The ‘Missing Middle’ at Ivy-Plus Colleges

Applying to College
141

Here is the thing - these colleges only provide increased chances for low income students because they are the schools for the rich and powerful. Once the rich and powerful no longer see these colleges as the places where their kids are validated in their membership in the ruling elite, the cache of attending these schools will drop, and the benefit that attending these schools will provide to poor students will disappear.

Basically, if a Harvard degree doesn’t indicate that you are part of the ruling class, it also no longer indicates that the rare poor kid attending Harvard also should belong to the ruling class.

One the majority of the students at an elite private college are no longer from the top 20%, the top 5% will stop attending the college, and the very wealthy donors will stop donating, and those corporations which are run by the ruling elite will no longer hire graduates from these college at high rates. There will no longer be any great benefit for poor students to attend such a college. It will be something of a Pyrrhic victory.

Wanting to “bring down” the Ivy+ colleges as symbols of the wealth inequality is one thing. If those are your politic, then doing things like forcing them to accept many more lower income students makes sense.

However, wanting to flatten the income distribution of these colleges in the hope that these colleges will provide the same benefits to a large number of poor kids that it does today to rich kids indicates a alack of understanding as to the real reasons behind the power and reputations of the Ivy+ and other “elite” private colleges.

PS. The same research shows that most well known public flagships also have a highly skewed income distribution. At Wisconsin, 40% of the students come from the top 20% by income, at OSU it’s 46%, at UIUC and UMN it’s 50%, at Purdue and Berkeley it’s 54%, at U Alabama it’s 56%, at U Michigan it’s 66%, and at U Virginia it’s 67%. Those last two are as bad as any “elite” private college.

142

The report from the first post suggests that nearly all highly selective colleges have a skewed income distribution. All private colleges I am aware of that are actually highly selective (some of the ones called “highly selective” in the report admit the majority of applicants) show >50% of students have parents in the top 20% income category. The report mentions the following percentages of top 20% income by college designation group.

Portion of Students Who Come From Top Quintile Income Families
“Ivy-Plus” Colleges – 68% (all are >50%)
“Other Elite” Colleges – 63% (all except UCLA are >50%)
“Highly Selective Private” – 57% (all that are actually highly selective are >50%)
“Highly Selective Public” – 48% (lowest is UCSD at 40%)

The report suggests one of the reasons for the skewed SES distribution of matriculating students is the skewed SES distribution of high scoring students. The portion of top 20% by SAT/ACT score as listed in the report is below. It suggests that if the vast majority of students at a college have >1300+ SAT, then it’s likely that the majority of students at the college are from top quintile income, which appears to be the case at typical colleges with the listed score range.

Portion of Students Who Come From Top Quintile Income Families*
1500-1600 SAT – 68% from top quintile
1400-1490 SAT – 59% from top quintile
1300-1390 SAT – 53% from top quintile
*I am excluding students with imputed scores

However, test scores are far from the only factor. Highly selective test optional colleges don’t appear to do much better than test required ones. For example, the NESCAC colleges have a median of 73% from top quintile income. Bates has a good portion of students who are admitted test optional, yet still had 76% of students from top quintile income, which is higher than the 73% NESCAC median. Their need aware policies with a ~$75k cost likely contributes, as does their application pool, being a private college, being a small LAC in Maine that is >100 miles away from any large cities, admitting ~70% of the matriculating class through ED, favoring legacies and athletes with ~34% of students being varsity athletes, etc.

143

Regarding endowment, , cut and pasting a prior post I made some time ago:

"My understanding is a lot of endowment income typically goes to financial aid, to lower student tuition costs.
State-supported institutions receive state funding, obviously, and already provide lower tuition in the first place, hence don’t need endowment for this function.

For example, Cornell is actually divided into The “Endowed Division” and the “Statutory Division”. The “statutory division” colleges receive funding from New York State. All its in-state students enrolled in the statutory colleges receive reduced tuition regardless of demonstrated need.

from a June 2008 article:

“The yearly check from Albany functions as a de facto endowment for the statutory colleges, funding professor salaries, student services, and research initiatives. Last year, Cornell received $175 MM in state support. That’s the functional equivalent of a $3.5 billion endowment.”

$3.5 billion divided by 20,000 students is additional $175,000 endowment equivalent per capita.

I’m sure these numbers have gone down since then, since state education funding is always under pressure.
Still “quasi-endowments” of this type should not be ignored, lest ye mislead.

“Thus true inter-institutional endowment comparisons which do not detail quasi-endowments represented by state funding initiatives as well as external research funding grossly misstate the comparability between institutions which may, or may not, be inherently non-comparable.”
List of colleges and universities in the United States by endowment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia "

144

Today 1/2 of the contract colleges undergrads are NYS residents, hence getting reduced tuition. When I attended, there were many “middle class” students attending the contract colleges.

But “middle class” needs to be viewed in context. A house in a good school district in the New York NYC suburbs costs at least 2.5 times what it costs in an equivalent suburb of a certain midwest city. I know, because I moved from the latter to the former. (Except my actual differential was more than this. For a “worse” house).To view wages without consideration of cost of living (in the areas where parents of high-achievement kids are most interested in living- which will be the areas with the better schools) is misleading.

It seemed like half of the contract colleges enrollment was from Long Island (which has high housing costs in the areas with good schools I believe)when I attended. Lots of these people were there, attending these specialized programs, in part because of the tuition discount.

145

“Thus true inter-institutional endowment comparisons which do not detail quasi-endowments represented by state funding initiatives as well as external research funding grossly misstate the comparability between institutions which may, or may not, be inherently non-comparable.”

External research funding- when Boeing gives a grant to a mechanical engineering professor at Cornell, the money does NOT go “to financial aid, to lower student tuition costs”. The number of times this gets stated on CC as if it were gospel is astonishing.

Yes- money is fungible. But Cornell doesn’t get to take the millions of dollars in corporate research grants, NSF (a declining source of funds, by the way) and spread them across their financial aid budget.

Those dollars go to a specific project with detailed accounting as to how the money gets spent, and accountability as to when the dollars go in and when the metrics/research results come out. And with the same breath that the folks on CC have decided that research U’s are bad for undergrads because only doctoral candidates benefit from research opportunities, the folks on CC have decided that research dollars can be diverted to increased financial aid. Neither statement is true.

146

It should be recognized that income levels in many cases are transient. They are not guaranteed to be permanent. Whereas money spent on college tuition is permanently gone. Also, when we were going through this, the aid calculators counted cash on hand, and positive housing equity, but did not give any consideration for negative housing equity. Spend that cash, then what will you use to acquire a place to live later on? There were lots of people in that situation, in the suburban NYC metro area, a few years ago.

147

One thing I find funny…These schools cater to the rich. Most people who go to these schools don’t become rich. Most of the ones who are rich never went to these schools. You see the irony here? It’s not even about wealth, it’s about privilege. You think these wealthy people are are handing money to a school they never went to…just because the school is oh, so awesome? Noooo! There’s ALWAYS strings attached. Just follow the money trail down the rabbit hole, and you’ll find the wonderland of corruption.

148

“The ivy league is responsible for the widening income gap?”

It’s more than the ivy league, probably 50-100, and that would include public flagships as well. And this is not something new, people have been studying the effect of elite colleges on the widening income gap for a while now.

From an Atlantic article in 2013"

“A recent landmark study by Stanford’s Caroline Hoxby and Harvard’s Christopher Avery lent further empirical evidence to this accusation, finding that high-achieving low-income students do not have access to selective schools. The study showed that the mismatch is due to a lack of knowledge, not quality. Low-income students outside of major urban centers do not even apply to the top-tier colleges for which they are qualified.”

So it’s good that people at Harvard and Stanford are looking at this, because change will have to happen from within, if it’s going to happen at all. Chetty who’s leading the income mobility work is also from Harvard, and a really good book on the subject was written by a Yale law professor.

“Sorry- still not Harvard’s fault. The dorms at my state flagship are MUCH nicer than any dorm I have ever seen at an ivy league university.”

You keep bringing up this up and it’s clearly anecdotal, I have personally seen the freshman dorms at Stanford and Berkeley, and they’re not even close (hint - Stanford’s are better). I also know of some UCs that had to put 3 people in 2-person dorms. And if you’re happy with the current system, as millions of people are, of course it’s nobody’s fault, because there’s nothing to fix.

“Wanting to “bring down” the Ivy+ colleges as symbols of the wealth inequality is one thing. If those are your politic, then doing things like forcing them to accept many more lower income students makes sense.”

Exactly - no one is saying bring down the top universities, it would be opening access. But honestly I’m skeptical it can be done.

149

The solution is to widen access to public universities. UCLA, Berkeley, UIUC, U Michigan, U Alabama, etc should be affordable to high achieving students of all family incomes. Moreover, they should be funded at levels which allow them to compete with the private colleges for research money, hiring faculty, and recruiting top students.

However, all of that would require increased state and federal funding. Since most of the same people who are screaming about the fact that public schools aren’t affordable are also screaming that taxes should be cut, and that education should not be getting any more funding, this will never happen.

Basically, in the USA it seems that most of the people believe that taxes are evil, but, at the same time, they believe that the government owes them the services that are funded by those taxes.

150

Thelonious, I have never seen a dorm at either Stanford or Berkeley-

"You keep bringing up this up and it’s clearly anecdotal, I have personally seen the freshman dorms at Stanford and Berkeley, and they’re not even close (hint - Stanford’s are better). "

I specifically mentioned Ivy League dorms- I have been in dorms at every single Ivy, and they range from the merely gross to the adequate. Nicer dorms at Stanford? I’m not surprised- I find their physical plant to be astonishingly gorgeous, but if I recall correctly, there is not a single building at Stanford built earlier than the 1880’s so it is a “young” campus compared with its Eastern counterparts (and it is not in Ivy League).

You are accusing ME of being happy with the status quo? I specifically mentioned that the un-affordability of state flagship U’s is a huge problem (and I’m not happy with it). It impacts tens of thousands more families than the alleged abuses of the Ivy League so yes, I think it’s a bigger problem. You are lucky to be in California with high quality UC’s and on down the food chain to the community colleges. There are many states with one crown jewel- the flagship- and after that, the academic offerings start to decline pretty quickly. Not that they are bad-- but they are limited. These are colleges which were once designed as state teacher’s colleges, or affiliated with a local hospital to train RN’s (not even BSN’s). No chance any of them are going to become UCSD in the sciences any time soon- they don’t have the budget for the faculty, the physical plant, etc and their state legislators don’t have the will (or don’t care) to take on something as “controversial” as increasing state funding for higher ed.

151

re#146: what is a “wonderland of corruption”?
What proportion of the numerous full-pay parents do you contend engaged in some kind of corrupt practice in connection with same? Enough to constitute a “wonderland”?

I paid, I guess I was cheated, I never got my rides…

Perhaps it’s mostly “ambitious, smart high-achieving kids, aided in becoming so by the wealth of their parents” and maybe a really, really teeny “trickle of corruption”??

But then what do I know, maybe everybody really is out to get me…

152

re#144, my focus was state funding of the statutory colleges, I just cut and pasted that quote which cited research funding as well. Since it was not my issue I do not want to belabor or defend the point raised in the wikipedia quote. In general I agree with you about that. However:

  • As it happens, I personally received a summer job from an externally funded professor, in his lab, while I was also taking summer courses there. Not literally financial aid, but it had the same effect, to me.

-Some university funds that are not external are probably also used to support professors and research, and are likewise not available for financial aid to undergraduates. I imagine. Regular endowment is not a perfect measure either.

-I imagine some external funds probably displace funds that would otherwise come from the university, thereby freeing those dollars up. Not mostly, but some.

If your sole objective is to measure the amount of financial aid a university gives out, why look at endowment at all? Much less quasi-endowment. Just look at how much financial aid the university gives out. I assume that’s available somewhere, somehow…
But don’t forget to count all those folks that get reduced tuition at state-funded colleges of a university.

153

First of all, most of the students who attend those schools do fairly well, economically. This has been demonstrated time and again. This includes poor students who attend “elite” colleges - most do far better, economically, than their parents.

The vast majority of the people donating money to “elite” colleges are either alumni or parents of students/alumni. Some donate in hopes of their kids being accepted, and some people donate to colleges in order to create specific programs to help students afford these colleges.

There are also many wealthy people who invest in projects like the development of drugs or software. They are not donating money, they expect to get something back for their investments.

You seem to forget that universities engage in a lot of research, and, while some of it is basic research, a lot of it is not, and many of the results of research going on at universities can end up making a lot of money. So of course wealthy people across the world are interested in investing money in universities with well developed research facilities. This is especially true for private universities which have a lot more freedom in how they can profit from the stuff produced by employees and students.

I have no idea as to what you think is going on at these colleges. There is a lot of inequity, increasing the financial inequality of the USA, etc. But these are neither hidden, nor are they illegal in any way.