College Scholarship Tycoon
November 1, 2017 7:58 AM   Subscribe

Can you improve your school's rankings without discriminating against the poor? Probably not, as it turns out. This Vox article and browser game will simulate how selective colleges make their student acceptance and aid package decisions (in a very simplified way). Decent overview of the market failures in the system and in the way America ranks its universities, so that poor students are discriminated against while richer kids with better SAT scores get aid they probably don't really need.
posted by sharp pointy objects (54 comments total) 22 users marked this as a favorite
 
I have not read yet, but personally I think it goes farther than what the article even supposes. You can adjust by Hispanic and black educational staff ratio (not even adjusting for their income) and get a pretty decent copy of the current rankings. With more being lower, unfortunately.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:09 AM on November 1, 2017


Rankings are based on SAT scores and acceptance rates? But... even if there was no classist component, how are those things in any way an indication of a school's quality? Like, let's pretend the SATs are a full and objective evaluation of a student's intellectual and/or academic prowess. Even then, the only thing that SAT score tells you is... how good the student is, going in. That says absolutely nothing about the quality of the school who accepts them. And even if acceptance rate weren't as easily gamed as the article points out, it still has nothing to do with the services provided by the school.

Off the cuff, I would have assumed rankings might have been about things like graduation rate, graduate GPA, post-graduate employment, etc. -- all of which can still be gamed and are still affected by financial and racial inequality, but which at least attempt to give evidence for what the school itself actually provides. (The article does mention class sizes, which are a little more sensical, although the precise implementation seems wacky as well -- why wouldn't rankings be based on median class size, or also deduct points for megaclasses, or something?)
posted by inconstant at 8:16 AM on November 1, 2017 [7 favorites]


I may have missed something but all the proposed solutions talk about how to game the rankings. Not one solution talks about changing the ranking criteria itself. It just sort of sits there as this absolute thing that can never be changed.

-or what inconstant said above.
posted by vacapinta at 8:20 AM on November 1, 2017 [6 favorites]


I would have assumed rankings might have been about things like graduation rate, graduate GPA, post-graduate employment, etc. --

The rankings they are referring to are about the above things, but all those things are highly correlated with family income. For example, if you want to increase your graduation rate (typically measured in students who graduate in 4-5 years), then you get rid of low-income students, who are more likely to have jobs, have to support family back home, get homesick, etc, that prevent them from graduating in 4 years.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:21 AM on November 1, 2017 [5 favorites]


I actually found this comment most enlightening (and this is coming from an economist):

FTA: Rebecca Blank, chancellor at the University of Wisconsin Madison.
As far as I'm concerned — I'm an economist — that's a real waste of where we should be spending our money in higher ed. But I've got to keep some of those top students in Wisconsin. … It is one of these arms-race things that I'm not happy with but I don't quite know what to do about.

Recently, she explained a bit more of her thinking to me: "I don't want our top students from our very top schools leaving our state to go to other universities. If they come to college, they're also more likely to stay in the state after college. If they leave the state, the opposite happened."


This seems like something a powerful economist could have some ideas to fix. I mean, if students leave for college and never come back, it (economically) means that your state sucks and you should perhaps do something about that instead of fighting an unwinnable arms race. But giving money to wealthy people is way easier, so....
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:29 AM on November 1, 2017 [13 favorites]


but all those things are highly correlated with family income
....yes, which is why I said, in the part which your quote cut off, "are still affected by financial and racial inequality".

This segment of the article gave the impression that they didn't even bother with those things:
You might even think it matters that how students perform at your school.

But these rankings don't care that much. Rankings largely care about who you're bringing to your school.
posted by inconstant at 8:29 AM on November 1, 2017


This segment of the article gave the impression that they didn't even bother with those things:

Sorry, I wasn't misquoting you. The article is incorrect. All the major rankings do take into account what students do while they are at the university and beyond (for a while alumni giving back to to the university was highly factored in some rankings). They rank for class size, starting salary & job titles post-grad, prof vs teaching assistant, grad courses offered, and more.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:34 AM on November 1, 2017 [1 favorite]


Okay, got it. I have moved from "this doesn't make any sense at all" back to "this makes sense in a depressing way".
posted by inconstant at 8:36 AM on November 1, 2017


GF teaches at one of the very top schools in the world for upward mobility. Its US news and World Report ranking is 56th among Regional Colleges in the North.

There's something off about that, to me.
posted by Navelgazer at 9:11 AM on November 1, 2017 [7 favorites]


I hate, hate, hate the idea of college rankings. Yeah, if you have the opportunity to go to a Big Old East-Coast School, you should, mostly because you're likely to run into rich people who can hire you after you graduate. But beyond that it matters far more what you major in, whether you're adequately prepared for that major, whether you study hard, and where your internships are than the name that's on the diploma. For complicated reasons my work recruits both from big-name schools and lower-tier state schools and two years after you graduate, no one cares.
posted by miyabo at 9:25 AM on November 1, 2017 [5 favorites]


Betsy DeVos has proposed some intriguing ideas to improve schools overall.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 9:43 AM on November 1, 2017 [3 favorites]


You’d think there’d be a demand for a high quality, low cost university. A “bare-bones” university, so to speak. A stripped down in-state school with high academic standards and a tuition capped at something reasonable as a function of average income. Something akin to Olin College, but I don’t know if that’s possible without a huge endowment.

You’d think smart, hardworking young people would be worth something to employers. But maybe ‘smart’ and ‘hardworking’ aren’t actually the metrics they’re hiring for, but instead ‘obedient’ and ‘indebted.’
posted by leotrotsky at 9:49 AM on November 1, 2017 [11 favorites]


This is interesting, my alma mater didn't (doesn't?) participate in rankings. There's been an ongoing debate about the effect of this decision on low-SES students. The main objections being:

1. It hurts recruitment because it makes knowing about and being confident in the quality of education harder for people not "in the know".

2. Without a clear quality signal, potential employers will shy away from hiring graduates if they don't already know about the college.

It seems like even if a college doesn't want to participate in these rankings, it'll still be affected by them.
posted by phack at 9:52 AM on November 1, 2017 [1 favorite]


Rebecca Blank .... explained ... "I don't want our top students from our very top schools leaving our state to go to other universities. If they come to college, they're also more likely to stay in the state after college. If they leave the state, the opposite happened."

This seems like something a powerful economist could have some ideas to fix. I mean, if students leave for college and never come back, it (economically) means that your state sucks and you should perhaps do something about that instead of fighting an unwinnable arms race.


She has plenty of ideas, given that she devoted her academic career to researching ways to fight poverty and wrote extensively (e.g., It Takes a Nation: A New Agenda for Fighting Poverty) about it. But one way to improve the state is to retain the best-educated citizens, and this is one approach. She's running one university, not the entire state or the entire national educational system.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 10:32 AM on November 1, 2017 [13 favorites]


You’d think there’d be a demand for a high quality, low cost university. A “bare-bones” university, so to speak.

I think at this point that need is being met (when it is at all) by traditional universities adding nights-and-weekends courses. I would expect to see those offerings expand but I don't know how affordable they are. Housing, meal plans and parking make money for schools, so giving those up doesn't help the school reduce cost.

Plus, differentiating yourself in a world of Phoenixes would be challenging. For-profit institutions use that same type of language to describe themselves.

I think institutions like you describe should be the standard, but here we are.
posted by Emmy Rae at 10:33 AM on November 1, 2017 [2 favorites]


phack, I don't know if you went to the same school I did or not, but mine decided to stop a while ago. They still get ranked and were dropped down about a hundred places in retaliation for a while after they stopped cooperating. When I was there US News worked off of publicly available figures. I don't know if they're still opting out.

Also, I don't know if this was for US News or another service, there was something that asked those being surveyed about their impressions of other colleges. As in the dean filling out the forms would rate the other colleges. Which is just ridiculous.
posted by Hactar at 10:35 AM on November 1, 2017 [1 favorite]


even if there was no classist component, how are those things in any way an indication of a school's quality?

This is crux of the matter. I have never seen a good measure of an actual school, especially a post-secondary school. Plenty of measures of the students but my theory has been that highly-ranked schools get that way by cream skimming more than anything. Bring in the brightest students and wow, you graduate the brightest students. But actually measuring the value-add of a school is hard and honestly most schools would rather not discuss it.

You’d think there’d be a demand for a high quality, low cost university. A “bare-bones” university, so to speak. A stripped down in-state school with high academic standards and a tuition capped at something reasonable as a function of average income. Something akin to Olin College, but I don’t know if that’s possible without a huge endowment.

It's called Canada. U of T, UBC, McGill, Waterloo, whatever - they all rank comparably with US peers and have undergrad tuition levels about 1/5th to 1/10th depending on the program.
posted by GuyZero at 10:53 AM on November 1, 2017 [7 favorites]


There are lots of great options in the US, at lesser-known small colleges and state schools. But parents (and kids) are chasing the rankings without really understanding what they mean.
posted by miyabo at 11:01 AM on November 1, 2017


It's called Canada. U of T, UBC, McGill, Waterloo, whatever - they all rank comparably with US peers and have undergrad tuition levels about 1/5th to 1/10th depending on the program.

I looked at some data using one of the international rankings - it doesn't matter that much, since they're all broad indicators anyway - and found that at basically any point on the rankings; top 25, top 50, top 100, top 250 - that the actual enrolment of the Canadian schools was double that of the American schools, relative to population. In other words, if x% of Americans were attending a top 100 school, 2x% of Canadians are. Many of the top US universities, especially the Ivy League, loom large in the public imagination but don't actually educate that many people.

The other thing in Canada is that - at the undergraduate level - most programs are broadly available at a pretty high quality and there aren't a lot of college towns, so many/most students live at home during university, which is also a huge cost savings. In-province tuition at McGill is $5K (Canadian out-of-province tuition is $10K), but residence costs are $14-19K.
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 11:14 AM on November 1, 2017 [1 favorite]


But one way to improve the state is to retain the best-educated citizens, and this is one approach.

I don't agree, but if I did, then nationally, it would be very easy to connect the dots that the best way to improve the country would be to remove the worst-educated citizens, either through deportation or incarceration. And by denying the worst educated the opportunity to attend college.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:20 AM on November 1, 2017 [1 favorite]


The other thing in Canada is that - at the undergraduate level - most programs are broadly available at a pretty high quality and there aren't a lot of college towns, so many/most students live at home during university, which is also a huge cost savings.

To the extent that there are, informally, commuter schools in major cities vs the fancy schools. Toronto has U of T but the local commuters are more likely to go to York or Ryerson (to the extent that Ryerson is majority commuters by some huge margin, like 90% non-residential). Montreal has Concordia and others vs McGill. Vancouver has SFU vs UBC. But there are a few sort-of college-town universities like U Lethbridge or St FX. That said, it's not expensive to live in Lethbridge or Antigonish.

But yes, while the Ivies loom large in the US university psyche, you're correct that by undergrad population they're a tiny drop in the bucket. They have huge endowments so they're not really beholden to anyone, they arguably have a stronger focus on graduate-level education and they just don't want to get big. It's plain old NIMBY thinking - make someone else do the work.

There was a great article describing private US universities as being over-capitalized earlier this year but I can't find it.It was very illuminating.
posted by GuyZero at 11:27 AM on November 1, 2017


Back to the original link, the phenomenon happens in elementary schools as well - if ESL students and lower-income students leave, the school's standardized test marks will tend to rise.

Whenever people moving to the SF Bay Area ask about school and whether their children will die in a knife fight on their first day of kindergarten if they go to a school that gets a 6/10 on greatschools, I always point out that they need to dig a lot deeper and the main thing they're likely to find is a bias rooted in the racial makeup of the school rather than bad teaching or Santa Clara gang violence (which, not to minimize it, is a legit issue, just not that much in elementary school)
posted by GuyZero at 11:39 AM on November 1, 2017 [3 favorites]


You’d think there’d be a demand for a high quality, low cost university. A “bare-bones” university, so to speak.

What are you proposing that they give up to become low cost while still being high quality?
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 11:47 AM on November 1, 2017


Even then, the only thing that SAT score tells you is... how good the student is, going in.

Well, one of those contrarian economics-think things you hear, from people who are into things like that, is that the real purpose of getting a degree from a fancy school is to signal that you could get in. And - I'm not sure this one is entirely untrue.
posted by atoxyl at 12:14 PM on November 1, 2017 [8 favorites]


(And to connect you with other people who could get in - through ability and ambition or through money and influence...)
posted by atoxyl at 12:21 PM on November 1, 2017 [2 favorites]


Goodhart’s Law strikes again!
posted by MengerSponge at 12:21 PM on November 1, 2017 [2 favorites]


Well, one of those contrarian economics-think things you hear, from people who are into things like that, is that the real purpose of getting a degree from a fancy school is to signal that you could get in. And - I'm not sure this one is entirely untrue.
Hm... surely we'd just frame acceptance letters rather than diplomas then? Then again, I admit I have a poor grasp on why people do things.
posted by inconstant at 12:46 PM on November 1, 2017 [1 favorite]


What are you proposing that they give up to become low cost while still being high quality?

Excessive university administrators:

By contrast, a major factor driving increasing costs is the constant expansion of university administration. According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions.

Campus building booms:

Overall debt levels more than doubled from 2000 to 2011 at the more than 500 institutions rated by Moody’s, according to inflation-adjusted data compiled for The New York Times by the credit rating agency.
posted by GuyZero at 1:08 PM on November 1, 2017 [6 favorites]


In terms of brain drain Louisiana created the TOPS program which was essentially a full tutition scholarship to any in state public university with a high school 2.5 GPA and a 20 on the ACT. Maintaining a 2.5 in college is required to keep the scholarship.

It's funding had been more questionable in recent years, but it certainly paid for my schooling but it didn't stop me from leaving though, most of my friends who used TOPS stayed in state.

I really don't think college is affordable for most anymore. I think richer kids is a misnomer of who needs funding and who takes out loans, because it's a good chunk of students from all racial backgrounds.

Yes, there are major issues with diversity. Plenty of kids need scholarships, but most students will need financial assistance regardless of racial background. If you notice all the richer family income is over 120,000 a year in the example! Median income isn't anywhere near that.
posted by AlexiaSky at 1:11 PM on November 1, 2017


For my part, I'm involved in admissions to a STEM graduate program at a state institution and am constantly harping to other faculty that we need to preferentially recruit people who are from and likely to stay in our rural state, rather than rich suburbanites from neighboring states who will be likely to leave. The main pushback is from our admissions director who is obsessed with preserving the "prestige" of our department and actively looks for chances to weed out applicants from non-elite schools in our state. Sigh.
posted by fraxil at 1:17 PM on November 1, 2017 [2 favorites]


we need to preferentially recruit people who are from and likely to stay in our rural state, rather than rich suburbanites from neighboring states who will be likely to leave.

At least they're not leaving the entire country. As a Canadian, my advice is to give up fighting it. They can't afford to live on the coasts anyway so they'll be back.
posted by GuyZero at 1:22 PM on November 1, 2017



By contrast, a major factor driving increasing costs is the constant expansion of university administration. According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions.


Worth noting that this has come with staff cuts (and staff wage freezes) - so there are lots of white collar administrative jobs that pay well but the trash is collected only two days a week and vacuuming is an annual event. In a previous job, the unit first cut a skilled staff position that involved reviewing and scanning invoices, routing them for payment and creating all the transaction records in the financial system, replaced that person by a half-time staffer who had no background plus a student (and the staffer basically just had more responsibilities piled on top of their previous job), then got rid of the half-time staffer and had the work done by the student and the CFO's assistant, who had to work until midnight to get the bills paid....then fired the student. The unit, a major and well-known part of a major university, was dealing with calls from unhappy creditors on a regular basis - not because there was no money to pay the bills but because the administration repeatedly refused to hire staff to process the bills.
posted by Frowner at 1:54 PM on November 1, 2017 [8 favorites]


Hm... surely we'd just frame acceptance letters rather than diplomas then?
No: Partly because that signals "I'm smart enough to get in, but either not conformist enough or not hard-working enough to finish", and partly because that's a little too close to a plain IQ test for disparate impact lawsuit comfort. I'm still not sure why "our employees take a quick IQ test with disparate impact" gets you sued, yet "our employees take a four year combined IQ+SES test with huge costs and worse disparate impact" is usually fine. But unless either half of that tradeoff changes, expect to continue seeing job postings that insist you have a bachelors degree but don't care what your major was.

Anyway, education has a huge positive correlation with life outcomes, and so unless that's entirely ability bias and signaling, it might be a good idea to try to measure each university's contributions to the human capital and social capital components as well. But there's not many standardized ways to measure the former (maybe PE exam scores, for the fraction of engineering students who take it soon after graduation?) and there's no standardized way to measure the latter, so don't expect it to happen any time soon.
posted by roystgnr at 2:02 PM on November 1, 2017 [2 favorites]


But actually measuring the value-add of a school is hard and honestly most schools would rather not discuss it.

Compare the differences between high school and college stats. Check the stats on the source schools: Average GPA, graduation rate, attendance rates, test scores, etc. Then compare those to the college's graduates. If there's no improvement, there's no sign the college was above adequate; if they take in 4.0 students from schools with terrific test scores and they churn out 4.0 students with terrific test scores, all they've done is not mess things up.

If they take in students from schools averaging 2.6 GPA and a 30% dropout rate, and their average is 3.6 GPA and 15% dropout rate, then they're adding value.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 2:23 PM on November 1, 2017


Over 40 years ago, I got a "National Merit Scholarship" that allowed me to 'upgrade' my choice of colleges and go to of the most expensive schools in Southern California (not USC). That was my biggest academic mistake (the college later hired Ken 'Kill the Clintons' Starr as Dean and recently was mentioned in an exorcism joke on The Simpsons). I transferred away in a near-panic and took on Student Loans to go elsewhere before it was cool. (My parents were affluent enough to pay 80% of them and get them settled before I was 30.) Still, my experience exposed me to an Economics professor who was an early acolyte of Milton Friedman whose proud idiocy cured me of any Libertarian tendencies before my 20th birthday. And I went from a high school GPA of 3.9 to total college GPA of 2.9, curing me of most of my illusions of genius.
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:30 PM on November 1, 2017 [1 favorite]


If they take in students from schools averaging 2.6 GPA and a 30% dropout rate, and their average is 3.6 GPA and 15% dropout rate, then they're adding value

In electrical engineering they take in students with 4.5 GPAs and graduate them with 2.8s and they're actually adding a lot of value. Measuring a high school GPA and comparing it to a college GPA is farcical for a huge number of reasons.

At best you can compare how schools do relative to each other - does college A add more or less value to a set of students than college B does to a similar set of students. But it varies year to year, it's probably not clearly globally rankable and again, the colleges have to agree to try to figure this out. But there's really no incentive for them to do so.
posted by GuyZero at 2:36 PM on November 1, 2017 [3 favorites]


I didn't say measure the student's GPAs - measure the high school's average GPA. This would give them incentive to seek out high-performing students from low-average schools.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 2:40 PM on November 1, 2017


If they take in students from schools averaging 2.6 GPA and a 30% dropout rate, and their average is 3.6 GPA and 15% dropout rate, then they're adding value.
I'm not totally sure that I'm following you, but wouldn't that just encourage grade inflation? Grading systems are basically arbitrary, so all you'd need to do is give every student an A, and you'd look like a great school. One could argue that some elite colleges already do this. And I routinely see students who graduate from high-school with 4.5 GPAs (on a 4-point scale!) who are not in the top quarter of their classes. GPAs don't mean much.

But I'm not sure how that relates to the article, which discusses a huge problem. There's been a wholesale shifting of financial aid towards kids from more-affluent families. I think most people recognize that it's a problem, but the incentives to do it are huge, and I'm not seeing any meaningful efforts to combat it.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 2:45 PM on November 1, 2017 [2 favorites]


> the only thing that SAT score tells you is... how good the student is, going in. That says absolutely nothing about the quality of the school who accepts them

If SATs showed how good individual students were, I know I would prefer to be a student surrounded by other good students. But SATs don't show that, so it's moot.
posted by The corpse in the library at 3:43 PM on November 1, 2017 [1 favorite]


One plausible value-add metric would be "median income of students who enroll compared to median income of students who are admitted but choose not to enroll". It's not perfect because of course success should not be measured only in dollars, but it's hard to game and correlates with school quality.
posted by Easy problem of consciousness at 3:46 PM on November 1, 2017 [1 favorite]


I'm still not sure why "our employees take a quick IQ test with disparate impact" gets you sued, yet "our employees take a four year combined IQ+SES test with huge costs and worse disparate impact" is usually fine.

The strongest argument I've seen is that it's a binary decision: yes or no. Whereas an IQ test is a number, one which is hard to put any meaning on a specific number for. If you set the bar at 110, does a minority who scored a 109 have a disparate impact claim? IQ is pretty well established as varying across racial lines, so you'd have to argue that extra IQ point is a business necessity. Good luck on that.
posted by pwnguin at 7:13 PM on November 1, 2017 [1 favorite]


Hm... surely we'd just frame acceptance letters rather than diplomas then?

I didn't say - and I don't think - it's entirely about that. I just think it's probably true that it plays a bigger role than big-name universities would like to admit.
posted by atoxyl at 7:46 PM on November 1, 2017


that's a little too close to a plain IQ test for disparate impact lawsuit comfort. I'm still not sure why "our employees take a quick IQ test with disparate impact" gets you sued, yet "our employees take a four year combined IQ+SES test with huge costs and worse disparate impact

Isn't part of that ruling that the test was not sufficiently established to be relevant to the applicant's ability to perform the job? Whereas for a degree in the field there's a much more obvious argument that it's a valid qualification - even though there is a legitimate argument that some classes of people are disadvantaged when it comes to opportunities to get a degree.

By the way the signaling argument is about the added value of degrees from selective institutions (or I guess of any degree over one, yes) not the value of specific degrees as qualifications.

Incidentally I don't understand is aren't some pseudo-IQ tests like the Wonderlic still used by some companies in the U.S.? Are there circumstances under which they can still get away with it?
posted by atoxyl at 7:55 PM on November 1, 2017


*over none I mean
posted by atoxyl at 8:10 PM on November 1, 2017


“If there are a bunch of affluent kids with above-average test scores that you want to attract to your school to boost your SAT averages, for example, give them all modest scholarships and you can get a leg up on your competition.”

In the recent book Dream Hoarders, author Richard V. Reeves quotes Stephen Burd of the New America Foundation (p. 89-90) saying that it makes financial sense to give affluent kids partial scholarships, not just to boost SAT averages: “If a school offers a single low-income student a full scholarship of $20,000, the school may feel good about itself, but it’s out $20,000. But if it can attract four affluent students to its campus instead, by offering them each a $5,000 discount off full tuition, it can collect the balance in revenue and come out way ahead financially. Such competitive discounting to the affluent may not be equitable, and it may not be sustainable over the long-term, but once the cycle starts it can be very difficult for any one institution to resist unless they all do.”
posted by LeLiLo at 9:50 PM on November 1, 2017 [2 favorites]


I don't understand is aren't some pseudo-IQ tests like the Wonderlic still used by some companies in the U.S.? Are there circumstances under which they can still get away with it?

If you really want to know, here's Wonderlic's position:
[W]ell developed cognitive ability tests like the Wonderlic Personnel Test (“WPT”), these instruments have extensive statistical documentation that they are predictive of important components of workplace behavior... In contrast, most of the other hiring tools discussed in this paper have very little, if any, scientific evidence that they are valid predictors of important workplace behavior.
posted by pwnguin at 10:42 PM on November 1, 2017


If SATs showed how good individual students were, I know I would prefer to be a student surrounded by other good students. But SATs don't show that, so it's moot.

Right, but they are correlated with them. If you take a pool of people who got 1500+ on their SATs and a pool of people who got between 1000 and 1100, the 1500+ pool will contain a higher fraction of good students. So SATs get used as a quick and dirty filter. Which, to the point of this thread, tends to discriminate against good students from poorer backgrounds and privilege mediocre students from richer backgrounds who can afford things like SAT prep despite being mediocre students.
posted by Justinian at 11:26 PM on November 1, 2017


So here's the thing. Standardized test scores are part of this story, but they're only part of it. Many institutions are using data analytics tools to figure out which students are more likely to be influenced by financial aid offers when they decide which college to attend. The institutions do this because one factor in rankings is yield: what percentage of admitted students accept the offer. Increasingly, institutions see financial aid as a way to increase their yield.

What the data analysis shows is that rich kids are more likely to choose a college based on an offer of financial aid than working-class or middle-class kids are. Many working-class kids only apply to one college. I work at an institution that admits students according to a formula. You can go to the admissions website, enter your GPA and ACT scores and some information about what classes you've taken, and they will tell you whether you're going to be admitted. For many kids, the cost of applying to college is not trivial. The application fees aren't trivial. The $50 each time you retake the ACT isn't trivial. ACT prep classes can cost like $1000. Those kids will often plug their numbers into the website, realize that they're going to be accepted, and not worry about retaking the ACT or applying anywhere else. And that means that they're doubly disadvantaged for financial aid: they're disadvantaged because they don't have the higher scores that they'd get if they'd retaken the ACTs, let alone taken a prep class, but they're also disadvantaged because they're not shopping between different institutions who might offer them different financial aid packages. And since the university knows that students like them are typically not shopping between different institutions, the university is going to offer them the stingiest financial aid package that will allow them to attend and not a penny more. It's loans all the way down for poor kids.

Rich kids, on the other hand, typically apply to several schools: a reach, some that seem realistic, and then a safety. They take SAT or ACT prep classes, and they retake the tests several times to get the best possible score. They wait to receive offers of admission, and then they choose between the offers based on a number of factors, including who has offered them a shiny scholarship that will look good on a resume and give their parents something to brag about. "Junior had his heart set on MIT, and that didn't work out, but he got a full ride to State U, and he'll be living in their honors dorm and has been accepted into their STEM leadership initiative, which means he'll be doing research in a professor's lab from day 1." And meanwhile, some working-class kid who is just as smart and talented as Junior is maxing out her loans and working overnights at a nursing home to pay her tuition.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:35 AM on November 2, 2017 [5 favorites]


And meanwhile, some working-class kid who is just as smart and talented as Junior is maxing out her loans and working overnights at a nursing home to pay her tuition.

It's worse than that. State U is penalized in the rankings for taking a working-class kid because a job which limits the hours you can take classes means that you most likely won't graduate in 4-5 years, making the university's ranking worse. Then working-class kid is penalized for taking difficult classes because the loans are due pass or fail, so there is strong incentive not to stretch for a difficult major, which lowers their income profile out of college, means more poor people on the hook for less valuable degrees, and means they give less as alumni donations, all of which also hurt the university ranking.

So there is strong incentive not to admit working class people to begin with, regardless of how smart they are.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:23 AM on November 2, 2017 [2 favorites]




For several years now I've been encouraging my kids to learn Norwegian. It's on Duolingo, it's relatively easy for English speakers to learn, and university is free there for everyone, even folks from outside Norway.

Either that or they're going to school in Germany, or Canada, or England.

The US university system is insane.
posted by leotrotsky at 7:59 AM on November 2, 2017


Need-blind selective schools do exist but they are few and far between (and even more rare schools that help poor students so they can do things like unpaid internships).
posted by typecloud at 9:13 AM on November 2, 2017


The US university system is insane.

Wait until you see how applications work.

Canadian university applications took my daughter a day or two.

4 US universities? We're at 2 months now, they'll probably be done by end of this month, so three months total. thousands of words of writing, tightly edited, about who you are and who you think you'll be in the future. It's a nightmare.
posted by GuyZero at 9:17 AM on November 2, 2017


LeLiLo's comment is the crucial "why" behind the futility of the exercise. No school wants to make gold-plated dorms for its students, but individually they all feelc ompelled to as a way of attracting high-paying students. It doesn't really matter whether you accept kids from middle class or lower class economic backgrounds, because they weren't going to be paying $60K a year even with "generous" loans. But if the college loses even a few list-price students, that's a problem.

The concentration on a few schools is really amazing. UCLA is getting 97,000 applications for 6,500 slots. It makes more sense to talk about an enrollment ratio of 15:1 than a rate of 7%. Because going from 10% down to 7% seems like a small change, but you're talking about going from 9 kids getting rejected for every one who gets in, to 14. It's huge. Whereas UC Merced, which lacks the (expensive) location of UCLA but is still a UC, is admitting almost everyone. They have an admit ratio of 1.4:1.
posted by wnissen at 3:02 PM on November 2, 2017 [1 favorite]


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