Comment by geebee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by geebee | Hacker News Reader

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I feel somewhat ambivalent about this. I'm glad that Brown wants to eliminate student debt, and I'm glad that low income students at ivies often pay no tuition. However, this doesn't change their essential model, which is to enroll a very small number of undergrads[1], deny admission to the vast majority of applicants, and generally lean toward affluent students.

Compare this with an elite public research university like UC Irvine or UC San Diego. I didn't say Berkeley or UCLA on purpose, I said UCI and UCSD because people often aren't aware of what research powerhouses mid tier UCs really are, that they produce far more groundbreaking research than many of the exalted ivies. In addition, these universities enroll a much larger number of undergraduates, and a much higher percentage of low income students. The result is that these institutions do far more for the US and the world - they produce exceptionally valuable research, and act as an engine for social mobility on a large scale. UCLA, for example, enrolls more low income students than the entire Ivy League combined. I believe this is true of several UC campuses, and until very recently, it was true of Berkeley as well.

In short, I don't want to see the ivies patting themselves on the back too much here for offering a sweet deal to low income students. It's a fine enough thing in itself, but let's be clear - the elite private college system is structured to ensure that the absolute number of low income students will always be very low. I'd be more impressed to hear that an ivy is scaling up like UC Irvine and offering a good deal to a high percentage of low income students, than to hear they're remaining tiny, and using a massive endowment to shower benefits on a minuscule number.

[1] Interestingly, Berkeley and Harvard enroll similar numbers of graduate students, who are often very profitable as low paid skilled labor for research labs. The divergence is at the undergraduate level.

I can confirm the general profile of undergraduate students at UC Irvine. I graduated in 2004 as a first-generation high school/college graduate and went on for an advanced degree. A substantial number of my classmates were also the same. I believe in the UC because, for the most part, it maintains its mission of providing Californians access to higher education if you want it.

I recall the rule (not sure if it's still the same) that if you are within the top 10% of your high school class, you will be admitted to a UC campus so long as you meet a minimum SAT score.

> I recall the rule (not sure if it's still the same) that if you are within the top 10% of your high school class, you will be admitted to a UC campus so long as you meet a minimum SAT score.

If you are in the top 9% of all California graduates, and you are not accepted at any of the campuses you applied to, you will be offered a space at some other UC campus, if there is space available. [0]

If you are in the top 9% of your California high school class, that's a competitive factor in admissions but not a guarantee of admission. [1]

[0] http://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/freshman/califor...

[1] http://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/freshman/califor...

This is true except for Berkeley and UCLA. They require you to submit separate applications (at the very least at some high schools, it could be that the elite high schools in California are allowed admittance into any UC).

UCLA is actually important to note, as from a NYTimes study, they turn the largest population of students who grew up in the bottom 20% to people who are in the top 20% of income earners.

Do you have a source? this is really interesting, would love to read more.

I believe this is the study that's being referred to. It's not by the NYT but they wrote about research by economist Raj Chetty, of Stanford, and others.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/opinion/sunday/americas-g...

Brown (and most likely all other Ivies) is need-blind (except for international students).

So, unless you think they are lying, your point doesn't stand on limiting low-income students. You point on size of college is an altogether different issue.

"Beginning with the Class of 2007, Brown implemented its need-blind admission policy. Need-blind admission simply means that an applicant's ability to pay for their education will not be a factor in the admission decision"

https://www.brown.edu/about/administration/financial-aid/nee...

I want to start by saying that it's awesome that Brown, Cornell, Yale, and whatever other Ivies are need-blind. That's awesome, and I applaud them for it.

That said, economic status and academic performance correlate closely. A college that's very selective will necessarily filter out a lot of lower-income kids purely because it's hard to do extra-curriculars if you need to work after school and/or if you can't afford them, it's hard to get good grades if you're worried about whether you get to eat this week, etc.

My point being that Brown can be both need blind and not have a lot of lower-income kids there.

>My point being that Brown can be both need blind and not have a lot of lower-income kids there.

This is a very hard problem to solve for a university alone. In India, there is affirmative action AKA "reservation" and trust me that system has it's own perils. I still think meritocracy is the way to go while having systems developed by the govt. to help the under privileged kids meet that bar.

Why should a school select students based on extra-curriculars? Why is "working at a job" not considered an extra-curricular?

Why should a college even choose the highest academic performers? It's an educational institution, not a contest.

At the end of the day, what is a college optimizing for, and why?

Colleges could be selecting for students who the college can provide the most value to, or which students need that college the most, or which students show the most potential for post-college success by the college's metrics.

>Why should a college even choose the highest academic performers? It's an educational institution, not a contest.

It will inherently be a contest as long as admission rates are below 100% and schools' reputations are non-uniform. If you shake up admission criteria to be more holistic and less weighted on academic performance, applicants will refocus their attention and compete to satisfy the new set of criteria (at least those within their control).

I definitely wouldn't argue that colleges are optimizing for greatest societal benefit, but it would take a lot to truly align their self-interest with a selection process that doesn't heavily consider academic performance (particularly for private universities).

Still don't understand. By expanding the pool of admissible students (including those with other attributes than academic), don't they increase their rates?

This is a little beside my point, which was that competition will remain as long as schools remain selective ("selective" defined for the sake of this argument as accepting less than 100% of applicants). Even if there was a broad increase in admission rates, people would still compete to be part of the X% accepted to "top" schools.

To address your point, though, I'll assume your use of "admissible" is synonymous with "admitted" students. An increase in rates would require that the number of admitted students increase relative to the size of the applicant pool. If the applicant pool increases with the number of admitted students there isn't necessarily an increase in the rate of admission depending on the relative increase in the size of the applicant pool. If we instead define "admissible" as meeting criteria for admission but not necessarily being admitted, I wouldn't be surprised to see a corresponding increase in admission standards to maintain existing admission rates. Interested to see if anybody has evidence to support or refute this based on historical trends in admission criteria (GPA, SAT, etc.) vs. admission rates.

or which students show the most potential for post-college success by the college's metrics

I think this is what they're doing, and it's really hard to do that for a 17 or 18 year old kid beyond grades, test scores, and extra-curriculars. What would you suggest?

The college system as a whole does best when it functions as a matching problem for curricular difficulty. Past academic performance is a noisy predictor of future academic performance. Students admitted in the sciences at schools too hard for them transfer into humanities and social sciences at disproportionately high rates. Breaking the system inhibits the ability to provide the most learning overall by ensuring everyone can be challenged appropriately.

https://www.collegetransitions.com/blog/college-legacy/

> A study of thirty elite colleges, found that primary legacy students are an astonishing 45% more likely to get into a highly selective college or university than a non-legacy. Secondary legacies receive a lesser pick-me-up of 13%. One study revealed that being a legacy was equivalent in admissions value to a 160 point gain on the SATs (on a 1600 point scale).

The end result of the legacy advantage can be seen on elite college campuses across the country. At Harvard, one-third of students offered admission have Crimson lineage. Fellow Ivies, The University of Pennsylvania and Brown also admit upwards of 33% of legacies, double their overall admit rate. Princeton, with its minuscule 7% admissions rate, has been known to admit over 40% of legacy candidates.

In addition to some other excellent points made on this subthread it's worth adding that matriculation is structurally need-biased, in that attendance requires forgoing a full-time income for 4 years, while also providing for living expenses.

Actually, this has stopped being true in at least some sense. All Universities that take a part in the coalition application are need aware at least for students applying in that way.

>So, unless you think they are lying, your point doesn't stand on limiting low-income students.

You missed the point. Poor kids in general don't go to Math & Science high schools, or high schools that offer college level courses in Calculus I-III, Number Theory, Abstract Algebra, Differential Equations, Linear Algebra, 1-2 semesters worth of programming, Data Structures, etc. These kids don't have have access to private tutors to ensure they ace their SATs, SAT Subjects, ACTs etc. They aren't enrolling in multiple ECs and they don't have teachers with PhDs writing them letters of recommendation. These kids don't have parents that went to colleges and don't have the resources handed to them as the kids that are getting into Brown, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford etc. If you look at the lower level high schools in America, they barely give any of their kids any advantage. They actually put them at a major disadvantage compared to the elite high schools.

It's great elite colleges have these needed based programs. But by virtue of their admissions criteria they are excluding lower income students on a vast scale.

We probably disagree about the extent to which need blind admissions, on its own, addresses the problem of low enrollment from income students.

One factor here is that high achieving, low income students apparently are often unaware of the amount of financial aid available to them at elite private universities. They will often opt for a local state university, even though they would likely get a better financial aid package from the private.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/12/why-few...

"The reasons are varied, but a lack of finances is critical. Tuition can be prohibitively expensive. Elite schools often offer scholarships to low-income kids, but the schools have done a bad job of letting poor students know such assistance is available.

Professor Caroline Hoxby from Stanford University and other researchers found in a different study that many simply don't apply to elite schools because of something as seemingly minor as not having the application fee. There are fee waivers but, again, many don't know that."

On a related note, about half of UC students pay no tuition (this isn't an accounting trick where most of the costs are hidden "fees" - there are a few, but "no tuition" is what it sounds like in this case).

Another factor in the higher numbers of low income students at UCLA and Berkeley (as well as other UC's) is that UC takes a lot of community college transfers. This keeps costs low, and also may help bridge the "awareness" gap by making high talent low income students aware of the possibility of attending UCLA or UCB.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/17/upshot/californias-univer...

"Throughout, the University of California took deliberate steps to attract students of modest means. It kept tuition low and did far more to recruit community-college transfers than most elite state universities. The transfer pipeline is crucial, because many highly qualified low-income students— unaware of how much financial aid is available at some four-year colleges — first enroll at a local community college, where published tuition tends to be low."

note that Brown was decade(s) later than other Ivies in implementing need-blind admission.

need-blind is great, but it's only useful if it's paired with a commitment to make attendance affordable -- which other Ivies have done, and Brown is now trying to do.

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