The Influence of Affluence: Socioeconomic status at elite schools

Prep School Admissions
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^The preference for full pay versus financial aid must be an order of magnitude at least (more than 10 times) in order to arrive at ratios like 70/30 to 60/40. I’d guess that no family earning less than $250,000 can afford to be full pay, at least on average. That’s maybe 5% at most of American families. Wealthy people are smarter on average (but many of the kids of the wealthy will be significantly less intelligent than their parents, due to regression to the mean), but not by too much, based on all the research between SES and intelligence. Holding all the other attributes desirable to schools constant, such as leadership skills, “emotional intelligence,” “grit,” etc - and importantly there is no reason to assume that these other attributes are negatively correlated with intelligence - you’d get ratios more like 80/20 to 90/10 the other way (FA to FP) without extreme FP preferences. This analysis is roughly consistent with what another poster wrote somewhere on here about what was told to the poster at NMH - that the school had “six times” as many FA kids that they wanted to admit than they could.

I always scratch my head when I read on here that the top schools can “fill their classes with FP 99% kids” - or its corollary, “each of the Ivies can fill its class with 4.0 GPA 1600 SAT kids.” LOL. There are probably around 600 kids in the entire US who score a 99% SSAT (I guess you can add a few for the 99% ISEE, although there will be some overlap of course and double counting of the same kids). How many of those want to go to boarding school? Maybe 200? Maybe 300? The true number is probably a LOT lower, given how low the correlated boarding school stats (SAT scores, NMSF, achievement test scores) are as compared with day schools. Now, given the distribution of intelligence, how many of those 200-300 (at the very most) could possibly be from $250K+ families? Maybe 50-100, and that’s being extremely generous. Not even a small school like Groton could fill its class with them.

You could do the same exercise with colleges and the SAT. The SAT is a relatively easy test compared to what it was, say, 30 years ago, but nevertheless I think there are only approximately 650 perfect scores each year. How many of those scores also have 4.0 GPAs? Not even Dartmouth could fill its class if it wanted to.

I actually think what @someone3301 wrote makes a lot of sense, although he or she misses a few important things. (For instance, boarding schools do need to extend financial aid to a select and small group of very intelligent kids as part of their attempt to maintain the facade that they are “elite” centers of learning - there are just not enough “elite” smart, wealthy kids. The rest of the aid can be allocated to fill other needs, like athletics, virtue signalling by means of preferred and visible groups, etc.)

I admit I am an “intelligence snob” about a lot of this, and understand that many people will argue that there is not that much difference between a 84% standardized score and a 97% (or 99.8%). Well, my experience has been very different (from working with “edge smart” kids through certain gifted programs). There is a world of difference between kids separated by two standard deviations in ability (roughly the difference between 99.8 and 84), and even for those separated by only one standard deviation (roughly the difference between 97 and 99+). It’s very noticeable.

Bottom line, if you want to get those “edge smart” kids, you need a financial aid budget. You’re just not going to find many in the FP group (because the FP group is small, and smarts are distributed a little more “fairly” than income and wealth - nature’s gift to us as a society!). The dirty secret is that not many of the boarding schools are particularly interested in “edge smart” kids, probably because it would be bad business in light of their lesser ability FP cohorts. There are a very few exceptions, and I think everyone can guess which schools “scoop up” the truly extraordinary kids out there.

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My recollection of a discussion with an AO was that it’s the international applicants who can bring both the scores and money in droves.

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@SatchelSF I know you are extremely knowledgeable about the profoundly gifted. But I’m not sure your assumption that they are more desirable as school applicants is necessarily correct. Elite schools want to show that they are selective and academically rigorous, but they also want to build a community. There are other qualities they look for, too. The same is true in business, by the way. I used to be a school snob when it came to hiring and used to pick the smartest candidates I could find. Now I hire for hunger, attitude, persistence, and the ability to work well with (and bring out the best in) others. Those are much better predictors of success in most settings than academic pedigree and IQ, IMHO.

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@CaliMex - I do hear what you are saying about “other qualities,” but think about it a little more. When we are talking about really selective places like the very top boarding schools (acceptance rates less than 15%, say, and that’s after some self-selection in the applicant pool already) or the very top colleges (single digit acceptance rates), they have great freedom to choose among applicants. What reason is there to presume that things like “hunger, attitude, persistence, ability to work well with others”, and I could add others in here like “grit” or “emotional intelligence,” etc. are NEGATIVELY correlated with intelligence? Because that is effectively what you are arguing. Even with zero correlation, that would mean that on balance, the higher IQ (being at least one attribute that schools or employers seek) would tip the balance. (By the way, the research is pretty consistent that the IQ and other aptitude tests are biased AGAINST the highly intelligent cohorts, as they consistently overpredict the performance of lower scoring groups when matched for equal scores. The implication here is that the other qualities that IQ and aptitude tests are not measuring directly, but which are desirable from an outcome point of view, are POSITIVELY correlated with intelligence/aptitude.)

I do hear you about hiring, though! But I fear you may have reached the wrong conclusions :slight_smile: There are plenty of dummies even at the Ivy League (as I know you know), and grades and scores are no longer reliable indicators as grading and testing have become so compressed. I know I am in the minority, but I actually think that on measures of how well kids think and perform, the current “elite” groups are not as capable as those of 30 years ago, but that’s a different discussion…

You sound like a good friend of mine who was a top executive at one of the big Bay Area biotechs, and he would always tell me how unimpressive their hires were, and they were all “top” students from places like Stanford and MIT, etc. His primary complaint was always the same: they all had top scores and grades, but just couldn’t “think” and reason. I just laughed and said they don’t make them like they used to, lol. More accurately, they don’t GRADE and ADMIT them like they used to…

Thirty years ago there were 5-8 perfect scores on the SAT per year. Today there are more than 600. I don’t know what the average GPA was twenty years ago in high school, but I’m sure it was nowhere near the average today (over half of all high school seniors in the entire US had cumulative GPA higher than A-). Do you think that our high schoolers and college students are suddenly (just one generation later) that much smarter? Me neither :slight_smile:

Also, @CaliMex, the fact that you abandoned your former “school snob” status makes my point! These admissions directors don’t know what they are doing, or else their “holistic” admissions criteria would result in graduates that would turn out to be great hires! If they had done their job correctly, you could still be a school snob, having left the “gating” aspect of the hiring screen to the school admissions committee.

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If I recall correctly, your kid is off-the-charts smart, @SatchelSF. Do you believe all the FA candidates admitted to the schools he applied to were even smarter and had even higher scores? Because if that’s the case, I might as well tell my girl not to bother with applications :wink:

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@CaliMex - I’ll PM you my thoughts.

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There are too many students admitted to top schools: boarding, college etc for reasons other than academic achievement and capacity. Those damn holistic “Buckets” Just as an aside: there is a fair amount of data that shows that at the very highest IQ measurements that academic achievement does not always follow. Meaning that the very high scoring students on standardized tests and other tests are not necessarily the best students. Look at John Irving or Albert Einstein. Ironically my peeve with PEA is that at nearly every one of the PEA assemblies with guest speakers they always address the kids as the “best and the brightest” and the “cream of the crop” I think it is a terrible thing to say over and over to these kids. Further, I think the tables have turned and the top schools need the money the least. PEA doesnt need a development admit any more than Harvard does. I believe the merely wealthy kids need to be very highly qualified.

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@SatchelSF, Would it be possible that the grade inflation is at least partially due to current students working so much harder, if not smarter, than we did in our high school? Because to me, they really seem to. I know I didn’t study a fraction of what current college bound high schoolers do.

And would it be possible that your friend just forgot how our generation were when we just graduated college decades ago, and have unreasonable expectation from the new recruits?

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“Would it be possible that the grade inflation is at least partially due to current students working so much harder, if not smarter, than we did in our high school?”

Bingo! Add that to the fact that the standardized tests are so much “easier” for the top students than 20 years ago - in the sense that they make no real distinctions among kids in, say, the top 1% - and you have a recipe for an “arms race” in which kids are desperate to distinguish themselves.

About my friend, no, I think he’s right. Something has changed that is causing people to think and reason less. Maybe it’s the ability to google any answer :slight_smile:

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IQ scores continue to rise… Torrance scores, which measure creativity (divergent and convergent thinking) have been declining since 1990.

http://www.newsweek.com/creativity-crisis-74665

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So the current education system makes student work much harder than we did and yet be less qualified for jobs at the end? What can we do about it? I doubt making the standardized tests harder will solve the problem.

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My daughter took a class this summer in which the professor asked the students to give up mass media for a week and write about the experience. She (my D) realized from this that her media consumption was killing her creative outflow (which had been copious and wonderful). I don’t doubt that this is a factor for others.

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I agree @twinsmama - “boredom breeds creativity”… and I think drive, dedication, self-awareness, etc.

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Read the article in the WSJ today about the kid from Brown who just played Magnus Carlsen (chess). Fascinating, and over the top: jkind of illustrative of the idea that there is not much learning for learning sake anymore. Education has become a race for world domination LOL --i.e money

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“My recollection of a discussion with an AO was that it’s the international applicants who can bring both the scores and money in droves.”

I suspect that the international applicants can bring the money, but can they really bring the scores? It’s unfortunate that none of the testing companies provides any fine-grained demographic data anymore, but as far as I can tell, the estimated 600 99% SSAT scorers per year, and the roughly 600-650 (in recent years) perfect SAT scorers would include all foreign test takers as well. If they didn’t, that would raise serious concerns about the percentile rank validity, no?

I can imagine many perfect international scores on the quantitative portions of the tests, as the quantitative tests in the United States in general are extremely easy for “quantitative” kids (that’s true of SAT, ACT, ISEE, SAT II, AP - really any test you look at) for many reasons having to do with our reluctance to accept group and gender testing differences in our society.

But it’s hard to imagine that too many foreign students are scoring at the highest levels in English language-based measures. Sure, there must be some, but presumably they would be subsumed within the 600-650 top scorers in SSAT or SAT identified above.

Moreover, as it appears that the numbers of foreign students at top boarding schools and colleges seem to be limited, that would imply that if there were truly many international FP top scorers (on both quantitative and verbal measures), then there are coordinately even FEWER available domestic top-scoring students, whether FP or FA.

I think the AO is just blowing smoke. If you look at SAT scores, achievement test data provided, number of NMSF, etc. - in other words, if you just look at the very limited data that the schools are willing to provide - it’s pretty clear that apart from one or two schools, there could not be many top scorers at any of the boarding schools, period. Certainly not enough to “fill the class” with 99% FP candidates, which is what we often hear. Not even close.

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While tests like the SAT are easier today, the opposite is true for competitions like the AMC selection process for the US IMO team. The AMC tests of 30 years are shockingly easy compared to today. So among the most talented kids, competition is ferocious.

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It seems that one thing is perfectly clear. As a consumer of goods and services it is an advantage to be able to pay for what you desire to consume.

Furthermore, as a seller of goods and services, when confronted with candidate consumers of equal merit (all things considered, including fit, gender, geographic representation, etc), the seller will prefer a consumer who can afford to pay the bill.

One hundred percent of the time, without exception.

Unless, of course, the seller is a bakruptcy attorney!

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^ Absolutely right about the AMC series. The lever of talent out there is amazing (my child has been heavily involved in AMC since fifth grade and it’s certainly humbling to contemplate that there are fifth and sixth graders who have qualified for USAMO) .

But that’s all just part of the “arms race” to distinguish oneself that I mentioned upthread because it’s so easy to get great grades and SAT scores. In fact, having interacted with many of these kids, I’d say that qualifying for AIME by end of 8th grade is the minimum expected now by talented math competitors, which is amazing if you look at today’s AMC12 versus the AJHSME of a generation ago. Also, a number of colleges now ask for AMC12 and AIME scores, including I think Yale and certainly MIT (of course only if the applicant has them).

AMC is terrific because it hasn’t succumbed to outside pressure to water down the standards. AMS implicitly recognizes that the huge influx of extremely capable Asian kids into the US means that the tests have to be hard in order to allow differentiation at the top. But even the AMS had to cave a little to the desire for additional credentials. That’s why they started USAJMO a few years ago for the 10th grade and under group.

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@QuietMan yes but what you are saying is pure capitalism which no longer exists in any market. All of these schools are taking lesser qualified candidates to fulfill social engineering goals/optics and likewise, many are taking lesser qualified students that can foot the bills i.e wealthy international students. (Many of the full pay students are now asian.) I think the definition of wealthy has changed too.

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“Lesser-qualified candidates” for “social engineering” and “optics”?

The SLIGHTLY “lesser qualified” candidates I’ve heard about are typically legacies, siblings, and development cases/big donors…