@lookingforward I’m actually going to be a freshman in college in about a month, so I’m not really asking as a way to find a college or anything; I was just curious what everyone else would think.
I’ll be the first to admit that there’s a lot of things about college admissions that I don’t know or understand – in fact, that’s why I made this post – and my intent wasn’t to “point fingers” so to speak, although maybe I did. But what I’m asking about isn’t what colleges will tell you about how things work, I’m asking about what (if anything) colleges aren’t advertising about themselves. I don’t think they have some kind of conspiracy going on, but I don’t think they’re all 100% transparent either.
To clarify a little, my intended question wasn’t necessarily to restart the whole financial-aid class wars debate (I don’t think that’s productive), but to ask whether colleges’ efforts to admit more lower-income (and as a previous poster pointed out, sometimes also middle-income) students has resulted in a measurable decrease in the percentage of wealthy students at top schools. In other words, are colleges actually becoming less wealthy, or just acting like they are as a public relations tactic?
I think @Postmodern says it best – it does feel like a paradox because every argument seems reasonable at face value, and yet not all of them can be true at once. I’m hope there’s a long German word for that feeling because I sure feel it a lot! 