Why the middle class has a huge disadvantage in admissions.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why not use the state school option?

A lot of middle class do it.
But the conversation with your teenager is not going to be easy.
Kid: I am so excited to be accepted to my favorite and top college in the country.
You: We can’t afford 80k a year, instead you should go to state university.
Kid : So, tell me why I was working so hard in high school?
You : Well…

I love the inanity of this post. It only makes sense inside one very specific bubble.

I can't even imagine what parents from my rural Midwestern town would say to it. Maybe, because you were raised to work hard. Maybe, anything worth doing is worth doing right. Maybe, keep up that nonsense and you can take a couple years off to work and pay your own way through State Flagship U.

Maybe implied here is that all of the kids who work just has hard knowing only State Flagship is at the end of the rainbow for them are inherently raised better than you raised your kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What’s the gist of this article/video for those who can’t see it?

Has little to do with most the comments here about donut hole aid.
It's referencing the recent NY Times article which is a summary of this research paper: https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/CollegeAdmissions_Nontech.pdf

Controlling for other factors, students already in the 1% are significantly more likely to be admitted to elite schools.

Students in the 1% are slightly more likely to apply, that explains 20% of the disparity. Students in the 1% are more likely to attend if accepted that explains 12%. But students in the 1% are simply more likely to be admitted.

This in turn breaks down into three categories. They are more likely to be legacies, 46% (they also get a bigger legacy bump 5 fold for a legacy with income of $660k vs. 3 fold for a legacy with income $83k-$116k). They are more likely to be recruited athletes, 24%. But the remaining 30% is simply that their files receive higher non-academic ratings:

The remaining 30% of the admissions advantage for students from families in the top 1% is explained
by the fact that they are judged to have stronger non-academic credentials (e.g., extracurricular activities,
leadership traits, etc.) than students from lower-income families. The relationship between parental income
and non-academic credentials is mediated by high schools. Comparing non-legacy applicants with the same
test scores, demographics, and parental income, Ivy-Plus applicants who attend non-religious private high
schools are twice as likely to be admitted as those who attend public high schools in affluent neighborhoods.
Conditional on SAT/ACT scores, the academic ratings of students from private high schools with high
admissions rates are no higher than those from public high schools, but their non-academic ratings are
much higher. Since children from the top 1% are much more likely to attend private high schools, these
differences in non-academic credentialing across high schools contribute to the income gap in admissions
rates to Ivy-Plus colleges.

Dcum donut hole. Live in million dollar house, two cars under ten years old and 1-2 big vacations with a few weekend ones and lots oth other expensive things. Then scream poverty.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What’s the gist of this article/video for those who can’t see it?

Has little to do with most the comments here about donut hole aid.
It's referencing the recent NY Times article which is a summary of this research paper: https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/CollegeAdmissions_Nontech.pdf

Controlling for other factors, students already in the 1% are significantly more likely to be admitted to elite schools.

Students in the 1% are slightly more likely to apply, that explains 20% of the disparity. Students in the 1% are more likely to attend if accepted that explains 12%. But students in the 1% are simply more likely to be admitted.

This in turn breaks down into three categories. They are more likely to be legacies, 46% (they also get a bigger legacy bump 5 fold for a legacy with income of $660k vs. 3 fold for a legacy with income $83k-$116k). They are more likely to be recruited athletes, 24%. But the remaining 30% is simply that their files receive higher non-academic ratings:

The remaining 30% of the admissions advantage for students from families in the top 1% is explained
by the fact that they are judged to have stronger non-academic credentials (e.g., extracurricular activities,
leadership traits, etc.) than students from lower-income families. The relationship between parental income
and non-academic credentials is mediated by high schools. Comparing non-legacy applicants with the same
test scores, demographics, and parental income, Ivy-Plus applicants who attend non-religious private high
schools are twice as likely to be admitted as those who attend public high schools in affluent neighborhoods.
Conditional on SAT/ACT scores, the academic ratings of students from private high schools with high
admissions rates are no higher than those from public high schools, but their non-academic ratings are
much higher. Since children from the top 1% are much more likely to attend private high schools, these
differences in non-academic credentialing across high schools contribute to the income gap in admissions
rates to Ivy-Plus colleges.

Dcum donut hole. Live in million dollar house, two cars under ten years old and 1-2 big vacations with a few weekend ones and lots oth other expensive things. Then scream poverty.

No, those people usually send their kids to private and pay for college, too. DCUM donutholes don’t have those things, they’re satisfied with UMD CS, but they like to blow off some steam all the same.

Regardless, that’s not what the post was about.

[Anonymous]

While most Ivies are not hospitable to granting credit for AP and college/community college courses taken while in high school, some other highly ranked privates DO acknowledge those efforts (my kid got both AP & community college credit at Northwestern). With some careful planning it is quite possible to attain enough credits via such means to graduate in 3 years as opposed to 4.

So you’re thinking “that only cuts my savings shortfall by 25%.” But let’s do the math.

Suppose kiddo wants to go to a private that’s $80k per year. And you have only saved enough for $40k per year. You have $160k to pay for $320k in expenses. That puts you $160k in the hole.

BUT, if kiddo accrued enough credits thru AP & college/community college classes to graduate in 3 years, the finances look like this:
Expenses: $240k
Amount saved: $160k
Shortfall: $80k

So the magic of math indicates that graduating in 75% of the time can cut YOUR SHORTFALL IN HALF…because not only do you not have to pay for that 4th year, the $ you had earmarked for that 4th year can now be applied to the first 3 years.

PLUS, since kiddo is out a year earlier, you can add his/her first year’s wages to the savings.

(Obviously this approach is better or worse depending on the % of the 4-year expenses your savings would cover.)

[Anonymous]

Conditional on SAT/ACT scores, the academic ratings of students from private high schools with high
admissions rates are no higher than those from public high schools, but their non-academic ratings are
much higher. Since children from the top 1% are much more likely to attend private high schools, these
differences in non-academic credentialing across high schools contribute to the income gap in admissions
rates to Ivy-Plus colleges.

I have to wonder how much of this “income gap” is actually a “race gap,” or vice versa. Surely the high stats public school students in this analysis are disproportionately Asian American. Maybe the schools aren’t really racist, “just” classist, and Asian Americans, like all public school students, have EC deficits compared to the prep school kids. Or maybe all public school kids are downgraded as a means of excluding Asians! Either way I’d like to see the analysis controlling for race as well as class and test scores.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Conditional on SAT/ACT scores, the academic ratings of students from private high schools with high
admissions rates are no higher than those from public high schools, but their non-academic ratings are
much higher. Since children from the top 1% are much more likely to attend private high schools, these
differences in non-academic credentialing across high schools contribute to the income gap in admissions
rates to Ivy-Plus colleges.

I have to wonder how much of this “income gap” is actually a “race gap,” or vice versa. Surely the high stats public school students in this analysis are disproportionately Asian American. Maybe the schools aren’t really racist, “just” classist, and Asian Americans, like all public school students, have EC deficits compared to the prep school kids. Or maybe all public school kids are downgraded as a means of excluding Asians! Either way I’d like to see the analysis controlling for race as well as class and test scores.

That's your lens, there are an awful lot of people who are not Asian. The authors confirm the same patterns controlling for race but that's not the focus of this study. Yes, the system is classist, elite schools are selecting for the trappings of wealth, and also further grooming those traits. Intelligence is along for the ride there. The second finding is that this works, mean wages are only negligibly different, but students who attend an elite school are much more likely to earn in the 1%, etc. Regardless, the ship has sailed, moving the needle now requires addressing classism, which is what this study anticipated.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why not use the state school option?

A lot of middle class do it.
But the conversation with your teenager is not going to be easy.
Kid: I am so excited to be accepted to my favorite and top college in the country.
You: We can’t afford 80k a year, instead you should go to state university.
Kid : So, tell me why I was working so hard in high school?
You : Well…

I love the inanity of this post. It only makes sense inside one very specific bubble.

I can't even imagine what parents from my rural Midwestern town would say to it. Maybe, because you were raised to work hard. Maybe, anything worth doing is worth doing right. Maybe, keep up that nonsense and you can take a couple years off to work and pay your own way through State Flagship U.

Maybe implied here is that all of the kids who work just has hard knowing only State Flagship is at the end of the rainbow for them are inherently raised better than you raised your kids.

Some have higher aspirations than assistant manager at Menards.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why not use the state school option?

A lot of middle class do it.
But the conversation with your teenager is not going to be easy.
Kid: I am so excited to be accepted to my favorite and top college in the country.
You: We can’t afford 80k a year, instead you should go to state university.
Kid : So, tell me why I was working so hard in high school?
You : Well…

I love the inanity of this post. It only makes sense inside one very specific bubble.

I can't even imagine what parents from my rural Midwestern town would say to it. Maybe, because you were raised to work hard. Maybe, anything worth doing is worth doing right. Maybe, keep up that nonsense and you can take a couple years off to work and pay your own way through State Flagship U.

Maybe implied here is that all of the kids who work just has hard knowing only State Flagship is at the end of the rainbow for them are inherently raised better than you raised your kids.

Some have higher aspirations than assistant manager at Menards.

I don’t think DC Urban Moms is for you. I had to google “Menards” to find out it’s a home improvement store in the upper Midwest.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why not use the state school option?

A lot of middle class do it.
But the conversation with your teenager is not going to be easy.
Kid: I am so excited to be accepted to my favorite and top college in the country.
You: We can’t afford 80k a year, instead you should go to state university.
Kid : So, tell me why I was working so hard in high school?
You : Well…

I love the inanity of this post. It only makes sense inside one very specific bubble.

I can't even imagine what parents from my rural Midwestern town would say to it. Maybe, because you were raised to work hard. Maybe, anything worth doing is worth doing right. Maybe, keep up that nonsense and you can take a couple years off to work and pay your own way through State Flagship U.

Maybe implied here is that all of the kids who work just has hard knowing only State Flagship is at the end of the rainbow for them are inherently raised better than you raised your kids.

That's a problem, though. Your kid won't even get into the state flagship either. Ours didn't get in and if you think mine did poorly, we know a 4.0 UWGPA NMF who also didn't get in. What does it take these days?

All that work and you get some lower ranked state U that no one outside the state knows.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why not use the state school option?

A lot of middle class do it.
But the conversation with your teenager is not going to be easy.
Kid: I am so excited to be accepted to my favorite and top college in the country.
You: We can’t afford 80k a year, instead you should go to state university.
Kid : So, tell me why I was working so hard in high school?
You : Well…

I love the inanity of this post. It only makes sense inside one very specific bubble.

I can't even imagine what parents from my rural Midwestern town would say to it. Maybe, because you were raised to work hard. Maybe, anything worth doing is worth doing right. Maybe, keep up that nonsense and you can take a couple years off to work and pay your own way through State Flagship U.

Maybe implied here is that all of the kids who work just has hard knowing only State Flagship is at the end of the rainbow for them are inherently raised better than you raised your kids.

Some have higher aspirations than assistant manager at Menards.

I don’t think DC Urban Moms is for you. I had to google “Menards” to find out it’s a home improvement store in the upper Midwest.

READ

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why not use the state school option?

A lot of middle class do it.
But the conversation with your teenager is not going to be easy.
Kid: I am so excited to be accepted to my favorite and top college in the country.
You: We can’t afford 80k a year, instead you should go to state university.
Kid : So, tell me why I was working so hard in high school?
You : Well…

I love the inanity of this post. It only makes sense inside one very specific bubble.

I can't even imagine what parents from my rural Midwestern town would say to it. Maybe, because you were raised to work hard. Maybe, anything worth doing is worth doing right. Maybe, keep up that nonsense and you can take a couple years off to work and pay your own way through State Flagship U.

Maybe implied here is that all of the kids who work just has hard knowing only State Flagship is at the end of the rainbow for them are inherently raised better than you raised your kids.

While I wholeheartedly agree that hard work is its own reward and that "anything worth doing is worth doing right," you as someone from the rural midwest are missing a lot of the context that informs the exchanges quoted above. There are only eleven elite post secondary institutions in the midwest region, two of which (Michigan and Wisconsin-Madison) are flagship public schools and arguably the academically strongest universities in their respective states; most of the midwestern states are home to no more than one elite college or university; and in the one midwestern state whose two elite schools are both private universities (Chicago and Northwestern), the flagship, Urbana-Champaign, is overall an academically rigorous institution with one of the most challenging comp. sci programs in the country. In other words, most of the smartest, talented and hardest working students in the midwest attend their public flagship. By contrast, the flagship universities of most states are intellectually quite weak, while the majority of rigorous schools in the northeast are private universities and colleges that students in the region routinely choose over in- state public options. Given the pervasive idea that the U.S. is a meritocracy and that affiliation with elite institutions, fair or not, does confer some very real opportunities that are not readily available to graduates of other colleges and universities, it is quite understandable that a student who busts ass to earn, say, a 4.5 GPA and a 1550 SAT might wonder why s/he/they did so only to end up at a school where the average SAT is an 1160, the average ACT is a 22 and their classmates perceive college as an extension of their high school years rather than as an opportunity to engage intellectually.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:^as if all of us did European vacations and drive Mercedes. LOL. Clueless. Net price calculator EVERYWHERE is that we will get $0. We saved, we aren't big spenders, etc.

There is this complete disconnect that people don't understand how hard some of us worked and the sacrifices we made after paying off our own student loans because now we fall just outside the aid group. And, any generational advantage we managed to scrape up to will essentially be wiped out by college tuition.

Instead of fighting with each other, we all need to demand something be done about the exorbitant cost of college these days. It will be $100k year soon for many of these private universities and the publics will bump accordingly. AT 85K, we aren't that far away from it.

Since you have struggled so much with student loan debt of your own (and your spouses), I would think you would understand that where you go does not matter---it's what you do while there and that student loan debt is NOT worth it. Amazing that you list that as a struggle yet somehow still think your kids and/or you should take on massive debt for college. Imagine the gift of state school or private with good merit that means your kid only takes on $27K total of debt and you take on none.

I was a STEM major, my kid is not. The actual school is much more important for future employment.

Maybe for graduate school, but not really for undergrad. Plenty of T20 non-Stem Majors still making only 40-60K 5 years after graduation. I'd argue it is what the kid does while at school that matters more. And in a lower paying field, it's even more important to not go into major debt. Much easier to have a great life if you only have a $300/month student loan payment ($27K in loans), not $1500/month.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It is frustrating that if you make $250k now, the assumption is that you have been making $250k long enough to save $320k for your child's education. For those of us who only started making that amount of money when our child was in high school (with both parents working all along), that's not realistic.

It's not the end of the world; our child will be fine. But it's quite the bucket of cold water to realize that a whole lot of schools are completely inaccessible to your kid, schools that would have been accessible a few years ago when we made $100k.

And FWIW, I am fully aware that $250K is NOT middle class! It's a great income and we're grateful. But having that income now doesn't magically make $300k of savings appear.

Here's an idea, you take the extra money you earned and put it to college savings if "top" privates are important to you. Even if you made $150K, you should have been saving at least for a state school and when you made much more put it into savings vs. lifestyle. So, just curious when you are screaming poverty at $250K, how much did your house cost, your cars, how many vacations, even weekend vacations did you take in the past 5 years? Much of it is lifestyle choices.

+1000

You could have chosen to save majority of the pay increases over the last 5 years if "elite private education" was of value to you. DOn't upgrade your house or lifestyle instead save for college and retirement. But apparently most do not seem to understand the idea of personal accountability or personal savings.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why not use the state school option?

A lot of middle class do it.
But the conversation with your teenager is not going to be easy.
Kid: I am so excited to be accepted to my favorite and top college in the country.
You: We can’t afford 80k a year, instead you should go to state university.
Kid : So, tell me why I was working so hard in high school?
You : Well…

No, the conversation should simply be: "We can afford to send you to an in-state university. We cannot afford OOS or private schools, so please don't apply to them."
Kid: "Ok."

Or---that's great, you can apply to some Private schools and OOS publics, but you need to search for ones that give merit and actually get enough merit to make it affordable to us. Here is what affordable to us means---$X thousand per year. So lets find several instate/safety schools that we know we can afford and you will get into to apply to and supplement that with key OOS/Privates where you have a shot at getting enough merit.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Maybe on their work resume then can have an asterisk next to their degree from state school

With the footnote:

*accepted to JHU, UPenn, Georgetown & Duke

When some snobby Ivy alum neighbors looked down their nose when they found out I attended my large state university, I wish I was wearing a sweatshirt that had that asterisk. I was #8 (back when there was actual true rank) out of 687 kids at my Fairfax Co high school, state champ varsity sport all 4 years, student body officer, high SAT score, etc etc

My parents would only allow me to apply in-state. Rich people don’t understand we can’t all afford Ivy/top private tuition and that limits our choices.

But, hey, we have the same lifestyle now and equivalent careers.

That is what most fail to understand. Just look around at work and with your friends, and majority likely did NOT attend elite universities. At work, most of your co-workers likely attended state U, privates you've never heard off, etc. Yet somehow (sarcasm alert for the impaired) they are doing the same job as you and likely getting paid the same....how does that happen?!?!? Because nobody really cares where you went, it's more about references and how you perform on the job and how well you work with the team....