Posts with the tag admissions

Income, Financial Aid and College Admissions

Ben Miller — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 23:01:48 EDT

It’s been less than 48 hours since the most elite colleges and universities in the country made their admissions decisions available to prospective applicants, and already stories are popping up about record low admission rates. As usual, the figures are minuscule: Harvard took just 7.1 percent of its applicants, Columbia 8.7 percent. By contrast, Dartmouth College, with a 13 percent acceptance rate, may as well have just thrown its doors wide open.

It’s not surprising to see record-low acceptance rates given the surge of applications over the past year, but looking at overall figures fails to answer important questions such as how many of those seven accepted students out of every 100 applicants comes from a low-income family? (For that matter, how many of those rejected 93 do as well?)

These are important questions, especially given the highly trumpeted recent decisions by a number of colleges to eliminate all loans for students that meet certain income requirements. Some of these policies are sensible, such as Washington University in St. Louis’s elimination of loans for families making less than $60,000. Others, such as Harvard’s dramatically slashing costs for families making up to $180,000, are deeply flawed.

Setting aside the issue of whether these policies will lead to an increase in the socioeconomic diversity of America’s elite campuses, it is worth considering some potentially negative ramifications that could arise if other, less wealthy schools start down the no-loans path.

The problem, as laid out in an excellent piece in Inside Higher Ed concerns what would happen if schools that are need aware (meaning they factor the applicant’s income into at least some admissions decisions) start eliminating loans. Under this hypothetical situation, a school might offer spots to fewer low-income applicants because each one is more costly (a $40,000-plus scholarship versus maybe half that amount and loans). This would result in an outcome where moves designed to cut costs for poorer applicants led to fewer low-income students accepted.

While the Inside Higher Ed example is crucial for considering how no-loans policies work within the larger sphere of postsecondary education, it is important to offer a few caveats and considerations. First, it is possible for a school to have generous aid, not be need-blind and still have good socioeconomic diversity. The perfect example of this is Smith College, an all women’s school in Northampton, Mass. Through both its Ada Comstock Scholars Program and a general institutional commitment, the school has succeeded in putting together a student body that has the best diversity among the richest colleges and universities — 33 percent of Smith’s students come from families with incomes below $60,000, 19 percentage points above Harvard’s mark.

While Smith has not eliminated loans for its students, its experience does show that institutional generosity need not hamper socioeconomic diversity — provided a school is willing to make a strong and concerted effort to admitting low-income students.

It’s also important to consider the combination of no loans and being need aware in the context of affirmative action. If more and more court cases and state laws continue to side against admissions decisions based on race, then it is likely that income status will become the next criteria for achieving diversity. In this case, colleges would consider income anyway and the issue would become if they guaranteed to meet 100 percent of demonstrated need.

Two Recommendations

From a mere equity standpoint it is important that all colleges, and especially those considering going no loans, commit to a need blind admissions policy. As the numbers at elite schools demonstrate, it is hard enough to get into college these days, the least universities can do is guarantee that the reason the student did not get in was completely unrelated to their ability to pay.

Second, it is time for colleges to begin doing a better job reporting the socioeconomic diversity of their campuses. Schools are more than happy to trumpet statistics on racial diversity, but data on family income is practically non-existent. The Web site economicdiversity.org, one of the best sites for institutional data, is only able to extrapolate about the low-income makeup of colleges using the income of financial aid applicants and recipients of Pell Grants, which generally go to students from families making under $40,000 a year. Therefore, all schools should be required to report both the average income of their admitted students and the breakdown within income quintiles.

These two changes won’t fix all the problems of access and equity, but they will ensure that when those gaudy admission figures come out in the future we will know for sure that all students, regardless of income, got a fair shot, and we shall see just whether the wealthiest schools are elite, or just for elites.

College Acceptance Rates to Creep Up In a Few Years

Matt Zeitlin — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 14:52:54 EST

Starting about a year ago, my school's college counselors gravely informed us that because of demographics, this year would be the hardest ever to get into college. According to the Times, however, the number of high schools seniors is going to peak in about two years, making about 99% of colleges less selective:

Projections show that by next year or the year after, the annual number of high school graduates in the United States will peak at about 2.9 million after a 15-year climb. The number is then expected to decline until about 2015. Most universities expect this to translate into fewer applications and less selectivity, with most students likely finding it easier to get into college.

Although it's certainly true that good schools have gotten more selective, there's a bit more to this trend then simply admittance percentages going down. The first oddity is that while the elite schools have gone from incredibly selective to total crapshoot (Harvard, Yale and Princeton admit less than 10% of their applicants, despite 85% being perfectly qualified to go), the number of good, selective schools has skyrocketed. Schools like Emory and USC, which only a decade or two ago were considered mediocre rich kid schools, have, because of their bulging endowments, been able to snatch up the best professors and students. USC, for example, will not only offer scholarships to good students, but will just straight up hand out cash. Also, due to the increasing financial returns to a college education, the number of objectively highly qualified students, with good SAT scores and what, has also increased due to the incentives. This means that, from the other end, the number of good schools has to go up because there's been a downward flow in where the good students are going to school. Add on the fact that because of applications being predominately online and most schools accepting the Common Application, it's become much, much easier to apply to a bunch of good schools, and consequently, acceptance rates have to go down.

But while the stress and amount of work associated with trying to get into a competitive school has certainly gone up - as I can attest - the actual quality of American higher education, at the highest level, has probably gone up more.

Undercover in an Admissions Office

Zach Marks — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 10:21:34 EDT

I’ve spent a large part of the last two weeks in the Admissions Office gearing up for this year’s admissions cycle. My actual work has been focused on setting up the Student Ambassadors program, an effort to reach out to low-income students by sending Yale students to high schools in their area during breaks that we’ve identified as having a number of high achiever but that don’t traditionally get visited by admissions officers from selective schools like Yale. The University supports the initiative because it helps attract “diamonds in the rough,” increasing the number of low-income students at Yale, but there is of course a larger social benefit: the program addresses the fact that low-income students often don't have guidance counselors walking them through the admissions process or parents paying for SAT courses and helping them apply for scholarships and financial aid. While Ambassadors give presentations on Yale, they usually end up answering more broad questions about admissions and financial aid and often become mentors to the students they visit, guiding them through the application process.

Ivy Admissions: Same As It Ever Was

niralshah — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 18:43:51 EDT

Today's American Prospect has a great piece deflating the recent glut of upper-middle class scare pieces on increasing selectivity in elite college admissions. Author Kevin Carey's point is that "[t]he declining odds of getting into an elite college are mostly a statistical mirage, caused by confusion between college applicants and college applications."

A little statistic data sheds a lot of light on the situation. Carey notes that, while the number of high school graduates have jumped by 8% in the past four years, so has the number of acceptance letters mailed out by "elite" colleges and universities. When discussing the ratio of acceptances to applications however, Carey's example is slightly less solid.

"Imagine 20 students, each of whom applies to five schools and gets into two. Now imagine if the same students each applied to ten schools and got into two. The outcome for the students is the same: two acceptance letters. But the schools report lower admission rates, and the odds of admission seem worse."

Should International Students Get Need-Blind Admission?

niralshah — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 14:42:20 EST

An article in my school’s daily paper addresses efforts by international students to change the college’s admissions policy. Currently, the applications of all North American (US, Canada, Mexico) students are processed independently of their financial aid applications. This is not true for international students. At a quick glance, only Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Williams, and Middlebury provide need-blind admission to international students.

On its face, the argument seems pretty simple. As the college seeks to diversify its student body with international students, there is little to be gained for the college or the students by a policy that selects for wealthier applicants. This is especially true considering the low price-tag (at least in Dartmouth’s case, at $1.2 million) of the policy change.

Of course, it comes down to an issue of priorities. I think it’s a fair argument, but in my ironically (my parents immigrated on student visas) ethnocentric way, I think activist energy and college resources should be focused towards improving access to higher education, larger aid packages, and better recruiting among socioeconomic and racial groups that are disadvantaged in America. They aren’t mutually exclusive, but academic institutions are conservative (reluctant to change) by nature, and in the rare event of a dialogue leading to policy change, I think it is important to keep the larger picture in mind.

I'm curious to see what people think.