@TheBigChef “If you check all the boxes, you get into schools like BC and Holy Cross”. Well, you know very little about the caliber, culture and mission of colleges like Holy Cross and BC.
- There are about 4M kids born each year in the US. Even 0.1% is 4K.
- Rich people don't just exist in the US.
Though you do have the point that it’s going to be the very top of the totem pole that has 5% of their class as developmental admits and the percentage isn’t spread evenly over the Ivies/equivalents. If a 7 figure donation can get your kid in to HYPS, Cornell almost certainly isn’t filling 5% of it’s (fairly large) entering class with developmental admits.
“However, even the top 0.1% aren’t generally rich enough to donate $5 million because they are “only” making about $4 million a year”
If you make $4M a year, you generally should be able to donate $5M. Otherwise, you are making the argument that someone who makes $240K generally shouldn’t be able to pay $300K for college.
“But I definitely overestimated the number of kids in the 1%, since the families of the 1% generally have far fewer kids per family than average”
You state this as fact but I’m fairly certain you’re not right. What do you believe the average number of kids per family is these days?
Finally, what is legal may not be moral and may still be corruption. For instance, if it is legal for a company to pay an officeholder and then as a favor, that officeholder issues an executive order to favor that company, that may be perfectly legal, but it would still be corruption.
Dale & Kreuger’s study concludes that indeed an elite college DOES help poor students move up in income, but not wealthier ones. Obviously, not very many a year as few low income kids go to elite colleges overall. For minorities, first gens and low income kids, elite schools do help them move up.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/upshot/elite-colleges-actual-value.html
and a bigger “but”
So to move to the upper middle class, elite schools don’t matter as much, just going to a good college like a CUNY or CSU does.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/does-it-matter-where-you-go-college/577816/
@MmeZeeZee , just found this about one of the coaches (Rudy Meredith at Yale). Looks like the recommended sentence will be 33-41 months plus return of all the money he accepted in bribes:
https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-rudy-meredith-plea-appearance-20190328-story.html
Sorry it took me so long to respond (and this thread moves quickly)!
Thanks for the link. This is rather interesting:
“Judge Mark L. Wolf accepted the guilty plea from Meredith, who has been cooperating with authorities in Massachusetts for nearly a year, though the judge expressed concerns that prosecutors hadn’t addressed the full extent of his misdeeds.”
Prosecutors did not address the full extent of his misdeeds? If the prosecutors are choosing to charge some families and protect others whose kids got admissions tips from Meredith, that suggests the prosecutors are just as corrupt as Meredith himself.
Exactly who did this coach give a tip to and how many parents made payments – either legitimate “donations” or directly to the coach – and had a child who got an athletic tip? Seems wrong to selectively prosecute some parents and not others.
- About 3.6 million kids graduated HS every year, so let us say that that there are 3,600 in the top 0.1% (though it is likely about 70% of that), which would put 360, at most, in all Ivy+ colleges.
If the top 0.1% could afford donations that would assure their kids entry to an Ivy, do you not think that more than 10% of them would be entering an Ivy+, or that more than 30% of them would be entering the other “elite” colleges? Those are exactly the numbers that you would expect if they were entering with legacy or recruited athlete hooks. About 2% of all graduating HS students are getting into an Ivy+ colleges, and “rich people” hooks provide, on average, about 5 times the acceptance rates, which brings us to the 10% of the top 0.1%. Actually, that would be somewhat less, since that 10% includes the kids from the top 0.01% as well. So we are maybe talking about 9% of the 0.01%-0.1% group.
In any case, we’re still talking about no more than 2% of all students at the Ivy+ colleges being from the top 0.1%. For the reasons I mentioned, the % is likely no more than 80% or less than that, and even among the 0.1%, there are about 1/2 who are making less the $2 million a year, and definitely cannot afford a one time $5 million donation.
- The negative relationship between income and fertility is well known. I don't want to quote here, but look up "Birth rate in the United States by household income". Because contraception and abortion are easier for the affluent, because wealthier men and women have kids later in life, which both reduces the time available to have kids and the fertility (which drops as you get older). I have found data suggesting that the fertility of the top 10th percentile is about 72% that of the average, but I could not find the source of the data.
I feel the study of lower income student outcomes at Ivy League schools is flawed. They can’t place the same cohort at Ivy school a and place them en masse at xyz state.
My belief is the better outcomes are a function of the students themselves. If they attended XYZ State, the same student with this drive, ambition and intellect would soar just as easily.
@MWolf, from info from Harvard’s internal documents, it looks like 9.34% of admits and more than 10% of one class are from developmental/favored lists: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/10/18/day-three-harvard-admissions-trial/
How does that occur? It could be that very low 7 figure donations or even high 6 figures gets you on the list but at that amount is only a tip to push you over if you are close.
More likely, those folks who are big donors (9 figures) have a lot of chits they can use. Besides their own children, they could bless the applications of their extended family or kids of friends as well, which could mean a tip or hook or automatic admit depending on how much weight they put behind it and the strength of the candidate.
“In any case, we’re still talking about no more than 2% of all students at the Ivy+ colleges being from the top 0.1%.”
The NY Times published a study done about how many colleges had more students from the top 1% in family income than from the bottom 60%. It was quite stunning. But for the record, at Yale, 3.7% of the students were from the top .01% and 19% from the top 1%. At Dartmouth, 4.5% of the students came from the top .01% and 21% from the top 1%. Brown is 4.3% from the top .01% and 19% from top 1%. Harvard is 3% from the top .01%.
For a comparison: MIT has 1.5% from the top .01% and only 5.7% from the top 1%.
The median family income at MIT $137,400. The median family income at Dartmouth is $200,400.
(FYI, this study is a few years old and the NY Times article about is from 2017 so it is possible these colleges are trying to do better.)
Perhaps students like Ms Obama, David Hogg and Justice Roberts’ child etc are in included on this list. Not direct donations but useful for development purposes.
Plus major building donation levels and ongoing new commitments paid by assets acquired a generation back are still reaping dividends.
Also top 1 percent is an income driven stat.
Most serious wealth is in trusts and other vehicles. The annual income of the beneficiaries are not 1% but granddaddy’s trust is where all the serious money is held.
The houses, educations and expenses all get paid by the trust. Their income is not top tier.
You’d be surprised by the actual lack of big careers in this group. They go to Deerfield and Harvard and have regular and unspectacular careers. Or they choose an artistic or hobby business path. Vermont furniture making or the clothing shop that’s never that busy in Newport or Cape Cod. It is a nice lifestyle and they can be really nice people. It’s family dependent but more common than you would think.
@PurpleTitan Their average acceptance rate was 42.2%. If these include the 1.5% or so of admits were actually kids who had a 100% acceptance rate for being kids of large donors, that would leave the rest with about a 30% acceptance rate. I would guess that you are right - there are smaller donations that do not assure acceptance but increase the chances beyond that provided by legacy. Also, some of them could have been in the recruited athlete category, who have acceptance rates in the 80% range. On preview - the categories that @privatebanker also sound reasonable.
@observer12 Much of my data is from that NYT article. The percentage that these kids are from the kids of the top 1% and the top 0,1%, added to the achievements of kids at these schools, tells me that the kids who are really benefiting from this are the smarter kids from the top 1%. So while Ivy+ colleges are accepting 20% of the academically top middle class kids, they are probably accepting 60% of the academically top kids from the 1%. Middle class kids who are at the top 5% of their class, but not the top 1%, have something like a 10% chance, while rich kids with those academics have a 40% or 50% chance, etc. Part is, of course, things like legacy, and part is also the fact that rich kids go to smaller high schools, so the top 5% are the top 5 kids, while for middle class kids they are the top 20 kids. The rich kids therefore also have, proportionally, more valedictorians and salutatorians. So the same achievements often look better on a rich kid’s application than on that of a middle class kid.
So it’s not that the rich kids aren’t mostly very smart. It’s just that very smart rich kids have a much higher acceptance rate than very smart middle class kids.
Of course, when we’re talking about the kids of very big donors, whose parents are buying them a slot, you can get some admissions who are as dumb as a bucket of nails. I read some of their tweets on Twitter, and wonder how they finished elementary school, much less got into an Ivy. Of course acceptance rates were higher than so it took less of a donation from daddy to get the family dunce into Yale or Harvard. Luckily for the colleges, these are very few and do not actually affect the level of the student body. Unluckily for the college, these are the ones most likely to wave their degree around in very public settings. Unluckily for the USA, the Ivy degrees of these dunces often allows them to reach positions of influence and power, and convinces some people that these dunces are smart.
I apologize as there were typos in my post and instead of the top .1% I wrote the top .01%. So the percentages of students are those in the top .1%.
I was just responding to your estimate that they were no more than 2% of the students from the top .1% when the percentage was often twice as high.
“So it’s not that the rich kids aren’t mostly very smart. It’s just that very smart rich kids have a much higher acceptance rate than very smart middle class kids.”
I am not making any judgements about “very smart” or not. I am only saying that colleges could put all students in a single pile and admit the very top students and surely they would get some very rich students just like MIT does. It just would not be nearly as many.
Presumably the college sees some institutional need to put a bunch of very rich students’ application in a separate pile and the only reason for that I can imagine is that most wouldn’t be likely to be admitted if they were in the bigger pile of all applicants.
@observer12 Ah, makes sense.
Even for MIT there is an advantage for the wealthy - they are overrepresented there as well.
One of the reasons that MIT can afford not to give preference to legacies and to others is that their finance is almost entirely dependent on research revenue. They are very focused on technology, and even their performing arts focus on connections between performing arts and technology. These research avenues are extremely lucrative - the government, foundations, and corporations pout hundreds of millions or more into this type a research, and there is no place which is better set up to perform much of this research than MIT. MIT’s revenue from research is almost 4 times that of Harvard, for example. It provide almost 40% of MIT’s revenue.
Any university which does not have that level of lucrative research is a lot more dependent of donations. So MIT is able to stay open without the amount of revenue generated by donation. Their research output also gives them power which research at non-tech universities do not have. Places like Harvard get that power by being the place where the rich and powerful get their education, and that requires legacy preference. Universities like Ivies, which are based om a liberal arts curriculum, will rarely produce the type of research that gives them power.
Large public universities tend to be big players in their state, and tend to have extensive engineering and agricultural research, both highly lucrative and sought after by government and corporations. Many of the top ones have no legacy preference. I have no idea why Georgia tech has legacy preference, TBH. Overall I think that public colleges should not have legacy preference, since they are there for the entire state, not just the richer residents. One exception is the way that I think UNC uses it - only for OOS. That’s OK.
https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-morrie-tobin-college-admissions-scandal-20190331-story.html is an article about how the admissions cheating was discovered through the securities investigation.
I am very surprised that Harvard’s fencing coach hasn’t even been suspended awaiting investigation.
Here is my question:
Regardless of whether Brand designated certain fencers as “recruits” because they met some basic criteria even though there were far superior fencers/students he could have recruited, Brand did allow his house to be purchased for hundreds of thousands of dollars beyond its value.
Is that a “gift” for IRS purposes? At what point is he legally obligated to report that income?
Not to mention that Brand’s questionable non-pofit that got formed the same year it received $100,000 donation from the fencing foundation that the Harvard dad had just “donated” a million dollars to. That just “coincidentally” happened the same year his older son was applying. What happened to that money and that non-profit?
It’s really odd for a dad to donate a million dollars to a national fencing foundation that turns around and happens to give the largest donation ever to a different fencing foundation that had just been set up by the Harvard fencing coach when he has kids applying to Harvard who are fencers. How is this getting a pass?
And how is what Brand did any different than what the U. Penn basketball coach did? In both cases, the students being recruited after the father “gifted” them some money were athletes – just not ones who were likely to be recruited if they were middle class. Seems like selective prosecution because if the U. Penn coach wasn’t allowed to take money, why is the Harvard coach? Should the U Penn coach have just bluffed it out and said the kid plays basketball and so what if I took a gift? Is that what we are coming to?
I thought everyone agreed that this would have been okay if the dad had just given all that money to the fencing team’s account, but once a coach benefits personally, it is wrong no matter whether the student is a decent athlete or not. Seems like there is a double standard here. Brand benefitted personally. Just like the U Penn basketball coach did. But one had to plead guilty and the other one hasn’t even been put on suspension by Harvard.
At very least, the Harvard fencing coach is guilty of violating Harvard’s conflict of interest policy. I’m also surprised he hasn’t been suspended during the investigation.
“First, and as reported by Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Ed, Harvard will assess whether Brand violated the school’s conflict-of-interest policy. The policy requires that employees “avoid situations or activities that could interfere with their unencumbered exercise of judgment in the best interests of Harvard University.” It further requires that employees report any possible conflicts. A failure to report can constitute grounds for disciplinary action or termination.”
Source: https://www.si.com/more-sports/2019/04/05/harvard-fencing-coach-peter-brand-house-investigation
There was some truly over the top statement by a Harvard administrator about making sure employees were better informed about conflicts of interest! Talk about giving Brand a pass. As if maybe Brand didn’t know that having someone whose kid was applying to Harvard as a fencer purchasing his home for 80% over the fair market price – which just happened to be what he needed to buy his new home – was a conflict of interest or could ever be perceived as wrong.
I’m sure the U Penn basketball coach wishes that the U Penn administration had defended him and said “we have to improve our conflict of interest policies so employees understand them better” as if there is any circumstance where this could be okay.
Giving Brand the benefit of the doubt is especially questionable if he and his wife formed a non-profit that inexplicably received a $100,000 donation right after the dad donated one million dollars to a fencing foundation. That was when his first son was applying. And we are also supposed to think that if it happens right after the kid gets in, that is different than it happening right before. Say what? Especially when the recruit designation happens earlier in the process.
If a drug company bought a house for an inflated price from a research scientist, that research scientist would be immediately fired. No question. Harvard would not say it needed to make sure employees understood “conflicts of interest” policies better.
Fencing is the illegal act of paying for and reselling stolen property. Ironic.
Can you imagine if a research scientist had his house purchased for 80% over market value by a drug company CEO and Harvard said it was okay because the drug being researched by this scientist actually was pretty good so no harm, no foul? It wasn’t a bribe, the CEO just liked him a lot and wanted to do a favor for him? There is no way that the ONLY thing that would matter is whether the new drug being researched was mildly effective or was just a piece of candy, where the scientist would get a pass if the drug was mildly effective.
@observer12 I wonder if it is selective prosecution or simply the fact that they were unable to get enough evidence to prosecute all? I’ve missed a bunch of posts in this thread but I think it’s common knowledge by now that a number of incidents have slipped through the net for lack of prosecutable evidence like the wiretaps?