<p>I find so hard to care about this.</p>
<p>More kids in the public school in the nearby wealthy neighborhood go to elite schools than the kids at Camden High in Camden, NJ.</p>
<p>Neither of these is shocking news.</p>
<p>It’s not like every public school is some melting pot of socioeconomic diversity and ethnicity. I bet if you look at the public schools that send kids to schools like Yale, you’ll find that the families look similar to private school families.</p>
<p>44% went to all types of private schools. That’s a definite bias. What does it indicate? Any answer would be just a guess, considering the information given. But I’d be interested to see the numbers without the legacy/endowment kids. Again just a guess but the bias is likely toward money and nothing else.</p>
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<p>Actually, I think we do have enough information available to determine, in a general way, whether the graduates of the five prep schools listed in the article are over-represented.</p>
<p>According to the linked article, graduates from those five prep schools in recent years comprise 3.7% of Yale’s class. The graduating classes from those same five schools add up to a total of about 980 graduates per year. During the same time period Yale got about 25,000 applicants for admission per year.</p>
<p>So in the very unlikely event that 100% of the graduating seniors from all five prep schools all submitted applications to Yale, then they would comprise about 3.9% of the total application pool. Which is very close to the same number (3.7%) as their representation in Yale’s class.</p>
<p>Thus, we can safely say that those five schools are very likely over-represented, but it’s hard to say by exactly how much. To know that we would have to know what percentage of the 980 graduates of those schools applied to Yale. If you assume that 1/3rd of the graduating class applied to Yale, then they are over-represented by a factor of about 3-fold, and so on.</p>
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The Yale student body is also 3x more likely to be Asian than the general US population and half as like to be Black or hispanic as the US population. Therefore we can conclude that Yale shows a bias towards Asian applicants over URMs and would likely choose an Asian applicant over an equally qualified URM. </p>
<p>These assumptions are incorrect because I didn’t consider that the rate of highly qualified applicants who choose to apply to Yale differs between the two groups. For the same reason, one can not conclude that the stats indicate a bias towards private schools or money. As discussed in my earlier post, it’s most likely the other way around. Low SES is a hook, as well as legacy/endowment. However, I’d expect the rate of low SES in public schools to be higher than the rate of Yale legacy/endowment in private schools. I agree that money has a good correlation with chance of applying to and attending selective colleges, for reasons that have been previously mentioned in this thread.</p>
<p>I don’t know why it is news that private universities have a large number of private high school students.</p>
<p>I think it would be interesting to see what it looks like at the top publics like Berkely, UCLA, UMich, UNC, UVA, and a few others. I think that might be a more interesting piece of information, not to mention the tiny number of students who go to these privates compared to the rest.</p>
<p>carry on.</p>
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<p>The bias is a given unless you believe that 44% of the high school population goes to private school. As stated the motive for the bias is a guess, although I’d bet on money over need.</p>
<p>I’m sure that money is less of an issue for parents who pay for private school than public. It’s not bias, its life. </p>
<p>Even in socialist paradises like Venezuela and Cuba and China, there is a huge gap between rich and poor and who gets good healthcare, healthy food, potable water, political access and elite education. </p>
<p>It’s life. Nothing to be upset about. The more you have, the more you can get. So acquire more wealth and get more if you want it.</p>
<p>FYI, not everyone admitted to a private elite college is well-to-do. Most of my HS classmates from the top 25% admitted to Ivy/peer elite colleges came from families as far from well-to-do as you can get. The same applies to most who gained admission to such colleges from public HS…whether magnets or not located in lower middle class or lower SES areas. </p>
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<p>FYI: Mainland China has been “Socialist” in name only for at least the last 2 decades. </p>
<p>This extends to their university system which was completely free for any student who qualified for admission through the national college entrance exam. One of the byproducts of the increasing “Socialist in name only” trend has been the elimination of free tuition sometime in the very late '90s* so students and their families after the '00s had to factor in tuition expenses along with prepping for the exceedingly competitive Gaokao. </p>
<p>Currently, Mainland China is arguably just as/more laissez-faire about its markets/capitalism as/than the US. Just look at how their version is remarkably similar to that of the US in many ways during the period Upton Sinclair wrote “The Jungle”…</p>
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<li>When I visited in the late '90s, free tuition for anyone qualified for admission was still in effect. It was eliminated only a year or two after I left China.</li>
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Let’s go through some specific numbers and make the following 3 assumptions:</p>
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<li><p>~10% of high school seniors go to private schools. ~90% of go to public schools.</p></li>
<li><p>High school seniors at private schools are 5 times as likely to apply to Yale than high school seniors at public schools. So if x% of public school seniors apply to Yale, then 5x% of private school seniors apply to Yale.</p></li>
<li><p>High school seniors from private schools who apply to Yale are 2 times as likely to be qualified enough to be accepted than high school seniors who apply to Yale from public schools. So if y% of public school seniors are qualified enough to be accepted, then 2y% for private schools</p></li>
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<p>So the number of applications Yale receives from US students at private schools who are qualified enough to be accepted is number of HS seniors in US * 0.1<em>5x</em>2y = num seniors * xy . And the number of applications Yale receives from students at public schools is num seniors * 0.9<em>x</em>y = num seniors* 0.9xy . So we’d expect a ratio of (1/1.9) = 53% private and (0.9/1.9) = 47% public with no external biases, hooks, or other limitations. </p>
<p>I’m sure the specific numbers are not correct. I chose them for easy rounding, rather than accuracy. The point is you are ignoring the difference in rate of students who apply and rate of students who are qualified enough to be accepted, which leads to a different conclusion.</p>
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<p>While that may be the case with regard to such things as enforcement of health and safety regulations, isn’t about half of production and employment in the PRC economy in government owned companies?</p>
<p>The private schools are better schools. It shouldn’t be surprising.</p>
<p>At some point, we have to stop expecting everything is or should be equal every where all the time. This is the land of opportunity. What we do with that and what our children get as a benefit correlates with how successful we are maximizing the opportunities.</p>
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<p>I am coming at this from “socialistic” subsidy aspects such as free tuition for anyone qualified for admission to university which existed until sometime in the very tail end of the '90s. </p>
<p>Basically, since the institution of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, many benefits for ordinary people not in bad graces with the CCP/local party cadres such as guaranteed employment(a.k.a. Iron Rice bowl) and other social welfare subsidies were eliminated…and up until very recently…the CCP hasn’t implemented a viable replacement such as social security for retirees.</p>
<p>Speaking of comparing socialistic/capitalistic elements…it’s interesting that when it comes to university admissions, most nominally communist countries were actually much more capitalistic/elitist in some ways than in the US. </p>
<p>Whereas the US has universities for all academic levels and many second chances…even for remedial students who had difficulty completing elementary level arithmetic, no such systems existed in those nations. </p>
<p>You either met the high academic standards set by the competitive entrance exams/school leaving exams or you simply didn’t go to college…or even had a route to college if you faltered in the late elementary/middle school stage. </p>
<p>Only exception to this was China during the Cultural Revolution…and that was widely considered such a disaster for Chinese educational/research institutions that their elimination of the competitive national college exams because it was “too elitist” was rescinded at the end of the '70s. </p>
<p>Turns out eliminating such “elitist” admission procedures wasn’t a good idea when the result was that some illiterates were admitted to the universities of that period. Then again, by that stage of the Cultural Revolution, all the remaining students were doing were preparing endless political hackery campaigns.</p>
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<p>No. Some are and some aren’t. Even the exclusive private schools aren’t necessarily better academically, nor are their top students necessarily better than top students anywhere else. What they do offer is the expectation that many of their students will apply to “elite” schools, much more personal assistance/hand-holding in the application process, and connections.</p>
<p>One of the crucial differences between a public school (non magnet) and a private school is that at most public schools the default option for college bound students is the community college. At private schools, at least the ones in my area, that isn’t the case and only the very very bottom students consider going the CC route.</p>
<p>Whereas going to a four year college, even in many upper middle class suburban high schools, is considered impressive, at most private schools it’s the default so there tends to be a greater aspiration among private school students to apply to the most selective schools.</p>
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<p>Data: You can’t invent numbers to make the math work.</p>
<p>I’ll never forget a remark made by an Ivy league college representative at a “meet & greet” in our town. She spoke with one REALLY REALLY outstanding kid we knew and was very positive, but she told his mother something like, “If he had attended a private school I could almost guarantee his acceptance.” She sounded really regretful, like the kid had missed the boat by attending our (outstanding) public HS.</p>
<p>It made me really angry, but in the end the kid did attend one of the HYPS schools.</p>
<p>I know that’s just one anecdote, but there is (or was) something out there about the private school mystique.</p>
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Maybe, but here in the hinterlands, where there is no secular alternative, Catholic school is elite and that’s where the local HYP students come from, be they Protestant, Jewish, Wiccan or whatever. And they’re outrageously expensive and most middle-income Catholics can’t afford them so they’re Catholic in name only, but that’s another rant for another day.</p>
<p>Data10 is right. The following statement, I think, makes the point very succinctly:
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<p>While it’s debatable (maybe) whether private schools on average are “better” than public schools, there’s no question that many private schools are selective, and thus they already have larger concentrations of students who are more likely to have the qualifications to get into selective colleges.</p>
<p>It would be interesting to see a breakdown between students coming from academically selective programs (including those from selective private schools and public magnets and similar programs) vs. those who don’t. I’ll bet it would be quite eye-opening.</p>