Kevin Carey wonders what's the point in Harvard extending so much tuition assistance to students from low- and middle-income families if they barely admit anyone from such families in the first place? It's a good question. More generally, discussion of college's role in social mobility and how we might broaden access tend to proceed from the badly flawed assumption that the dollar cost is the main barrier. In fact, admissions policies are structured so as to have a large class bias (both in the way merit is defined and in the nature of the departures from a strict merit regime) and then students from economically struggling families often have money-related difficulties staying in school that relate less to inability to pay tuition as such than they do to the opportunity costs of being in school.
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Beyond Tuition
11 Dec 2007 12:41 pm
Comments (23)
both in the way merit is defined
Yes, this is the big problem. The rules are unfortunately still dictated by class, even if anyone is then subsequently allowed to play by them. The problem is that it may be too expensive or impractical to do that. The NYT article on how upper class New Yorkers are getting their kids into squash (not the vegetable) to ease their way into an ivy league school was a beautiful (if seemingly minor) case in point. It's not that any one is barred from playing squash (or participating in the countless similar extracurricular options), just that it's easily available only to the upper class.
Seems the quickest solution would be getting rid of legacies. I know it won't happen, but nothing about college annoys me more than a person's chances of admission to, say, Harvard zooming up from 10 percent to 50 percent simply because of their parent(s).
Bleh. No wonder state universities have become better than the Ivy League at pumping out the country's power elite.
Actually, I think the best way of understanding today's Harvard University is to realize that it's gradually become a very large hedge-fund with some sort of college or whatever attached to one side. The same is true to a lesser extent for the other Ivies and Stanford.
This development has led to some Congressional talk of changing the tax laws on Harvard-type hedge funds, due to the fact that they're no longer "non-profits" in any meaningful sense. Therefore, spending something like 0.5% of their annual income to fund this new PR-gimmick seems like a pretty sensible investment.
Harvard is overrated. (Class of '80.)
Harvard has a large enough endowment to make a difference but instead it plays PR games. Wouldn't it make more sense to use the endowment to build Harvard II, a teaching-focused school, staff it with excellent teachers, limit admissions to underprivileged students, and then provide tuition free education? They have the money for this, right?
Re "spending something like 0.5% of their annual income to fund this new PR-gimmick "
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Actually , Harvard may be trying to recruit some smart kids into the university in order to make all those rich morons on Harvard's Deans List look good. "Intelligence by Association" --which the rich buy like they buy everything else -- including distinguished professors.
Said smart kids tend to be from the poor and middle class (since it requires work).
Someone might point out to Congress that Harvard isn't all that expensive -- that Congress could send all those young black men to Harvard for far less than what it is spending per year to keep them in prison.
Actually, there's some merit to a federal partnership with Harvard allowing prison inmates to enroll.
1) Have a rapist?? -- enroll him into Harvard's Women Studies program. Those feminists will straighten his ass out.
2) Some southern Klan member commits a hate crime? -- send him to Harvard's African Studies Department and make him attend their lectures.
3) Some business executive commits fraud? Send him to Harvard Business School so he can learn how to do it right and on a corporate scale --where do you think Enron CEO Jeffery Skilling got his MBA?
I must tell you, as someone familiar with admissions practices at elite schools, how shockingly uninformed both Matt's and Kevin's posts are. The comments above aren't much better.
Do you folks have any idea how small a percentage of the student body is comprised by legacy and development admits?
Harvard is not overrated (and boy, I really could have benefited from this program). (Class of '95.)
Do you folks have any idea how small a percentage of the student body is comprised by legacy and development admits?
IIRC, legacies are about three times as likely to get into Harvard as non-legacies. That's not really the issue here, however, since there are plenty of upper class applicants who aren't legacies but still have a substantial advantage going in.
Do you folks have any idea how small a percentage of the student body is comprised by legacy and development admits?
Yeah, the comments started to wander, but the point as it started out is not that the number of students admitted under an explicitly "class-based" development or legacy basis swamped the students who got in on a "merit-based" process of open admission, but rather that "merit" is defined in such a way, against such and such a cultural context, that it largely resolves to "class", too.
Geez, this will affect 53% of each class... oh how I wish they had implemented this last year. I suppose, though, that if you are a New Yorker (like, say, MY) at Harvard and you only hang out with the other NYC kids, you would quickly get the impression that 2% of the student body are middle class and 98% are rich kids with gobs of cash and cocaine habits.
Oh and: the x3 admissions rate for the legacies is just net, and has nothing to do with the miniscule preference giving to legacy students. A much better comparison would be the admissions rates of legacies at Harvard and Yale at the other institution... but nobody measures that, so...
The return on Harvard's investment fund is astronomical. Whatever they're doing- we all need to know.
I'd add to Senescent's comment the observation that preparing to apply for college has become a major task consuming elite-class students for much of their pre-college lives. Middle-and-working-class students [to say nothing of the truly poor] tend to be more casual about it, because their reference groups set horizons lower. I grew up in a SC mill town in the 1950s and 1960s, where Duke [much less prestigious then than now] was the height of aspiration, but most would settle for a state u. or a small church college. I hadn't a clue about how to compete for a top school--though I was lucky enough to go to a high school that offered free tutorials for the SAT. I got into Amherst, I suspect because they found a kid from a SC mill town to be an attractive diversifier. In today's admission market, I'd be lost. But the problem goes beyond elite schools' admission policies. Any policy can, and will, be gamed by those with the money and the obsessiveness. The real problem is the higher-education bubble itself, the notion that one's whole life rides on getting into Harvard, Amherst, or what have you. These places, and others down the ladder [like my own present employer] have gotten much more competitive than they used to be. Short of abandoning any notion of merit and going to a random lottery, I don't know that Harvard can single-handedly solve that problem. Set a standard, and the rich will find some way to buy it.
These discussions of the admissions policies of the "nation's elite universities" just go on an on in the blog and print outlets of magazines like the Atlantic (god, especially the Atlantic), Harpers, New Yorker, etc. The admissions policies of Harvard and the entire Ivy League are relevant to a tiny minority of the population, but I guess if you float around in the world of the elite media (drawn largely from these institutions) you probably have no idea that this is true.
The vast majority of the college educated public attends public universities. Do you ever hear anyone going on about the admissions policies at Florida State (class of '90, yo!)? No, because people who attended FSU are educated enough to realize that everyone in the world did not go to FSU. Sheesh.
Ivy league universities may act as gatekeepers for certain fields: political consulting, elite blogging, punditry, and so on. But there are really excellent programs in science, engineering, humanities, history, music, you name it at public universities across the country and you'd have a hard time convincing me that someone who attended Harvard and Yale is at all likely to be better education or informed that someone who attended only state universities.
Most people who scrip and save to send their kids to private universities (or put themselves into hock) are wasting their money. Case in point: friend of the family who graduated from Harvard with a degree in Japanese literature and currently works as a therapeutic masseuse.
Sorry, but sometimes the elite ivy league pinheads with their cultural blinders on really piss me off.
Let me place myself against the consensus here and stress that this change is still a big deal. It will make Harvard genuinely affordable for everyone who is admitted, and (more importantly) will spur peer universities to make similar changes to their own financial aid regimes.
Now, I understand the perspective of many commenters who assert that the admissions process itself is biased against low-earners. It is. But many statements, like this one by JH, are well over the top:
"True enough. Unless they're also willing to fund piano camp, basketball camp, private foreign language and SAT tutoring, jaunts to far-flung, impoverished countries to read to blind kids, and summer camps in Oxbridge, then it's bordering on an empty gesture."
Guess who went to a middling public school, never dreamt of having an SAT class or SAT tutor, never went to a summer program that wasn't free, wrote his own applications, and somehow managed to get into Harvard? Only two years ago?
Me.
Don't tell me that this policy doesn't make a difference, because I very personally know one case where it would have.
I didn't go to Harvard specifically because the financial aid package was too weak.
"Do you folks have any idea how small a percentage of the student body is comprised by legacy and development admits?"
At Columbia, being a legacy meant your chances of getting in were slightly better than flipping a coin. At Harvard, as Matt said, three times better than the unwashed masses. Give me another number at another institution, if you've got it.
The point isn't the volume; the point is someone getting a seat at an institution over equally-qualified applicants simply because you have pedigree. I have a crazy idea that education is the way to prevent the growth of an alienated underclass that sees no stake in democracy. Legacies of any kind don't help that.
Yeah, count me as another "would-be-Ivy-Leaguer" except for the price. You could look through a good section of my dorm at Berkeley ("The KMart of higher education") and tick them off - the guy who couldn't afford Cornell, the guy who couldn't afford Princeton, the guy who couldn't afford Brown, etc...not a major social problem, but a well known issue for a certain upper middle class suburban population.
Well Matt, I guess you can take your case as a universal rule, and anyone who is middle-class and well-qualified will get into Harvard. No, there are other considerations-- geography, what classes your high school offers, whether your high school offers a weighted grade point average, etc.
I recently met a person who said she never would have gotten into Stanford if she hadn't been able to go to Bronx High School of Science (open to all New York City students who qualify on a test). Most people there get into the college of their choice, many Ivy League. For the rest of the country who doesn't have a mega-high school Ivy League factory nearby, they have to make do with their local public high school that offers four AP classes. It's not a fair playing field.
I don't have any specific numbers (it's the end of the semester and I am blog-crastinating, so this will be a no-footnotes post) but I do remember meeting some shockingly idiotic legacies at Williams -- including one young woman who had never heard of the CIA!
More than this, though, I think what bothered me was the rank classism of having the daughter of the CEO of Deutsche Bank being served in the dining hall by the son of Mexican box factory-workers from the S. side of Chicago.
Equal opportunity, indeed.
Comments closed December 25, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
True enough. Unless they're also willing to fund piano camp, basketball camp, private foreign language and SAT tutoring, jaunts to far-flung, impoverished countries to read to blind kids, and summer camps in Oxbridge, then it's bordering on an empty gesture.
Posted by JH | December 11, 2007 1:19 PM