Legacy admission into colleges and universities

[Gatorubet 30202]

11 hours ago, Helobious said:

You sound wildly ignorant of history. A lot of Latinos are white. A lot are native. And this will shock you if you don’t watch baseball but a lot are black too. 

“Shady stuff?” Ever heard of Operation Wetback? Have you ever heard of a colonia? You know in a lot of the country latinos had to go to segregated schools and live in segregated communities too right? You want to talk about Chinese railroad workers being mistreated and exploited (and they were), how about the thousands and thousands of migrant farm workers even up to today? My dad regularly had pesticides dumped on him from a plane while he was picking fields in Cali in the 1970s. Complain about working conditions or pay? Fine I’ll just call immigration on your family. And you completely ignore who’s probably 2nd most likely to be negatively profiled by police after black people. 

All “non-white” people have had it shitty here at some point. Shit even a lot of white people have. You can argue who had it worse after natives & black people all day long. The reality is affirmative action was meant to assist people from underserved & underrepresented communities. To act like that didn’t largely describe the Hispanic community, especially back in the 1960s when a lot of these policies were made, is absurd.

 

None of this can be true. After all, wasn’t everybody protected by the Texas Rangers?

[jimmyjazz 45898]

11 minutes ago, HRSchenker said:

No CR but the only person from my high school in the last 10 years to get accepted into an Ivy League was this Asian chick who made it to Yale. UT actually rejected her. Like jimmyjazz said, admissions are weird.

A good friend of mine from the middle east had a son get a full ride to Georgia Tech in engineering.  He was rejected by UT engineering.  I think his SAT was something like 1570, and he was way high (valedectorian?  can't recall) at a prominent Austin private school.  Bizarre.

 

 

[Samson's Wig 3191]

There are all kinds of unqualified kids getting into most universities, for a variety of reasons.   I don't think schools are doing anyone a favor by letting them in for legacy, affirmative action, economic, or any other reason beyond a demonstrated ability to thrive in an academic environment. When these types of factors are used as tie-breakers, it makes some sense, but if they become a deciding factor we've fucked up.   Racking up student loan debt just to drop out because you weren't capable of succeeding in an academic environment isn't going to do you any favors or right any historical wrongs, even if it makes some of us feel better to attempt it.

Graduation rates aren't pretty in general at around 65% for public and private non-profits, with private for-profit schools being at the bottom of the barrel at around 30%.  Legacy students are an outlier in that they graduate at a higher rate than other students, but affirmative action students and socioeconomically disadvantaged students have a significantly lower graduation rate than other students.  Simply granting a kid entry to the party isn't enough if they weren't prepared for the experience beforehand.   Any programs like these should be combined with additional resources to help these kids overcome the deficit they're starting with.  Or perhaps we should be doing a fuckton more to ensure kids are getting educated properly at the grade school level, as that's where the inequities truly lie and by the time college rolls around it's often much too late.

Once vouchers get going at a significant rate, a bunch of white kids will be getting spoonfed Jesus bullshit all through grade school and their parents will have guaranteed they are disqualified from attending any school that isn't Oral Roberts or similar. That should open the floodgates of opportunity for others if our public schools don't completely collapse.

[Samson's Wig 3191]

5 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

A good friend of mine from the middle east had a son get a full ride to Georgia Tech in engineering.  He was rejected by UT engineering.  I think his SAT was something like 1570, and he was way high (valedectorian?  can't recall) at a prominent Austin private school.  Bizarre.

 

 

Texas public school admissions are fucked up, UT in particular.  If you are good enough for engineering at GT, you're plenty good enough for UT.

[jimmyjazz 45898]

2 minutes ago, Samson's Wig said:

Texas public school admissions are fucked up, UT in particular.  If you are good enough for engineering at GT, you're plenty good enough for UT.

Definitely my point -- GT might be the best engineering program in the country.  It's certainly the equal of UT, and most would argue better.  Throw in the value of the scholarship (in-state VS out of state) and it makes no sense at all, especially with no scholarship at stake at UT.

[Celery Man 20934]

9 minutes ago, Samson's Wig said:

 

Legacy students are an outlier in that they graduate at a higher rate than other students, but affirmative action students and socioeconomically disadvantaged students have a significantly lower graduation rate than other students.  Simply granting a kid entry to the party isn't enough if they weren't prepared for the experience beforehand.   Any programs like these should be combined with additional resources to help these kids overcome the deficit they're starting with.

it seems like you attribute the difference in graduation rate to academic readiness but of course the financial situation of affirmative action admits is at least as much of a factor in their likelihood to make it through to graduation

Edited July 4, 2023 by Celery Man

[GabrielsHorn 2183]

I’m pretty strongly against legacy admissions, but it would be fascinating to see what defense Harvard and others would use in a court of law. 

[dcbc 14471]

8 hours ago, slorch said:

This.

I passed up the legacy of poverty.

Full disclosure: There is no fucking way I'd get into Texas or probably even A&M at current standards.  Oh well.  My kids did better.  I can live with that.  Not much choice, really.

Full disclosure, despite my parents' lack of college education, I never experienced anything close to poverty. 

[Guest]

2 hours ago, dcbc said:

Full disclosure, despite my parents' lack of college education, I never experienced anything close to poverty. 

yeah, didn't mean to imply that was an absolute result. 

It sucked.  Glad you didn't experience it.

 

[closetohumping 17438]

7 hours ago, Gatorubet said:

None of this can be true. After all, wasn’t everybody protected by the Texas Rangers?

Those losers have been in third place for years 

[TwiceHorn 31447]

7 hours ago, Celery Man said:

it seems like you attribute the difference in graduation rate to academic readiness but of course the financial situation of affirmative action admits is at least as much of a factor in their likelihood to make it through to graduation

Apparently when the top X% admission policy began, and UT was still in "fail out, we dgaf, in fact fail out faster" mode, there was a substantial problem with readiness and grad rates or progress rates because of it.  That apparently has changed quite a bit and academic readiness is not so much of an issue.

[dcbc 14471]

2 hours ago, slorch said:

yeah, didn't mean to imply that was an absolute result. 

It sucked.  Glad you didn't experience it.

 

Me too.  My dad grew up in poverty.  His dad was a sharecropper (he was born in 1910, and I was the surprise baby of the early 1970s).  As for poverty, he did not recommend it.  He also valued for his kids the education he never had.

[ImissWallyPryor 9046]

The legacy admissions thing is probably exaggerated, at least in terms of under qualified applicants gaining admission. There simply aren’t a huge number of multi-million dollar donors relative to the number of children of those same donors. That, along with the fact that most über-wealthy families send their kids to really good prep schools, means that most of their children probably have good enough SATs to warrant serious consideration without legacy status. Sure, there are exceptions, but they comprise a tiny fraction of one percent of all applicants.

As others have pointed out, legacies have a lot of loyalty to their alma mater, so they are more likely to make the kind of donations that benefit a multitude of students they’ll never meet. I’d bet any amount of money that multi-generation UT families donate much more than one-and-done grads.

I don’t really care if legacy admissions are eliminated because I don’t think it will make a huge difference.

And do the people complaining about legacy admissions really want admissions to be solely merit based?  For every single unqualified legacy admission there are probably dozens of athletes admitted who are under qualified academically.

What about international students? Maybe there is a foreign student SAT I haven’t heard about, but I suspect schools are so eager to take on foreign students because they pay full tuition on top of donations from some of their home countries (i.e. OPEC and China). 

Edited July 5, 2023 by ImissWallyPryor

[NotActuallyALonghorn 4976]

On 7/3/2023 at 4:50 PM, bschoolprof said:

This. Legacy = donors, and universities have whole armies of people dedicated to fundraising. That’s how many top privates can offer free tuition to poor and middle class students. Top schools, public or private, can’t survive without donors. 

If, the bolded part is true, and I'd need solid evidence that it is, I'd argue that pragmatically this is a decent argument for legacy admissions. Yeah, on the surface it sucks that kids who don't really deserve it get in, but if it results in donations that allow them to give scholarships to kids who couldn't otherwise afford it then maybe it is something that we should consider keeping around.

[Guest]

13 hours ago, Gatorubet said:

None of this can be true. After all, wasn’t everybody protected by the Texas Rangers?

They can't even protect Arlington...

[Neonmoon 38129]

6 hours ago, NotActuallyALonghorn said:

If, the bolded part is true, and I'd need solid evidence that it is, I'd argue that pragmatically this is a decent argument for legacy admissions. Yeah, on the surface it sucks that kids who don't really deserve it get in, but if it results in donations that allow them to give scholarships to kids who couldn't otherwise afford it then maybe it is something that we should consider keeping around.

I would agree with you except the part where certain people weren’t admitted in the school for a couple hundred years. I actually think Harvard was probably the most progressive with admissions, they started in the late 1800s. But many southern schools didn’t until 1960s. 

I think all this will just change to economic language. We’re going to admit so many less fortunate students and so many well off students. It will balance out. Etc. 

[bschoolprof 6252]

7 hours ago, NotActuallyALonghorn said:

If, the bolded part is true, and I'd need solid evidence that it is, I'd argue that pragmatically this is a decent argument for legacy admissions. Yeah, on the surface it sucks that kids who don't really deserve it get in, but if it results in donations that allow them to give scholarships to kids who couldn't otherwise afford it then maybe it is something that we should consider keeping around.

See below for Princeton.  It's true of the other top privates as well.  They fund "poor" students via endowment income, and the corpus comes primarily from alumni donations.   

Quote

PRINCETON, N.J. -- Princeton University will expand its financial program by offering free tuition to qualifying students.

Most families earning up to $100,000 a year will pay nothing for classes starting in 2023.

Families earning above $100,000 will still qualify for aid, with most of the additional scholarships going to families making less than $150,000 and families with multiple children in college.

The expanded scholarship program is part of Princeton's efforts to be more inclusive.

Previously, the annual income level was capped at $65,000 a year for families.

Princeton was one of the first universities in the country to eliminate loans from its financial aid packages in 2001. Since then, more than 10,000 undergraduate students have graduated with grants paying for their full tuition.

"One of Princeton's defining values is our commitment to ensure that talented students from all backgrounds can not only afford a Princeton education but can flourish on our campus and in the world beyond it," President Christopher Eisgruber said. "These improvements to our aid packages, made possible by the sustained generosity of our alumni and friends, will enhance the experiences of students during their time at Princeton and their choices and impact after they graduate."

https://abc7news.com/princeton-university-free-tuition-ivy-league-financial-aid/12217156/

 

[jimmyjazz 45898]

I stuggle with the concept of balancing the need for public universities to serve the entire population while simultaneously building one or more true "flagship" top-tier schools.  California has obviously pulled it off.  New York, to a lesser degree.  Texas is lagging well behind.

I don't know how it's possible to demand individual meritorious grades & scores for UT-Austin yet accomodate students who have not been afforded the educational opportunities many others have.  I don't think top 6% works across the board.  My kid at UT-Austin is of the opinion that a lot of her classmates are really not very sharp.  I don't know if that's true, but it's unfortunate if true.  She wasn't top 6%, more like 10%, but she's having no problem and is about 30 hours from graduation.  It just seems to be a very arbitrary standard that isn't crafted well enough to truly accomplish everything we need to accomplish for the top public school in the state.

[HonkeyVape 107]

9 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

I stuggle with the concept of balancing the need for public universities to serve the entire population while simultaneously building one or more true "flagship" top-tier schools.  California has obviously pulled it off.  New York, to a lesser degree.  Texas is lagging well behind.

I don't know how it's possible to demand individual meritorious grades & scores for UT-Austin yet accomodate students who have not been afforded the educational opportunities many others have.  I don't think top 6% works across the board.  My kid at UT-Austin is of the opinion that a lot of her classmates are really not very sharp.  I don't know if that's true, but it's unfortunate if true.  She wasn't top 6%, more like 10%, but she's having no problem and is about 30 hours from graduation.  It just seems to be a very arbitrary standard that isn't crafted well enough to truly accomplish everything we need to accomplish for the top public school in the state.

She's right, I am not very sharp and I went to UT.

You have already gone through it, but I do wonder now that my kids are getting to the college prep and admission age. It's a different world and time. Schools we routinely make fun of are as strong academically as UT was when most of Surly went there from the 70's to early 00's. Or at the very least, about the same admission standards.

A poster above said it best, and I think we can all relate to it with UT:

Public, state schools-- no legacy admits. They don't need it and you can easily legislate it.

Private schools- Let them do what they want, that makes sense to their university mission and vision (which, a lot of times, seems consistent and even early-moving to this kind of stuff).

[52-80 19150]

31 minutes ago, HonkeyVape said:

She's right, I am not very sharp and I went to UT.

“Think of how dumb the typical UT student is and realize half of them are even dumber than that”

[gyroprotagonist 2592]

is there even a legacy component to UT admissions? you have to figure that somewhere in the admissions bureaucracy there is a detailed specification on how to admit students using certain criteria.  just curious if 'legacy' is part of that or is it more like the part where admissions checks to see if any buildings are named after the applicant's progenitors before making a final decision.  

 

 

[PenelopeWitherspoon 19100]

1 hour ago, HonkeyVape said:

She's right, I am not very sharp and I went to UT.

 

This is single handedly the most correct thing you have ever posted on this site.

2 hours ago, jimmyjazz said:

I stuggle with the concept of balancing the need for public universities to serve the entire population while simultaneously building one or more true "flagship" top-tier schools.  California has obviously pulled it off.  New York, to a lesser degree.  Texas is lagging well behind.

I don't know how it's possible to demand individual meritorious grades & scores for UT-Austin yet accomodate students who have not been afforded the educational opportunities many others have.  I don't think top 6% works across the board.  My kid at UT-Austin is of the opinion that a lot of her classmates are really not very sharp.  I don't know if that's true, but it's unfortunate if true.  She wasn't top 6%, more like 10%, but she's having no problem and is about 30 hours from graduation.  It just seems to be a very arbitrary standard that isn't crafted well enough to truly accomplish everything we need to accomplish for the top public school in the state.

It shouldn't be a 6% across the board.  A kid that is top 10 or 20% from Westlake or Highland Park is going to be much more prepared for college than a kid in the top 5% of Iraan or Vidor.  

[TwiceHorn 31447]

On 7/3/2023 at 9:00 PM, bolverk said:

I see you're not familiar with his posting history.

PRONG HORN is kind of a futureman of non sports threads. 

😬😬

[Gatorubet 30202]

23 hours ago, GabrielsHorn said:

I’m pretty strongly against legacy admissions, but it would be fascinating to see what defense Harvard and others would use in a court of law. 

[TwiceHorn 31447]

36 minutes ago, PenelopeWitherspoon said:

This is single handedly the most correct thing you have ever posted on this site.

It shouldn't be a 6% across the board.  A kid that is top 10 or 20% from Westlake or Highland Park is going to be much more prepared for college than a kid in the top 5% of Iraan or Vidor.  

As one of those, it is true but the HP and Westlake kids don't need UT the way the Iraan and Vidor kids might. As badly as they may want it. 

[dcbc 14471]

1 hour ago, PenelopeWitherspoon said:

 

It shouldn't be a 6% across the board.  A kid that is top 10 or 20% from Westlake or Highland Park is going to be much more prepared for college than a kid in the top 5% of Iraan or Vidor.  

The top 10% Rule (now Top 6% and probably soon to be Top 5%) was a reaction to the Supreme Court's Hopwood decision about UT's race-based admission standards.  Before that, it was a combination of class rank and SAT scores for automatic admission and Provisional Admission Summer School at UT for those who didn't make that cut to see if they could make the grade, which would entitle them to admission in the fall.  

 

Top 6% now accounts for 75% of UT admissions, with the remaining 25% coming from holistic application review, by which someone in the Top 10% at Westlake or Kinkaid or Highland Park or St. Mark's has a good chance of gaining admission.  After that, there's the CAP program, which is a year-long version of the old summer school system (make grades at UT satellite school and you are admitted to UT Austin (but not necessarily the college of your choice at UT Austin).  Presumably, the CAP admissions even out with the Top x% students, who didn't have the educational chops (because they're high school wasn't challenging/competitive and who can't make the grades at UT.  

 

Anyway, it's not perfect (far from it) and wasn't perfect before.  But it's the hand we're dealt until they shuffle the deck.

Edited July 5, 2023 by dcbc

[Longhornfan1024 1707]

1 hour ago, gyroprotagonist said:

is there even a legacy component to UT admissions? you have to figure that somewhere in the admissions bureaucracy there is a detailed specification on how to admit students using certain criteria.  just curious if 'legacy' is part of that or is it more like the part where admissions checks to see if any buildings are named after the applicant's progenitors before making a final decision.  

 

 

Texas public universities are not allowed to consider legacy status in admissions decisions.  This is a private school/non-Texas issue.  

[Longhornfan1024 1707]

1 hour ago, PenelopeWitherspoon said:

It shouldn't be a 6% across the board.  A kid that is top 10 or 20% from Westlake or Highland Park is going to be much more prepared for college than a kid in the top 5% of Iraan or Vidor.  

You're pointing out the whole reason for the top 10% law.  The top 5% kid from Vidor and a whole host of other areas of the state wouldn't get into UT without the top 10% law, so legislators from those districts passed to law to ensure that the kids of their constituents could get admission to UT.  It acts to diversify the student body by ensuring equal admissions from across the state and allowing legislators from poor performing areas to tell their constituents that they are providing access to UT for their kids.  And hopefully the kids who gain admission to UT from the low performing areas go back to those areas and raise the bar so that we see actual societal benefits from the law.  

[Celery Man 20934]

3 hours ago, jimmyjazz said:

My kid at UT-Austin is of the opinion that a lot of her classmates are really not very sharp.

i suspect you would find a shocking amount of this even at very prestigious schools. I can think of many examples, both from people I've known and people in the public sphere.

[Longhornfan1024 1707]

3 minutes ago, Celery Man said:

i suspect you would find a shocking amount of this even at very prestigious schools. I can think of many examples, both from people I've known and people in the public sphere.

Kids are stupid.  Even the smart ones.  

[bolverk 29659]

3 minutes ago, Celery Man said:

i suspect you would find a shocking amount of this even at very prestigious schools. I can think of many examples, both from people I've known and people in the public sphere.

Yeah, I know a guy who got his undergrad at Princeton and master's at MIT. While he's a good guy, I wouldn't consider him much brighter than a lot of people I knew as an undergrad at Tech.

[bschoolprof 6252]

5 hours ago, jimmyjazz said:

My kid at UT-Austin is of the opinion that a lot of her classmates are really not very sharp.  I don't know if that's true, but it's unfortunate if true.  

It's true.  

[PenelopeWitherspoon 19100]

2 hours ago, Longhornfan1024 said:

You're pointing out the whole reason for the top 10% law.  The top 5% kid from Vidor and a whole host of other areas of the state wouldn't get into UT without the top 10% law, so legislators from those districts passed to law to ensure that the kids of their constituents could get admission to UT.  It acts to diversify the student body by ensuring equal admissions from across the state and allowing legislators from poor performing areas to tell their constituents that they are providing access to UT for their kids.  And hopefully the kids who gain admission to UT from the low performing areas go back to those areas and raise the bar so that we see actual societal benefits from the law.  

 

2 hours ago, dcbc said:

The top 10% Rule (now Top 6% and probably soon to be Top 5%) was a reaction to the Supreme Court's Hopwood decision about UT's race-based admission standards.  Before that, it was a combination of class rank and SAT scores for automatic admission and Provisional Admission Summer School at UT for those who didn't make that cut to see if they could make the grade, which would entitle them to admission in the fall.  

 

Top 6% now accounts for 75% of UT admissions, with the remaining 25% coming from holistic application review, by which someone in the Top 10% at Westlake or Kinkaid or Highland Park or St. Mark's has a good chance of gaining admission.  After that, there's the CAP program, which is a year-long version of the old summer school system (make grades at UT satellite school and you are admitted to UT Austin (but not necessarily the college of your choice at UT Austin).  Presumably, the CAP admissions even out with the Top x% students, who didn't have the educational chops (because they're high school wasn't challenging/competitive and who can't make the grades at UT.  

 

Anyway, it's not perfect (far from it) and wasn't perfect before.  But it's the hand we're dealt until they shuffle the deck.

 

2 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

As one of those, it is true but the HP and Westlake kids don't need UT the way the Iraan and Vidor kids might. As badly as they may want it. 

And what that does is dumb classes down for the kids that are prepared.  College in the US has basically become 13th grade becuase so many kids are not taught what they need to be taught in school.  They are taught to pass standardized tests for school rankings.  They are not taught critical reasoning.  

Look, I was a public school kid, and I think public schools are very, very important, but they also fail two kinds of students.  Those that are incredibly bright, and those that need extra help.  Some kids are not meant to go to college, and that should be ok.  As it is, some of those kids from Iraan have no business sitting in a classroom at UT until their critical thinking and problem solving skills are better.  That is what community college is for, and I think that is a route that more and more kids should take.  Donot use 4 year universities as your college prep and fuck up what other people experience.

Look, I went to a private University.  We were required to take 60 hours of core classes, including world religions, lit, philosophy, history, math, and science, no matter what your major was.  Some of those classes, like intro to philosophy, were so painful, I was ok to take a lower grade than I had earned just to not have to listen to some of those morons in the class.  

[Guest]

5 hours ago, PenelopeWitherspoon said:

This is single handedly the most correct thing you have ever posted on this site.

It shouldn't be a 6% across the board.  A kid that is top 10 or 20% from Westlake or Highland Park is going to be much more prepared for college than a kid in the top 5% of Iraan or Vidor.  

Completely unprovable. Quite possibly utter bullshit.

That's why there is an application process. That's also why the SAT/ ACT even exists.

Small town kids gotta have a chance too. Even at that, Vidor is a 4A school, and not even remotely similar to Iraan.

One thing I fucking LOVED about my son's West Point experience is that after Day 1, it didn't make a shit where you came from or what you had done.  nobody knew who had had the prep school experience or that podunk rural education.   All that mattered was today and what you were going to do tomorrow.  It is diverse as hell.

Edited July 5, 2023 by slorch

[TwiceHorn 31447]

4 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

As one of those, it is true but the HP and Westlake kids don't need UT the way the Iraan and Vidor kids might. As badly as they may want it. 

It occurs to me that UT did such a damn good job with/for most of us a generation or two ago that if we didn't have options other than Big State U, most of our progeny do, even if we bitch about the tuition and fees.

The mission of all our state us is to serve the people of the state and that has to include a lot of people that have no private or out of state options for various reasons.

As much as we all may love UT and want our kids and grandkids to go forever and ever amen, I think we've got to concede that at some point it is a resource for others whose needs trump our own nostalgic wishes and wants.

[Gil Bang 25937]

i'm an idiot

 

 

(just busting balls)

Edited July 6, 2023 by Gil Bang

[Gil Bang 25937]

35 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

It occurs to me that UT did such a damn good job with/for most of us a generation or two ago that if we didn't have options other than Big State U, most of our progeny do, even if we bitch about the tuition and fees.

The mission of all our state us is to serve the people of the state and that has to include a lot of people that have no private or out of state options for various reasons.

As much as we all may love UT and want our kids and grandkids to go forever and ever amen, I think we've got to concede that at some point it is a resource for others whose needs trump our own nostalgic wishes and wants.

shouldn't any right-thinking Texas Alum be fucking thrilled if their kid got into Rice? 

[Brew 3049]

On 7/3/2023 at 8:30 PM, jimmyjazz said:

Admissions are weird.  My younger two both CAP'ed into UT.  The older is whip smart, great grades, great test scores, tons of extracurriculars, but spent so much time on music that she finished just outside of top 6%.  We did the whole SAT coaching, essay coaching thing, but CAP it was.  It worked out fine, it was online (covid) and she'll graduate pretty soon.

The younger, while not a doorknob, is certainly not as mature, and his grades and test scores were nowhere near as high.  I had zero inkling he'd even make CAP.  He focused on smaller schools, soccer scholarships, etc.  He applied to UT anyway, which I wasn't gonna discourage, but in the back of my mind thought "yeah, right".  No SAT coaching, no essay coaching.  He wrote his essay the night before it was due, I pointed out a couple of errors but pretty much left it alone . . . and voila!  CAP'ed.  I was flabbergasted.  I honestly think it was because his essay was written by an 18 YO kid, not an 18 YO kid run through a half dozen adult editing filters.  Got thru UT-Tyler with great grades.  Any port in a storm -- he's in.

You just never know.  Legacy, grades, scores, essays, mood of the admissions officer, whatever.  You just never know.

It feels almost like a crapshoot at this point. Our oldest is in the college application process now and it doesn’t make much sense how it plays out at a lot of these schools. She’s definitely not going legacy admit, because the college I graduated from went under in the economic crash of the late 2000’s.

One thing I don’t get is the current need for kids to apply to double digit colleges. It has to throw the admissions process off when only 10-20% of accepted kids actually enroll at a lot of the colleges she is looking at. I applied to one, got in, and went. She’s looking at applying to 10+ at the recommendation of the college advisor we pay (don’t even get me started on that one) with most being state schools with ultra low out of state acceptance or high end privates with low acceptance. Then she talks to other kids with 35 ACT’s that got rejected from places like UGA, UNC, UVA, etc and that keeps her in a cycle of “Oh my god, I’m going to have to go to XYZ tier whatever school.” I’m ready for this process to be over. With the youngest, I just hope she goes to college at this point and moves out.

[TwiceHorn 31447]

3 hours ago, Gil Bang said:

shouldn't any right-thinking Texas Alum be fucking thrilled if their kid got into Rice? 

Certainly.  It's a fine school with a nice campus in a great part of a great city.  The people that go there also tend weird. Lol.

It's also in many cases cheaper in actual cost (as opposed to stated tuition), than UT.

[jimmyjazz 45898]

4 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

Certainly.  It's a fine school with a nice campus in a great part of a great city.  The people that go there also tend weird. Lol.

It's also in many cases cheaper in actual cost (as opposed to stated tuition), than UT.

My daughter got a whopping scholarship to Trinity . . . but it would still have been more than UT.  I mean, $70K per year (or whatever) is pretty hard to fight.

[fattyflattie 4639]

3 hours ago, Gil Bang said:

shouldn't any right-thinking Texas Alum be fucking thrilled if their kid got into Rice? 

Of course.  I’ve been taking my oldest (and now oldest 2) to UT-Rice  baseball games for a couple of years now.  Honey, these are your choices.   For real though, really good school (and close to home). 

['stache 21802]

On 7/4/2023 at 12:39 AM, Helobious said:

You sound wildly ignorant of history. A lot of Latinos are white. A lot are native. And this will shock you if you don’t watch baseball but a lot are black too. 

“Shady stuff?” Ever heard of Operation Wetback? Have you ever heard of a colonia? You know in a lot of the country latinos had to go to segregated schools and live in segregated communities too right? You want to talk about Chinese railroad workers being mistreated and exploited (and they were), how about the thousands and thousands of migrant farm workers even up to today? My dad regularly had pesticides dumped on him from a plane while he was picking fields in Cali in the 1970s. Complain about working conditions or pay? Fine I’ll just call immigration on your family. And you completely ignore who’s probably 2nd most likely to be negatively profiled by police after black people. 

All “non-white” people have had it shitty here at some point. Shit even a lot of white people have. You can argue who had it worse after natives & black people all day long. The reality is affirmative action was meant to assist people from underserved & underrepresented communities. To act like that didn’t largely describe the Hispanic community, especially back in the 1960s when a lot of these policies were made, is absurd.

 

This is at the Greenwood Rising museum in Tulsa. Also, my father was told he could not apply to UT's Engineering school back in the day because he's "Mexican" (second generation born on this side of the Rio Grande as if that mattered). Fuck that fucking racist piece of shit.

Edited July 7, 2023 by 'stache

[closetohumping 17438]

On 7/3/2023 at 5:36 PM, PRONG HORN said:

 

Yeah.  And what the heck are Latinos mad about anyway?  What's their complaint?  Black people have the history of slavery and oppression.  Why were Latinos ever included in affirmative action?  Because their parents had to swim a slow river and walk in the desert for a little bit?  

 

 

I'm trying to figure out if this is a troll or not.  

[closetohumping 17438]

On 7/5/2023 at 12:13 PM, TwiceHorn said:

As one of those, it is true but the HP and Westlake kids don't need UT the way the Iraan and Vidor kids might. As badly as they may want it. 

One would think they're headed to aggy right?

[Celery Man 20934]

On 7/5/2023 at 11:27 PM, TwiceHorn said:

Certainly.  It's a fine school with a nice campus in a great part of a great city.  The people that go there also tend weird. Lol.

i don't want to paint with a broad brush but this is true of every single Rice grad without exception

[BabaYaga 15290]

On 7/5/2023 at 11:09 PM, fattyflattie said:

Of course.  I’ve been taking my oldest (and now oldest 2) to UT-Rice  baseball games for a couple of years now.  Honey, these are your choices.   For real though, really good school (and close to home). 

Same boat.  15yr old daughter is all in on Texas, but Rice is always on the table.  If her performance in athletics carry over from a stellar freshman year, we've been having the discussion about athletics at Texas vs. Rice are very, very different.  We'll see.  A lot can change over the next few years.  

[bolverk 29659]

A lengthy and very well-sourced piece on the disparities in access to the Ivies+ and what's being done about it.

Study of Elite College Admissions Data Suggests Being Very Rich Is Its Own Qualification
By Aatish Bhatia, Claire Cain Miller and Josh Katz July 24, 2023

Elite colleges have long been filled with the children of the richest families: At Ivy League schools, one in six students has parents in the top 1 percent.

A large new study, released Monday, shows that it has not been because these children had more impressive grades on average or took harder classes. They tended to have higher SAT scores and finely honed résumés, and applied at a higher rate — but they were overrepresented even after accounting for those things. For applicants with the same SAT or ACT score, children from families in the top 1 percent were 34 percent more likely to be admitted than the average applicant, and those from the top 0.1 percent were more than twice as likely to get in.

'

The study — by Opportunity Insights, a group of economists based at Harvard who study inequality — quantifies for the first time the extent to which being very rich is its own qualification in selective college admissions.

The analysis is based on federal records of college attendance and parental income taxes for nearly all college students from 1999 to 2015, and standardized test scores from 2001 to 2015. It focuses on the eight Ivy League universities, as well as Stanford, Duke, M.I.T. and the University of Chicago. It adds an extraordinary new data set: the detailed, anonymized internal admissions assessments of at least three of the 12 colleges, covering half a million applicants. (The researchers did not name the colleges that shared data or specify how many did because they promised them anonymity.)

The new data shows that among students with the same test scores, the colleges gave preference to the children of alumni and to recruited athletes, and gave children from private schools higher nonacademic ratings. The result is the clearest picture yet of how America’s elite colleges perpetuate the intergenerational transfer of wealth and opportunity.

“What I conclude from this study is the Ivy League doesn’t have low-income students because it doesn’t want low-income students,” said Susan Dynarski, an economist at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who has reviewed the data and was not involved in the study.

In effect, the study shows, these policies amounted to affirmative action for the children of the 1 percent, whose parents earn more than $611,000 a year. It comes as colleges are being forced to rethink their admissions processes after the Supreme Court ruling that race-based affirmative action is unconstitutional.

“Are these highly selective private colleges in America taking kids from very high-income, influential families and basically channeling them to remain at the top in the next generation?” said Raj Chetty, an economist at Harvard who directs Opportunity Insights, and an author of the paper with John N. Friedman of Brown and David J. Deming of Harvard. “Flipping that question on its head, could we potentially diversify who’s in a position of leadership in our society by changing who is admitted?”

Representatives from several of the colleges said that income diversity was an urgent priority, and that they had taken significant steps since 2015, when the data in the study ends, to admit lower-income and first-generation students. These include making tuition free for families earning under a certain amount; giving only grants, not loans, in financial aid; and actively recruiting students from disadvantaged high schools.

“We believe that talent exists in every sector of the American income distribution,” said Christopher L. Eisgruber, the president of Princeton. “I am proud of what we have done to increase socioeconomic diversity at Princeton, but I also believe that we need to do more — and we will do more.”

Much much more. Spoilered to avoid long-catting:

Spoiler

Affirmative action for the rich
In a concurring opinion in the affirmative action case, Justice Neil Gorsuch addressed the practice of favoring the children of alumni and donors, which is also the subject of a new case. “While race-neutral on their face, too, these preferences undoubtedly benefit white and wealthy applicants the most,” he wrote.

The new paper did not include admissions rates by race because previous research had done so, the researchers said. They found that racial differences were not driving the results. When looking only at applicants of one race, for example, those from the highest-income families still had an advantage. Yet the top 1 percent is overwhelmingly white. Some analysts have proposed diversifying by class as a way to achieve more racial diversity without affirmative action.

The new data showed that other selective private colleges, like Northwestern, N.Y.U. and Notre Dame, had a similarly disproportionate share of children from rich families. Public flagship universities were much more equitable. At places like the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Virginia, applicants with high-income parents were no more likely to be admitted than lower-income applicants with comparable scores.

Less than 1 percent of American college students attend the 12 elite colleges. But the group plays an outsize role in American society: 12 percent of Fortune 500 chief executives and a quarter of U.S. senators attended. So did 13 percent of the top 0.1 percent of earners. The focus on these colleges is warranted, the researchers say, because they provide paths to power and influence — and diversifying who attends has the potential to change who makes decisions in America.

The researchers did a novel analysis to measure whether attending one of these colleges causes success later in life. They compared students who were wait-listed and got in, with those who didn’t and attended another college instead. Consistent with previous research, they found that attending an Ivy instead of one of the top nine public flagships did not meaningfully increase graduates’ income, on average. However, it did increase a student’s predicted chance of earning in the top 1 percent to 19 percent, from 12 percent.

For outcomes other than earnings, the effect was even larger — it nearly doubled the estimated chance of attending a top graduate school, and tripled the estimated chance of working at firms that are considered prestigious, like national news organizations and research hospitals.

“Sure, it’s a tiny slice of schools,” said Professor Dynarski, who has studied college admissions and worked with the University of Michigan on increasing the attendance of low-income students, and has occasionally contributed to The New York Times. “But having representation is important, and this shows how much of a difference the Ivies make: The political elite, the economic elite, the intellectual elite are coming out of these schools.”

The missing middle class
The advantage to rich applicants varied by college, the study found: At Dartmouth, students from the top 0.1 percent were five times as likely to attend as the average applicant with the same test score, while at M.I.T. they were no more likely to attend. (The fact that children from higher-income families tend to have higher standardized test scores and are likelier to receive private coaching suggests that the study may actually underestimate their admissions advantage.)

An applicant with a high test score from a family earning less than $68,000 a year was also likelier than the average applicant to get in, though there were fewer applicants like this.

Children from middle- and upper-middle-class families — including those at public high schools in high-income neighborhoods — applied in large numbers. But they were, on an individual basis, less likely to be admitted than the richest or, to a lesser extent, poorest students with the same test scores. In that sense, the data confirms the feeling among many merely affluent parents that getting their children into elite colleges is increasingly difficult.

“We had these very skewed distributions of a whole lot of Pell kids and a whole lot of no-need kids, and the middle went missing,” said an Ivy League dean of admissions, who has seen the new data and spoke anonymously in order to talk openly about the process. “You’re not going to win a P.R. battle by saying you have X number of families making over $200,000 that qualify for financial aid.”

The researchers could see, for nearly all college students in the United States from 1999 to 2015, where they applied and attended, their SAT or ACT scores and whether they received a Pell grant for low-income students. They could also see their parents’ income tax records, which enabled them to analyze attendance by earnings in more detail than any previous research. They conducted the analysis using anonymized data.

For the several elite colleges that also shared internal admissions data, they could see other aspects of students’ applications between 2001 and 2015, including how admissions offices rated them. They focused their analysis on the most recent years, 2011 to 2015.

Though they had this data for a minority of the dozen top colleges, the researchers said they thought it was representative of the other colleges in the group (with the exception of M.I.T.). The other colleges admitted more students from high-income families, showed preferences for legacies and recruited athletes, and described similar admissions practices in conversations with the researchers, they said.

“Nobody has this kind of data; it’s completely unheard-of,” said Michael Bastedo, a professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Education, who has done prominent research on college admissions. “I think it’s really important to good faith efforts for reforming the system to start by being able to look honestly and candidly at the data.”

How the richest students benefit
Before this study, it was clear that colleges enrolled more rich students, but it was not known whether it was just because more applied. The new study showed that’s part of it: One-third of the difference in attendance rates was because middle-class students were somewhat less likely to apply or matriculate. But the bigger factor was that these colleges were more likely to accept the richest applicants.

Legacy admissions
The largest advantage for the 1 percent was the preference for legacies. The study showed — for the first time at this scale — that legacies were more qualified overall than the average applicant. But even when comparing applicants who were similar in every other way, legacies still had an advantage.

When high-income applicants applied to the college their parents attended, they were accepted at much higher rates than other applicants with similar qualifications — but at the other top-dozen colleges, they were no more likely to get in.

“This is not a sideshow, not just a symbolic issue,” Professor Bastedo said of the finding.

Athletes
One in eight admitted students from the top 1 percent was a recruited athlete. For the bottom 60 percent, that figure was one in 20. That’s largely because children from rich families are more likely to play sports, especially more exclusive sports played at certain colleges, like rowing and fencing. The study estimated that athletes were admitted at four times the rate of nonathletes with the same qualifications.

“There’s a common misperception that it’s about basketball and football and low-income kids making their way into selective colleges,” Professor Bastedo said. “But the enrollment leaders know athletes tend to be wealthier, so it’s a win-win.”

Nonacademic ratings
There was a third factor driving the preference for the richest applicants. The colleges in the study generally give applicants numerical scores for academic achievement and for more subjective nonacademic virtues, like extracurricular activities, volunteering and personality traits. Students from the top 1 percent with the same test scores did not have higher academic ratings. But they had significantly higher nonacademic ratings.

At one of the colleges that shared admissions data, students from the top 0.1 percent were 1.5 times as likely to have high nonacademic ratings as those from the middle class. The researchers said that, accounting for differences in the way each school assesses nonacademic credentials, they found similar patterns at the other colleges that shared data.

The biggest contributor was that admissions committees gave higher scores to students from private, nonreligious high schools. They were twice as likely to be admitted as similar students — those with the same SAT scores, race, gender and parental income — from public schools in high-income neighborhoods. A major factor was recommendations from guidance counselors and teachers at private high schools.

“Parents rattle off that a kid got in because he was first chair in the orchestra, ran track,” said John Morganelli Jr., a former director of admissions at Cornell and founder of Ivy League Admissions, where he advises high school students on applying to college. “They never say what really happens: Did the guidance counselor advocate on that kid’s behalf?”

Recommendation letters from private school counselors are notoriously flowery, he said, and the counselors call admissions officers about certain students.

“This is how the feeder schools get created,” he said. “Nobody’s calling on behalf of a middle- or lower-income student. Most of the public school counselors don’t even know these calls exist.”

The end of need-blind admissions?
Overall, the study suggests, if elite colleges had done away with the preferences for legacies, athletes and private school students, the children of the top 1 percent would have made up 10 percent of a class, down from 16 percent in the years of the study.

Legacy students, athletes and private school students do no better after college, in terms of earnings or reaching a top graduate school or firm, it found. In fact, they generally do somewhat worse.

The dean of admissions who spoke anonymously said change was easier said than done: “I would say there’s much more commitment to this than may be obvious. It’s just the solution is really complicated, and if we could have done it, we would have.”

For example, it’s not feasible to choose athletes from across the income spectrum if many college sports are played almost entirely by children from high-earning families. Legacies are perhaps the most complicated, the admissions dean said, because they tend to be highly qualified and their admission is important for maintaining strong ties with alumni.

Ending that preference, the person said, “is not an easy decision to make, given the alumni response, especially if you’re not in immediate concurrence with the rest of the Ivies.” (Though children of very large donors also get special consideration by admissions offices, they were not included in the analysis because there are relatively few of them.)

People involved in admissions say that achieving more economic diversity would be difficult without doing something else: ending need-blind admissions, the practice that prevents admissions officers from seeing families’ financial information so their ability to pay is not a factor. Some colleges are already doing what they call “need-affirmative admissions,” for the purpose of selecting more students from the low end of the income spectrum, though they often don’t publicly acknowledge it for fear of blowback.

There is a tool, Landscape from the College Board, to help determine if an applicant grew up in a neighborhood with significant privilege or adversity. But these colleges have no knowledge of parents’ income if students don’t apply for financial aid.

Ivy League colleges and their peers have recently made significant efforts to recruit more low-income students and subsidize tuition. Several now make attendance entirely free for families below a certain income — $100,000 at Stanford and Princeton, $85,000 at Harvard, and $60,000 at Brown.

At Princeton, one-fifth of students are now from low-income families, and one-fourth receive a full ride. It has recently reinstated a transfer program to recruit low-income and community college students. At Harvard, one-fourth of this fall’s freshman class is from families with incomes less than $85,000, who will pay nothing. The majority of freshmen will receive some amount of aid.

Dartmouth just raised $500 million to expand financial aid: “While we respect the work of Harvard’s Opportunity Insights, we believe our commitment to these investments and our admissions policies since 2015 tells an important story about the socioeconomic diversity among Dartmouth students,” said Jana Barnello, a spokeswoman.

Public flagships do admissions differently, in a way that ends up benefiting rich students less. The University of California schools forbid giving preference to legacies or donors, and some, like U.C.L.A., do not consider letters of recommendation. The application asks for family income, and colleges get detailed information about California high schools. Application readers are trained to consider students’ circumstances, like whether they worked to support their families in high school, as “evidence of maturity, determination and insight.”

Public flagships do admissions differently, in a way that ends up benefiting rich students less. The University of California schools forbid giving preference to legacies or donors, and some, like U.C.L.A., do not consider letters of recommendation. The application asks for family income, and colleges get detailed information about California high schools. Application readers are trained to consider students’ circumstances, like whether they worked to support their families in high school, as “evidence of maturity, determination and insight.”

The University of California system also partners with schools in the state, from pre-K through community college, to support students who face barriers. There’s a robust program for transfer students from California community colleges; at U.C.L.A., half are from low-income backgrounds.

M.I.T., which stands out among elite private schools as displaying almost no preference for rich students, has long had a practice of not giving a preference to legacy applicants, said its dean of admissions, Stuart Schmill. It does recruit athletes, but they do not receive any preference or go through a separate admissions process (as much as it may frustrate coaches, he said).

“I think the most important thing here is talent is distributed equally but opportunity is not, and our admissions process is designed to account for the different opportunities students have based on their income,” he said. “It’s really incumbent upon our process to tease out the difference between talent and privilege.”

Source: Raj Chetty, David J. Deming and John N. Friedman, “Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges”