defend the indefensible: THE IVY LEAGUE

The Estimated Cost of Attendance
Tuition and fees: $28,400
Room and Board: $8,600
Books and personal expenses: $2,620
Cost for one academic year: $39,620

The one time I made an argument for class-based affirmative action in a class, I got called a racist, so maybe I should shut up.

I got nearly a full ride, but I can't imagine getting a grant that size now - it would have to be nearly three times what I got then.

Not 100% true. Brown only recently instituted a need-blind policy. It starts actually taking effect in 2007. The current undegrads are rather.. fortunate.

yeah, yer lucky trife hasn't found this thread ... (and i happen to agree with you on this issue).

Also, I realize what a great library it had - journals from 1890! Another good thing about non-state/private schools - the variety of students from all over the place, countries, cultural backgrounds, etc is great - most of my classmates were interesting and intense people. I liked being in a city having access to amazing professors.

This is actually several shades of bullshit. There were a bunch of rich kids in my class of 1600, but there were also a LARGE number of middle-class/lower-class kids as well; in fact, one of my roommates paid something like $4000 for his entire college education thanks to financial aid. Actually, something like 85% of the undergraduate population receives financial aid at one level or another (one of the benefits to having an endowment the size of a small country's GNP).

So now I'm Ivy League? I already feel snootier!

Maybe going to crappy high schools give you a disadvantage on the test, but that certainly didn't keep several people I knew who went to public schools in Florida, Arkansas or central DC schools from scoring very well and going to good Universities.

I would imagine so. In my experience, the dumbest kids at school were the richest ones - they didn't have to work to compete - they got legacies, or their daddies gave lots of money to the school. Those were the ones who sat around their dorms all day getting drunk or snorting coke.

Also, I hate to say it, but I always looked down on those kids whose parents spent all that money on test prep courses. If you're paying attention in school, you shouldn't need that stuff. I worked for admissions one year, and I saw first hand that they look for well-rounded, articulate, interesting students.

Really? Not in my experience. Being rich might make you a lot of things, but no more likely to be dumb than poor (dumb) people. I knew a lot of really smart people in college who were maddeningly rich too. In fact, almost all the people I knew at college were really smart. It was hard to find a dumb person. My roommate was a chemical abusing depressive grateful dead listening to jerk sometimes, but he also had read the Odyssey in Greek before coming to college. And he was from the South. And now is a PhD prof. at a biz school. But not rich then. It was a struggle for me to get through college, financially. But it was worth it.

And I did know a number of really dull people at college - they usually ended up in certain programs that were neither sciences nor humanities (I won't say for fear of offending anyone here who may have come out of similar programs).

It's no secret that the standards are lowered for legacy-type kids.

That tells me that the education system and admissions process are geared toward the wealthy/ier among us. Which goes back to - what's the 'good' of a need-blind admissions process?

It's better than a system that denies admission to people who come from a poor background, yes. (But isn't that system the status quo, with the emphasis on test scores and extracurriculars, etc.?) But any system that gives 3% of the spots to the bottom quarter of incomes needs to be fixed.

I'd be interested to see an SAT/ACT breakdown by class, but I don't remember their paperwork asking about family income.

I'd rather get rid of the politics that favor degrees from certain universities, but as long as they exist, I do think that these schools should admit a certain number of working-class students, so that all of Tomorrow's Leaders don't all come from the same class.

It may be that some of the people you didn't like at school, Kerry, were dull, rich, and lazy. In my experience the generalization didn't apply across the board.

You may have been sensing an affectation, a pose, that was certainly common at Yale. People who grade-grubbed and made a big fuss about how hard they worked were considered very uncool. A lot of people worked really hard, but acted rather nonchalant about their effort.

Yes, they were. It's called 'entitlement'.

I'm totally on-board with the just-as-good-an-education elsewhere, but that only goes so far. We give over so much capital to Ivy graduates. Every other 'first-time novelist' paperback I pick up at Border's has a Harvard-educated author, half the new film directors spent time at an Ivy, et al. - I don't believe that has anything to do with the Ivies having such a high percentage of great writers or talented artists (or businesspeople, politicians, anything else), and everything to do with their socio-economic status and the name on their degree.

I worry that we're limiting opportunities for the vast quantity of creative, talented, intelligent people out there who didn't go to an Ivy. Their educations and skill levels might be just as good, but they're being shuffled off into obscurity (or middle management suburbia) because they don't have the connections.

The sole reason that wealthy people have better grades is that they don't have jobs? Do you have any figures on how many high school students at different income percentiles have jobs and/or extracurricular activities (do you really believe that admissions committees don't consider a job one of the higher forms of 'extracurricular activity' and don't give greater weight to applicants who had to work while in school?). Maybe the quality of the school they attended had something to do with it too?

And is SAT test prep the sole reason that wealthier students do better than poorer students? My parents easily could have afforded a class, or years of classes. I never took one.

The current admissions criteria at such schools - including consideration of factors such as race, athletic participation, "legacy" status, etc. - produces a student body in which 10% of students are "low income," according to the study by The Century Foundation, referred to in milo's first post here. According to that study, if factors other than grades and test scores are eliminated from consideration, the percentage of "low income" students rises to 12%, the graduation rate also rises slightly, and the student population of African Americans and Latinos drops from 12% to 4%. The authors conclude that race-based admissions should be continued and expanded to increase racial and income diversity simultaneously.

I wonder how milo proposes to conduct an admissions process without reference to grades and test scores.

I never wanted to go to an Ivy (though I had a junior-high infatuation with Duke/Duke basketball - too bad I don't have any depth perception!), so my resentment (if it is that), has more to do with the cultural status of them

Haha. Have you ever been to the East Coast?

One way to measure the low income population of student bodies is to look at the percent eligible for Pell Grants, i.e. with family incomes less than $30K. In 2001, UCLA's undergrad student body contained more such students than any other highly selective institution, at 36%, higher than the national average of 22.6%. Ivies Columbia and Cornell* are not far off the national average, at about 17%. The rest of the Ivies are closer to 10%, with, of course, Princeton down below 8, but even then this reveals that most of the Ivy schools have at worst half as many low income students as other colleges do.

Another note - in all of these statistics, we're looking at the percentage of low income students who attend these schools, not the percentage of such students that are admitted. I wonder how many of those admitted attend.

*admittedly, Cornell contains several undergrad colleges, of which only one is an Ivy

(I don't remember seeing applications that asked about work experience, for that matter.)

The Duke article pretty much reiterates exactly what has been said - the Ivies are not the intellectual powerhouses they're cooked up to be. But that doesn't deal with the cultural perception.

I found the CF report - it's not purely based on income (as I read the original)

"There is even less socioeconomic diversity than racial or ethnic diversity at the most selective colleges (see Table 1.1, page 69). We find that 74 percent of the students at the top 146 highly selective colleges came from families in the top quarter of the SES scale (as measured by combining family income and the education and occupations of the parents), just 3 percent came
from the bottom SES quartile, and roughly 10 percent came from the bottom half of the SES scale."

FWIW, at least. (Even going by income - if the Ivies are at 10%, that's still too few)

As to your last one - aren't those linked? Can you have more "low income" students without leaving out "high income" students?