 types of outcome the only one I find indicative of the kind of academic quality I admire is 2. However, I would want to see academic research or public service grad programs separate from the sheer number of professional grad programs such as law school, med school, etc.

Athletic recruits overall are a wash in terms of 'high income'. What is in the paper but not mentioned is that Athletic recruit along with high SAT score is the a potent combination. That would imply recruiting more high academic athletes if one want to optimize chances for 1% but it would go against the goals of the paper.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m having a hard time believing that eliminating athletic recruitment will change things unless they really mean eliminating most athletics.

Even if they tell coaches they can’t recruit, if they are going to field a squash team or a fencing team as examples, then they will still look for kids with squash and fencing championships who are going to come from the top 1%.

Without the recruiting preference, the demographic of squash and fencing team members would change.

How? They would still recruit kids who played squash and fenced and would give added weight to champions much the same they give added weight to a piano player that wins prestigious awards or a Math Olympiad kid.

The squash and fencing champs would all most likely be wealthy.

There's lots of middle class fencers and squash players with great academics.
They might not be as good without the world class coaching available to wealthier kids and they are more likely to be minorities.

Again…these schools look for top performers in all disciplines…math, sciences, music, theatre…even if they don’t directly recruit for their robotics team or their orchestra.

Do you think top classical musicians are middle class? Guess what…vast majority are not because lessons and training are expensive.

So, once more, even if they don’t officially recruit a fencer they will still want a fencer that wins world class competitions over some random kid that doesn’t compete at high levels.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m having a hard time believing that eliminating athletic recruitment will change things unless they really mean eliminating most athletics.

Even if they tell coaches they can’t recruit, if they are going to field a squash team or a fencing team as examples, then they will still look for kids with squash and fencing championships who are going to come from the top 1%.

Without the recruiting preference, the demographic of squash and fencing team members would change.

How? They would still recruit kids who played squash and fenced and would give added weight to champions much the same they give added weight to a piano player that wins prestigious awards or a Math Olympiad kid.

The squash and fencing champs would all most likely be wealthy.

There's lots of middle class fencers and squash players with great academics.
They might not be as good without the world class coaching available to wealthier kids and they are more likely to be minorities.

That would be great and actually in line with the authors conclusions in this paper. For this study they were looking at theoretical ways of increasing social mobility.

Their suggestions were in general to give preferences to lower socioeconomic groups at about half the rate of legacy preferences and equal in weight to athletic recruiting preferences. For athletics they did not suggest reducing preferences for athletic recruits but rather making adjustments so that athletic recruits fit the same socioeconomic curve as the class as a whole. Increased emphasis on lower SES recruiting would fit their suggestions.

NP, just jumping in. There is already emphasis on lower SES recruiting thanks to the social mobility factors in US News ranking. Pell is huge. Perhaps the authors should advocate for universities to drop need-blind.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m having a hard time believing that eliminating athletic recruitment will change things unless they really mean eliminating most athletics.

Even if they tell coaches they can’t recruit, if they are going to field a squash team or a fencing team as examples, then they will still look for kids with squash and fencing championships who are going to come from the top 1%.

Without the recruiting preference, the demographic of squash and fencing team members would change.

How? They would still recruit kids who played squash and fenced and would give added weight to champions much the same they give added weight to a piano player that wins prestigious awards or a Math Olympiad kid.

The squash and fencing champs would all most likely be wealthy.

There's lots of middle class fencers and squash players with great academics.
They might not be as good without the world class coaching available to wealthier kids and they are more likely to be minorities.

You're joking, right? My guess is that there are no "middle class" fencers or squash players, period. No one has access to these sports without their parents paying a lot of money for private lessons, coaching, court time, travel teams, uniforms, etc. etc. There's no "AYSO" for fencing or squash. A bunch of other sports are also just for the wealthy, such as ski-racing, sailing, equestrian, golf, mountain biking, etc.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m having a hard time believing that eliminating athletic recruitment will change things unless they really mean eliminating most athletics.

Even if they tell coaches they can’t recruit, if they are going to field a squash team or a fencing team as examples, then they will still look for kids with squash and fencing championships who are going to come from the top 1%.

Without the recruiting preference, the demographic of squash and fencing team members would change.

How? They would still recruit kids who played squash and fenced and would give added weight to champions much the same they give added weight to a piano player that wins prestigious awards or a Math Olympiad kid.

The squash and fencing champs would all most likely be wealthy.

There's lots of middle class fencers and squash players with great academics.
They might not be as good without the world class coaching available to wealthier kids and they are more likely to be minorities.

You're joking, right? My guess is that there are no "middle class" fencers or squash players, period. No one has access to these sports without their parents paying a lot of money for private lessons, coaching, court time, travel teams, uniforms, etc. etc. There's no "AYSO" for fencing or squash. A bunch of other sports are also just for the wealthy, such as ski-racing, sailing, equestrian, golf, mountain biking, etc.

There are middle class ways to participate in many of these sports…fencing, squash (our public school has a squash club team), golf, sailing…probably not equestrian.

However, playing and winning regional, national and international competitions are massively different things.

Even if schools don’t explicitly recruit…they still would look at awards and national rankings and what not.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

We show that under the identification assumption that different college admission committees’ assessments of a candidate’s underlying merit (i.e., the component that predicts long-term outcomes) are positively correlated with each other, comparisons of students who are admitted vs. rejected from the waitlist can be used to identify the causal effect of admission for marginal applicants.

Using this design, we find that being admitted from the waitlist to an Ivy-Plus college increases students’ chances of achieving early career upper-tail success on both monetary and non-monetary dimensions. The causal effects of admission to an Ivy-Plus college are much larger for students with weaker fallback options– e.g., whose colleges in their home state channel fewer students to the top 1% after college. Exploiting this heterogeneity in treatment effects, we estimate that the marginal student who is admitted to and attends an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average flagship public is about 50% more likely to reach the top 1% of the income distribution at age 33, nearly twice as likely to attend a highly-ranked graduate school, and 2.5 times as likely to work at a prestigious firm.

Seems like the assumptions about admission from the waitlist are not warranted. Most waitlists are need-aware. Generally, waitlist acceptance is related to institutional priorities. I think they are reading way too much into that.

--my kid was admitted to an Ivy-Plus off the waitlist this year. full pay, high stats. Was not admitted off the waitlist at other, lower-ranked schools. Not being admitted off the waitlist at the other schools does not imply anything about the merit of his app.

They are trying to do too much in this "study".

College-Specific Analysis Sample. When studying admissions and matriculation at specific colleges Section 3.2), admissions decisions (Section 3.3), and the causal effects of colleges on outcomes (Section 4), we focus on the subset of Ivy-Plus and flagship public colleges for which we have internal application and admissions data. In these analyses, we define the analysis sample as all permanent residents or citizens in the college-specific dataset who submitted a first-year undergraduate application to the college over the years for which we have data who (1) can be linked to the tax data based on their SSNs or ITINs and (2) can be linked to parents in the tax data.

Full pay students often do not include SSNs in the application because they are not applying for need-based aid. My kids did not.

The data come from 1098-T forms that colleges submit for all tuition paying students. For non-tuition paying students, it’s complemented by Pell Grant data. Read before you criticize.

DP. Curious. 1098-T forms are only for enrolled students. Students who applied, but did not attend, would not have their income included.

How does having a 1098-T form tell the researchers what the student's income level is? What are the mechanics by which personal income data is available to researchers, and should it be, both for those who receive need-based aid and for students who didn't submit financial aid forms? The university does not have a family's financial information for those who didn't apply for aid.

“We obtain data on children's and parents incomes from income tax returus (1040 forms) and third-party
information returns (e.g., W-2 forms), which contain information on the earnings of those who do not file tax returns. We measure income in 2015 dollars, adjusting for inflation using the consumer price index (CPI-U).
Parental Income. Our primary measure of parental income is total household-level pre-tax income. In
years in which a child's parent files an income tax return, we define household income as the Adjusted Gross Income reported on the 1040 tax return. In years in which a parent does not file an income tax return, we define household income as the sum of wage earnings (reported on form W-2) and unemployment benefits (reported on form 1099-G) for all parents linked to a child. In years in which parents neither file tax returns nor receive information returns, household income is coded as zero. Chetty et al. (2020) show that these income definitions yield an income distribution similar to that in the American Community Survey (ACS) under the same income definitions.”

How do the researchers have access to the tax forms? That is my question. This is not public information, nor do colleges have it for students who did not apply for aid.

(As a separate question, do families applying for aid agree to give access to their tax information to third parties? I guess I shouldn't be surprised if they do, but that doesn't say much for privacy.)

They referenced an IRS contract.

[Anonymous]

I think kids should be judged within the competitiveness, level of difficulty and rigor that they have demonstrated. There are too many allowances made in the name of social mobility.

There are hundreds of schools for kids who have either not chosen or have not been aware of high rigor and competition. They shouldn’t get a free pass and dance into T50 schools. Let them go to lesser ranked schools with less rigor that matches their capabilities and demonstrated experience. Let them then rise to the occasion, get top grades, participate and compete for top EC s and then win…on their own merit..scholarships to graduate school.

It’s aggravating to see wealthy kids killing themselves to do more and more when extremely lesser qualified kids get admitted instead simply because some educators want to swap upward and downward social mobility. We should just let these AOs come in and tag the UMC kids that they want to move down the ladder in sixth grade. Tell them they have very little chance because their parents are highly educated and successful. Be transparent.