<p>Vell28, are you naive enough to think Vassar has no idea and does not care which applications are the ones submitted by the sons and daughters of the top 0.1? If Bill Gates’ children apply to Vassar someday, don’t you think the admissions officers would drool over their applications? </p>
<p>Of course they would. Who could blame them? Even though Vassar is need-blind, everyone would excuse such behavior. </p>
<p>But at what point does such behavior become inexcusable? I maintain that Vassar crossed the line when they admitted a significantly larger percentage of wealthy students at a time when the administration warned that admission of traditional students would drop significantly to make room for admission of low-income students.</p>
<p>You should take a statistics course while you are in college. It helps in the interpretation of data. </p>
<p>Vassar enrolled more than 25 more wealthy students into the class of 2017 than they had enrolled, on average, into each of the previous four classes. My guess is that at least 35 spots (a conservative estimate) were taken by wealthy applicants to the class of 2017 that would have been given to middle class applicants who needed partial financial aid if Vassar had kept the relative proportions of wealthy students and middle class students constant while admitting more low-income students. At a minimum, I estimate that nearly 7% of the 533 spots in the freshman class that were not reserved for low-income students went to wealthy students that should have gone to middle class students on financial aid, assuming Vassar wanted to keep proportions constant. This is statistically significant. This kind of difference does not usually happen by chance alone. (I am using data favorable to Vassar and assuming only a 4% drop, not the 10% drop Vassar reports, in financial aid recipients in the freshman class.)</p>
<p>When the president of Vassar decided to become the public face of programs to admit low-income students and started trying to shame other college presidents into following her lead (see NYT article from July 2013), she should have first made sure her own admissions system was beyond reproach. </p>
<p>Do you have evidence, Vell28, that the number of middle class admits who turned down Vassar’s offers of admission to accept merit scholarships elsewhere was larger this year than in the previous years? You spoke to a few admitted prospective students in April. Meh.</p>
<p>How did it happen that so many spots were given to wealthy applicants that one would have thought would have gone to middle class applicants at a school that professes to value economic diversity and claims to be need-blind? I don’t know. Maybe Vassar increased the number of recruited athletes whose parents could afford to pay for years of expensive coaching and specialized summer sports camps. Maybe the Vassar admissions officers accepted more students from America’s wealthiest zip codes. Maybe Vassar favored students from certain high schools this year that in the past tended to send students who did not request financial aid. It is often not difficult to distinguish the applications written by students from families with money from the others without viewing financial aid applications.</p>
<p>If it was not Vassar’s intention to increase admission of wealthy students, the admissions committee could have used the waiting list to correct this problem. After all, the school claims to be very sensitive to the need for economic diversity.</p>
<p>Vell28, I never wrote an anti-QB comment or a comment against admitting veterans. I never said anything that merited your scorn. My gripe is that admission of middle class students got cut, not only to admit more low-income students, but to admit more wealthy students, too. </p>
<p>I do not remember the average SAT scores for Vassar’s class of 2016, but the average SAT score for the class of 2017 seems low. Vassar could have easily admitted a class composed of students with higher SAT scores. Thousands of highly qualified students with greats statistics, college essays, and an impressive list of extra-curricular activities are rejected from Ivies, Ivy equivalents, and top LACs every year because of lack of space. I attribute the somewhat lower SAT scores for the current freshman class at Vassar, at least in part, to the admission of 20% QB students. I accept that many (but not all) QB students have lower SAT scores, because SAT scores correlate with parental wealth.</p>
<p>Vell28, I take offense at your comment that “people who become finalists for QB are usually students any college would want, regardless of income. So, yeah.” REGARDLESS OF INCOME??? Your comment and its smug tone with the “So, yeah” ending is a slap in the face to the many middle class students with better SAT scores and high GPAs, often earned at more competitive high schools, who did not have any hooks in the college application process but were not admitted in order to make room for QB students (as well as for more wealthy students). They did nothing to deserve your contempt. </p>
<p>While QB students have the right to claim they deserve special consideration because of the disadvantages they have faced in life, they do not have the right to claim that most of them would have been admitted even without consideration given to their low-income status. Admission standards and the whole application process are different for them. Even Vassar’s president says so.</p>