Why do they need financial diversity at the cost of academic excellence. The world did not get to where we are with financial diversity as cornerstone. My 2 c
Education should be about more than further entrenching privilege. And it is not at the expense of academic excellence. Do you not think there is both potential and actual excellence among the less socioeconomically privileged?
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Yes merit comes in all forms. I believe in it.
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Not sure financial diversity is part of D’s mission:
“Dartmouth College educates the most promising students and prepares them for a lifetime of learning and of responsible leadership, through a faculty dedicated to teaching and the creation of knowledge.”
That doesn’t mean that they wont recruit students from “all backgrounds, regardless of their financial means”, but that is different than saying obtaining financial diversity is a priority.
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Is that a stated goal of all or some of the schools?
I didn’t know that was actually a consideration on admissions
Yes, top colleges have explicitely stated they want more socio economic diversity and modified their FA formulas for that.
However there’s an " inside joke" that goes, there never were “complaints due to too few FGLI admitted students” leading to a remaking of the class, aka, as you would have if some legacy/donors kids/athletes were “missing”. 
Joke not data!
In the pre-test-optional Chetty data, there were almost as many Dartmouth students from households in the top 1% (23%) as there were from the bottom 80% (27%).
Both Yale and Dartmouth have made it crystal clear in their PR push around this decision that it is a major priority to enroll more poor students.
Do they have a category for people that can actually pay tuition?
Regarding financial diversity: many of the Black folks who get admitted to the most selective universities are the children of financially successful recent African immigrants, as opposed to the descendants of slaves or other Black victims of historical racism in the U.S.
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Regarding financial diversity: many of the Black folks who get admitted to the most selective universities are the children of financially successful recent African immigrants, as opposed to the descendants of slaves or other Black victims of historical racism in the U.S.
You could make a similar statement about higher income kids from any race being more likely to be attend the college than lower income kids, but freshmen surveys consistently suggest a larger portion of URM students are lower income than other races, and a smaller portion of URMs are higher income than other races. Some example numbers from the Princeton survey are below. It looks like roughly half of Black kids have below median income, and roughly 10% have top 5-8% HH income. That’s not a bad financial distribution. Legacies are different story.
More relevant to the thread, the freshmen survey also implies that test optional admits were far more likely to be lower income than test submitters.
Princeton Freshmen Survey: Class of 2027
- Black – 45% have low enough income for full ride*, 10% have too high income for FA
- International – 35% low enough income for full ride*, 28% have too high income for FA
- Asian – 30% have low enough income for full ride*, 27% have too high income for FA
- White – 24% have low enough income for full ride*, 38% have too high income for FA
- Athlete – 22% have low enough income for full ride*, 39% have too high income for FA
- Legacy – 5% have low enough income for full ride*, 55% have too high income for FA
**Threshold for full ride seems to be below ~median US household income; No FA threshold is likely top 5% to top 8% HH income, depending on family + financial situation
Princeton Freshmen Survey – 30% have too high income for FA (top 30% income is roughly >$250k)
Princeton Class Profile --34% have too high income for FA
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Define “academic excellence”.
The world never advanced when a small number of people set up a system to keep all the resources in the hands of a small number of families. Defining academic excellence in a way that provides advantages to the wealthy is one of those ways.
In fact that reason that the USA managed to do so well is that there were many opportunities for low income people, including in business. When the definitions of "excellence are determined by family income you have a small number of families slowly (or not so slowly) collecting most of the power and resources.
Furthermore, “academic excellence” has more weight for the wealthy. Another, more recent, study by Chetty has demonstrated that, for the same SAT scores, the wealthiest people have a much much higher chance of admission to “elite” colleges.
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Can you quantify this? What percent of the wealthy are using accommodations and what percent of these get into the T10s
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There was also this article from around the varsity blues scandal, but notice the word eligible. It does not say that 1/3rd of students from that district receive extra time on the College Board. It just says that they are eligible, and I really doubt the CB actually grants extended time to anywhere near that many students in a single wealthy city. I bet the number is much lower. Nevertheless, even if these students are not receiving extra time on the ACT and the SAT, they may be receiving it on ordinary tests and assignments in their regular classrooms, which could help explain some grade inflation in some schools. At the same time, I am really uncomfortable making assumptions (as implied by those articles) that families are gaming the system. Maybe most of the accommodations are legitimate and the real travesty is that fewer middle-class and low income students have access to the expensive diagnostic testing and counseling that could help identify their needs. So it becomes a problem of access to neuropsychological testing not misuse.
The Wall Street Journal reports that, across the country, students in affluent communities are far more likely than those in lower-income districts to obtain special allowances giving them extra time for test-taking, including for the crucial SAT and ACT exams used for college admissions.
The most egregious example cited in the Journal story, which looked at data from 9,000 US schools? Newton North High School, where an eye-popping one of every three students is eligible for extra test time.
I don’t have a gift link to the Wall Street Journal. The article is here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/many-more-students-especially-the-affluent-get-extra-time-to-take-the-sat-11558450347?shareToken=st83589dbb02924786a0c54d46f56d5af6
I don’t think it is unusual at all for one-third of students at affluent schools to get SAT accommodations. Parents can pay for the testing and the diagnosis write-up can be sent to the College Board.
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I wonder what percentage of these test takers with accommodations make it to the T10 or T20?
Maybe not quite 1/3 but I am always surprised at how many friends of my kids have extra time. A lot of them “because they are anxious”
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A simple solution, especially now that the SAT is online/adaptive, would be to give as much time as needed to all test takers.
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24% of the students in a very affluent public high school near me received accommodations. 4 times the national average according to our local news outlet that covered the story.
As far as I know, there weren’t reports on where that 24% landed for college.
I just looked up the stats at my D’s university. 7% have disability accommodations of some kind but only 1/2 of the 7% have testing accommodations.
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Anecdotally, the number of kids in wealthy schools who receive testing accommodations has gone up even further since the spate of reporting on the issue in 2018.
If we assume it is all medically justified and 40% of the kids in a CT suburb with a median household income of $248,000 receive an accommodation, then there is no other practical or fair solution than extended time for everyone. The fact that rich kids have 30-40x the access to specialized quality health care than poor kids isn’t a bug in our healthcare system; it is its organizing principle.
It would have been nice if during their PR push Dartmouth and Yale could have called attention to the issue.
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