dont be in the 60th to 99th percentile in income

[Anonymous]

I don't really understand what the Y axis reflects. Does the paper or any of the material have a Y axis that shows something like chances per 100 in being admitted so I can understand what the deviation really is.

If a kid with a 1400 SAT goes from an 8/10 chance to a 4/10 chance because he's in the 80th income percentile instead of the 40th income percentile, I guess that would matter to me. If the same kid goes from a 10% chance to a 5% chance, I guess I don't care that much.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If you were a gen x, boomer or elder millenial who attended a t10 school, how did you not get into top 1%

Like the well trodden path coupled with the greatest equity boom in the history of the market means that schools are right to give side eyes to alums who aren’t top 1% but also didn’t go into something like teaching at a school

Like if you are a gen x, and attended Penn (to use an example) - you have to really have been clueless or messed up not to be in the top .5%

You had access to top firms, then the bull market for 30 years would supercharged your financial position further

Maybe by going into the Government for law and trying to pay off six figure student loans?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This strikes me as not at all surprising. I don’t get what the “a ha” is here.

It is interesting to see it quantified.

Also it is interesting to see how much of a boost being in the 0-60 income percentile gets you. But would be more interesting to see it broken out by race, as one suspects "poor + URM" gets much more of an admissions boost than "poor + white/Asian".

But the racial breakdown of the overrepresented top does not interest?

DCMUM is so interesting in that they are fine with elite college discriminating against non 0.1% (hence their overrepresentation) but will tear each other apart on who gets more of the scraps they leave for the rest (the not overrepresented population).

DCMUM enforces to measures of right here.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This strikes me as not at all surprising. I don’t get what the “a ha” is here.

I think the assumption that more money = more privilege and opportunities is well understood. I think the A ha! moment is the dip in the low-mid 90s because thats were a lot of DCUM posters fall. I am guessing most my DCUM middle class (AKA rich in the heartland/bible belt) peers assumed, as I did until just now, that the graph was a gradual increase as income rose, with a hockey stick shape once it got to the 95-98% range. We knew we weren’t super advantaged, but even if we don’t say it out loud, maybe we hoped that our cisgender white male offspring from NoVa had at least some benefit from being full-pay applicants.

Cue the DCUM whining about a new kind of donut hole! Boo boo! My kid is disadvantaged by being rich! I guess it’s time to get my 4th grader into fencing or rowing crew while we work on starting a non-profit he can run after school.

Haha. Well, it's not too tough to become poor if these folks really want to be like the lucky duck poor people!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:“A large new study, released Monday, shows that it has not been because these children had more impressive grades on average or took harder classes. They tended to have higher SAT scores and finely honed résumés, and applied at a higher rate — but they were overrepresented even after accounting for those things.”

this is about the 0.1%. But to me that is not the interesting story. the interesting story, which the author of the article mostly ignores (she has one sentence) is that the 60-99% percentile is the loser.

Really? That's what you've taken from this. It's admission rates. The majority of applicants are going to be in the 60-99th percentile income range. Of course they are going to be accepted at a lower rate...there are more of them. If you look up the composition of college campuses, though, I'm sure you'll find that they make up the majority of students.

+1

Exactly! the majority of kids in the 5-50% range do not have T25 schools on their radar. They grow up with a plan to attend CC then transfer to a state school (for affordability), and if really lucky attend all 4 years at a state school if they can afford it. They are not obsessed with attending Elite schools, so they don't apply.

This depends on who you are. If you are in the 60-99 percentile, it means that you need higher scores than if you are in the 0-60 or the 99.9-100 group to get in. So if your goal is to have a flat income distribution at Harvard, this is good. If you are a top half but not oligarch student, this is depressing. It does tell the top half but not oligarch students that it really is harder for them to get in.

[Anonymous]

This article is based on data up to 2015 which is very old. Elite colleges noticeably changed their demographics since then.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:So what. This isn’t news.

Where have you been hiding if you are surprised by this?

This.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:And here's the real depressing detail from the paper:

"Attending an Ivy-Plus instead of a flagship public college triples students’ chances of obtaining jobs at prestigious firms and substantially increases their chances of
earning in the top 1%."

So many friends' smart children are headed to flagship this fall due to cost...

And yet, my kid at a flagship has been offered as a junior for employment after college at "prestigious" firms. Go figure.

[Anonymous]

I would encourage those interested to read the paper or at least the non-technical summary. They also make their full data available. The key findings listed in the non-technical summary (https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/CollegeAdmissions_Nontech.pdf) are:
1. Ivy-Plus colleges are more than twice as likely to admit a student from a high-income family as compared to low- or middle-income families with comparable SAT/ACT scores.
2. Higher admission rates for students from high-income families can be attributed to three factors: preferences for children of alumni (legacies), higher non-academic ratings, and athletic recruitment.
3. The three factors underlying the high-income admissions advantage are not associated with better post-college outcomes; in contrast, SAT/ACT scores and academic ratings are highly predictive of post-college success.
4. Attending an Ivy-Plus instead of a flagship public college triples students’ chances of obtaining jobs at prestigious firms and substantially increases their chances of earning in the top 1%.
5. By changing their admissions policies, Ivy-Plus colleges could significantly diversify the socioeconomic backgrounds of America’s highest earners and leaders.

The consequences of #2: "This higher admissions rate leads to 103 extra students from the top 1% in a typical Ivy-Plus class (of 1,650 students) relative to a benchmark in which students are admitted at the same rates across the parental income distribution conditional on their test scores." Legacy admission policies account for about 47 of the 103 extra students from the top 1%. Non-academic ratings account for 31 of the 103. Athletic recruitment accounts for another 25.

Based on a quick reading, my take is that the 4th finding may be on the weakest grounds, as it's based on data on admitted vs non-admitted waitlisted students to Ivy-plus univs. A clever approach to causal inference, but one that hinges on the assumption that admissions from the waitlist are largely "exogenous" to the applicant's attributes (economic, academic, non-academic) that they look at. This basically makes the outcome differences between waitlisters who are accepted (to Ivy-Plus) vs non-accepted (who attended leading public univs) a valid measure of the "impact" of Ivy-Plus colleges.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This article is based on data up to 2015 which is very old. Elite colleges noticeably changed their demographics since then.

Well, it needs to be that old so they can also get post-college income rates (the study assesses impact on outcomes too).

[Anonymous]

I thought this was interesting about outcomes from Ivy:

"The researchers did a novel analysis to measure whether attending one of these colleges causes success later in life. They compared students who were wait-listed and got in, with those who didn’t and attended another college instead. Consistent with previous research, they found that attending an Ivy instead of one of the top nine public flagships did not meaningfully increase graduates’ income, on average. However, it did increase a student’s predicted chance of earning in the top 1 percent to 19 percent, from 12 percent."

So basically the primary income outcome advantage to an Ivy is you get a stronger shot at being in the top 1%.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So what. This isn’t news.

Where have you been hiding if you are surprised by this?

At work (too busy working to earn enough to pay for private high school tuition).

But, come on 60/99% you don’t get aid and can’t demonstrate “need”..

At $150k HHI in the DMV, $85k/year is a major sting!!! If you were in lower bracket, the kid would go for free. There is your answer—that percentile will go broke paying for it and not get $$ from the large endowments at these schools.

Bingo!! They get full tuition and don’t have to dip into their large endowments. Of course, at very expensive Ivy-private+ it’s an advantage.

[Anonymous]

^ and kids come prepared for the rigor. A lot if smart kids from disadvantaged areas are woefully unprepared when they get into these elite schools. It’s not their fault, but they can be very far behind at the starting gate.

[Anonymous]

Try to understand the operational business model of a University college using student tuition as the revenue stream. Sure there are the endowment and research grants revenue streams, but focus on the Tuition line of business.

Tuition revenue from the high income family students is used to not only cover their tuition cost but also to cover the tuition cost of the other half of the student population from mid to low income families. So when a high income student pays, say $30k in full tuition, $15k goes to cover that student's instruction costs, and the other $15k goes to cover another qualified low income student in the form of financial aid. There is nothing to debate here: university needs full tuition paying students to exist as a business. In other words, low income merit students need the high income students to be enrolled and fully pay their tuition on time.

That said the challenge is finding high income students who are absolutely committed to staying the full four years as well as academically willing to put in the effort to satisfy the graduation requirements that are tied to the university ranking. This is no trivial challenge, finding high income students who are also studious. Here is where the legacy students come into the picture. Legacy students bring the emotional commitment to stick around for full four years paying full tuition and graduate with a degree. By offering admissions to studious legacy students, the university is making sure the lower income students have a reliable funding source to cover their tuition costs.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Although the graph is interesting people are treating it like it’s some nefarious plot. There are far more students in the 60-99% income range applying to college than below 60%. And for the top 1%, there’s not that many of them and they apply mainly to the legacy institution, so of course they have a higher rate.

Basic statistics people…