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<p>It also says that, in terms of predicting university GPA, high school GPA > SAT II > SAT I. Also, using high school GPA + SAT II + SAT I has only very slightly more predictive than using high school GPA + SAT II. And high school GPA alone is more predictive than SAT II + SAT I.</p>
<p>^^ya but that still doesn’t tell the real story.</p>
<p>with equal gpa’s a kid with a 2300 SAT is going to outperform a 1800 SAT kid, all other things equal, this outperformance will happen consistently.</p>
<p>and the other thing about SAT’s is they’re a better predictor of IQ’s…granted a kid still needs to know how to work to be successful, but you can go into any high school and grab the kids with 2300+ and you’ll also find the highest gpa’s. you can’t do the opposite.</p>
<p>village: that sounds a bit like entitlement, not the American dream. and some families can do it in 1 generation, but it’s not easy and it often takes more than studying hard. </p>
<p>Doing exceptional things on top of a 4.0, which then helps in admissions, generally takes a strong community and a supportive family. And it is a lot more difficult for poor kids. But private schools (hyps etc) and the constitution do not say if you get a 4.0 we’ll let you go to an elite school. The american dream and the paths to success are a lot more complicated that that! And there are set-backs all the time, that’s life in a competitive world</p>
<p>It is lot more exceptional for a poor kid to maintain a 4.0 while working at McDonalds than a rich kid getting the same GPA while taking violin lessons.Yet the latter activity(violin playing) would be prized higher.We have not even talked about the belief that high SAT scores somehow reflect “innate” ability,a belief that rationalizes the rich kids high scores after taking expensive tutoring classes while the poor kid does not even afford the blue book</p>
<p>villager, the minimum wage job trumps the violin lessons (unless we’re talking Midori) and the volunteering oversees (unless it’s a highly unusual and self-motivated kid, not someone whose family paid $$$ for a summer trip). Working to help support the family (or to pay for violin lessons, or overseas travel) would look even better.</p>
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<p>You are misinformed. Merely being able to play the violin very well is not prized at HYPS. Being a prodigy, maybe, but we are talking about extremely rare individuals (e.g. Yo Yo Ma).</p>
<p>If there were two applicants to Harvard with otherwise equally strong credentials, one of whom was from a low-income family and had worked 20 hrs/week in McDonald’s for 4 years and another from a high-income family who had played violin for 4 years in the school or even all-state orchestra, it would not be a close contest. The low-income kid would be far more likely to get in. Especially if the McDonald’s employer wrote a supplemental letter of recommendation praising the kid for being one of the best employees.</p>
<p>ETA: Cross-posted with SlitheyTove.</p>
<p>It’s not true. Poor kids writing that they worked to help support their families and have a stable employment history are helped in admissions.</p>
<p>And even middle-class kids who choose to work and not pursue enrichment over the summer are good with most admissions folks.</p>
<p>However, many low income kids are spending summers watching siblings, and that doesn’t help them all.</p>
<p>Fancy activities that are super planned for kids (like expensive European tours for example) don’t help much either.</p>
<p>Activities that show personal commitment, like a program in which one builds houses overseas or plays one’s violin for x hours a week, will help.</p>
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<p>Utter nonsense. They are highly impressed by kids who have worked these types of jobs, especially in the context of having to help supplement the family income and / or save money for college. You don’t think they haven’t figured out that it’s only the wealthy kids who are able to have their parents pay for them to go to Africa or South America and help the underprivileged? Of course they know that. And it might have been rewarded 10, 15 years ago when such things were new – but now they are old hat, and they’re skeptical of such things unless there’s a way to demonstrate that it was truly meaningful and not just mom/dad paid for me to do good deeds in a unique locale.</p>
<p>Being poor does not mean colleges must lower their standards for excellence in order to admit you. In addition the colleges have to make sure that the students they admit will be able to succeed academically at their college, otherwise they would be doing a disservice to the students themselves, and also to the rest of the college community. </p>
<p>And finally, yes, private colleges must manage their financial aid dollars so that they can remain financially secure institutions for the long term. It is great for everyone- rich and poor, that colleges are making an effort to effect social change and create a diverse student body that includes low-income and URM and other categories of students but in the end they are operating an educational institution- not a charity. I believe elite colleges are making vigorous and good-faith efforts to increase enrollment from low-income students. </p>
<p>The people who are getting squeezed out are the children of the not-quite-affluent middle class. But I don’t think these students are going to suffer too much by attending the fine colleges that exist in abundance, one notch below HYPS.</p>
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<p>Eh, you know something? If my upper-middle-class, everything-handed-to-him double-legacy kid hadn’t gotten into NU and “his spot” was explicitly handed to a low-income kid from the 'hood who was promising but had a life circumstance that didn’t enable him to have the EC’s that my kid does – I’d be ok with that. Because then my kid would have gone to Brandeis or Kenyon or Macalester or even U of Illinois and still done just fine in life. Whereas for that kid, an admission to a place like NU will be truly transformational in terms of his job prospects and life trajectory. </p>
<p>And honestly, part of what I’m paying for at these prices is, indeed, the opportunity for my kid to be transformed by meeting / living with / working with kids of all backgrounds, not just the fellow upper-middle-class kids he’s been surrounded with all his life. </p>
<p>But hey. If you think that the most elite schools are being watered down by admitting too many lower-income students for the sake of diversity, then of course you wouldn’t want to put your kid there, right? I mean, it’d be pretty silly to bemoan how intellectual standards are being watered down while simultaneously salivating over the prospect of getting your own kid there.</p>
<p>Unfortunately for them, violinists are a dime a dozen, even good ones. Maybe an oboist… :)</p>
<p>Seriously, of course SATs reflect innate ability. They also reflect the intellectual and cultural environment in which the student was raised, the education to which they had access, the degree to which they took advantage of that education, and among other factors too numerous to mention, yes, prep courses.</p>
<p>BTW, my father’s parents were immigrants, and he received full scholarships to HYP (All three! The trifecta!). He had classmates, also with immigrant parents, who similarly attended Stanford and Princeton on scholarship. (There may well have been more, but I happen to know about those two.) They were all students at an urban HS in the Pacific Northwest, apparently dominated by students of Scandinavian and Chinese background, most of whom were of modest means at best. So I disagree with the idea that it takes generations to attain that kind of success.</p>
<p>A bigger problem for the poor kid is if s/he was raised in a home without a single book, and was never taken to a library or a museum or concert, and went to a HS where the GCs steer everyone to the local directional state U, and it never occurs to them that bright kids who did well in school but didn’t have any money ought to consider applying to the deep-pockets schools that although technically expensive might well end up costing that student far less.</p>
<p>Actually, so many violinists are needed in orchestras, we were shocked that DS was always asked to play the violin and not the viola in orchestras. He learned the viola to fill a niche (not many really committed viola players) but was asked to play the violin in every case. I know this was a very minor point, but I thought I’d mention it.</p>
<p>Consolation, I see everything you’re saying. Had a similar experience.</p>
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<p>Amen. My kid was tired of being around affluent and upper-middle-class entitled suburban kids (like herself :)! ). Her current private college has a higher percentage of low-income, working class, inner city and/or rural kids than either of her two high schools did. Would she like to see even more? You bet.</p>
<p>consolation, i agree with you…but the un-pc family thing to say is that it took my family a little longer from a dna/IQ stand point. an issue which is rarely discussed here, sure hard work etc is important but the single biggest factor in brain power and academic success is dna. i marry a spouse who’s family is smart (6 generations of engineering phd’s) and what do you know, my kids are scoring in the 99 percentile and reading books starting at age 4.</p>
<p>fastest way to make your kids smart, marry well:)</p>
<p>dna! there’s no substitute!</p>
<p>No, Pizza, I don’t ‘know something’ about that end of it. But since you specifically mention NU…I will tell you that our suburban HS district–which encompasses an extremely wide socioeconomic range–has had multiple admits to Northwestern over the last 10 years, and the VAST majority of them are from low-income households. We’re middle to upper-middle class income-wise, and I wouldn’t let either of my D’s even apply to NU, because I knew upfront we wouldn’t be able to afford it because of the way their need-based aid skews. Again, private U’s can do what they want with their money, but don’t expect me to help subsidize it with exorbitant tuition. </p>
<p>Just sayin’. I guess this addresses more the post by vicariousparent about the ‘not-quite-affluent’ middle class getting squeezed.</p>
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<p>Actually, even the most predictive combination of admissions characteristics (high school GPA + SAT II + SAT I) was found to explain only 26.5% of the variance in university GPAs.</p>
<p>And the paper says the following:</p>
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<p>I thought the general consensus is that the real COA is significantly higher than even the full-pay student. At my D’s college, I believe it is $25,000 or so more. Your exorbitant tuition is not funding other students FA, the schools endowment and private scholarships are.</p>
<p>I’ve heard those arguments for many years, about the COA being more than full-pay tuition, and also about need-based aid coming solely from endowments. And I don’t believe it. You can’t tell me that it costs more than $45K/year to educate ONE student at NU, when they still have to pay for room & board & books & activity fees. Unless those professors & grad students are getting some pretty substantial coinage. OR…(suspicious mind alert! 
) maybe the overage is going into the endowment!</p>
<p>Jogged a memory so I dug through my bookmarks. Here’s a site that shows Student Related Expenditures / Total FTE. Most recent year shown is 2009. Scroll to the far right. </p>
<p>[College</a> Results Online](<a href=“http://www.■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/search1b.aspx?institutionid=243744]College”>http://www.■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/search1b.aspx?institutionid=243744)</p>
<p>Okay–what about this:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>There is a group of middle class Americans who absolutely are at a huge disadvantage when it comes to the way fin-aid is used vis-a-vis the rapid rise or COA beyond what anyone could have reasonably expected.</p></li>
<li><p>AND, it is incredibly important to raise the pell grant to the level where it will actually fund a state U education so that the impoverished in this country can afford to go to college and not drop out due to financial duress.</p></li>
<li><p>AND it is a good thing to have diversity on campuses and therefore ORM students do have to have better scores and GPA’s than URMs, simply because they are overrepresented and this is not as desirable to the colleges.</p></li>
<li><p>And it’s tough all over.</p></li>
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<p>But, it is toughest on those who grow up in true poverty. It really just is. The disadvanatages are so deep and the list of disadvanages so long, that if we haven’t grown up with the truly awful schooling, the lack of nutrition, the lack of space and quiet, the lack of books and time, the worry about basic things like electricity and food and hot water, we don’t begin to “get” it.</p>