@Sam-I-Am : No…many schools have programs, if not more specialized ones than it that aim to target first gens. and minorities. the % of URMs is very similar to other elites (not so much ORMs) and the SES diversity is still lower than many other places outside of the Ivy Plus, so while I applaud them for taking financial stress away from its matriculates the efforts you mention hardly make it a leader in any metric of diversity. It merely does okay and gets a “thank you for trying” like all of the others.
@Otemachi : I question the utility of that metric. The out of college incomes income wise are similar to say…other southern elites and this does not address the SES diversity issue. If you start off with little SES diversity to begin with, of course many students will eventually land in cushy spots. Again, high median income of the parents will correlate with monetary outcomes because this is often related not only to academic performance at any given point in time but connectivity/networking. The more SES elite students are, the more things that tend to open up. Of course now-a-days most millenials will drop down vs. the parents, but if you start off with an edge, it often lasts relative to others with less of an edge. Without putting such data within that context, we can’t tell why this is the case. Yale has a much lower mid-career income than H, I don’t think that makes it particularly worse. In fact some data suggested that it is because Yale grads. are more evenly distributed across job sectors, meaning some choose to go into lower paying more service or civic oriented careers than H and even some similar schools. I have witnessed numerous anecdotal evidence that it seems wealthier students usually have more “access” even if the academic performance isn’t all that great. I wish I had data (and can perhaps find some), but I think SES status of the family a student comes from can propagate and affect such data in interesting ways.
It isn’t come on because I noticed a lot of departments there also gave top awards to seniors exclusively based on the highest GPA…perhaps and hopefully there will not be any or many 4.0s. VU also, like many schools grants Latin honors only based upon GPA tiering as opposed to only doing departmental Latin Honors. How am I supposed to know. If 4 people get 4.0, then things like favoratism could come into play and they ultimately choose to limit the medals to the few people that have 4.0s if a prize is GPA based. Do not underestimate the shallowness of college honors in some arenas.