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Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

If there was a "poor kid" who had incredible credentials AND didn't sound like a basket case, then he'd be hotly pursued by every top school in the country.

In this regard, how poor is poor? And, for my better understanding of your statement, what are some examples of "incredible credentials"? This whole discussion is quite interesting to me, as I applied to exactly one college in my day, in the 1970s, my state's flagship university, largely for financial reasons. I was not aware then of what I hear now, that more selective colleges will both admit and fund students from working class or poorer backgrounds.

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Poor would be minimum wage or below. So food stamps, free school lunches, 3 pairs of pants.

Incredible credentials would be 2400 SAT, 780-800 on 3 or more SAT IIs and straight A's.

And yes, the top schools are flush with cash, though they took a beating this past year, and they are using it to bring in kids from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. It's one of the big trends in the Ivies over the last 10 years.

Incredible credentials would be 2400 SAT, 780-800 on 3 or more SAT IIs

Fewer than 300 members of class of 2008 worldwide scored 2400 on the new three-section SAT,

http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/sat_perce...

so that is a rarely encountered characteristic even in the applicant pools of Ivy League colleges. (Princeton's entering class of about 1,243 students is numerous enough to include all of those students, if they all apply to Princeton.)

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/41382...

And not all of the 2400-scorers on the SAT Reasoning Test have the specified scores on the SAT Subject Tests. So I guess I wonder if slightly less incredible credentials would still be noteworthy.

SAT fee waivers

http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/sat/calenfees/fe...

or their ACT equivalent

http://www.actstudent.org/faq/answers/feewaiver.html

appear to be the usual way that colleges identify low-income students. The specified income level

http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/sat/counselors-gu...

for SAT fee waivers is meant to match the eligibility levels for some federal programs, but might imply somewhat more prosperity than "food stamps, free school lunches, 3 pairs of pants." For sure, anyone eligible for the fee waivers would be shocked by the LIST price of any Ivy League college.

Poor would be minimum wage or below. So food stamps, free school lunches, 3 pairs of pants.

So if he's poor enough that the college can brag about admitting him, he gets in, but if he's run-of-the-mill economic 15th-percentile, he has no shot unless he manages to finagle his way into a high school offering the "right" extracurriculars (e.g. crew)?

Incredible credentials would be 2400 SAT, 780-800 on 3 or more SAT IIs and straight A's.

Out of curiosity, is the difference between 2300 and 2400, or even 2200 and 2400, really that significant? I know that it matters a lot in admissions, but I don't think it has much predictive value over academic performance at the upper levels. IQ tests become less predictive at the upper end, and I wouldn't be surprised if SATs were the same way.

economic 15th-percentile

What do you mean by "economic 15th-percentile" (mentioned in more than one of your replies) in this context? What income level?

http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/in...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...

$18-30k works, which would be about 15th-percentile once students, pensioners, and part-time workers are taken out. I'm talking about the level at which a person is definitely poor, but not in abject poverty. In upstate New York, that level of income wouldn't make a person impoverished.

The income range you mention is eligible for SAT fee waivers

http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/sat/counselors-gu...

and is heavily recruited by Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, at least, being well within the scope of their financial aid initiatives.

"Recruiting", in this sense, just means encouraging them to apply. These colleges want lots of applications, because it makes their acceptance rate lower, and they'll occasionally find a diamond. That's already common knowledge.

On the other hand, encouraging people to apply with almost no chance of admitting them is not "recruiting"; it's playing a numbers game. I say "no chance of admitting" because it's nearly impossible to clear the extracurricular bar at the socioeconomic 15th percentile. At that level, the "right" extracurriculars are not offered, but you're not so poor that you can pull off an "overcoming challenges" essay (that was the admissions schtick du jour ca. 1998-2003) or that a college can brag about admitting you.

I'll simply say that what you post here is not current information (it may very well have been current information at the turn of the century) and leave it at that. The income range you mention is taken into account in admission decision-making today, and I know current examples of that happening in this year's admission cycle. The Laura D'Andrea Tyson article I posted as a separate submission recently

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_27/b3840045_...

seems to have been part of changing the culture of university admission offices. A student from a family with an income at the fifteenth percentile of national household incomes is a rare student at the most selective colleges and IF the student has competitive grades and test scores and some economically reasonable extracurricular involvement, the student has a great chance of admission today and a very good chance of lavish financial aid. Colleges today do brag about admitting students at that income level.