Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:This is an interesting study that the NYT did regarding the income of student families at competitive universities.
This is Brown, but you can click in any of the schools and see their detailed stats.
The median parent income at Brown for the class of 2013 was $204,000. 19% were from families making over $630,000. 70% were from families making over $110,000. And these stats have changed very little since 1980.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/brown-university
Wealthy families create stronger applicants. I don't think a single person would dispute that.
So, then it effectively it works the other way around? They know that the very strongest applicants will be rich, and to keep from being 100% rich kids, they give a certain percentage of poorer kids a “hook” for being first generation college, etc. when they do this, they have capped their exposure to scholarship kids at that level. So, for these schools, it’s not really “need blind,” it could be more accurately described as “need aware,” but only if you’re in the top % of poor kids that they’ve given a hook.
Forgive me, but that sounds like some serious nuclear-grade equivocation. And a classic "post hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy.
It's a self-selecting sample, yes, which permits them to be need blind for all applicants.
For it not to be, all criteria would have to be out the window, and they'd have to pick at random. They have to pick the best on some criteria, and no matter what it is, the wealthy will be better prepared to meet it.
But the wealthy are not, statistically, better prepared to meet the criteria of being first-generation college students, URM, or from relatively poor areas. Colleges are not “need blind” for these students. They identify these students and judge them by a different standard when it comes to the part of the admissions criteria that rich kids are better at. When they know what % of those students they will admit, they know what % of the rest of the student body will be relatively affluent. (I’m not implying that all first-gen college students or URM are poor, but I will bet a significant sum that colleges have very good data on what percentage of those categories are not, just like they have data on what % of high-scoring students are not wealthy.)
Just saying — some seem to have this idea that “need blind” means that colleges just randomly select the most qualified kids and just let themselves be surprised by the financial result in the fall. There’s no way this is true — just as they have data that projects what their overall yield rate will be, they have data on what they can expect with regard to demand for aid, based on what criteria they use to qualify students for what people on this board refer to as “hooks” (whether legacies on one hand or, e.g., first gen colleges students on another) and how many of those there are. The results vary quite a bit by school, even in the Ivy League, but are remarkably consistent from year to year for each school, except where the school has made admitting more financially needy students a specific goal. It’s not just a coincidence.
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