<p>Poetgrl, I think you just about said it all…bravo. :)</p>
<p>ucb, you’re missing my point. the higher IQ (SAT) kid can out perform the lower IQ kid. And elite college admissions is looking for high performers, not just someone who works longer hours (you know the kids at Cal called grinders).</p>
<p>I bet the UC system uses this report to justify admitting kids from lousy high schools, but high gpa’s, of course UC and specifically Cal are not doing so well with elite status these days. Unfortunately Cal is going the wrong fast because of the lack of money and institutional problems such as not favoring alum kids, which is the best way to raise money!</p>
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Agreed, this is the state of things now. Even when a few colleges go out of their way to nab a few low income students for diversity’s sake, those students are just the token poor kids who are very very few in comparison to those who are trapped in poverty. The system must change; in comparison to many struggles of poverty, college means little.</p>
<p>poetgrl #80. You summed it up well. I agree. Especially the last paragraph.</p>
<p>Also, I’d like to add that coming from a “low” income household…it’s really tough to have ECs and community service if you can’t even afford to buy a car. You always need to depend on somebody to give you rides to school after ECs…which in my case = sometimes spending around 5 hours in school waiting to get picked up after my ECs. It’s tough. Plus, you have other family commitments like taking care of a younger sibling and doing household chores because my mom is a single mom…so she doesn’t have time for that. I didn’t work…but many low income kids will be working instead of doing ECs…which is an important factor at top schools.Also many can’t afford those expensive SAT/ACT prep classes so…</p>
<p>It’s kinda tough as a low income student to make it to top schools. I wish I had known about Questbridge earlier :/</p>
<p>I totally agree with poetgrl’s post.</p>
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Questbridge does a horrible job marketing. I didn’t know about them until it was too late.</p>
<p>“Questbridge does a horrible job marketing.”</p>
<p>Somehow MY son got on the list, but I think they go it backwards…the invite said “high achieving low income kids”…</p>
<p>I’m kidding! He’s a great kid!</p>
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<p>You seem to have your mind made up, whatever the facts say. I think the flow of dollars is pretty clearly the other way, from endowment to support for undergraduate education. Northwestern takes an endowment distribution of about $280 million/year and plows it into its general fund operating budget. A slightly smaller amount, $254 million, goes for financial aid. So there’s no evidence in Northwestern’s budget that your tuition dollars are subsidizing students on FA; nor that your tuition dollars are somehow being siphoned off to build up the endowment. The cash flows in the other direction, and your kid is in effect being subsidized by endowment and annual gifts, well beyond whatever he or she pays in tuition. </p>
<p>I can certainly believe that the marginal cost of educating the last undergraduate in the door at a school like Northwestern is less than $45K. But they can’t set prices on that basis. The tuition is based on the average cost per student, after figuring in any other sources of revenue (in NU’s case, principally endowment payout and annual giving) that can go to support undergraduate education. Think about it: their fixed costs are enormous. They’ve got to heat, light, air-condition, and maintain all those buildings whether or not your kid attends. They’ve got to mow the lawns and do the landscaping. They’ve got to maintain a multi-million volume library, and that requires librarians and an acquisitions budget and operating costs. They pay very substantial sums in software licensing fees, telecommunications services, and electronic hardware. They’ve got to pay debt service on bonds they’ve issued in the past for major capital projects. They pay out additional millions for office supplies, faculty and administrator travel, postage and shipping, and other non-salary expense items. NU’s athletic department loses money; that costs a bundle. And of course, as by far their largest single expenditure item, representing well over half the total budget, they’ve got to pay the salaries, benefits, and payroll taxes for roughly 1,100 faculty and hundreds of administrators and staff—whether your kid is taking classes from those particular faculty, or interacting with any of the staff and administrators. It all adds up to a $1.6 billion/year operation. Divide that by 18,856 undergraduate and graduate students, and it comes out to just shy of $85,000 per student in annual operating costs. </p>
<p>Now you can’t attribute all those costs to the university’s educational mission, of course. A little over a quarter of the total, $443 million, is a research budget funded through grants and contracts from outside sources; undergrads don’t pay for this, it doesn’t directly benefit them, and it shouldn’t count in calculating the cost of their education. But even taking that $443 million off the table, it still costs over $1.1 billion/year to run the place, which works out to a little over $61K/year per student (undergrad and grad). Let’s assume, as is probably the case, that grad students are somewhat more expensive (inter alia, many of those in Ph.D. programs are supported by the school). Even so, I don’t think it’s at all unreasonable to think that the cost per undergraduate would come in somewhere north of $45K per year. So even as a full-pay, you’re not subsidizing anyone; you’re being partially subsidized by the endowment and annual giving.</p>
<p>When the football (or basketball, or insert your sport here) coache’s salary goes (and it often does in many schools) north of a cool million deneros, the cost will go up for undergrad.</p>
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<p>While football and basketball are the sports that get the most criticism for lower academic standards and the like, the big name football and basketball programs (the ones with the high paid coaches) typically make money, which usually subsidizes the lower profiles sports (though often not completely). From a purely cost point of view, a university with a big name football and/or basketball program would probably be best off dropping all of the other sports but keeping the big name football and/or basketball program(s) that make money.</p>
<p>Here’s another College Results Online page that might be of interest to some. For specific definitions of terms such as Instructional Expenditures / FTE, Student and Related Expenditures / FTE, and Educational and General Expenditures / FTE click on the little question marks.</p>
<p>[College</a> Results Online](<a href=“http://www.■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/search1b.aspx?institutionid=243744]College”>http://www.■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/search1b.aspx?institutionid=243744)</p>
<p>Edit: Looks like you’ll need to manually click on the Finance and Faculty tab.</p>
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And they use high salaries to get and keep the best coaches so their programs can continue to make large amounts of money so the school can continue to use it to subsidize other programs. I don’t like the system, but I know how it works, and I’m not going to blame the schools for working in a system that they have to stay in. Higher paid coaches usually mean better coaches, which means more wins, better profit, more money going towards unprofitable sports, university costs, and academics.</p>
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<p>As pointed out, the coachability of the SAT I means that using it as a measure of IQ is confounded by the effects of the SAT I specific coaching. If two applicants would have had an uncoached SAT I score of 2100, and one submits the 2100, while the other takes coaching classes and submits a 2300, is the second one really “smarter” in ways that matter in terms of performance in university?</p>
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SAT, like IQ, is a horrible measure of intelligence, a word for the broad concept of human consciousness. IQ tests attempt to quantify the unquantifiable and do a horrible job, especially with all the cultural biases (that the SAT used to be chock full of).</p>
<p>Further, someone unwilling to work on the SAT may be unwilling to work on class material.</p>
<p>a real IQ test (there are a couple) administered over 3 days by a qualified child psychologist in testing is accurate and an excellent indicator of future performance. And the younger the age the more accurate. These tests have been given to tens of thousands of kids over the last 70 or so years since there invention, they are very meaningful as an intelligence measurement. And the results is based on follow up studies of thousands of test takers and their academic and professional outcome. or BillyMc is your belief that all the little johnnys are the same except some get better resources? everything is the same, porsche and ford??</p>
<p>agree with you though, you still have to work to be successful!</p>
<p>and ucb, the second kid coached who gets a higher score is smarter. gaming for an advantage is what the more intelligent animals do:) it started back on the savanna. besides take all the kids and give them coaching, the kids who’ve been score in the top percentile since they were little will still prevail.</p>
<p>How does lowering the importance of SAT, ACT and ECs get schools more money for scholarships to poor kids?</p>
<p>DeborahT “Here’s another College Results Online page that might be of interest to some. For specific definitions of terms such as Instructional Expenditures / FTE, Student and Related Expenditures / FTE, and Educational and General Expenditures / FTE click on the little question marks.”</p>
<p>It’s interesting that public colleges can provide a quality education with instructional expenditures of 10-20k but the private colleges in the link are incurring up to 120k per student? The facilities often aren’t any nicer…I smell a rat!</p>
<p>Pacheight "a real IQ test is accurate and an excellent indicator of future performance. </p>
<p>Future performance in what regard? In the real world no one gets paid for their IQ.</p>
<p>IQ basically tests pattern recognition. The test for IQ was originally commissioned by the Army. It measures speed of comprehension as well as basic pattern recognition.</p>
<p>It does not measure depth of understanding.</p>
<p>It was designed by folks who quantify things so it reflects those biases.</p>
<p>There are many other definitions of intelligence.</p>
<p>And no, I don’t have sour grapes, I, and my family, test very well.</p>
<p>My dad had an IQ of 187 as written on his Army records. </p>
<p>He learned languages, math, anything objective quickly and easily and was obviously vry bright.</p>
<p>He had awful taste in literature and not much better in music.</p>
<p>He had conventional tastes and opinions and thought watching the Giants play football the pinnacle of life.</p>
<p>I don’t think he brought “intellectual vitality” to his college classroom.</p>
<p>His lack of subtlety and nuance broke my heart over and over. He refused to send me to Yale. State U was fine. He forced me to leave home before I finished high school.</p>
<p>He did have a great sense of humor and joie de vivre, but I don’t think these were results of his IQ, nor do I think his negative traits were.</p>
<p>My point is that a genius IQ did not guarantee the most significant parts of intelligence, and is thinking patterns disappointed me over and over again. This has been true of many extremely high IQ individuals I have met.</p>
<p>OTOH: Richard Feymann and James Watson, Nobel prize winning scientists, both scored 125 on IQ tests according to their autobiographies.</p>
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I don’t know statistics for the correlation of “future performance,” whatever is meant by that, but I do know that the idea of being able to quantify intelligence is psychologically laughable. And if it was a true measure of intelligence, why would it be “the younger the age the more accurate”?</p>
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A multitude of test-takers lends no validity to the test itself, moreso merely the societal institution that is the test.</p>
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Similarities between healthy children at the start of life are overwhelmingly greater than the differences; some will be “naturally” better at math or music or some such thing, but all have a good potential. Environmental factors then begin to differentiate them. The rich have an overwhelmingly better lot in life than the poor, so of course their children will receive better training, education, and opportunities.</p>
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I know kids who took the SAT, were happy with their score, but got a tutor at took it again at their parents’ behest, scoring significantly higher. Are they more intelligent by virtue of being forced into it?</p>
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But not all kids do get coaching, that’s the point. Some merely don’t want it, others can’t afford it, so a lot more than just innate ability shines through.</p>