Wealth, privilege and college admissions

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Harvard’s reputation has been withering for years.

If that were true, fewer people would be applying. The number has been around 60K for the last three years, a big jump from before that. So the market disagrees with you.

Their academic reputation had been withering. Not their market value. These are not the same thing.

The jump is most likely due to the common app and from lower income students with lower stats, who see Harvard as an opportunity to get a free ride. UMC students increasingly staying away from Harvard.

[Anonymous]

So many sour grapes posts on this thread.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m a Yale graduate. I was a regular middle class kid from a public high school (both my parents were teachers, so maybe on the lower edge of upper middle class). I had a very good experience at Yale, got good grades, married a classmate, went to an R1 state university for my PhD, and I have a nice professional life.

Most of my friends from Yale are like me. MC or UMC kids who became professionals. We mostly married each other and we have nice lives.

But, there was another Yale that we had nothing to do with. The Yale that was filled with rich, well-connected kids who all knew each other from prep schools, summer camps, country clubs. They pretty much hung out with each other at Yale and with their high school friends from other colleges. After graduation, they got jobs through connections, worked for family companies, married each other. Where they went to college didn’t really matter. The ones from Yale and the ones who went to Michigan or Emory are all still rich and all still friends.

If your kid wants to go to an Ivy, that is a nice dream and they should pursue it. But, it’s not likely to be transformational. Upper middle class kids are mostly going to become upper middle class adults. Rich, well-connected kids are mostly going to become rich, well-connected adults. A few from each group will float up or down.

I don’t get the obsession with who gets into the Ivy League schools. That is not where class change happens. A Yale full of nice upper middle class kids will mostly produce professionals and academics but not an outsized number of the rich or powerful in society. That is fine but I’m not sure it’s worth fighting each other over.

I went to Dartmouth and this is spot on. A few people crossed boundaries due to sports teams but most of us stayed with the social classes we were born into and are now UMC professionals.

Someone who went to HYPS here and agree. Athletics and engineering were the only real driver of class change that I saw. Hardworking good athletes did extremely well after college. Engineering students also changed course.

But otherwise, no.

Dh went to Yale. I went to Harvard. I do agree that the uber rich kids hung out together and married one another. Dh and I are children of poor immigrants and we ended up marrying one another.

DH is very successful and earns a seven figure income. He is well connected and I don’t think he would have had the same opportunities had he gone to Penn State. We live a very UMC lifestyle. Some people may think we are rich. All would not have been possible had we not done so well academically. This may be an Asian way of thinking. We are taught that education is our ticket.

It’s not just Asians. My mom’s choices were to be a teacher or a nurse and then a stay at home mom. My dad had no college. I went to MIT and Stanford Law. DH went to a great state school, crushed it at a top 10 MBA program (his parents were just like mine) and we both now make mid-seven figures. My daughters are what the target should be - hard workers who are really smart from stable, highly successful families. They have great grades, great sports, great service engagement, etc etc. The best schools should be fighting for them. If doing what we did (coming from nowhere with no hooks) hurts my kids, then feminism has been poorly served.

Fellow Stanford Grad here. I disagree our children should be the targets. These schools are leading institutions in America. They should be thinking about how to target high impact individuals who will lead society through its next stages of challenges: the next Barack Obama, the kid who’s going to solve climate change, the one who can take a country through devastating forest fires, create the next Grameen Bank, use their privileged networks to concentrate efforts towards greater goods than ensuring their place in a nice country club. Too many kids like yours and mine who come from stable families will go on to create stable families regardless of whether they go to Stanford or elsewhere. The world needs someone who can bring stability to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of families, not just theirs. This is what Stanford should aim for

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If their academic reputation is "withering," why wouldn't that be reflected in fewer applicants?

Not the ones who mostly care about the name.

How can the "name" carry any value when its academic reputation is purportedly withering?

To be fair, Harvard does excel in their graduate programs. Medicine, Law, Business. A PhD in math or physics from Harvard is no small thing. The JFK School isn't what it used to be. Tufts, Hopkins, Princeton, probably even GW and several others would provide a more rigorous deep dive into public policy or international relations. But overall, Harvard maintains its academic reputation through its graduate programs, which do tend to accept the best and not the hooked.

But at the undergraduate level, Harvard has long been known to be a soft school. MIT students can cross-register at Harvard. And they do so when they need a GPA boost. I just looked it up. 72 percent of Harvard students graduate with a GPA above 3.7. That's ridiculous.

For undergrad, schools like Harvard and Yale - and increasingly Stanford - are not the meritocracies of the popular imagination. They are country clubs for the rich and privileged. Even the URM angle is misleading. Two thirds of black students at Harvard are either African or from the West Indies, or the children of immigrants from those regions. And you can bet the other third all come from private schools.

I think when talking about top undergraduate universities in America, you need to put Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford in a separate category. They are operating in a different world.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If their academic reputation is "withering," why wouldn't that be reflected in fewer applicants?

Not the ones who mostly care about the name.

How can the "name" carry any value when its academic reputation is purportedly withering?

They mean that they are “driving on fumes” so to speak. That the reputation and not the actual academics and student outcomes are carrying them and keeping them at the top.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If their academic reputation is "withering," why wouldn't that be reflected in fewer applicants?

Not the ones who mostly care about the name.

How can the "name" carry any value when its academic reputation is purportedly withering?

To be fair, Harvard does excel in their graduate programs. Medicine, Law, Business. A PhD in math or physics from Harvard is no small thing. The JFK School isn't what it used to be. Tufts, Hopkins, Princeton, probably even GW and several others would provide a more rigorous deep dive into public policy or international relations. But overall, Harvard maintains its academic reputation through its graduate programs, which do tend to accept the best and not the hooked.

But at the undergraduate level, Harvard has long been known to be a soft school. MIT students can cross-register at Harvard. And they do so when they need a GPA boost. I just looked it up. 72 percent of Harvard students graduate with a GPA above 3.7. That's ridiculous.

For undergrad, schools like Harvard and Yale - and increasingly Stanford - are not the meritocracies of the popular imagination. They are country clubs for the rich and privileged. Even the URM angle is misleading. Two thirds of black students at Harvard are either African or from the West Indies, or the children of immigrants from those regions. And you can bet the other third all come from private schools.

I think when talking about top undergraduate universities in America, you need to put Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford in a separate category. They are operating in a different world.

This has always been true, but for some reason lots of people don't realize it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m a Yale graduate. I was a regular middle class kid from a public high school (both my parents were teachers, so maybe on the lower edge of upper middle class). I had a very good experience at Yale, got good grades, married a classmate, went to an R1 state university for my PhD, and I have a nice professional life.

Most of my friends from Yale are like me. MC or UMC kids who became professionals. We mostly married each other and we have nice lives.

But, there was another Yale that we had nothing to do with. The Yale that was filled with rich, well-connected kids who all knew each other from prep schools, summer camps, country clubs. They pretty much hung out with each other at Yale and with their high school friends from other colleges. After graduation, they got jobs through connections, worked for family companies, married each other. Where they went to college didn’t really matter. The ones from Yale and the ones who went to Michigan or Emory are all still rich and all still friends.

If your kid wants to go to an Ivy, that is a nice dream and they should pursue it. But, it’s not likely to be transformational. Upper middle class kids are mostly going to become upper middle class adults. Rich, well-connected kids are mostly going to become rich, well-connected adults. A few from each group will float up or down.

I don’t get the obsession with who gets into the Ivy League schools. That is not where class change happens. A Yale full of nice upper middle class kids will mostly produce professionals and academics but not an outsized number of the rich or powerful in society. That is fine but I’m not sure it’s worth fighting each other over.

I went to Dartmouth and this is spot on. A few people crossed boundaries due to sports teams but most of us stayed with the social classes we were born into and are now UMC professionals.

Someone who went to HYPS here and agree. Athletics and engineering were the only real driver of class change that I saw. Hardworking good athletes did extremely well after college. Engineering students also changed course.

But otherwise, no.

Dh went to Yale. I went to Harvard. I do agree that the uber rich kids hung out together and married one another. Dh and I are children of poor immigrants and we ended up marrying one another.

DH is very successful and earns a seven figure income. He is well connected and I don’t think he would have had the same opportunities had he gone to Penn State. We live a very UMC lifestyle. Some people may think we are rich. All would not have been possible had we not done so well academically. This may be an Asian way of thinking. We are taught that education is our ticket.

It’s not just Asians. My mom’s choices were to be a teacher or a nurse and then a stay at home mom. My dad had no college. I went to MIT and Stanford Law. DH went to a great state school, crushed it at a top 10 MBA program (his parents were just like mine) and we both now make mid-seven figures. My daughters are what the target should be - hard workers who are really smart from stable, highly successful families. They have great grades, great sports, great service engagement, etc etc. The best schools should be fighting for them. If doing what we did (coming from nowhere with no hooks) hurts my kids, then feminism has been poorly served.

You make mid-seven figures. If you were attached to the school (grad school in this case because MIT flat out does not care) through large donations and volunteering your kid would be the kid they want. If you aren't, then why should they assume that your kid will be? I have a family member who has state school undergrad followed by ivy league medical school. He has done very well and been very involved with the medical school through donations and serving on committees and eventually the board. All of his children got into the ivy for undergrad

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We are going to see more and more reports like this, and school like the Big 3 are going to take college admissions hit as a result. It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen. Slowly but surely, it will happen.

https://www.axios.com/local/washington-dc/2023/08/07/georgetown-admissions-advantage-report

What this article is missing is being full-pay.
-- Wealthy kids can afford to apply early decision because they don't need to compare financial packages. Early decision admissions odds are almost always better.
-- Colleges love full-pay kids because they subsidize the scholarship kids.

I give being full-pay part of the credit for my completely unhooked kid getting accepted ED to a top 5 USNWR college. (From public school. And before you absolutely slate me or my kid, my kid also did have national-level achievement in something and really great stats. You need a ton of things to get into the top colleges, but being full-pay can absolutely one of those things.)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We are going to see more and more reports like this, and school like the Big 3 are going to take college admissions hit as a result. It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen. Slowly but surely, it will happen.

https://www.axios.com/local/washington-dc/2023/08/07/georgetown-admissions-advantage-report

What this article is missing is being full-pay.
-- Wealthy kids can afford to apply early decision because they don't need to compare financial packages. Early decision admissions odds are almost always better.
-- Colleges love full-pay kids because they subsidize the scholarship kids.

I give being full-pay part of the credit for my completely unhooked kid getting accepted ED to a top 5 USNWR college. (From public school. And before you absolutely slate me or my kid, my kid also did have national-level achievement in something and really great stats. You need a ton of things to get into the top colleges, but being full-pay can absolutely one of those things.)

Being full pay helps a ton, so does having the resources for SAT/ACT tutors and better public or private schools. This report made a big splash but I haven't yet seen an Ivy get rid of legacy admissions, or preference for athletes, or other ways the rich get in easier. I don't think schools want to try and finance their operations on all scholarship kids, it doesn't make sense for them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We are going to see more and more reports like this, and school like the Big 3 are going to take college admissions hit as a result. It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen. Slowly but surely, it will happen.

https://www.axios.com/local/washington-dc/2023/08/07/georgetown-admissions-advantage-report

What this article is missing is being full-pay.
-- Wealthy kids can afford to apply early decision because they don't need to compare financial packages. Early decision admissions odds are almost always better.
-- Colleges love full-pay kids because they subsidize the scholarship kids.

I give being full-pay part of the credit for my completely unhooked kid getting accepted ED to a top 5 USNWR college. (From public school. And before you absolutely slate me or my kid, my kid also did have national-level achievement in something and really great stats. You need a ton of things to get into the top colleges, but being full-pay can absolutely one of those things.)

Yeah I think OP is off. Private school is on the upswing for colleges. Just look at this year.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:“…It became clearer and clearer to me that the admissions gold mine was a male student who didn’t need any financial aid. I saw so many of them. Some were actually good and deserving students. But others fit a similarly bleak profile: students with mediocre grades from fancy private schools, with a year of postgrad at prep school to make their GPAs less frightful-looking. Hockey recruits. Lacrosse recruits. Basketball recruits. If these were full-pay kids, they were more likely than not to be admitted. Even though I scored them accurately and fairly according to our guidelines, and even when I wrote scathing rejection notes, I knew in my gut that most of them were going to get in anyway, the same way I knew that some of the poorer students for whom I fiercely advocated were not. It all came down to the limited number of spots for students who need financial aid. If a student could pay full tuition, he was immediately more desirable. (Even though we were specifically looking to beef up the number of men admitted, full-pay, mediocre white girls could sometimes skate by too.)”

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/amphtml/anonymousadmissions/college-admissions-scam-felicity-huffman-lori-loughlin-ivy

This is how my grandfather got into an Ivy from one year of "post high school football" at Andover, I want to say in 1912. (He finished up at college and then joined up and was sent to France.)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We are going to see more and more reports like this, and school like the Big 3 are going to take college admissions hit as a result. It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen. Slowly but surely, it will happen.

https://www.axios.com/local/washington-dc/2023/08/07/georgetown-admissions-advantage-report

What this article is missing is being full-pay.
-- Wealthy kids can afford to apply early decision because they don't need to compare financial packages. Early decision admissions odds are almost always better.
-- Colleges love full-pay kids because they subsidize the scholarship kids.

I give being full-pay part of the credit for my completely unhooked kid getting accepted ED to a top 5 USNWR college. (From public school. And before you absolutely slate me or my kid, my kid also did have national-level achievement in something and really great stats. You need a ton of things to get into the top colleges, but being full-pay can absolutely one of those things.)

Being full pay helps a ton, so does having the resources for SAT/ACT tutors and better public or private schools. This report made a big splash but I haven't yet seen an Ivy get rid of legacy admissions, or preference for athletes, or other ways the rich get in easier. I don't think schools want to try and finance their operations on all scholarship kids, it doesn't make sense for them.

They don't want to get rid of legacy or athletic bumps because these are both ways they raise money from alums.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We are going to see more and more reports like this, and school like the Big 3 are going to take college admissions hit as a result. It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen. Slowly but surely, it will happen.

https://www.axios.com/local/washington-dc/2023/08/07/georgetown-admissions-advantage-report

What this article is missing is being full-pay.
-- Wealthy kids can afford to apply early decision because they don't need to compare financial packages. Early decision admissions odds are almost always better.
-- Colleges love full-pay kids because they subsidize the scholarship kids.

I give being full-pay part of the credit for my completely unhooked kid getting accepted ED to a top 5 USNWR college. (From public school. And before you absolutely slate me or my kid, my kid also did have national-level achievement in something and really great stats. You need a ton of things to get into the top colleges, but being full-pay can absolutely one of those things.)

Yeah I think OP is off. Private school is on the upswing for colleges. Just look at this year.

There are plenty of full-pay families in public school. Like us (kid did a few years of private school but not high school). I would think that, these days, being full-pay from somewhere like Blair or Wilson or TJ would give a better bump than being full-pay from a private school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m a Yale graduate. I was a regular middle class kid from a public high school (both my parents were teachers, so maybe on the lower edge of upper middle class). I had a very good experience at Yale, got good grades, married a classmate, went to an R1 state university for my PhD, and I have a nice professional life.

Most of my friends from Yale are like me. MC or UMC kids who became professionals. We mostly married each other and we have nice lives.

But, there was another Yale that we had nothing to do with. The Yale that was filled with rich, well-connected kids who all knew each other from prep schools, summer camps, country clubs. They pretty much hung out with each other at Yale and with their high school friends from other colleges. After graduation, they got jobs through connections, worked for family companies, married each other. Where they went to college didn’t really matter. The ones from Yale and the ones who went to Michigan or Emory are all still rich and all still friends.

If your kid wants to go to an Ivy, that is a nice dream and they should pursue it. But, it’s not likely to be transformational. Upper middle class kids are mostly going to become upper middle class adults. Rich, well-connected kids are mostly going to become rich, well-connected adults. A few from each group will float up or down.

I don’t get the obsession with who gets into the Ivy League schools. That is not where class change happens. A Yale full of nice upper middle class kids will mostly produce professionals and academics but not an outsized number of the rich or powerful in society. That is fine but I’m not sure it’s worth fighting each other over.

I went to Dartmouth and this is spot on. A few people crossed boundaries due to sports teams but most of us stayed with the social classes we were born into and are now UMC professionals.

Someone who went to HYPS here and agree. Athletics and engineering were the only real driver of class change that I saw. Hardworking good athletes did extremely well after college. Engineering students also changed course.

But otherwise, no.

Dh went to Yale. I went to Harvard. I do agree that the uber rich kids hung out together and married one another. Dh and I are children of poor immigrants and we ended up marrying one another.

DH is very successful and earns a seven figure income. He is well connected and I don’t think he would have had the same opportunities had he gone to Penn State. We live a very UMC lifestyle. Some people may think we are rich. All would not have been possible had we not done so well academically. This may be an Asian way of thinking. We are taught that education is our ticket.

It’s not just Asians. My mom’s choices were to be a teacher or a nurse and then a stay at home mom. My dad had no college. I went to MIT and Stanford Law. DH went to a great state school, crushed it at a top 10 MBA program (his parents were just like mine) and we both now make mid-seven figures. My daughters are what the target should be - hard workers who are really smart from stable, highly successful families. They have great grades, great sports, great service engagement, etc etc. The best schools should be fighting for them. If doing what we did (coming from nowhere with no hooks) hurts my kids, then feminism has been poorly served.

Fellow Stanford Grad here. I disagree our children should be the targets. These schools are leading institutions in America. They should be thinking about how to target high impact individuals who will lead society through its next stages of challenges: the next Barack Obama, the kid who’s going to solve climate change, the one who can take a country through devastating forest fires, create the next Grameen Bank, use their privileged networks to concentrate efforts towards greater goods than ensuring their place in a nice country club. Too many kids like yours and mine who come from stable families will go on to create stable families regardless of whether they go to Stanford or elsewhere. The world needs someone who can bring stability to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of families, not just theirs. This is what Stanford should aim for

This makes no sense at all. The kids of previous poster are as likely --if not more-- to become those global changemakers you seem to worship. This is not an opinion but a fact, having worked in foundations and seen the profiles of many famous and not-so-famous social entrepreneurs and pioneers.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We are going to see more and more reports like this, and school like the Big 3 are going to take college admissions hit as a result. It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen. Slowly but surely, it will happen.

https://www.axios.com/local/washington-dc/2023/08/07/georgetown-admissions-advantage-report

What this article is missing is being full-pay.
-- Wealthy kids can afford to apply early decision because they don't need to compare financial packages. Early decision admissions odds are almost always better.
-- Colleges love full-pay kids because they subsidize the scholarship kids.

I give being full-pay part of the credit for my completely unhooked kid getting accepted ED to a top 5 USNWR college. (From public school. And before you absolutely slate me or my kid, my kid also did have national-level achievement in something and really great stats. You need a ton of things to get into the top colleges, but being full-pay can absolutely one of those things.)

Yeah I think OP is off. Private school is on the upswing for colleges. Just look at this year.

There are plenty of full-pay families in public school. Like us (kid did a few years of private school but not high school). I would think that, these days, being full-pay from somewhere like Blair or Wilson or TJ would give a better bump than being full-pay from a private school.

Why would you think that?