Some Colleges Have More Students From the Top 1 Percent Than the Bottom 60
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
For the past 7 years I've been involved in education from pre-k to university and my BS detector didn't budge during these episodes.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20161228/23550336364/malco...
But the guy can be good, I'll check these out.
http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/the_gladwellian_debate.ph...
This is, I think, the bigger problem. Educational opportunities are highly differentiated by wealth at a young age. Better public schools require living in more expensive neighborhoods. Private schools are expensive and even on financial aid difficult for some people to get to. Poor people can't afford to send their kids on summer trips (i.e. summer camp) and effectively the poor are more likely to have learning stop in the summer. To top if off, the guidance people in poor school districts get in/around their senior year is rarely helpful and sometimes just terrible (I.e. councilors telling students to not even bother applying to Harvard, etc...)
So yes, I'd say it's more complicated. When you're poor you're playing against students with a stacked deck. That's not to say there is no personable accountability, but it's not the only determining factor.
The middle school put me ahead of my high school colleagues. I was a year ahead in math, and two years ahead in english. Their computer science education led me to taking APCS a year early, with CS courses at a university shortly thereafter. They had even prepared me for standardized testing like the SSAT and SAT.
Yes, your family's important. Yes, there's some anti-intellectualism along the bottommost socioeconomic ranks. But the quality of one's school is a massive factor in how one learns.
I agree that home life influences schooling outcomes as well. Families with higher incomes can afford for one parent to stay home or to pay for a nanny or whatever. But in addition, many schools are funded disproportionately, where the schools with the most need receive the least funding.
Now, my family hasn't been rich by any means, but they wouldn't have been able to afford such a thing just a few years prior. The same goes for after school activities - or even just a trip with the French club to France or Canada. When you are poor, these things are out of reach.
Any time things like summer camp came up, I just tuned out, because I knew it wasn't going to happen for me. As an adult, I can see that, in some cases, I could have made something happen if I had really wanted it. But as a child, I had the mentality "that's not for me" and could not have even begun to figure out how to make it happen, because I wasn't just poor, but lacked any real support at home. (I was babysitting, but I fell into the poor person trap of spending money to feel better. All my cash went straight to comic books and soda.)
not all non profits are innocent.
If the person has to work, or if they have been out of high school for a while and has family responsibilities, for-profit schools generally seem to be more flexible, especially the ones that are mostly online. You don't have to worry about missing class if kids are sick and you don't have to worry about your work hours getting cut because you have to go to class.
Heck, some people lose jobs because the jobs aren't flexible enough for school or don't go to school because of their job.
It winds up feeling like the colleges cater only to a traditional student - young, without a family, and not needing to work anything but a part-time job - but this doesn't reflect the reality some folks are facing. It isn't a financial decision whatsoever: It might be if they had to pay a little bit upfront, but that would be enough to keep some folks from going: I'm not sure this is an improvement or not.
But some elite colleges have focused more on being
affordable to low-income families than on expanding
access.
If the second, the question then becomes how to encourage those applicants. Is that "access"?
Or do we need to re-think "qualification" to be more democratic (if it includes, say, international exposure that can be bought)? Are institutions obligated to change their qualification criteria to this end? Should they all?
The selectivity-vs-income ("rainbow") chart is interesting and fairly linear. I wonder what a similar "qualification-vs-income" chart would look like: e.g., are top 0.1%-ers "more qualified" (e.g., more likely to get into a selective university by performance alone) than other bands?
Then we're either into really dangerous territory (e.g., wealth correlated with intelligence), we're back to (re-)defining qualification criteria, or we shift the "blame" from university admissions to childhood education.
Presuming Harvard is interested in increasing enrollment at all, that alone doesn't help increase these percentages. If Harvard accepts 1 low-income student for every 10 people, and accepts 100 more people in total, the mix is still 10%. I don't think that's "increased access".
The article links to the page you've linked to, and includes links to data and source information. I haven't personally vetted what NYT has done here, but it seems fair to take original research and run with it in new directions.
There are accompanying NYT articles, and I agree that it's fair to jump off from the research. I believe the discussion needs to incorporate the conclusions from the paper into that new direction.
Additionally everyone that has finished High School should be accepted into any state-funded university. You can seed out the unqualified students during the first two semesters.
Which, in relative terms, is not that hard: simply re-purpose state prisons.
If you filter out a lot of students early on, you don't need to build new ones.
People going to college should consider it a valuable use of their time, not a necessary credential for entering the workforce. Guess which of those I believe drives college admissions right now.
Of course many careers will benefit from a college education, but here in the US we have long since surpassed that number of people attending college.
Because education is important, and our society is helped by everyone having access to improve their lives. I don't want to get into an automation discussion, but I personally believe that it will be even more important in the next few decades.
> People going to college should consider it a valuable use of their time, not a necessary credential for entering the workforce
I completely agree! But I think that is a separate problem. I'd love to go to school for things completely unrelated to my career. I don't think college should necessarily be easy, but getting into it should be. I personally believe that encouraging people to further educate themselves, especially "non-intellectuals"* , is a great way for everyone to benefit.
IME, most people who skip college aren't skipping it because they are dumb, but because they don't have the resources to attend easily. In my own experience: High-school wasn't reflective of my current educational desires. I want to attend more college classes, but don't have the resources to do so. I live a pretty simple lifestyle, and if college isn't easily accessible to me, I can't see how it's accessible to people with kids, two jobs, etc
* : I don't know how else to phrase that without sounding condescending. If someone has a better wording, let me know.
If the problem is that there are many qualified students who can't get into college because there isn't enough supply, then the answer is to build new 4-year universities or reduce demand. Demand can be reduced by offering more vocational training opportunities or 2-year degree programs.
If the problem is that college is too expensive, that gets back to state funding of public universities as well as tuition inflation.
I think I can't really explain that system well, so here is a short pdf that explains the options you have in the Swiss education system:
http://www.edudoc.ch/static/web/bildungssystem/grafik_bildun...
After you finished high school you can go there. (I'm not sure, but there might be some exception where you need to pass an exam)
Depending on the course, 2/3 of the students will be gone after two semesters.
On a side note, ETHZ (and other Universities in Switzerland) charge some $500-1000 per semester, and taking on student debt is rare. This way, by dropping out, students mostly only lose the invested time and don't face potential bankrupcy.
Companies already avoid asking about marital status or children etc, this could easily be added to that list.
In other words, there is a signaling and counter-signaling mechanism here. An investment banker saying they went to school in Philly is expecting you to understand they went to Wharton, and the only acceptable clarifying question is something like "oh, undergrad or for your MBA?"
Asking me not to say I went to an Ivy on my resume is fine -- I can disclose it in 50 other ways that will be obvious to the people who care and much harder to censor.
Instead my practice is to literally not look at people's resumes. This isn't perfect -- some co-workers will choose to ask about a project listed on the resume they are interested in, and I don't think that's a horrible idea usually. I simply don't like the assumptions I start to generate when I read people's resumes.
Anyway, school names tend to be worth vastly less in an interview than getting to that point. Face to face Ivy grads are better than average when selected randomly, but because of the selection effect people at elite institutions often get a negative bias to Ivy grads. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox
PS: You see similar things when look at people from say MIT by SAT score you would find the lower scores tend to be better indicators than high ones. Which is the same issue, people with low scores need other factors to get into the door.
seems like cheapening the credentialing might be a better way to attack this problem
This is a great study if you want to learn more:
http://www.bain.com/Images/BAIN_BRIEF_The_financially_sustai...
Tribal community colleges tend to be dual role institutions.
1) I am not going to discuss "sovereignty" as applied to the tribe and just say schools like getting state certification because it makes everything (including grants) easier
Of course, the problem you mentioned still exists - a lot, if not most of people are not cut out for higher education, and since there is no financial barrier to entry, why aren't people spending 3+ years on taxpayer's dime doing nothing?
Well, I believe there are two mechanisms at work here - it's stupidly hard to get into any university, even a relatively poor one. You need fantastically good results on the high school diploma or you are not even considered.
Second mechanism - first year is the sieve to rule out who is not cut out for higher education. It has a reputation for being harshly difficult, and it's not unheard of university courses failing or just losing 90% of all students that have enrolled in their first year. If you come to university with an attitude that you are going to party and play games, you will be out by the end of the first semester. Then, if you do reach the end, there's no "grades" on your diploma. You can't graduate with a low score so to speak - you need to have absolutely pristine record to actually graduate. People have finished their 3-4 years and have been re-taking final exams for years just because you need to get something stupid like 90%+ score to actually pass.
In comparison, I was shocked by education in country like the UK - in here, first year of uni is almost treated like kindergarten. It's not meant to be difficult. You are not meant to be treating it seriously. It's the year when you are supposed to get the partying out of your system and enjoy yourself. The grades from 1st year don't even count towards your final degree. The only way to fail in 1st year would be to assault a lecturer or something. Then anything above 40% is a pass. "First" is just a paltry 70% of higher. So you can cruise through higher education and graduate, even if your scores were below 50% average.
I don't know what the solution is (US-centric). Push the education and values as widely as possible relentlesly, hoping to get a positive first derivative, and maybe in 50 years things will be better?
Likewise, best schools are clearly based in major cities and metropolises. Those are not cheap, though thanks to not as silly housing market as in the US, the difference is less than half order of magnitude for rental and cost of the living; decent system of tax funded boarding houses further evens it out some.
I've seen people barely pass all along, the 90% thing is a joke. Some even just cheat.
That said, even those barely making it are generally not half bad.
This is one of those things where there's a very long causal chain. Stopping your explanation at "students do not take education seriously" grossly and negligently oversimplifies things. [1]
For example, you ignore all the perfectly serious people who have low GPAs but have bad teachers, bad schools, abusive parents, are in deep poverty, have experienced severe trauma, or are homeless. You also ignore the many, many reasons people might end up in high school not taking education seriously.
You also ignore the people who are serious and did well but still aren't getting the college educations they need. Of which there are plenty. Apparently in your view we shouldn't help them just because there are other people you deem not serious enough.
[1] Note also that this is a pretty clear example of the fundamental attribution error: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
([1] According to the very first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry you linked there are studies that suggest the fundamental attribution error doesn't even exist in practice.)
The US has 300 million people, we are allowed to work on more than one thing at a time.
Second:
> It doesn't matter the reasons why they don't take education seriously, the fact is that they don't. It would do absolutely nothing for these students
The reasons do matter, because some are more amenable to fixing than others. They also matter because we should fix them.
> It's not until we have 95-99% high school graduation rates, with a majority of those graduating also have high GPAs, that we need to consider whether we are providing sufficient access to colleges and universities.
This is monstrous. It is an excuse for inaction, not a serious plan.
If only one student needs more education but cannot get it, then we need to consider why. That other students are unready does not lessen their need. That other students are unready does not lessen the potential benefit to society of having a more productive, better-educated person in society.
[1] So? More work suggests that it does. And whether or not it's a primary effect or the derivative of other effects, you are certainly engaging in the pattern of behavior here, which is the point you are so busily ignoring.
You're also ignoring the point: There is zero societal value in providing cheap college to a student who, for whatever reasons, has dropped out of school in the eighth grade. We need to fix high school, not college.
And as far as providing for those who are ready, do you have any statistics that show that students who would benefit from college are unable to do so? We provide tax breaks for colleges and universities, we have grants available for needy students, we have subsidized loans available for most every student. The average student loan debt in 2016 was ~$30,000. The lifetime earnings benefit of having a bachelors degree is $600,000 - $900,000. There doesn't seem to be a college access problem.
That point is different than the one you made previously, and is much narrower. Plenty of people are excited to fix high school. But you're saying we should refuse to improve college access until high school is comprehensively fixed. (And you ignore all the other problems that reduce readiness for college besides high schools.)
Sorry, why should I provide statistics that you can readily look up since you're the one claiming you already have all the answers here? It's not my job to forcibly educate you one study at a time. Especially since you demonstrate no willingness to actually understand the problem.
Instead, person A can waft through making A's and B's while person 2 has to work their butts off, when a C should really be acceptable.
Most states have a variety of institutions that cater to students of different fields and levels. What is the advantage of them all accepting everyone?
Reforming the primary and secondary education systems in this country would make a great difference. But that is easier said than done.
At a local community college I worked at previously, the most popular math course was college algebra. Many kids right out of high school were in this course with very weak math skills. Now this is only one subject, but I think education needs to be addressed earlier.
And just to add, local community colleges are a fairly cheap avenue for just about anyone to take college course (and remedial high school courses like algebra). It shouldn't be the job of a four year college to devote extensive resources to re-teaching material that should have been learned in high school. Let's focus on making education better before college so more people are ready and qualified to enroll after high school.
This and the "healthcare should be cheap for everyone" positions are so intellectually lazy. "Education" and "healthcare" aren't some intangible pie-in-the-sky assets that are being magically bestowed upon certain individuals. They are services provided by institutions that must pay for high tech facilities and competitive wages in order to retain the best staff, accreditations, and reputation. Those costs have to be paid by someone. A half-baked solution that is subsidized or mandated only reduces competition and drives prices higher.
But, education for all is "expensive," even though it would cost fraction per year for what we spent in Iraq per year.
Switzerland has about the same physical area and population as the state of Virginia, only it's about 50% richer by raw GDP. Not exactly a good analog for the entire US.
How does that affect government spending/GDP?
> a GDP per capita 50% higher than the US
Purchasing power is similar. This means the higher GDP per capita is compensated by higher spending on government employees, social welfare (A person without a job or children gets around 2800CHF/months) and so on.
> a physical size of about 0.5% of the US.
How does that affect government spending/GDP? The only thing I see here is potentialy lower cost for infrastructure. But then the alps that take up 60% of the land area and building tunnels is expensive.
Contrast that with a federal program and all of a sudden you have dozens of offices across the entire country. You have to add another layer of management to oversee those offices and ensure they are adhering to the same standards. Rolling out even a minor change requires re-training hundreds if not more staff. You've taken what was a relatively lean operation and turned it into a bureaucracy of the largest scale. And now it's a target for fraud because they're handing out free money and inevitably poorly investigate abuses at a snail's pace.
You can't predict the general governemnt spending based on the size, population and PPP/capita.
The fact remains, Switzerland has an extended welfare state, cheap education and still lower general government spending than the US.
But well, maybe it is also because the Swiss people have greater power over the government than any other country.
What a great idea! NYT really capitalizes on this medium and doesn't simply deliver print articles via web.
Also, the top colleges from that population that enrolls the highest percentage of low income students are much more prestigious than the top 1% income colleges.
These schools aren't elite because they attract the smartest students, they are elite because they attract the richest ones, who then have a leg up with their wealthy and well-placed alumni network.
The school I went to was almost 25% Econ majors. Out of a class of ~500, we had 18 Math majors. We didn't even have a CS major available. The value wasn't in Linear Algebra, it was in people. I'm one of two people I know from school that work in STEM. All of my college buddies work in finance or politics. I still attend the meet and greets in NYC, and I end up as the center of attention because I DON'T work in finance (anymore).
Funny enough, my brother also went to one of those schools. He's at GS.
> 12 “Ivy plus” universities (the Ivy League colleges, Duke, M.I.T., Stanford and the University of Chicago)
They mostly have smaller enrollments though, and probably not a lot of research programs.
I did undergrad at WashU, which in this ranking is the poster child for regressive admissions. WashU is opposite MIT in this respect: a medium-sized endowment ($6B / class size = 1400 => $4M/student) and no will to use it, at least not on scholarships.
It was not that way back when I attended. The only way I can make sense of the graphs of diversity vs. time is that they are aggressively increasing tuition, recruiting among the wealthy, and erecting fancy buildings.
I haven't looked at the rest, but I'm guessing (by repuation) that for a lot of those schools, "elite" is more about class and networks than academic ability.
[0]: https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/college-university-search... [1] https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/college-university-search...
Most colleges like Trinity and my alma mater make money off wealthy but average students and international students. Both pay full price most of the time.
(To be fair, if I had a trust fund I would've liked to go to one. You can be in a setting where you can get a lot of personalized attention, and the focus is in undergraduates than the big research programs that bring in the money.)
Graduates from NYC schools (including graduates with non-wealthy backgrounds) disproportionately stay in NYC and make an NYC salary, which looks upper-middle-class by national standards but doesn't go very far when your rent is three grand.
Therefore the claimed effect is at least somewhat spurious, being driven purely by geographic CoL variation. A better analysis would compensate for this, perhaps by normalizing by local CoL's.
I wouldn't necessarily call them elite (especially those further down the list) but they are good schools.
Colorado College - 24th
Washington & Lee - 11th
Colby - 12th
Trinity - 38th
Bucknell - 32nd
Colgate - 12th
Kenyon - 27th
Middlebury - 4th
Though I've personally benefited from diversity recruiting for low income, first in family to go to college, etc. I still believe the solution is to fix K-12. In particular, Boston is an example of there being great higher education, but terrible public schools.
-----------------
Short of that, I would recommend for the following actions:
1. Anonymous interviewing for all companies, mandatory. Let's be honest, those attending elite schools are the biggest beneficiaries of "discriminatory recruiting." Oh, except, not if you're the stereotypical beneficiary of affirmative action [1] (ironic because really white women are those who benefit the most [2]). The idea here is to level the playing field. I imagine most resistance to this will come from people who went to schools similar to mine.
2. Banning of private schools. This probably won't happen, but private schools simply perpetuate the problems with access. How is it that rich cities like Boston, New York, Chicago and San Francisco have terrible school systems? Don't get me wrong, this isn't THE solution, there's still the rich suburb effect [3]. Practically, this probably wouldn't work. Those in control generally either live in rich suburbs or send their kid to private school. It would take one heck of a politician to pull this off.
3. Affirmative action should now be implemented at the beginning, not at the end. Helping people who already succeeded is unnecessary for real change, and expensive. Not to mention it's cheaper and more effective [4]. The tin-foil hat in me says that people wouldn't want this to happen, simply because it'd produce better competition. Affirmative action at the end is more tame.
4. More advocacy of college alternatives. Personally, I went to a two-year college and transferred to an "Ivy Plus/Elite College" in order to not pay loans. Ironically, that was not necessary since they paid for everything anyway, but hey, I didn't know that. For many, college loans are just entrapment [5]. Two year college is a factor to help mitigate the pain, in the short term [6].
5. Complete banning of for-profit school. There's already been movement in this direction, with the prevention of enrollment of students with federal aid to ITT. [7]
I have many more ideas about this, but unfortunately things are very complicated. The intersection between the economy, parenting, culture, the government as well as racism, discrimination and access make it very difficult to propose a general solution.
I disagree with my own advice above depending on the city, and the circumstances. Ultimately, this is too tough a problem to solve merely with broad strokes, but I do believe the sentiment "fix K-12" summarizes my view.
[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/03/06/elite-college...
[2] http://ideas.time.com/2013/06/17/affirmative-action-has-help...
[3] http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/09/even-if-...
[4] http://thefederalist.com/2016/06/24/we-wouldnt-need-affirmat...
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/08/upshot/student-debt-is-wo...
[6] http://www.scholarsstrategynetwork.org/brief/make-first-two-...
[7] http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2016/0828/For-profit-...
Honestly, government help is definitely necessary to help the less privileged kids. But it is by no means sufficient if the home environment is broken and parents don't have time to develop their children.
[1] http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/may/9/education-lev...
[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/02/lets-not-pa...
But it doesn't diminish in any way the dumb people. If you have no intention of getting an education or supporting yourself in the modern world, a tougher education system with higher standards won't discourage your reproduction.
I like the way the French do food with kids in school. Kids eat lunch at school. They do not bring sack lunches, and they don't get to leave for lunch. All of them have access to the same food, and kids experiment with foods from an early age.
I then thought of what would be the most blue-collar state university in Indiana, and checked ISU: <1% from the 1% and 46.5% from the bottom 60%.
1. I think its interesting/notable that the colleges that are most successful at helping poorer kids, are not elite schools, but rather are training people for well paying "middle class" jobs like teaching them how to be an air traffic controller
2. nowhere does it talk about the cost of providing an education...if it costs College X $75,000/year/student and College Y costs $15,000/year/student then making Y "affordable" is eminently easier than X...the point being some schools may want to have a more economically diverse student body, but in order to achieve that end, they would need to either spend less on education (and consequently become less prestigious), raise more money/get more grants, or charge the students that are already paying full tuition even more...none of which appealing/easy...
As a graduate of an elite college coming in from a highly privileged background (and thus as someone trying to minimize cognitive dissonance), I do think we would lose something if we as a society only put our resources into colleges that focused on lower income students. That said, I wouldn't be too bummed if more of my tax dollars ended up in places where it was actually helping people who benefited from that help.
Given many studies (notably Google's) showing that school performance is not a good indicator of future performance. Is losing prestige such a bad thing? It would be if the prestige was correlated with significantly smarter and better performing graduates.
But if the prestige only comes from being associated with higher class individuals, all you are losing is a false-positive signal.
There is MIT for education.
Harvard and the like may offer great financial aid to those students, but those students are the very ones that aren't going to be accepted Harvard.
Their parents' income relative to what...
The city their parent works or lives in? The state? Country-wide?
Seems like an important thing to clarify. You can be in the top 5–10% in a small blue-collar town and still middle of the road across the country.
Re-read OP, didn't see them explicitly call it out, but they did implicitly mention "[percent] of American families" in places, so likely it's nation here too.
Besides, farming is the backbone of civilization. You don't need much education for that. Everything we have nowadays is extra.
Compare the yields from India to best-in-class producers of the same products [1]. For the top 5 products (excluding Buffalo milk) Indian production is 70% less efficient. (Buffalo milk is excluded because I don't have a source for best-in-class production.)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_India Largest agricultural products in India by value
But 150 years ago—and for 10,000 years before that—farming employed 90% or more of the workforce in every country.
Also, farming is heavily automated and done by very few hands outside of truck crops. Farming truck crops is low wage, incredibly difficult work that we generally use illegal labor for.
That having been said, I'm in a CCNT course for a reason: I could be lliving on a steady 40 grand and not have to wprry about backbreaking work every day.
There are ways to better oneself without ever setting foot in a college or university. How did America's forefathers survive! I was the first person in my entire male lineage to attend college and yet I come from a long line of successful businessmen.
I don't know much of NYC but isn't it... huge? I'm sure that there are parts of it far away from Manhattan that aren't shitholes and where you can live with a "normal" wage.
If you want to own property elsewhere (Brooklyn, Queens, SI, Bronx), you need to be upper middle class and have some savings—no millions needed though unless it's some super prime location.
The 1% that commute long hours to Manhattan do it because they want to live in their large Long Island or upstate estates/houses, not because they can't afford Manhattan. If they wanted to be close to work, they'd just have to live in a smaller house/condo without a large front lawn or private pool.
Millions of families live "decent" lifestyles in NYC all the time without being millionaires.
See here: http://streeteasy.com/condos/midtown-east?sort_by=price_asc
Cheapest studio condos go for upwards of $500k.
One quibble: it's not them, it's their parents.
There are 18 year old entrepreneurs who've created lots of economic growth, of course, but they're very much not the crowd we're talking about here.
History will not be kind to this point of view.
One of the caveats of capitalism is that capital creates capital, wealth accumulates naturally at the top. This is why it has to be balanced with strong social welfare systems to avoid reverting to feudalism.