@melvin123 I like what you’re trying to do in post #127, but my first thought (without looking at the rest of the math) is that you need to correct your POC calculations to take in to account that all POC are not hooked URMs. At Brown, most are likely Asians who are decidedly NOT hooked.
Thanks for all the feedback. You are all correct that Asians are included in Persons of Color (which I didn’t realize at the time), and that Asians are decidedly NOT hooked. I looked at the 2017-2018 CDS and found how many kids are in each group, but then I can’t correlate that back to ED verses RD. For those interested, that class break-down is White 42.5%, Asian 17%, International 12%, Hispanic 11%, Black 7%, Mix 5%, unidentified 5%, Native American/Hawaiian 0.5%. This also raises the fact that 12% of the class is international, and the information on ED vs RD didn’t identify that, and we all know international is a very different pool for admissions purposes.
I feel like it’s impossible to really KNOW what the real numbers are, especially for Asian applicants because they are grouped with POC for ED/RD news releases. It’s a little easier to determine for Whites, and I think for Whites there is no statistically different chance of admissions at Brown for ED verses RD. This conforms to what the Dean of Admissions said, that applying ED made no difference. One last comment is that the group White includes Middle Easterners and as you dig more and more into these things, I start to wonder what is really a “hook”. I think a White person from Syria has more of a hook than a Hispanic person from Spain, but maybe that’s just me.
It would be interesting for someone to do this analysis on other schools. I wish I picked a school other than Brown since the POC grouping made it more difficult.
“Neither of my sons applied ED. Each did EA at two schools – S1’s EAs were two of his top choices (MIT/Chicago), and S2’s were one of his top choices and another very strong in his field (Chicago/Georgetown).”
Sure. But your family clearly knows how to play the game (which is another important part of the formula). You figured out and did play the early game at those top schools that roll with EA/REA vs. ED vs. SCEA – MIT, Chicago, ND, Gtown, BC, UVA. Your kid (like mine) was more interested in the EA group than the ED group. You figured out how to target those schools under the available rules.
Given how the top schools have sorted their admission plans out, the results of all flavors of early (SCEA, ED, REA, EA) turn out to be fairly similar. A successful SCEA app to HYPS or an REA app to ND or Gtown or an EA app to MIT (although all non-binding) as a practical matter turn out to be very ED-like in how they work.
No question that the ED boost varies from school to school. Brown is definitely weaker than Penn or Duke. But Brown still provides an ED boost.
Clearly you don’t HAVE to play the ED/SCEA/REA card to get into one of these schools. Half the students don’t. But that means that half the students do. Half coming in via early is a BIG number.
In the families that have 2 or 3 or 4 kids in elite schools, very likely that many of those kids are boosting their odds by making use of all available hooks. That’s knowing how to play the game.
Maybe one or two kids is so studly that they can beat the odds without using early/legacy/athlete boosts. But to go 3 for 3 or 4 for 4, the family is going to be working the hooks. And those hooks strongly correlate with higher wealth. Not hedge fund wealth, but top 5-10% incomes. Wealthier kids with hooks (including early as a hook) is the most common student on these campuses.
@melvin123 Another factor that skews the higher ED acceptance %'s may be that the typical applicant who is not hooked (URM, athlete, legacy) and applies ED tends to be a higher stat applicant than the typical RD applicant. I’m just not sure the higher acceptance rates translates to better odds of acceptance for the unhooked applicant?
With that said, a close family friend’s of ours recently had both their unhooked D’s apply ED to WashU (38% ED acceptance rate) and Vanderbilt (20.5% ED acceptance rate) and both were accepted to their school of choice. The million dollar question is would they have been accepted RD? I guess we will never know…
@northwesty why do you say that Brown still provides an ED boost? Their admissions director said that it does not. And I thought my numbers, as imperfect as they are, show that it does not.
I think someone should really run some numbers for the other schools. I think a lot of families might be committing to ED thinking that it provides a significantly stronger boost than it does.
And sorry, I don’t mean to be hijaking this thread. I’m just trying to respond to comments that one of the ways families get multiple kids into highly selective colleges is to play the ED game. Duke says it is a benefit. I thought I read somewhere that Penn was scaling down on this both in terms of total numbers and on doing more URM and 1st generation admits in the ED round, so that the benefit of ED for unhooked kids was decreasing at Penn.
@socaldad2002 I’ve heard the same as you at all the info sessions I attended, that the ED round applicants on average are more qualified than the RD round.
Mel – I’ve heard Brown say it doesn’t provide “very much” ED boost. That’s just not credible to me. But no one has the data to really prove/disprove. But if ED was JUST for athletes and legacies, then why don’t they just restrict ED to those groups?
If there’s ZERO advantage to an unhooked in applying ED, it would seem quite sleazy/misleading for Brown to offer ED to those kids. The ethical thing would be to offer those kids unrestricted EA instead. But Brown doesn’t do that.
Of course there’s a boost, as Brown and savvy parents know. But colleges have some incentives to keep the details of how much boost opaque. Because they want to get lots of ED applications and also lots of RD applications too. The schools could easily publish transparent data on this and then folks wouldn’t have to speculate.
While the average income level of a HYPS family appears “high” (if you aren’t from a major metro area with insane cost of living), I’m not sure its evidence of a causal relationship between SES and achievement. I think it is more indicative of who can afford to attend. If you aren’t on the lower end of the income scale and getting substantial financial aid in the form of grants, or at the higher end where you can afford to pay it out of pocket, Ivy isn’t an option. My son didn’t bother to apply Ivy because we simply could never afford the “EFC” that I (as a single parent) was expected to contribute. Unfortunately, financially, those schools were unattainable for our family.
“If you aren’t on the lower end of the income scale and getting substantial financial aid in the form of grants, or at the higher end where you can afford to pay it out of pocket, Ivy isn’t an option.”
This is a huge misconception that I unfortunately see spread around a bit too often here on CC. Ivy IS a great option at ALL economic income spectrum, not just the high and the low end. For those in the middle, you pay less at an Ivy than at an in-state. My older son, for example, is at an in-state with Presidential scholarship, yet I pay more for his tuition and room and board than my younger son at an Ivy, and we’re in the upper middle income class category.
@TiggerDad According to Brown’s website:
"What types of assets are included in determining the Parent Contribution?
A. Brown collects parent asset information to help determine a family’s overall financial strength. Some examples of assets that must be reported are savings, checking, CDs, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, college savings plans, real estate, business equity, and home equity."
If you live in a high cost of living state, I really doubt most upper middle income class families will get any financial aid discount at most, if not all of the ivies.
For example, an upper middle class family of 4 live in Long Island (NY), make between 150K - 175K combined salary a year, have saved 100K in a 529 college savings plan and have a few hundred thousand in equity in their house. Do you think they would get a COA discount? If not, this family would have a difficult time affording Brown as they are still 180K short (280K COA minus 100K 529). Out of reach for this family.
@socaldad2002 I think it really depends on the individual Ivy. I ran the NPC for several and had very different results. Brown did not give as good of a result as Harvard, which has a bigger endowment, but that could just be my results.
" For those in the middle, you pay less at an Ivy than at an in-state."
You really can’t have a good discussion of this topic using subjective/imprecise terms like “middle.” Middle of what? You really need to talk in terms of the actual data to see the landscape.
The median income at Princeton (which has BIG financial aid) was $186k. Among Princeton parents, $186k is the exact middle of the middle class. Even though $186k is the 83rd income percentile nationally. 17% of P students come from 1% ($630k), 72% come from the top 20% ($110k).
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/princeton-university
40% of P students are full pay, 60% get fin aid. So probably the full pay line at P starts at around (depending on circumstances) $250k-$300k.
If you make $1 million a year, $70k full pay is 7% of your income. If you full pay at $300k, that’s 23% of your pre-tax annual income. Totally different scenarios.
If you make $110k (upper class nationally at 80th percentile, but lower class at Princeton) P says you pay $16k a year. That’s 14.5% of annual income and less than in-state. That’s a great deal.
So a lot depends on what you mean by “upper middle class.” Is that $110k or $200k or $300k?
I think there’s not a “misconception” at all for people who are upper class nationally but only middle class for P. They pay the highest percentage of their income to Princeton by far. As you approach the full pay line, the system stops being progressive and actually becomes quite regressive. Which is why the #1 topic on CC seems to be some variation of the “full pay at X versus the merit deal at Y” question.
Given its demographics, you can argue that it would be much more logical and fair for Princeton to charge maybe $150k a year, but then give fin aid to folks up to $750k or so.
^ The Home Equity and Business Equity is a killer for lots of folks. If you live in a high COL area and have been there for a long time, you likely have a lot of home equity. Some use it to pay college, others say heck no. Many colleges want you to use it. If you were going to downsize and sell your house anyway, not a terrible idea (if you don’t need it for your retirement). If you plan on staying in the house, could really hurt you at some point.
P.S. Recognize that the discussion above is about Princeton, which is in the stratosphere financially – $2.6 million of endowment per student.
Things get pricier if your school is trying to scrape by with “only” $5-10 billion of endowment money (Penn, Columbia, Vandy, NW, Duke, Chicago, WUSTL, ND, Cornell).
Yes, the home equity treatment is huge. HP don’t consider it all – treated as $0 value as an asset.
S caps it at 1.2 times income. So treated like $300k in the bank for a $250k income family.
Most other top 20s cap it at 2.4 times. So treated as if you have $600k cash in the bank.
Obviously, there’s no clear cut, universal demarcating line between “upper,” “middle” and “low” income classes. I was using the terms loosely in general way as you can find here, “Which Income Class Are you?”: “According to census data from 2015, 6.1% of households bring in $200,000 and higher every year and 14.1% bring in between $100,000 and $150,000. This is the upper middle class.”
https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0912/which-income-class-are-you.aspx
It is true that each Ivy is different. When I did my own NPC comparisons among the Ivys, HYP tend to be the most generous. While assets are considered, unless you have millions in that category, you can still end up with total cost less than an in-state. We do have what anyone would consider a pretty sizable assets along with the upper middle class income level as defined above, yet it’s cheaper for us at an Ivy than an in state.
The point that I wanted to make is simply that you can’t paint the whole Ivy as unaffordable based on old and outdated perceptions of what they used to be and persuade oneself or others not to even bother applying.
I don’t know that “business equity” is a killer. Depends on the business and depends on the totality of the family’s finances.
There are business owners who are deducting 25% of the square footage of their homes, their car, some portion of every vacation (carefully timed to coincide with a conference or client event), etc. Everything is a “write off”. They are living a nice upper middle class lifestyle on $75K per year “taxable income” in a high rent neighborhood.
The financial aid policies at most colleges are just designed to try and establish some parity for these families with others in similar circumstances. If you are a W2 employee you aren’t writing anything off, and the last time you filed an expense report was for a weekend fedex you needed to send out while you were attending a family funeral. Other than that- zip. So yes- for some families, owning a business or being self-employed is going to hurt you in financial aid. For others, it just levels the playing field a bit so that whatever portion of your ordinary lifestyle which is being financed by your business, ends up getting added back. Most people who work for a company pay their own cellphone bills, own their own cars (or lease), pay for their own gas, and don’t have a family room/dining room in their primary residence which is called “corporate HQ”.
Seems fair to me even if the system isn’t perfect. I have a college friend who claims not to know how much gas costs-- and hasn’t known in 10 years. He puts it on “the company card” (which is him- the company) and deducts it all. I don’t cry that a financial aid officer is going to “penalize” him by taking a look at his write offs!
“The point that I wanted to make is simply that you can’t paint the whole Ivy as unaffordable based on old and outdated perceptions of what they used to be and persuade oneself or others not to even bother applying.”
@Tigger – People should of course run the numbers for their own situation and the particular school.
But the picture you paint (Princeton less than in-state State U!!) is correct only within some very narrow parameters. That is pretty much a best case scenario.
Look what happens if you change the income number to from $110k to $250k income. And then change the school to Notre Dame, Vandy, Penn, Duke, Brown, JHU instead of fat stacks Princeton. Schools that are rich but not Princeton rich, and who also hit the home equity pretty hard.
Then you probably are talking a full pay $70k net price. That’s 3X what state U costs, not less than 1X. A net price that is 30% of annual income. Maybe do-able (perhaps for just one kid) but extremely painful to impossible for many.
If most here on CC had the option to pay less for Princeton than State U in-state, you wouldn’t have the hundreds of threads along the lines of “is X full pay worth it vs. Y at half pay.”
I was responding to the person who specifically said that Ivy is only affordable for either the families with high income or low income but not in between, i.e., middle and upper middle income class, and therefore she decided to have her son not to bother applying. The picture I painted was within this context of her statement. Outside of the Ivy and few other very well endowed schools, such as Stanford, of course the picture I painted would be “only within some very narrow parameters.” I’m fully aware of the FA comparisons at places like Duke, Penn, etc. since we were offered from 7 such institutions that allowed us intimate comparisons.