The Ivy League Was Another Planet
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I felt like an alien at school. Rural communities have a much lower cost of living, but also a much lower income. A rural kid who makes it to a university will almost certainly have to work an almost full-time job just to cover their living expenses, books, tuition, rent...etc. This divide was apparent to me as a student at Virginia Tech. 80% of VT's students come from the wealth DC suburbs. Yet wherever I worked when I was a student, the vast majority of my coworkers were from rural parts of the state. The "NoVa" kids in general didn't have to get jobs at all due to their parent's earning power. For them, rent was a joke. For rural kids, rent for a room is half what their parent's pay on mortgage or rent. Take this single piece of difference, and then extrapolate it to every other aspect of culture.
The tech field is an exception. I talked to 35-40 startups & companies from AngelList and other websites in a 4 months period. Ended up with 4 offers.
As for OPT: Aren't you allowed to work self-employed during that time [2,3]? So as long as you give yourself a job, you are fine?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#Congressional_yearly... [2] http://blog.messersmithlaw.com/?p=720 [3] http://e3visa.info/tag/opt-self-employed/
I'm graduating in May - I cannot self employ myself :). I already accepted a job offer with a startup, and they will be applying for H1-B for me in two consecutive years. If I don't get it, I'll have to leave. Otherwise, I get H1-B for a max of 5 or 6 years I think
You need some kids from "tough backgrounds" and ethnic minorities to convince your sponsors that their financial support is breaking down barriers, but you wouldn't want to spend money traipsing across the country mopping up all the "rough diamonds" to replace the regular upper-middle-class kids that don't need scholarships and are probably more likely to complete the course and leave a lavish endowment afterwards.
Yes, but nonprofits still act like businesses with the exception that they don't return money to shareholders. I'm part of a grant writing consulting firm and wrote a blog post inspired by a previous HN post like yours: "Why Nonprofits Are More Like Businesses Than You Realize" (http://blog.seliger.com/2012/09/02/why-nonprofits-are-more-l...) that explains what working with and around nonprofits is like.
Do you think that they would agree with you, or protest loudly that such a thing is ideologically invalid and that you're a horrible person who deserves to be shunned for the rest of your life and possibly longer?
Because if it's not, and those bright kids end up being successes, it could very well be in the long-term interest of a profit-making institution to make sure those kids are alumni. Not just for any possible donations, but for maintaining your prestige.
It's a fair assumption to say that bright kids from "tough backgrounds" are less likely to succeed. That's not on an individual level, but on a national level it's certainly true. For most, these are kids who saw their parents work hard and get nowhere. That's a special kind of demotivation that's difficult to shake by the time college rolls around. It's also why there's almost no upward social mobility in the US.
Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams http://www.amazon.com/Limbo-Blue-Collar-Roots-White-Collar-D...
EDIT to add: $25.52 for a Kindle book (Ain't No Makin' It)?! So the people who would be interested in perhaps reading it are screened out from affording it. Insanity.
What's your basis for claiming that? It doesn't jibe with available data. See:
http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-viewpoint/011110-51...
or
http://www.creators.com/opinion/thomas-sowell/dangerous-dema...
or
http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/tax-policy/Documents...
Quote:
The key findings of this study include:
There was considerable income mobility of individuals
in the U.S. economy during the 1996 through 2005 period
as over half of taxpayers moved to a different income
quintile over this period.
Roughly half of taxpayers who began in the bottom
income quintile in 1996 moved
up to a higher income group by 2005.
Among those with the very highest incomes in 1996 – the
top 1/100 of 1 percent –
only 25 percent remained in this group in 2005.
Moreover, the median real income of
these taxpayers declined over this period.
The degree of mobility among income groups is unchanged
from the prior decade (1987 through 1996).
Economic growth resulted in rising incomes for most
taxpayers over the period from 1996 to 2005. Median
incomes of all taxpayers increased by 24 percent after
adjusting for inflation. The real incomes of two-thirds
of all taxpayers increased over this period. In
addition, the median incomes of those initially in the
lower income groups increased more than the median
incomes of those initially in the higher income groups.For some reason, you cherry picked the one study that looked at all incomes in one of the most prosperous periods in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the... does a good job of summarizing a number of studies that show that the US ranks as one of the least socially mobile countries in the world.
No one is arguing that people make the same amount their entire career. That's not what social mobility is. The fact is, the US has one of the lowest levels of intergenerational social mobility, and that exceptions to the rule are held up as evidence of The American Dream in action. It's not impossible to end up better off than your parents (in relative inflation adjusted terms), but that's the exception, and it's usually due much more to luck than hard work. Millions of americans work hard and end up exactly where their parents were.
The fact is, most people end up in the same socioeconomic class as their parents. There are exceptions to the rule, but upward social mobility happens so infrequently in the US, that it's perfectly reasonable to model that as almost never happening. It's not impossible, it just almost never happens. The bigger problem is that the few counterexamples are used as anecdotal evidence to say "if everyone else would have just tried as hard, they'd be better off too". That's simply not true.
No, that's not what I'm saying at all. But you seem determined to intentionally misinterpret what I'm saying, and this conversation isn't doing anything to benefit me, so I'm bowing out.
It would be interesting to see if there are any admissions departments on record with statements that map to those philosophies, and any data that shows how those schools endowments fare over time.
This query completely ignores the human issue, which is significant and deserves consideration. But it would be interesting to know.
Where you're from and income level of your parents doesn't just affect your college experience once you're in college, but also earlier in the process.
I'll provide my anecdote: I grew up in a decent suburb with a decent public school system. However, my high school never produced any Ivy League college students and the counselors and teachers there never presented it as an option. Most kids were only vaguely aware of what the Ivy League even was. It was even a running joke in my year about one student who did apply ("Oh, so and so thinks he's going to go to "Harvard").
Meanwhile, the neighboring school districts, which were slightly more upper-middle class, routinely produced dozens of Ivy League-bound seniors yearly.
The main differences between my district and the neighboring ones was a 10 minute drive and a half century long history of old money in the other neighborhoods.
The point is: Where you are from and your surroundings can greatly impact your knowledge and access to higher levels of education.
Anecdotally, I'm from the latter type of family. Despite my mother's efforts, we still couldn't relocate to a really good area in time for me to go to high school, but we eventually got my brother into a much better public school than I went to.
-locally distinguished -distinguished at the town/county level -distinguished at the state level -distinguished at the national level
He told us that we were not competing with each other, but rather that we were competing with "a kid from Glastonbury [CT] who drove to school in a BMW this morning".
The message was clear: if you wanted to get into an ivy, the next four years of school were to be a grand song and dance to get as many state and national level checkmarks as possible.
We were lucky to have heard his message. There were a couple thousand other kids in the school that didn't hear it. How could they know that it worked this way?
Sure, we were all told we could be doctors or lawyers or industry titans... But we didn't actually know anybody that WAS those things.
Compared to my kid, who sits next to kids that have dads and moms that are district attorneys, nationally known surgeons, oil company owners, etc...
Kids at his school showed up for kindergarten and all but a few could already read. They spend their afternoons doing "enrichment" activities... Compared to the local public school where a sizable number of kids receive remedial tutoring and show up hungry.
"A rural kid who makes it to a university will almost certainly have to work an almost full-time job just to cover their living expenses, books, tuition, rent...etc."
The point of the article is that this is not true and almost no one knows it! If you go to Harvard/Stanford/MIT/etc -- basically any of the Ivy League, top LACs, or a few other elite schools -- and your family makes under, say, $60k/year, your tuition/room/board/books will be absolutely free. All covered by the school. No crippling student loans, no expectation of you working a job while in school (except maybe 10hrs/wk of cushy work-study for spending money). Even if your family is a bit wealthier, it's still the case that for most middle-class families the cost of an Ivy League education works out to less than the cost of the local state school. Very few families know this.
Is there culture shock? Sure, of course. That's part of the point -- for both the poor rural kids and the rich urban kids, and everyone in between. But at schools with the resources to do diversity right (which, sorry to hear, doesn't sound like it includes Virginia Tech), the shock is only cultural, not financial, so the full college experience really is accessible to students from any background.
My financial aid now covers more than tuition (housing/dining plan/etc). I owe more money for my freshman year at a state university than my 3 remaining years combined at an Ivy League school.
I work more because I want to have more web dev on my resume before hitting the real world and also because I like being able to pay for some niceties that my mother wouldn't otherwise be able to afford, not because I need to to stay in school.
The culture shock issue was huge, though: half the people in my freshman dorm read the New Yorker (or, more accurately, subscribed to it and prominently displayed it as an affectation), while I hadn't even heard of it. Learning how to ape upper class cultural cues was probably the most valuable thing I got out of college.
http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/15473/is-it-possi... even has an example of verbing an adjective in Calvin and Hobbes: http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25 (found via http://michaelyingling.com/random/calvin_and_hobbes/)
I also went there becasue it was the best cost - full boat except the room and food. I really regret it now, because the most valuable thing I found out you get in a bachelors of CS is recruiters visiting the school plus job fairs of big businesses like Google and Amazon that come right to the front door. Small schools have nothing like that, and maybe a few dozen tech companies at most hiring alumni locally.
Not making a judgement one way or the other; just interesting that this phenomenon seems to be exempt from politics.
Does the whim of a private company really get to determine if you get a scholarship or not - and thus profoundly influence your future career? Or are these universities really implicit public institutions?
I don't think Stanford university is purely private in the same way that, say, the Coca-cola company is private.
[1]http://bondholder-information.stanford.edu/pdf/AR_FinancialR...
Its a little difficult to make direct comparisons to Stanford, as Stanford's numbers will include a medical research university while Berkeley and UCSF are considered separate campuses, and Med centers have huge budgets. But the state financial support for UC Berkeley has dropped dramatically (around 12%).
It may be different for the smaller state schools that are not research universities. But if you line it up, private and public universities research universities are more similar than different in their sources of funding (grants, private donations, endowment income, etc). The things people believe distinguish these universities from private ones (tuition, state support) are actually a relatively minor part of the budget.
You might think the "writ small" version had more likelihood of being executed competently, but that shouldn't make you against the thing per se.
There are a great many things that, done out of personal choice by private citizens are laudable, but done en masse by a government body are offensive to me.
Want to choose a religion as a private citizen? Great. Want to do the same as a government? NFW.
Want to choose to serve in the military?...
Want to make reproductive choices?...
Want to decide your profession?...
Want to decide whom to marry?...
As others pointed out, wealth redistribution in this case is voluntary.
Now, whether it's true that Ivy League student = talented & hard-working and welfare mom = lazy hedonistic mooch is another discussion, but those are the stereotypes that many people operate under.
Now if the kids got huge loans, stuck the dough in stock market funds, defer interest until graduation at which time they cashed in the funds, paid taxes and paid off the interest free loans, and kept a tidy small profit, as my econ professor and his friends did in the 70s/80s, then money could be said to go to the kids. This practice has been pretty much eliminated.
Financial aid helps upward mobility but does not guarantee it. To think otherwise is pretty naive.
They can probably afford to have x% poor kids every year because the rich kids who pay can make up the rest.
If they got masses of applications from bright poor kids every year they would have to be more selective about offering aid.
And just to add another point of data: I did in fact get more grants than the cost of attending, so I profited from attending school without having to work. These policies are very real, and at least to me, they were very transparent and are what made me apply.
I don't think there is any attempt to hide it, either: I think the sad reality is that it's just harder for low income students to compete with upper middle class and wealthy kids who attend the nation's best K-12 schools and whose well-educated parents have pushed them academically as best they know how. Ivy League admissions policies try to correct for some of this, sure, but I'm sure it's extremely tough to balance that with penalizing kids who are well prepared due to their wealth. And these kids are astoundingly well-prepared, as I learned in college.
Why would you be worried about taking out a loan for an Ivy League education? Assuming you don't do something foolish like major in Medieval History, it's one of the safest, strongest investments in yourself you could possibly make, even purely from a financial point of view.
I came out of MIT with something like $40,000 worth of loans, but the M.Eng. that paid for returned (and continues to return) a substantial multiple of that.
It's nice that these elite institutions are now offering an essentially free education for lower middle-class households, but if you feel capable of exploiting the value of such an education, there's rarely a reason not to leverage yourself for it.
Still, though, I absolutely would not have taken out a $200k loan :) that was like 5x my parents' combined income. No way I could stomach that, and I don't understand how others can. I lucked out in studying CS and graduating during a boom so I'm earning quite a lot more than I ever thought was possible, but it was never my goal to be rich, and my state's flagship school was free for me due to merit scholarships.
And, despite following this line of argument, I've been unable to convince my younger sister to apply to Ivy League schools thus far. She's got time left in high school, so it's not final, but she's been balking at the idea of even applying, in part because of the perceived cost, even after I explained the "no loans" stuff to her.
The more interesting question is, what kind of financial aid can they expect at your average state university?
Unless your family is paying for multiple children going to college at the same time. Mine was a lower middle class family paying for my older brother and I to go to college (with my younger brother going to college by time I was a senior). My parents combined made more than 60k but not by all that much. Combine this with the fact that Columbia's financial aid pool actually dried up when I entered the school (an alum eventually donated a hefty sum a couple years later but that was after I graduated) and my family ended up not meeting the harsh financial aid requirements. And my case wasn't unique either. My roommate, and eventual best friend, was in the same position but without a younger sibling.
"Even if your family is a bit wealthier, it's still the case that for most middle-class families the cost of an Ivy League education works out to less than the cost of the local state school."
This one isn't true in all states. In NY, if you had the type of grades that would get you into an Ivy, you would get some form of scholarship to most of the local state schools. My cousin (same year and school) wasn't good enough to get into an Ivy but he had good grades. He put his effort into showing a few choice state schools that he was really interested in them. This landed him a partial scholarship (with grade requirements that he easily hit). Combined with how easy commuting is in NY (so no dorm) and his total tuition came out to less than half of what I paid in a single year.
You do not know that. You simply do not. The kids/family are operating from a fear reaction. Some years ago there was a study about why more poor people have (pre-video on demand) cable TV than phone. The paper's conclusion was you could predict and budget the cable bill to the penny, other than traditional low yearly increases, but you can never predict next months phone bill, all you need is some 900 number calls or lots of long distance (back when that was expensive) and that means you literally cannot afford to pay the bill this month, hit to credit report, collectors calling, maybe disconnected (so why bother connecting to begin with...). Whoops. Plenty of poor families can survive a stable $25 cable bill every month for basic cable but not a phone bill that might semi-randomly be $10 this month and $125 next month. Therefore out of fear sign up for the devil you know rather than the devil you don't know.
"No crippling student loans" You sure about that? Guarantee that no aid package to any poor kid in the country would contain loans as part of the package? That is definitely not how it used to be. In the old days you'd absolutely have loans as part of the package. If you get a $125K/yr software dev job, $20K of loans is small, but if you are one of the majority who drop out, or get a financially nonviable degree in a field with high new grad unemployment, that kind of loan could destroy you and your family. Much safer to go to state-U.
What you meant to write is something like a $40K/yr family can send a kid to a $60K/yr school and get a completely unknown and utterly unpredictable but probably rather large amount of help which might even approach the total cost of attendance but you'll never know until you sign up and it might vary from year to year and certainly will vary from school to school. Its not unusual for a low income family to have roughly 100% of their income already budgeted and no substantial access to loans, so teasing the family with $57K of "help" at a $60K school is useless if the family can't scrape up $3K extra per year. If they could scrape up $3K/yr they would probably already spend it on health insurance, or maybe car insurance, or food, or dentistry, or ... So assuming there's an infinite pool of available cash is unrealistic. On the other hand if state-U wants $4K but guarantees loan availability, the kid seems infinitely better off going to state-U because the tuition bill can actually be paid (with a loan ... but paid nonetheless)
Harvard actually does give completely free tuition, room & board, and books—not structured as loans—to anyone whose family makes under $65k/year. Expected family contributions (which may come in the form of loans) only kick in above $65k. Admittedly, that's unusual, only possible because Harvard has a gigantic endowment.
They also want a rather remarkable amount of (expensive) paperwork sent to them. Everything about the SAT costs money, $50 for the basic test, $11 to send the scores to a school (seriously, $11? In 2013 it costs $11 to shove some digits somewhere?) although all is peppered with "fee waiver available".
Aside from the cost investment, there is also the time investment problem. As per above if you decide you can't afford it, and they want a fairly large amount of work done to apply, even if even more paperwork could result in it being free, well, why bother?
My brother went to Harvard, partly because their financial aid offer was best, and I recall my father cursing the required forms. He's a lawyer, so ordinary legalese doesn't phase him, but he found those troublesome. Now I imagine a family without a JD in it, or even without a BA in it, trying to fill them out...
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/rankings_2012...
UC Berkeley, for instance, enrolls more low income students than the entire ivy league combined. 44% of UC San Diego undergraduates qualify for Pell grants.
I knew people at UCSD who were trying to major in computer science while working 20+ hours a week at Nordstrom or the Tie Rack at the local mall to pay the rent. There was some financial aid available, but not enough to cover the gap. There are plenty of rich kids at UCSD as well, but there's a big mix.
I understand that when two high seniors in a wealthy school district bump into each other in the hallway and get out their measuring tapes -er- acceptance letters, UCSD isn't considered especially elite. But if we lose a computer science student who got into UCSD because he couldn't keep up with the need to survive financially while passing compilers, vector calculus, physics, and a GE elective, we have lost an elite student.
I'm glad I saw this up close and understood the problems it causes. I actually think that it may be a problem at Ivy League schools that students are so far removed from this problem - they meet fewer low income students, and those they do meet are well funded. Do they meet the student who is struggling with the financial aid application because her father is claiming her as a dependent but isn't actually giving her any financial support? I know two young women in this spot, one who gave up on pre-med at least in part because of tough financial problems.
Going to college with a large number of low income students at a school that is not quite as capable of funding them as an Ivy League opened my eyes to a lot. In particular, I'm galled by the claims of large silicon valley companies that there is an engineer shortage. I'm all for skilled immigration, but how does it strike you that a government and corporate elite bleating about a skills shortage is willing to watch a talented young student get bounced from a compacted CS department while working 30 hours a week at nordstrom? All while state funding is dramatically reduced?
Having been in a situation similar to this, I can say that this sucks. A lot. Thank you for understanding. Most people just look down on and blame people who can't afford school, because they'd prefer to think that they got their own degrees through nothing but hard work, when it's instead partly to highly dependent on what sort of parents you have, these days.
The article's point is interesting, but looked at through this light, it's basically saying "I did not realize I could enter this lottery."
The parent commenter is pointing out that most kids from rural areas will end up at public state schools which do not have the resources of these elite private schools.
You're going to assume that (1) they are just saying that because Marketers Are Liars, (2) you're not smart enough - those schools are only for smart people, and (3) you can't afford it anyway.
I know someone who didn't know the difference between an Associate's and a PhD when they were in high school, and didn't even really conceptualize the idea that college was a real possibility when they were a teen.
My point is, you have to shift your entire cultural context when talking about the poor and the uneducated: you - anyone who's not deal with them - has to get the narrative context they live in before you can dismiss their non-attendance at the top schools.
- lots of extracurriculars
Rich kid: spent the summer spoon feeding starving children in Honduras
Poor kid: works during the summer at the mall to make some money, and has never left the country.
Rich kid: joined a dance troupe, plays two sports at varsity level
Poor kid: Doesn't live within 50 miles of a dance studio and can't afford the extensive travel/coaching/equipment needed to excel in a bunch of sports
Rich kid: Fluent in Spanish due to private language tutor and aforementioned trip to Honduras
Poor kid: Never was even formally taught English grammar (most public schools don't anymore)
- lots of AP classes
Rich kid: Got a 5 on 7 different AP tests.
Poor kid: Goes to a school that doesn't offer AP classes at all.
- testing
Rich kid: Took an extensive SAT prep class, then took SAT 3 times and ACT 2 times and uses the best score
Poor kid: Didn't take a prep class and just took the SAT once
- connections
Rich kid: has a parent who went to an Ivy League school, or has a family friend who is an alum/Important Person who can write a letter of rec
Poor kid: Doesn't know a single person who went to an Ivy League school. Gets letters of rec from teachers
Pretty much every step in the admission process is designed to favor the haves over the have nots. There's a lot of things selective schools could do to make the process fairer without too much effort, but it's reasonable to assume that the deck isn't stacked by accident.
What matters isn’t what you do; it's what you do with the opportunities that are available to you. Your hypothetical rich kid didn’t do anything more than what was put in front of her. Your hypothetical poor kid didn’t try to find ways to challenge himself either.
The rich kids from Palo Alto who got in were the ones who weren’t loading up on AP classes, they were the ones who had gone across the road to Stanford and kept walking into bio labs until they found one that would let them do grunt work.
The poor kids in rural New England who get in go down to the library or online and teach themselves grammar, then go on to learn a couple years worth of college-level linguistics and philosophy of language (which even rich kids don’t get to take in high school) because the books were there and they were interesting.
I wouldn’t pretend for a moment that the deck isn’t stacked. But it’s not stacked in this particular manner.
They announced PSAT and SAT dates during "home room" with appropriate registration deadlines. But for other college stuff, I really did rely entirely on the interwebs.
I later found out that I'd missed national merit by 2%, and that the PSAT was something that people with supportive families were not only told about ahead of time, but actively prepared for, sometimes even taken the -real- SAT as practice. I wish I'd known, or that the counselors had told me that it was something important. I do very well on standardized tests, and I'm sure that if I'd gotten at least 4-6 hours of sleep I'd have made NMS quite easily.
Poor kid: No one can help prepare you for the top-tier interview process! If you're lucky, a couple of your high-school teachers got doctorates from smaller universities. But have no idea on interview process. You worry about the interviews for weeks.
Rich kid: You get a dedicated coach, who knows the school's interviewers names, styles, and preferred questions. You're prepared, practiced, and experienced in avoiding any rough patches. You feel confident.
Poor kid: You're overwhelmed by the top-tier experience - everyone you met on the way, in the dorms, during the tour - was richer, smarter, better dressed. Many of them treat you with an odd kind of pity. You feel like an imposter.
Rich kid: You're relaxed and at ease with your other interviewees. They are your sort of people. There are a few "farm boys", and you're curious about them, but you know they're probably not going to make it, and if they did, how could they afford to stay!? You're getting a good feeling about this place.
Poor kid: In the interview you're stuck when they ask about your outside interests... you work at weekends, and study in the evenings, along with helping out at home. Outside interests are hanging out with your friends, reading and riding your bike. You know this isn't very impressive, and this makes you feel tiny.
Rich kid: When your asked about your outside interests, you've been coached no to say too much. You have so much free time in evenings, weekends, and holidays - due to your parents hiring cleaners, etc. that you do an overwhelming amount of stuff. A chance to show off the community work that you do, inbetween being a state level competitor in <insert any sport>.
Poor kid: When you're asked where else you applied, you look at the interviewers a little blankly... you applied here and a bunch of 2nd tier colleges. Frankly you're ashamed to list off the 2nd tier colleges. The interviewer must have figured out by now - you are an imposter.
Rich kid: When you're asked where else you applied, you reel off a list of top schools, dropping references to alumni of these schools that you've met or worked with.
Poor kid: When you're asked to work through a problem with the interviewer, you don't know where to start... you've never worked 1-on-1 with a teacher/educator in your life! You were the smart kid in school who was left alone to get on with it. The closest thing you've done to this was when your parents wanted to know what you were working on... and you knew they were only asking to show interest... not because they would understand - neither of them having high-school diplomas. You do your best... but it was awkward, you barely said a thing. You're now sure you've flunked the interview, and basically, you just want to cry at how badly you've screwed up, all those people who believed in you who you've let down, why did no one prepare you for this ordeal! And there's another 2 people lined up to speak to you today??!?!?!?!?
Rich kid: When you're asked to work through a problem, this is something you've done 1000s of times with your after school tutors, your AP class teachers, and most recently the interview coach. You jump at the chance to show off your knowledge. The interview is going well so far, all the weeks of preparation are paying off.
OK. So this wasn't quite me, but leans heavily on my personal experience, coming from a household with no high-school diplomas, a below average household income, and a school which, to their credit, pushed me to apply to a top tier university. But they didn't prepare me in any way for the interview - the only interview I'd ever had to that point was the one for my 12hr+ a week supermarket job.
???
You're joking right? I went to school in rural MN. Teachers have a BA degree from a state college and thats it. The only people with a doctorate at a high school would be a Principal or admin of some sort. Rarely, a teacher might have an MA in education.
I completely agree with you that the odds are still grossly in favor of the wealthy kids (after all, they don't want to penalize you for being rich), but from my own experience, I do believe these schools are earnestly trying to control for these disparities by looking at what you do to excel with the resources available to you -- not simply what you do in absolute terms.
You could replace "poor" with "not rich" and get the same result. I never thought of myself as poor at all until I had some encounters similar to what the author describes.
Why? Because at one college fair there was a guy from Harvard, not a recruiting team, but one random alum who cared and brought a bunch of pamphlets.
I asked him "do they ever even admit students from Idaho?" His answer, not only do they admit them but they want to admit more. Had it not been for that conversation, it's not clear if I ever would have applied.
I think it is hard for most people who grow up in an affluent area to understand how little information rural students get about college options.
I never took the PSAT because my school's guidance counselors didn't think enough students were going to go to college for it to be worth their time.
Hell, I applied to Harvard after the deadline because my guidance counselors told me college applications were due February 1st (which is true only of schools in the intermountain west) when applications we're actually due January 1st.
My only hope is that in the modern world rural students are better informed due to the ubiquity of the Internet. But in my experience, everything in this article rings 100% true.
She also thinks that elite colleges undervalue the kind of extracirriculars common in rural areas: FFA, 4H, etc. When I was in HS, our extracirriculars were things like robotics club sponsored by the DOD. In a way, both are representative of their region (middle America versus inside the beltway).
I think ultimately its bad for diversity to take ECs into account. Too much cultural and social bias inherent in that. Think about the kind of ECs elite colleges like to see: concert pianist, interning at a research lab, community service, etc. Unless you have a real sob story, "work" is not very high on that list. But by and large people who can spend all summer on community service projects are not people who have to work as teenagers to help support themselves.
Which is a very good school. The other problem a small but important segment of our society has is believing in the magic of very well marketed schools. Really, there are lots of good universities, and I don't think many people's lives are going to be made or broken by whether they're at U of Iowa or some other school, especially for undergrad.
Balancing a comfortable income and having a life were more important than striking it rich at all costs.
You don't need to fix the schools, you need to fix the wealth structure.
There is no value in replacing a pack of NY assholes by a pack of IA assholes.
I had a roommate who ended up at JPMorgan, and a few more distant associates really hit the jackpot in the Oil and Gas industry.
I will agree that if your life goal is a 100/hr a week investment banking position or some top tier management consulting position in NYC then a big state school probably isn't where you want to be. But you can't study petroleum engineering at Yale so it works both ways.
Of course you're right, these companies aren't the beginning and end of the great jobs available to college grads. If you have zero interest in these jobs, going to the most elite schools is much less important. At the same time, there is a reason a quarter of MIT grads end up in finance and consulting (pre-recession, it was a third). For better or worse, they offer relatively low-risk paths into the upper echelons of corporate America.
Hell Penn is a public university and an Ivy.
You can, without a doubt, get a great education outside of an elite school. But going to an Ivy gives you access to better speakers, better alumni networks, more institutional resources granted to students to do interesting/valuable things while they are at the university, the list goes on.
Is is really that controversial or incorrect to say you can get a great education in many places that don't have the same total resources as Ivies provide to their students?
An excellent point. The kinds of extracurriculars I had available to me growing up rural and poor were either things like Boy Scouts, 4H, or things of my own interest: community chamber orchestra or rock bands, demoscene, semi-local computer user groups, etc. I lived far enough from school that my bus ride ran a bit over an hour, once I got a car I stayed for a few after school clubs (poetry, chess) etc. but I usually didn't get home till it was too late for homework so I simply had to drop those few school sponsored activities.
While the tech magnet school an hour from my area had their very own Cray Supercomputer and sponsored robotics competitions, and all sort of other high-interest to college activities.
I can't really recall anybody from my school trying to get into the Iveys. The "big time" schools were all state schools either in my state, or the next state over for those really ambitious.
A while ago, HN had a long-form article-fest, and one that people linked to was an Esquire piece from 1983[1] about Robert Noyce. He came from Iowa and was a key in founding Intel--and from the way the article makes it sound, in putting men on the moon, as well (it's all connected anyway). What struck me is that several famous physicists were connected to Grinnell College in Iowa.
I suppose I'm a bit guilty of prejudice against the "fly-over states" at times, so that article and this thread were a good reminder (sort of a 1-2 punch) to knock me out of that thinking.
Perhaps part of that is also to see that such potential geniuses do not need to go away to the big city to reach their full potential, either. It would also be great if they could mature locally and contribute to the fields that are important to the communities they come from (agriculture, forestry, etc.).
[1] http://www.stanford.edu/class/e140/e140a/content/noyce.html
Most parents like mine, who had never gone to college,
were either intimidated or oblivious (and sometimes
outright hostile) to the intricacies of college
admissions and financial aid. I had no idea what I was
doing when I applied. Once, I’d heard a volleyball
coach mention paying off her student loans, and this
led me to assume that college was like a restaurant —
you paid when you were done. When I realized I needed
my mom’s and my stepfather’s income information and
tax documents, they refused to give them to me. They
were, I think, ashamed.
You can't fix stupid.
Sounds like a "how this stuff works" seminar or class could have been really valuable. I know I could have benefitted greatly when I was nearing my high school graduation, at least if I could have actually been convinced to pay attention and care.
We live in the age of the net. Knowledge is out there for the taking. Communities of people? Different thing entirely. Physical communities of people have value.
So when we say "college", we can either mean learning that knowledge and skill which will prepare you to begin really learning in the real world, or we can mean a place you go to appear smart, hang out with famous people, and make friends that can do you favors somewhere down the road.
We use "college" to mean both things, but more and more these are vastly different concepts. As students, it's probably important to understand whether your goal is to position yourself to actively engage in a discipline, or position yourself to actively engage in a community.
It's important to know that because most elite colleges are starting to look pretty generic in terms of politics, philosophy, and worldview. Either it's worth all of that money to hang out with the right people, or you're better off picking up classes at the community college for your undergrad and then taking a look again at where you are.
36 grand for a single undergraduate school year? Thanks, but you can go fuck right off America. At the very least studying overseas does provide you with a genuinely different political and philosophical worldview.
A person _can_ also be a solo founder. But you know, that's kind of hard. Sticking through it every day is a lot easier if there's someone besides you who cares, and someone besides you who notices if you stop really working at it.
To say that the social experience does not contribute to learning on a college campus is to miss that _determination_ is the thing that's most difficult, and that the external situation you set up as your learning environment can have a pretty big impact on that determination.
Which of your classes did you learn from and remember the best? For me, it's those classes where I had great problem set sessions with my friends. That's what stuck.
(My startup is working on this problem.)
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/cavery/
http://ideas.repec.org/e/pho46.html
My answer about why someone looking in from the outside might care about what kinds of students are admitted by elite colleges is the observation that elite colleges can be highly influential on public policy (as several other comments have already pointed out). If we are to have the graduates of Harvard and the other seven Ivy League colleges, along with graduates of Stanford and the other several "Ivy plus" colleges, making many of the policy decisions for our country, I hope they are informed by direct knowledge about the life of the rural and urban poor, the life of students with a disabled parent, the life of first-generation college students, the life of students who attended especially lousy high schools, and so on. I'm sure every graduate of an elite college knows how to take care of "his people," but it might be better for all of us if those graduates, in the aggregate, include most of the subgroups of people that include those of us who never attended such a college. That, to me, is a possible broad social benefit of genuine diversity in college admission.
In my home state of Connecticut (home to one of those Ivy League bastions and a short drive from the others), many of the top students at my high school went to UCONN, got great educations, got great jobs in Connecticut (since locals know how good the education can be), and continue to contribute to the fabric of the state. Because so many people have gotten quality education at an affordable price, they encourage other top students to attend UCONN, donate money locally after they graduate, and create jobs for future students.
At first blush it feels unfair (certainly on an individual level). But it may actually result in a far better outcome for society. It certainly makes my home state a better place to live.
Individuals deserve the ability to attain the highest level of success they are capable of, irrespective of any of any effects on society. Students are't public utilities, they're individuals with idiosyncratic aspirations and interests. Why is it ok for society of hold them back?
Society is a collection of individuals. Arbitrarily picking some of those individuals to be winners is certainly not any obligation of the rest of the individuals.
The rest of the state has no right to lay claim to my life. If states are worried about brain drain, they should incentivize local development to attract others from out of state (which I believe Utah is doing), not hide the truth from their youth.
Heck, I grew up in rural upstate New York. It never even occurred to me to think of a place like Harvard/Yale/Princeton, despite being only a few hours' drives away. In my high school, those places might as well have been Mars -- they just didn't exist on anyone's radar. They were from the movies, or something.
But after taking my SAT's, I got tons of unsolicited college mailings, including a brochure from Yale. I sent back the card to receive an application packet, decided to apply early-admission (what did I have to lose?), and was shocked when I discovered I got in.
Literally, the only reason I wound up going to an Ivy League school was because they sent me an unsolicited brochure. (And Yale was the only one which did, strangely enough -- it still never occurred to me to research Harvard or Princeton or anything, since the whole thing seemed so implausible in the first place.)
But except for that brochure, I probably would have gone to the University of Rochester, which, for whatever reason, seemed to be the default option at the time. Nothing against it, of course! :) But it is funny how the smallest piece of information can change someone's life so much.
Technology has the opportunity to change this, and although it hasn't drastically altered the information gap yet as it relates to college counseling, it is starting to. ConnectEDU is the most interesting technology company working on this problem that I'm aware of right now, but I'd love to hear about others as well.
Poor rural white kids don't go to Harvard.
[1] Ron Unz explores this and other Ivy League admission statistics in "The Myth of American Meritocracy" http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-...
I agree that regional and ideological diversity might be a problem for elite schools (or any school, for that matter). But I don't think the issues are necessarily political ones. In other words, are Harvard admissions people rejecting 4-H club members because they assume they're Sarah Palin loving conservatives, or because the Harvard admissions people didn't participate in 4-H clubs and don't know much about them?
I tend to agree, but I haven't read the source cited by the article. If anyone here has easy access to Epenshade's book, I'd love to hear how rigorous the "4H,ROTC decreased P(admission) by 65%" result was.
87 Espenshade (2009) p. 126.
> In other words, are Harvard admissions people rejecting 4-H club members because they assume they're Sarah Palin loving conservatives, or because the Harvard admissions people didn't participate in 4-H clubs and don't know much about them?
A third possibility: admissions people don't believe that generic "leadership" clubs are worthwhile, leading to a perceived bias towards clubs with more specific purposes than being line-items on college applications. We could test this hypothesis by looking for differential performance between 4H and ROTC and between 4H and NHS (Natl. Honor Society, the prevalent line-item club at my high school, which was not rural).
My opinion of 4H was based on 10 seconds of skimming their website, but in that time the generic terminology and cheap selling points targeted towards parents were enough to turn my stomach. It's possible that their website is just targeted towards a different audience, but you would have to convince me.
> they demand substantial amounts of time and effort
That doesn't exclude the possibility that they are a generic leadership club. A leadership club that didn't demand time and effort would be entirely fraudulent rather than simply having dubious value.
> and give achievements for the mastery of specific skills.
If it's like the Scouts, I'm tossing it in with "generic leadership club" unless they provide a metric by which I can judge the engagement and independence of an individual within their system.
Part of what I would want to see from an applicant would be personal goals outside of the framework of the institutions surrounding them. The ability of the individual to bend the institution to those goals would then count as the type of leadership I think colleges are after. They want people who will use the resources around them to do interesting things, not people who aim to collect every badge in the pile.
The pollution of the term "leadership" by those seeking to sell educational experiences is regrettable. Got your morse code badge? Not leadership. In charge of a group of kids learning morse code? Possibly leadership, depending on how much initiative you took to go beyond provided materials. Started a morse code club, created a curriculum for newcomers, advertised, handled paperwork / fund acquisition to get materials & go to a morse code contest? Leadership!
Just about everybody believes, both intuitively and based on research, that ideology relates to discriminatory behavior by employers, cops, judges, juries, etc. Why assume elite academic admissions committees, tasked with rejecting 95% of applicants, are different?
Elite disdain for the assumed characteristics of rural Americans may not explain all of the outreach or attendance gaps, but it's reasonable to assume it plays a role.
Only because they don’t know to apply, in my experience. I grew up in a rural, mostly poor, 97% white small town, which happened to have a few excellent teachers who pushed strong students to apply to the ivies. In most years 3-6 or so students are accepted.
We had 4H and JROTC. Those groups never did anything interesting or challenging to speak of. They certainly weren’t developing “leadership” skills, and participating in those groups took time away from doing far more interesting things. The kids in my class who went to the ivies weren’t in them because they were doing those more interesting things, which tended to be endeavors requiring personal initiative, not just showing up for activities.
Maybe 4H and JROTC aren’t a joke in other high schools, but I’m not surprised that they carry no weight in college admissions from what I’ve seen of them.
It is true that spoken English contains many informalities that become inappropriate in the context of writing, but this observation holds regardless of ethnic influence on the spoken dialect. Everyone has to filter what they write to achieve the tone of formality. I certainly don't speak with the same formality I use in my writing, and I suspect you don't either.
If you want to argue that the culture in middle/upper class suburbia gives its children an advantage with respect to writing English, I would agree. I would suggest that the problem should be addressed by raising standards in inner city / rural environments, rather than by lowering them at universities, which would only serve to fuel attitudes of resentment and entitlement.
> The very bright poor that i personally know avoid the top schools because they require too many essays
What does this necessarily have to do with being poor? I know plenty of "lazy" rich people that avoid the same applications for the same reasons. How do you propose that culturally induced hesitation be distinguished from laziness? How should admissions boards distinguish between cultural influence and poor technique in an applicant's writing? These questions aren't rhetorical, I would love to hear answers, since I can think of none.
> The smart but poor have high critical reading and Math scores, but very low writing aptitude test scores.
I know plenty of people who share this profile for reasons that have nothing to do with being poor. I, myself tend towards this end of the score spectrum and I do not come from a poor family. Instead, my scores look like they do simply because I chose to focus my efforts in school on math and the sciences rather than on writing. Are you sure this is not the case with the people you were referring to?
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/ha...
> I know plenty of people who share this profile for reasons that have nothing to do with being poor.
In my case I believe it was the "smart kid" bias. "The smart kids will figure it out for themselves. The other 30 kids in the class need more attention."
With mathematics, and sciences, there is usually a way to check your answers, and it's easy for the teacher to spot the mistake and circle it. So for the smart kids, the teacher doesn't have to do any explaining, the circled mistake is usually self explanatory.
Many of my written subject teachers would give A's and B's for my work. Yet, I was not, and still am not, a very good essayist. I never knew why I got B's. There was the same assumption that underlining sentences, and the occasional sentence of feedback on the would be enough for the smart kid to figure it out. I never did.
Well, despite having excellent critical reading, it wasn't until a Professor sat down with me in 2nd year, and in 5 minutes explained that my essays were technically correct, but there were two problems: first, I was always losing marks for making too great a jump of reasoning, that whilst he could follow because he knew where I was going, I'd still lose marks on for not explaining the connection; and secondly, because I made lots of these jumps, to get the word count to where it needed to be, I put far too many ideas into one essay, rather than exploring all the aspects of one or two.
Or in other words "quit trying to be so smart in your essays, trying to the right answer, instead write for the audience, and teach them the right answer".
I was discussing this with my english teacher recently; he informed me that although one of my AP practice tests was deserving of a nine (out of nine), I almost assuredly would have gotten a four due to the fact that I cited one source twice instead of citing an additional source. This has absolutely nothing to do with writing ability whatsoever, and is entirely arbitrary. Unlike math and reading standardized tests, writing is simply too volatile to read into.
I disagree, especially in the context of standardized tests. Sure, it wold be nearly impossible to objectively determine the difference in quality between two well-written articles or books on the same subject, but these media have little to do with the writing on the SAT or ACT, where you are given a generic prompt and asked to produce an essay under fairly intense time pressure. You will be forced to make tradeoffs between flow, source incorporation, structure, diction, angle of attack, and so on. The only people for whom these tradeoffs don't apply are at the low or high end of the score spectrum anyway.
Most of these tradeoffs can be evaluated in a somewhat objective manner: were there transition sentences? Were multiple sources incorporated into the argument? Did the writer maintain flow despite the time constraints? Doing all of this for a full-length essay under time contsraints is incredibly difficult, and I am fairly certain that ranking people by the extent to which they manage these objectives provides an internally consistent measure of writing skill (possibly unrelated to applications in which you would actually use writing, but that's another issue).
Back when I was applying to college, I remember being quite surprised at how straightforward the rubrics were. I was consistently able to predict my score immediately before/after completing the essay, both in the context of practice essays and for the "real deal". There was nothing arbitrary about it. I knew what my objectives were, and I knew weather or not I was achieving them, so long as I was willing to be brutally honest with myself.
> although one of my AP practice tests was deserving of a nine (out of nine), I almost assuredly would have gotten a four
This doesn't pass my smell test. I suspect that there was more wrong with your essay than a double citation. Perhaps you made redundant arguments in addition to using the same source twice? Then you would suffer penalties under structure, flow, AND source usage. In any case, I think that your teacher might have been trying to say "there are only a few details between you and a 9" rather than "this one detail separates a 4 and a 9."
Still, the fact that the grading scale places an unwarranted amount of emphasis on citation doesn't make it arbitrary or less concrete, so I think my point still stands. Students taking the exam should know that rubric inside and out, so I think it's fair even though the requirement isn't directly related to writing. Arbitrary requirements are part of life. Students also have to wear clothes during the exam even though you don't need clothes to write; I'm sure many great authors have done their best work in a state of dress that would be completely unacceptable in an AP exam.
She and her other friend from Pahrump, with the "standard" free public school education, she ends up an assistant professor and her buddy ends up with a Ph.D in mechanical engineering from Purdue (which is pretty darn employable).
That she didn't even "imagine" or think about the Ivy League schools made no difference to either of them. They were smart, the worked hard, and boom they are both "successful."
The comment about the military and its recruitment was also interesting. Because having been a military brat (the child of a military officer) it was clear that the military got their leadership from a wide swath of participants, not "just" folks from the military academies, one of my friend's dad was a general (1 star) and he always let us know he enlisted as an airman because his Mom couldn't afford to feed him as a teenager.
So the conclusion is that there isn't really a problem here. People who have the talent and motivation can get a good graduate degree from a good school. They need only finish their undergraduate degree at a state school. All the angst about Google or Facebook only hiring if you went to one of "these" 21 schools, is moot if you can get a masters degree there after you graduate from your "loser" school.
So I see the argument that the Ivy League won't even see you if you don't come through the right schools as an undergraduate, and that doesn't matter for anyone who gets an advanced degree. So if you have the talent get an advanced degree, it doesn't matter.
That said, it implies that if you are a loser and by the luck of having a wealthy family who shepherds you through the process so that you end up in an Ivy League school, you may find it easier to get hired as an undergraduate. But you are also just as easy to fire so that benefit is fleeting if you don't know your stuff.
Anyway, I read it thinking the author was trying to point out a problem only to discover that there wasn't a problem. I found that to be pretty clever.
The problem with societal ills like inequality is that most of them can't ever really be solved. Can you imagine a perfectly equal society? I can't. But liberalism requires some suspension of disbelief. Too much realism breeds cynicism, and cynicism allows intractable problems to get even more intractable.
There needs to be some number of smart and already connected students to maximize the value of the network, but the connection to alumni is on the average more valuable.
On the other hand, depending on their interests, I don't think it is a must to go to university, both my wife and me have Master level degrees, yet, we spent a lot of time getting them. If you want to be a doctor or a lawyer (shudder) you need to get university degree, but not if you want to be a programmer like me. I kind of love my work and would love my kids to follow my footsteps, but you never know what they might choose.
Please feel free to give me any hints and advice because I need a lot of those. What are your experiences and what would you do if you were in my place.
I did start college fund for them, as I understand this will not be wasted even if they don't go to collage.
The OP is right about the recruiting efforts of the private universities. It's not just the rural schools they skip. My son went to a high school near San Diego that straddles the border between an middle class area built in the 50s and a low income area. The student body is about 40% suburban white, 25% Hispanic, 10% recently moved from Iraq (Chaldean), and the rest African American, Native American and other minorities. It has a 7 out of 10 California high school rating, so it's not that bad.
There were no recruiters from "elite" private schools. The best students typically go to University of California, either USCD, UCLA, or Berkeley. The next level goes to the other UCs, especially Irvine or Riverside. Many go to San Diego State University, and the rest who continue their education go to community college.
My son loves economics, and got it early in his head that he really wanted to go to University of Chicago. We were pretty poor at the time, as I was changing my career and working my way up in from the total bottom in a new field doing mainly freelance work.
My son worked really hard to get to UChicago. He attended a recruiting event in a downtown hotel he found out about on the internet. I borrowed money and we flew to Chicago for an interview, staying in a sketchy hotel on the South Side. He applied for early admission and got accepted last year, the first student ever from his high school. They offered a financial package that pays almost everything.
His friends who are still at the school said that this year, for the first time, a recruiter from UChicago showed up. It is like my son put the school on their radar.
One thing we noticed as part of the process is that taking the PSAT is really important. It only costs about $20 and it's free in some schools. There might be something similar for the ACT.
My son did well on the PSAT and he got multiple letters from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and other Ivies trying to lure him in. Also from elite private four-year colleges. So there is an outreach by those schools in this way. Often those letters would mention the possibility of almost full support for students that needed it.
I think the Ivies are trying to reach out to poorer students. It's just that it's hard for them to think out of the box created by their own privileged backgrounds and understand how to reach that demographic. But our experience is that they are sincerely trying, and if a student makes the effort, he can definitely get in.
I think one of the biggest barriers is that counselors in schools like my son's or the OP's don't even consider these schools for qualified students (are they uninformed? lazy? incompetent? complacent?). If they pushed harder, both to the Ivies and in guiding the students, it would help a lot.
I want to move to a different school with passionate teachers and students, but now I have financial obligations(unemployed mom can't find work so I'm taking over her bills while she goes to school). I'm currently looking for a python remote job or job near Dallas. Until I can find something, I have to stay at this job so I can support my mom, thus UT Tyler is my only option.
I wish I would have done more research on scholarship opportunities back in high school. Maybe I'd be somewhere great right now. Oh well.
I went to a major public university my freshman year and transferred to an Ivy League school once I decided I wasn't satisfied with my experience at the public university. It ended up actually being significantly cheaper for me to go to the Ivy League, and opened up a world of opportunity and support I would have never found at my original school.
Since then, my sister has also attended the same Ivy League (you see a lot of families/siblings at such schools) almost free of charge. I could also go on about how the resources and individual support from a private school (effective tuition of 50-60k) far exceed that of a public school - even a top UC.
Feel free to email me if you'd like to chat.
That isn't necessarily the case. A close friend of mine attended a school (Bradley University, admittedly not ivy league) that gave a full ride to national merit scholars and finalists, but only if they had never enrolled anywhere else. She was a finalist, but she attended a state school for her freshman year. Bradley gave her nothing, but she still enrolled because money wasn't her biggest concern. She got her degree, but has said on numerous occasions that she'll never give a dime to any of their alumni fund-raisers since she paid the full load up front.
This is definitely the case. I went to a state school that was cheap. Transfering to a top school that usually costs 10x but with financial aid ended up being cheaper still.
Is it all right to ask what Ivy you went to? Is it the same as the school associated e-mail in your profile?
Arguably up there with Stanford.
How long would the Ivy-league schools maintain those huge endowments if most spots were taken by students from poor background?
This is how the University of Chicago does it (from their website):
Thanks to an extremely generous gift of $100 million from an anonymous alumnus, we are now able to offer an even more competitive financial aid package to many of our students. The Odyssey program has allowed more students from modest backgrounds the ability to pursue all that the University has to offer without the worries of working to pay off loan debt. For students with family incomes below $75,000 a year, all expected federal student loans are replaced with Odyssey Scholarships. For students with family incomes between $75,000 and $90,000, half of their expected federal student loan obligation is replaced with Odyssey Scholarships. You must apply for need based financial aid in order to be considered for this need-based University funded scholarship.
This is also a large part of the logic top-tier schools have used to justify their increased tuition to the federal government.
This logic is flawed imo. Yes the students are poor at the moment, but the endowments don't come from what students are now. They come from what they will be. "excellent students" plus excellent education strikes me as a pretty good recipe on that front.
Pretty long, I’d wager. The endowments weren’t built on tuition, they were built on alumni giving. One might hope that formerly poor students would be more likely to give generously as wealthy alumni.
It's worth noting here that colleges do make an effort to recruit kids from lower socio-economic backgrounds.
I know more than one affluent middle-upper class white kids who swept perfect PSATs, SATs, and SAT II's and who were rejected or waitlisted across the board at these four schools. From this kind of background, getting letters from top schools before applying is absolutely unheard of, and perfect/near perfect SATs are simply expected on their applications and mean nothing.
I mean, I support the decisions of most colleges to put considerable effort into recruiting kids from diverse backgrounds, but the point is, they definitely already do.
I can't speak for every state, but at least the ones I know about, the tuition for in-state students attending a state school are pretty reasonable.
Here's an old post I wrote up on it.
It's also incredibly hard to qualify for a pell grant. I wasn't able to work for health reasons last year, and the best I could get even while unemployed was $900/semester.
I didn't qualify for anything during the six years I was a dependent student. (Which is a huge part of why I wasn't able to be a student at all during that time.)
In the end the starting salary will probably not be all that different, but the amount that has to be paid back will be much less, allowing those state school grads to reach the benefits of their career much faster if they try and pay the loans off quickly.
All the smartest kids in my high school (including 1500+ SAT types) all went to UCSD/UCLA/Berekly. It wasn't until I was in grad school years later, and hung around lots of Stanford/Harvard/MIT grads that I realized they weren't really much smarter or harder working than all the kids in my high school, they just grew up with the expectation of going to a Ivy school ingrained in their experience.
It seems generally true that as the quality of the university increases, the financial resources it has at its disposal also increase. Many schools seem to be investing this into financial aid, but I wonder if that's generally true across the board. Also, I think no matter what it will take time to shed the stereotype that elite schools are for the economically elite. This is a major reason I think there isn't as much awareness about the vast amounts of aid that these schools give to students.
I'm almost 1 year into taking community college classes, was thinking of transferring to state college mostly because nobody ever bothered to tell me it would actually be cheaper to get into an Ivy League college.
Now, just have to figure out how to get accepted with a GED!
Can't afford it. My local district annual report shows the counselors only achievement metric is percentage of HS seniors who go to non-votech school after graduation. Helping one kid get into an ivy at the cost of helping 3 kids attend the local CC could quite literally cost their job.
In the grand scheme of things, I think it's probably not. However, I do think it's important that those kids have an opportunity to try, and that starts with awareness and an understanding of the steps required to attempt.
The study suggests that around 4 percent of all US high school graduates are high-achievers so we are talking about somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 high school graduates yearly who fall in this category. It's clear that not all high-achievers can go to Harvard. Right now the qualified applicants are sorted based on extra curricular activities etc. If more of the 25-35,000 low income high-achievers, which the study suggests there are, applied to Harvard, most would probably by filtered out based on the lack of extra curricular activities.
That's possible, but that certainly doesn't seem like a good reason to disenfranchise 25% of our brightest students.
Furthermore, I'd expect that if those students had help during their applications to the top-tier schools, they'd probably also apply to some other great schools along the way. More exposure to the system can only help.
The interesting thing about this is that a huge chunk of the operating expenses for top universities are paid for by us taxpayers. It'd be interesting to replace military recruiters with "government recruiters", charged with representing all the post-high-school government-funded programs available.
I do wonder what my life would have been like if my family had stayed in Birmingham and had managed to pull strings (grandad was headmaster) to get me into King Edward VII (Tolkiens alma mata and one of the top 2 schools in the UK)
However, there are a lot of great programs that are out there that are trying to rectify this situation. I applied to college through the QuestBridge[0] program, and in addition to providing tools and guidance for me in the application process, I've been fortunate enough to find a network of people in similar situations at school. They also do outreach, especially through alumni of the program.
Then we get to do away with all of this institution status business and people actually have to compete simply based on skill and competence. Not who your parent were, how much money they had or where they raised you or where you went to school.
And, I'm one who is more reluctant to embrace "the Internet" as some sort of default, "magical" solution.
But... most everyone has at least some level of access, now.
And so it seems to me that this particular... "information divide" is crying out for online redress.
Not some super fancy example of "design". Not a marketing opportunity to be "leveraged".
Some straight, to the point text (ok, maybe some pictures, even a few videos -- but to serve the purpose, not become it). From real people. Who know about this shit.
Brainiacs. And parents of future brainiacs who'd had to learn to negotiate this.
Anyone can view web pages. Consider it a "contribution" to volunteer some time to putting a good, concise, thorough, authoritative, and... I guess also collaborative, site together. (There are always new strategies and answers to be shared, and it helps not to feel one is in this all alone.)
Maybe also, or distinctly, this is something Sal and his Khan Academy should take on. A "meta" of the educational experience. How to negotiate school and its bureaucracy. (I realize this becomes daunting when looking across states, countries, systems. At a minimum, it would have to be broken down into regional efforts/teams.)
A half hour or hour's "WTF" video about the financial aid aspect, might be one good starting point for parents, per some of the description in the OP article.
P.S. Couldn't Khan Academy seek out good resources from dedicated career guidance professionals? I've run across some who are really dedicated to their field (and who are not mere marketing droids focusing solely on their institution). It strikes me this might be a good mechanism for finding appropriate materials and then getting them to the students and parents who need them.
Especially interesting is the forum. Unfortunately, it may not feel "at home" for all types of students, as most the participants are planning on going to top-tier schools, and have been all their lives. But if you post "I'm a rural student from X. Here is what I could pay to go to college, and here are my current stats (such as class rank, etc.). Does anyone have suggestions on where I should apply?" you'll get a whole bunch of people trying to help you out, pointing out schools that "match" your statistics, and schools that are "reach" schools, and explaining that you don't need a bunch of money to attend the reach schools, as they offer need-based financial aid. While I don't support spending ridiculous amounts of time on the site trying to figure out whether or not you'll be accepted, I think it's a reasonable place to learn about college admissions, especially if you have no background.
I got the same amount of advertisements from out of state schools as in-state after taking the ACT, but there was a feeling at my high school of anti-elite schools.
The same information can be obtained from reading the best textbooks in one's field of study.
If one insists on classroom education, the solution is to do it using video streaming, thus making it possible to enroll an arbitrary number of people in the same course.
As for the "social environment", just applying won't necessarily make you buddies with co-students, and anyway this model is not scalable.
If the writer's parents, extended-family, and school faculty were all unable to provide any insight for the writer then they were willfully ignorant. People do have a responsibility to educate themselves. Especially when they are in a position of responsibility.
The writer self-filtered himself from the opportunities available by not seeking out opportunities. Universities two thousand miles away should (and do) try to make themselves known to students. But that doesn't relieve a person of responsibility. If you don't have the motivation to find out about them, then you probably wouldn't succeed at the school anyway.
Everyone above who says, "Why don't these kids just Google Harvard and figure out it's cheap?" or, "Why don't they use CollegeConfidential?" is missing the point. The worst position to be in is when you don't even know what questions to ask.
These kids don't even realize what questions they could be asking.
It's not so hard to tell them.
We don't need to repopulate the Ivy League, we need to deprecate it.
/Ivy League grad.
/talented rural poor.
/Ivy grad
There's the rub. You have powerful, entrenched players working to protect their own interests. Even more importantly, ignoring cues like an Ivy education reduces the SNR for hiring managers who are already overwhelmed by noise. Stopping discrimination will require them to do additional difficult, thankless vetting work.
In the tech world, github makes this relatively painless, though not entirely effort-free. Perhaps such a system could be extended to legal and regulatory fields? A central platform for open source laws, regulations, and debates would do the trick. The difficult part would be getting people to use it.
Maybe you could start by targeting law schools and debate clubs, giving them an easy way to visualize the back-and-forth of an argument, and then try to use that traction to move into the public sphere? I seem to recall hearing about a few sites trying to do this, but evidently none of them have reached critical mass yet.