Interesting opinion article on admissions policy

interesteddad
Tue, 01 Feb 2005 01:20:35 +0000

Swarthmore looks like a rich person’s school to me.




If you took 50 liberal arts colleges and removed all pro-active diversity efforts on the part of the admissions office, the graph of Mini’s preppie index would look pretty much like the graph of median SAT scores. The highest scoring colleges would be the “richest”; the lower scoring colleges would be the “poorest”. It’s inevitable with the high correlation between wealth and test scores.

So, the proper use of Mini’s list, IMO, is with a little common sense. Compare two schools with identical SAT scores, and differences in Mini’s index probably do provide an accurate indicator of a pro-active admissions philosophy.

I would also caution that there are some regional factors at play. I think it is very difficult to directly compare West Coast and East Coast schools. The ethnic make-up of the regional populations are very, very different – as is the prevalence of “private school” education. For example, parochial schools are very prevalent in the northeast US, but not necessarily indicative of “rich” kids. Conversely, California is “magnet-school” crazy – public schools that may not necessarily correlate with “low-income”.

Also, the percentage of kids even remotely interested in private colleges in California or the South is very, very low. I think that skews the data in many ways.