I mentioned Harvard in my post, and you mentioned Harvard in your reply, so I will continue to use numbers from Harvard. According to Harvard’s NPC, the net ret price to parents for an income of $180k and multiple kids is $17k/year, with typical assets , not $90k/year. Most middle class families get excellent FA at Harvard, often enough to be less expensive then in state public alternatives. You generally need a far higher income than $180k to not get significant FA. A similar statement could be made for Ivy+ colleges in general.
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Some of them may offer some financial aid up to about 96th percentile or so parent income.
However, the big donut hole occurs for kids with divorced parents, who are often still fighting about their divorce and therefore uncooperative. Such students are typically shut out of whatever generous financial aid that the wealthy elite colleges claim to offer, and their parents typically have less to contribute for college costs than married parents with the same combined income (because they gave their kids’ college fund to their divorce lawyers’ kids’ college funds, and because living in separate households typically costs more than living in a shared household).
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That may be the real advantage that elite prep high schools offer to their students aiming for elite colleges. Their dedicated college counseling staffs are far more likely to give the students useful information in terms of knowing the system and how to play the elite college admissions game than a typical overburdened general counselor at a non-elite public or private high school. The dedicated college counselors may also have knowledge about what each elite college really looks for, and may steer top-end students to those elite colleges that are more likely to seem them as fits (rather than all top-end students applying to HYPS). Of course, a student from a low income family who got into an elite prep high school on financial aid or scholarship may have already had an information advantage to begin with.
Yes, much of this stuff can be found in other ways, but do most students (or their parents) know where to look (example: many new posters here do not know that net price calculators exist)? In many cases, the information that students and parents do find is inaccurate.
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Right, and the draw for schools like Duke is the network of wealthy students. This is very important for career/etc…
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Seinfeld kids, Springsteen kid, Rob Lowe kid, etc. went to Duke. All very good students, I’m sure, so hard to know how celebrity status, if any, might have helped in admissions.
Some schools definitely seem to be more attractive to celebrities than others.
I see no reason to believe that these kids are any smarter than average kids, and there is absolutely zero reason to assume that they had more academic achievements than an average kid. Other kids need to win national-level awards, be the top of the class academically, etc, and there is no evidence that these kids have those awards. Considering how much celebrity magazines love heaping praise on celebrity kids for doing even basic stuff, they would absolutely gush if a celebrity kid actually had some national-level achievement that wasn’t the result of nepotism.
I’m sure that at least some are great kids and that many are academically accomplished, but it’s highly unlikely that they are anything beyond what is known here as “average excellent”, and those kids are not being accepted to Duke.
So I would guess that celebrity status has almost everything to do with their admissions.
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Or, some schools find celebrity kids more attractive in admissions. So the kids attend the “best” college their parents status got them into.
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…well, it looks like they didn’t hold it against him 
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Congratulations to your son. I hope he has a wonderful experience.
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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.
Of course they were also way more likely than lower SES kids to have the necessary test scores.
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Chetty just got Chettyed. Some key quotes from the article:
“But inside the lab, Chetty and his colleagues have not always practiced what their research preaches, several former employees say. When hiring for their prestigious “pre-doctoral fellowship” program, for instance, the lab uses a rubric that explicitly favors students from the very colleges that its own research has called out for reinforcing elitist systems. Opportunity Insights didn’t have its first Black pre-doc until 2021. Seven former employees who spoke to The Chronicle about their experiences were bothered by what they saw as contradictions between the lab’s practices and its stated values.”
“In a 2021 copy of the rubric obtained by The Chronicle, “caliber of university” was worth two points, out of nine. The other criteria were research experience, worth four points; grades, worth two points; and a bonus point that could go to applicants “who truly stand out,” have a unique skill or perspective, or go “above and beyond.”
“A college’s caliber is determined by a list the lab leaders maintain. version of the list obtained by The Chronicle catalogs the 75th-percentile math SAT scores at more than 1,200 colleges. The rubric stipulates that the full two points go to alumni of colleges where the math SAT scores of top admitted students were 790 or higher; 1.5 points for scores of 750 to 789; and one point for 700 to 749.”
“Several former employees saw the rubric as conflicting with the findings of Opportunity Insights’ own research. Data from the lab’s latest college-admissions paper show just how tightly students’ SAT scores correlate to their families’ incomes. That paper also showed that at “Ivy Plus” colleges — defined as the eight Ivy League institutions, plus Duke University, MIT, Stanford, and the University of Chicago — family income has an outsize influence on admissions. Even among students who have the same SAT scores, students from families in the top 1 percent of American incomes are more than twice as likely to get into an Ivy-Plus college as students from middle-class families.”
“Does Raj Chetty Practice What He Preaches?: His research skewers elitist systems. But some former employees say his lab is part of the problem.” The Chronicle of Higher Education:
https://www.chronicle.com/article/does-raj-chetty-practice-what-he-preaches
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