Actually, though the graph is tricky to decipher, if you are in the bottom 70% of income or the top 1%, you have some advantage. Of course, the actual numbers are not shown, but there are clearly many more applicants in the bottom 70% than the top 1% (simply because the top 1% is a lot fewer people) so it is unclear how big the effect actually is. But colleges seem to slightly prefer accepting students coming from poorer families. (Or perhaps students coming from richer families send in more applications.)
The data has been studied in all kinds of outlets. When they reported that the top 1% are 200% likelier to be admitted my reaction was only 200%?! Then I read closer and realized that this is after accounting for academic performance, extra curriculars, class rank, etc.
Apparently the top 1% make up 14% of Ivy League undergraduates [1]. This doest directly translate into 1,300% more likely to be admitted (wealthier people are more likely to apply) but at a glance it would seem that the very rich are advantaged in college decisions mostly because they've got strong academics, test scores, extracurriculars, etc.
The "dumb|lazy rich kid" stereotype is very old and no doubt has some basis, but in the few rich families I've known, the kids were pushed extremely hard to achieve academically.
This doesn't counter the stereotype much, if you take two dumb/lazy kids and stick one in a middle class household offering the necessities, then take the other and stick them in a 1% household that can afford tutors and private schools and supporting year-round extracurriculars, who's going to do better?
Both households can try to "push hard" but what the rich household can do for a child is a strict superset of what the middle class one can.
Sure, but isn’t the purpose of college to educate the most qualified students? If they are actually better academically, why does it matter how they got to be that way? It is corrupt if they aren’t actually good academically and yet still get in to whatever school above more qualified students.
No, the purpose of academia is to enable an educated society.
If we let things fall into a reinforcement loop the result is a bimodally educated society: from there does the intelligentsia then go and rule over the rubble?
I mean, if people from the same families are actually consistently more qualified than the commoners over long spans of time, then sure, let’s have an aristocracy, why not? The root problem with aristocracy isn’t that it is forbidden for some sacred moral reason, it’s that it functionally doesn’t work well.
Differentiation based on traits is not stable across many generations, and the commoners will always eventually generate individuals who are better along whatever dimensions than the aristocracy does.
I don’t think we have to worry about this problem, so long as we prevent the actual corruption. If we are really looking at merit, the families will cycle out after a few generations (again, we do have to prevent the actual corruption).
We're not talking about taking the dregs of society and throwing them into ivy league schools: we're talking about people who didn't have 4 years of debate team and lacrosse and water polo but still managed to do quite well for themselves.
It creates a better environment for everyone involved, since like you noted, creating an aristocracy has traditionally not worked out for either side of the coin.
My point is that letting in applicants by (aspirational) merit does not create an aristocracy, even if some of the high performing applicants are wealthy. Aristocracy is created through corruption of (aspirational) meritocracy, because you need some non-(aspirationally-)meritocratic force to hold the same families in place generation after generation. They won’t continue to perform well forever. If they did perform well forever (again, they don’t), then aristocracy would be a more workable system than it is.
- many programs and activities that stand out aren't likely to be offered in poorer school districts
- the time outside of school hours they take has a cost: it can be in terms of needing additional transportation, or changing childcare plans for example.
College applications don't measure aspiration, they measure proxies for aspiration we've long known are flawed and heavily affected by wealth.
Honestly it's telling that affirmative action was struck down which in turn is threatening legacy applications, and not the other way around, when it's well known historical fact legacy applications started out as a way to keep out immigrants: at the end of the day these schools have been putting their endowments ahead of what benefits society, and that's not really how things should work.
I believe GP was complaining that rich people can also make their kids actually more qualified through better, more expensive schooling, not that colleges are letting them in when they are actually under qualified. I agree that legacy admissions should be abolished yesterday.
Yes but the implication didn't quote anything to back it up as being correct.
While certainly it has been shown that students with better upbringing perform better on such things the amount of that is way less than the difference in students.
Thus it isn't as simple as "those who are given all the tools do better" there is also an aspect of something else.
After all "they are just better students" would imply only a similar increase in application acceptance.
The is a large trend of "overrepresented groups are just better" again and I prefer to push back on "I don't have evidence of why else there is overrepresentation so obviously it is fair"...
Especially when Legacy is literally the opposite of fair.
You are thinking about it backwards. It's not a matter of what was done for the kids, but what was expected of them. Parents would not tolerate low effort. Also, I didn't know any who employed private tutors, but they did arrange to send their kids to the best schools within reach.
I don't understand this obsession with tutors. If the kids have good teachers at a school with high standards, the only time for tutors is if the kids need remedial help. I'm speculating this focus on tutors comes from the belief that rich kids can achieve at higher levels only because they are getting something extra. I think there is also an underestimation of how much more demanding the better schools are.
I’ve known both. Some kids have a huge chip on their shoulder to carry the family legacy or exceed their parents, while some were happy to coast on their trust fund.
I think the biggest difference is that kids without family money don’t have the option to coast.
Yeah so the article isn't about the general comparative application strength of rich vs poor, it's about whether a wealthy advantage exists when controlled for other factors. A meritocratic admission process should not consider family wealth, but these data show that it does. That line chart should, theoretically, be a straight horizontal line; instead we see strong effects of wealth. The Economist once said that a dumb rich kid has a better chance at going to an elite college than a brilliant poor one, and that seems to be the case here.
It's funny, the Ivies are actually quite up front that they're goal is to pick "future leaders" of the country, not the most academically gifted students (though this is an important sub-group). The fact that there's a quota of students who are chosen for purely academic talents is particularly telling.
If you have enough drive to get good grades and your parents are worth many millions of dollars you have an excellent chance of being one of society's future leaders, you're they're perfect candidate.
>It's funny, the Ivies are actually quite up front that they're goal is to pick "future leaders" of the country, not the most academically gifted students (though this is an important sub-group). The fact that there's a quota of students who are chosen for purely academic talents is particularly telling.
Yep, they sure did a "heckuva job" picking America's President when Yale picked George W. Bush.
For every high profile failure like W, there are likely numerous other unqualified morons anointed by these institutions as ‘leaders’ running companies and doing overall much more damage. The Ivies are ripe to be burned to the ground.
They had a ~1500 in 310m chance of picking someone who would become president. That is a pretty good job given its a 0.00048387096% chance of getting it right.
If the goal is to pick “future leaders”, Yale succeeded as far as admissions are concerned. I think it’s unreasonable to expect that an institution can predict what decisions a teenager will make in their 60’s.
And even with the 200%... count me skeptical that these modelers are able to control for the other specific factors of performance. When I did certain extra curriculars, there were certain achievements that were particularly noteworthy. The admissions counselors understood this, but did the modelers in 'all kinds of outlets' catch that?
Isn’t it the same reason why the poorer applicants have a better chance at getting in than the middle applicants? They have more interesting stories to tell on their essay. The really rich are going to engage in novel extracurriculars and have wilder travel stories at a young age. There’s just less variance in lifestyle in suburbia.
This article has the single strongest datapoint I’ve seen that shows that removing SAT actually favours the rich: it shows that for students with equal SAT, colleges give a much higher scores to all other factors (recommendations, no academic ratings) to applicants in the top income percentile vs ones in lower.
Interesting that to my knowledge only US universities have this kind of "lets look at extra curriculars" admission system in the first place. In all/most other countries, it is high school grades or entrance exams only.
Or - even better IMHO - it is admit almost everyone, and then have some tough exams (e. g. ETH Zurich).
Pretty sure the extracurricular admissions was itself a racism-motivated development. Once non-WASP groups started to attain adequate admission scores they needed another justification for denying them.
And things don't stop at the "entry point". If you are in the other, larger category of people without wealth levels of the top 1-5%, but with a kid having had the potential and abilities to being accepted into an Ivy school, financial inability to "keep up with the Joneses" prevents access to a lot of other school or future professional options. While able to pay enough to sustain college tuition, room and board, ability to build the necessary network, which is one of the foundations of future growth, by also attending expensive, while professionally beneficial events, in and out of school, was financially impossible. And this is where people meet and make decisions on the future of some of the kids, including job offers way before graduation. The game is end to end rigged.
Here in the UK the educational system is equally stratified. Now, it is true that excluding the very few admitted for sporting prowess (rowing at Oxbridge) the typical student at an elite University is of a higher calibre than the typical student at a non elite University. This is due to selection.
BUT, children of the affluent are able to access much greater educational opportunities than children of less wealthy parents. This means they have a better education and are better prepared to pass the entrance procedure at the best Universities, while equally capable but poorer children are disadvantaged from the outset. However strenuously denied, the suspicion that "people like us" are being selected is difficult to avoid.
I went to a second tier University where many of my fellow students were affluent but not good enough for an elite University. Even then it was clear that their life experience and future expectations were vastly different to my own. I have, I believe, succeeded on my own merits in the UK tech industry but even so I have ended up financially and socially below where the affluent kids started.
In a class based society birth and/or wealth are a far greater determinant of life success than talent or any other attribute. In this, the UK and US are identical.
This reminds me of the SAT, which is a major college entrance exam in the US. One of it's original goals was to level the financial playing field with an objective measurement of abilities. But then SAT preparation classes became a major thing and more affluent students were earning higher SAT scores due to the additional preparation. I hear some universities are considering removing the exam because it's no longer an accurate indicator of the student's abilities.
Those prep classes can only increase scores a modest amount.
A mediocre rich kid is still gonna get trounced by a smart poor kid on the SAT.
The data presented in the article shows how, after controlling for test scores, the wealthiest children get enormous preference on all the non-standardized factors that people want to replace standardized tests with.
Dropping the transparent and standardized metric means the wealthy will game the system in ways that are only going to be harder to detect. Money buys extracurriculars and niche hobbies and elite coaches/trainers/tutors/etc.
> The data presented in the article shows how, after controlling for test scores, the wealthiest children get enormous preference on all the non-standardized factors that people want to replace standardized tests with.
No, it shows that they get higher ratings (“preference” would be ratings for the same objective facts) on the existing aggregate of the other factors used in admissions, which is not:
(1) Showing preference,
(2) Showing the advantage on each of the factors, or the particular ones which would actually replace standardized testing in any particular evaluation.
The usual concrete recommendation I’ve heard when anyone discusses it is to replace the role of standardized testing by filling its weight by expanding the weight of the existing other objective academic criteria with which it is highly but not perfectly correlated, largely removing the test prep issue and the cost factors it involves, but not upweighting other non-academic factors (which have cost, access, and network factors much stronger than standardized testing does.)
While true, standardized testing is still more fair than qualitatively judging extracurriculars or applying arbitrary GPA normalization across high schools.
Does the entirety of human history offer as examples any other type of society?
It seems that people making this argument and its similar variations severely discount the heights they have attained. Your kids are one of the 3-5 most important things in your life, so what could be more ridiculous than the idea that you shouldn't have agency to improve their futures? And if you do, then you should expect to succeed more with more resources to the extent that the greater resources don't cause your own character flaws to achieve escape velocity in magnificent ways that stunt your children. If that's not true, a lucrative business of child-rearing consultancy should rapidly emerge to fix that.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 103 ms ] threadApparently the top 1% make up 14% of Ivy League undergraduates [1]. This doest directly translate into 1,300% more likely to be admitted (wealthier people are more likely to apply) but at a glance it would seem that the very rich are advantaged in college decisions mostly because they've got strong academics, test scores, extracurriculars, etc.
1. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/22/college-applicants-from-fami...
Both households can try to "push hard" but what the rich household can do for a child is a strict superset of what the middle class one can.
If we let things fall into a reinforcement loop the result is a bimodally educated society: from there does the intelligentsia then go and rule over the rubble?
Differentiation based on traits is not stable across many generations, and the commoners will always eventually generate individuals who are better along whatever dimensions than the aristocracy does.
I don’t think we have to worry about this problem, so long as we prevent the actual corruption. If we are really looking at merit, the families will cycle out after a few generations (again, we do have to prevent the actual corruption).
You answered that:
> it functionally doesn’t work well.
We're not talking about taking the dregs of society and throwing them into ivy league schools: we're talking about people who didn't have 4 years of debate team and lacrosse and water polo but still managed to do quite well for themselves.
It creates a better environment for everyone involved, since like you noted, creating an aristocracy has traditionally not worked out for either side of the coin.
/s (if that wasn’t obvious)
My point is that letting in applicants by (aspirational) merit does not create an aristocracy, even if some of the high performing applicants are wealthy. Aristocracy is created through corruption of (aspirational) meritocracy, because you need some non-(aspirationally-)meritocratic force to hold the same families in place generation after generation. They won’t continue to perform well forever. If they did perform well forever (again, they don’t), then aristocracy would be a more workable system than it is.
- low-income families are 3x more likely to have problems with their cost: https://mottpoll.org/sites/default/files/documents/031819_Pa...
- many programs and activities that stand out aren't likely to be offered in poorer school districts
- the time outside of school hours they take has a cost: it can be in terms of needing additional transportation, or changing childcare plans for example.
College applications don't measure aspiration, they measure proxies for aspiration we've long known are flawed and heavily affected by wealth.
Honestly it's telling that affirmative action was struck down which in turn is threatening legacy applications, and not the other way around, when it's well known historical fact legacy applications started out as a way to keep out immigrants: at the end of the day these schools have been putting their endowments ahead of what benefits society, and that's not really how things should work.
This is a failure of K-12 public educational systems for not preparing students as well as high income families can.
A lot of Ivy League school entries are "legacy" which means a parent went there.
Remember if you let in a minimum number of something that means you wouldn't have without a limit.
Legacy students aren't more gifted academically or they could get in as part of the academic pipeline, right?
While certainly it has been shown that students with better upbringing perform better on such things the amount of that is way less than the difference in students.
Thus it isn't as simple as "those who are given all the tools do better" there is also an aspect of something else.
After all "they are just better students" would imply only a similar increase in application acceptance.
The is a large trend of "overrepresented groups are just better" again and I prefer to push back on "I don't have evidence of why else there is overrepresentation so obviously it is fair"...
Especially when Legacy is literally the opposite of fair.
They may not have had teams of tutors, one for each subject, but I guarantee you that they worked with people at some point in their academic careers.
I think the biggest difference is that kids without family money don’t have the option to coast.
Is 200% higher acceptance greater than 0.1 GPA or 10 sat points?
If you have enough drive to get good grades and your parents are worth many millions of dollars you have an excellent chance of being one of society's future leaders, you're they're perfect candidate.
Yep, they sure did a "heckuva job" picking America's President when Yale picked George W. Bush.
Or - even better IMHO - it is admit almost everyone, and then have some tough exams (e. g. ETH Zurich).
BUT, children of the affluent are able to access much greater educational opportunities than children of less wealthy parents. This means they have a better education and are better prepared to pass the entrance procedure at the best Universities, while equally capable but poorer children are disadvantaged from the outset. However strenuously denied, the suspicion that "people like us" are being selected is difficult to avoid.
I went to a second tier University where many of my fellow students were affluent but not good enough for an elite University. Even then it was clear that their life experience and future expectations were vastly different to my own. I have, I believe, succeeded on my own merits in the UK tech industry but even so I have ended up financially and socially below where the affluent kids started.
In a class based society birth and/or wealth are a far greater determinant of life success than talent or any other attribute. In this, the UK and US are identical.
A mediocre rich kid is still gonna get trounced by a smart poor kid on the SAT.
The data presented in the article shows how, after controlling for test scores, the wealthiest children get enormous preference on all the non-standardized factors that people want to replace standardized tests with.
Dropping the transparent and standardized metric means the wealthy will game the system in ways that are only going to be harder to detect. Money buys extracurriculars and niche hobbies and elite coaches/trainers/tutors/etc.
It only benefits the rich and mediocre.
No, it shows that they get higher ratings (“preference” would be ratings for the same objective facts) on the existing aggregate of the other factors used in admissions, which is not:
(1) Showing preference, (2) Showing the advantage on each of the factors, or the particular ones which would actually replace standardized testing in any particular evaluation.
The usual concrete recommendation I’ve heard when anyone discusses it is to replace the role of standardized testing by filling its weight by expanding the weight of the existing other objective academic criteria with which it is highly but not perfectly correlated, largely removing the test prep issue and the cost factors it involves, but not upweighting other non-academic factors (which have cost, access, and network factors much stronger than standardized testing does.)
Does the entirety of human history offer as examples any other type of society?
It seems that people making this argument and its similar variations severely discount the heights they have attained. Your kids are one of the 3-5 most important things in your life, so what could be more ridiculous than the idea that you shouldn't have agency to improve their futures? And if you do, then you should expect to succeed more with more resources to the extent that the greater resources don't cause your own character flaws to achieve escape velocity in magnificent ways that stunt your children. If that's not true, a lucrative business of child-rearing consultancy should rapidly emerge to fix that.