Megan McArdle wonders:
These days, a nearly-perfect GPA is the barest requisite for an elite institution. You’re also supposed to be a top notch athlete and/or musician, the master of multiple extracurriculars. Summers should preferably be spent doing charitable work, hopefully in a foreign country, or failing that, at least attending some sort of advanced academic or athletic program.
Naturally, this selects for kids who are extremely affluent, with extremely motivated parents who will steer them through the process of “founding a charity” and other artificial activities. Kids who have to spend their summer doing some boring menial labor in order to buy clothes have a hard time amassing that kind of enrichment experience. […]
This entire thing is absurd. I understand why kids engage in this ridiculous arms race. What I don’t understand is why admissions officers, who have presumably met some teenagers, and used to be one, actually reward it. Why not give kids a bonus for showing up to a routine job during high school, like real people, instead of for having wealthy parents who can help you tap their affluent social network for charitable donations? Why have we conflated “excellence” with affluence, driven parents, and a relentless will to conform on the part of the kids?
Errr, that seems pretty self-explanatory to me. That the advantage goes to the affluent is not a biproduct. It’s the point. Who is more likely to be in a future position to do good by the university? Someone who comes from an affluent background or someone who works a routine job? In a world where students are penalized for the wrong extracurriculars, like the FFA or 4H Club, why in the world would we expect them to value someone who takes a job anybody could have?
You have to be special. It takes money to be special. That’s not totally fair. Private schools have been taking admirable steps to allow those whose parents make less money to get into these schools on grants instead of loans. So, while money does play a role, I would expect that it’s culture that plays a larger one. Some kid whose father is the Used Car King of Northern Idaho may have money, but it’s not necessarily the right kind of money. I mean, you can picture it, right? His father’s dealership with some huge, gaudy American flag. And hokey commercials. Fortunately, that guy is going to have very little clue how to get his kid into the Ivies. He probably thinks membership in the 4H club might help. He might think it’s a good idea for his son to actually work at the dealership to learn responsibility and work ethic. Such pedestrian values mean little compared to the enrichment of well-placed charity work.
Of course, coming from the background that I do, the entire notion of aspiring to go to a private school is a little bit weird. I was told from pretty early on that private school was an unlikely option. I got to see my brother admitted into a very exclusive school on the west coast only to be told “You can’t go. There is nothing that they have to offer that the flagship state can’t.” So in one sense I am sympathetic to the son of the car king, though on the other, there are more important things to life. Unless, of course, you want to actually run things. People from certain colleges get to do that, and they are particular about who they let in. Not just any smart kid, or rich kid, will do. So I do at times wonder about the cost of society.
Some of my parents’ values rubbed off on me. I, too, will be reluctant to bankroll my kid going to private school. Clancy feels even more strongly about this. I might actually make an exception for a school like Harvard. Fortunately for the top Ivies, I don’t have much idea of the hoops they would need to jump through and I am not sure how on-board I would be with doing what would be required for them to get in anyway. So they probably needn’t worry about the likes of the Trumans showing up.
The actual cost of attending is wildly unrelated to the sticker price.
One of the real tragedies is that smart, hard-working but poor kids are assuming that the only option is the local state school. While, if they actually applied to the “expensive” private school, they might find the overall package resulted in a smaller out-of-pocket cost at the end.
Looking at private schools with big endowments is a really, really good idea.
I think I have seen studies or articles that said poor kids who attend elite institutions are more likely to graduate than poor kids who stay close to home and attend the local, state university.
Probably a bit of self-selection there.
Also the ability to get away from family. Kids who stay local end up getting more concerned with family issues than their studies.
Kids that attend locally also are more likely to try to commute and/or work jobs while attending, both of which are often not conducive to graduating.
It’s to the credit of these schools that they have the sliding scales. My family (both the one I grew up in and the one I have now) is likely to be in that middle place where we wouldn’t qualify for much financial aid but also could not comfortably afford the tuition.
Don’t assume. Have kids fill out applications and see what the numbers are.
The endowments of some of these schools are very healthy. They can shake some bucks lose if you ask.
Some true stories:
– 2010 high school graduation. Number one son had a really great application on paper (Eagle scout (don’t get me started on the current mess in scouting. I hope and pray that the policy will be changed very shortly), National Honor Society, sports, AP classes, great test scores, summer job experience). Even so, he only got into about half the schools to which he applied.
However, even though the tuition/room&board/etc were very different, the financial aid packages (scholarships, not loans) came to within $250 for the cost to us. And this cost was less than UI at Urbana/Campaign. The only state school that would have been cheaper would require living at home. Once you add $10K for room and board, all the state schools were more expensive.
2011 hs graduation: Friend’s kid was accepted, with nice scholarship but the family still couldn’t swing it. She contacted Admissions with (a) all the great things she was bringing to the school, and (b) specific reasons why this school was where she wanted to go. They kicked in an additional $10,000, bringing the family’s out of pocket way down.
The schools that have endowments can make exceptions, and drop extra money (sometimes). They want kids who want to be there, and who will be successful. That’s worth a lot to the school.
Here’s some info on the University of Chicago’s Odyssey Scholarships.
https://odyssey.uchicago.edu/
Interesting. Thanks for sharing.
It’s actually a tad ironic that Clancy is even more skeptical of private schools than I am, but her influence is more likely to make our kid palatable to an elite private institution to begin with. Her father is a professor and she had the jacket to interest the elite schools in a way that my brother did not (neither did I, but my academic profile was clearly insufficient anyway).
Sure, NPR did a story on this exact subject just this morning. If you can get the right grants and scholarships lined up, it can actually cost less to go to Stanford than it would to go to Cal.
But this doesn’t address Will’s point. In order to be considered by Stanford, you need more than good grades and good SAT’s. You need to show that you’re “Stanford material.” This may very well be technically accomplishable by middle- to lower-income bracket kids, but without the class-specific knowledge, it’s going to be hard for them to luck in to that set of activities — and the opportunities and access to those kinds of activities may simply not be present. That’s where class remains an eligibility issue.
So, I know someone who got a free ride to American U. I think he got it purely because of test scores. Certainly he hadn’t done the “class based” things… Nor any real outside-of-school work to speak of (other than helping Dad @ store).
I went to one of the elite private schools that you mention and will get to the reasons in a second.
I went to Vassar College from 1998-2002. I think 60 percent or so of the student body attended public school, 40 percent private. Most of us came from the upper-middle class and above but there was also geographical and socio-economic diversity. During my sophomore year, a woman yelled at me for suggesting that we go to the cheap Chinese place because she could only afford to eat via the meal plan and campus dining. I went to an upper-middle class public school, some of my friends went to fancy prep schools as scholarship students and grew up in really rough towns. One woman I knew was from Boise’s small Jewish community. Another was from an affluent family in a Western ranching state that has more cows than people. There were also plenty of people from foreign countries. There was a woman who was an ex-Mormon from Utah or Idaho.
Vassar was my first choice and I was extremely fortune it to get in. I write about this in my essay for next week’s symposium but I needed the small classes that Vassar offered. I would have been lost at a large state university filled with lectures of hundreds of students. The lack of a Greek scene was also a plus. Vassar and similar schools are for a kind of precocious, artsy, and outsider student. We were not people who wanted to major in business, marketing, and accounting and just get a good job. We knew at 18 that we wanted to study writing, art history, theatre, and other subjects and try for something grander. At least for a bit.
That being said, I don’t think I would get into Vassar or a similar school if I applied today. My grades in high school were all over the map, my board scores were good, and my extracuriculars interesting enough. This was enough to get me a spot on the waiting list and then a spot in 1998. Now probably not.
At least in some cases, not all state schools (or even big state schools) rely on lecture halls. I had only a couple in my college career. Being in the Honors College allowed me to take a lot of the traditional lecture-hall courses in a small, more tightly-knit setting. I ended up in the HC by chance as much as anything (I mean I qualified, but without a couple people I knew, it never would have occurred to me to apply), but it turned out to be a really important part of my college experience. I was accepted into higher-profile schools, but I think I was well-served by going to a school that let me into their HC instead of the general population of a more selective state school.
Idaho has a school called Lewis-Clark State College. It’s a public school as its name would indicate, but it’s very much set up like a private school. By which I mean, not much of a sports profile (no football team, they’re in the Frontier Conference of the NAIA with a bunch of Catholic schools and Montana directionals), but it has the feel of a small liberal arts school with many of the same benefits (small classes, more tightly-knit community) and so on.
I think every state should have some LCSC’s. I went to a big school with a Division I football program and over 30,000 students, and it worked out for me better than some of the smaller schools I had previously been looking at, but it’s certainly not for everybody.
I know Lewis and Clark University in Portland but not LCSC in Idaho.
New York also has one or two public universities that are supposed to be smaller and more like a liberal arts college like Amherst, Williams, Swathmore, etc. There is Genneseo (5,000 students) and Purchase (4,000 students) according to Wikipedia. UC-Santa Cruz was supposed to be the equivalent of a small liberal arts college in the California system.
The problem with state system’s running smaller-schools is that it is not very efficient economically or one that makes sense in terms of prestige. Public education makes sense for a large research university where the professors can apply for a lot of grant money and the lecture hall is better at getting students in and out.
Well, the state may or may not be as efficient about it, but it can at least replicate aspects of the environment (smaller classes, more tightly-knit community) at state school costs, which isn’t nothing.
What I think that New Dealer meant by efficient was that its not harder for State schools to maintain a small class size than private liberal arts colleges. Private liberal arts colleges manage to maintain small class sizes by having high standars of admissions, being in places where people don’t want to go to school, and purposefully not growing even if they have the money. Its harder for these things to be justifiable in state university in the same way that its harder for public schools to keep kids out than private schools.
Lee, I agree that it’s harder to justify state schools being needlessly exclusive. I criticize states for doing it (though on the other end I also criticize open enrollment outside of juco/votech). That part may not be reproducible, but the other things he mentions (such as smaller class-sizes) can be.
If the reason for going to private school is specifically for the exclusivity, that’s not something state schools could or should replicate. General size, though, I think is self-limiting in that I don’t think most kids actually want to go to a small liberal arts school.
What was your major again? other than the basic intro “multiple choice tests” classes (which it’s okay if that’s what you’re talking about) the big state school does small classes for pretty much all majors (I saw mandatory electives with 20 people in them, so…)
They do small classes, but they do large classes, too. I didn’t have many big classes (see the above), but for regular students a lot of the intro classes will be warehoused.
*nods* but at my small private school, the psych class (and econ, come to think of it) was still huge (the difference primarily being “fewer required electives”).
Heh. My psych class was huge, too. It’s the only huge class I remember off the top of my head. I guess one of my history classes was kinda big also.
(Didn’t know you went to a small private school. For some reason I thought you went to a specific state institution in Mount Pleasant.)
Some intro classes were large but they tended to be team taught one day and then small sections on the second day.
So one day of Art History 101 was a 100 plus person lecture with three professors. The second day was split into much smaller sectionals with 20 or so students and one professor.
We had that, too. I wasn’t really counting that.
I’m not sure how you get from the ideas you discuss in the main part of the post to saying you wouldn’t send your kids there, if you get a chance. I’d maybe understand if it was about not supporting those institutions. But it’s not like tuition is what’s swelling those endowments (s you and Angela point out, the tuition money really is the least of it).
So those schools act to perpetuate a closed elite. And certain people are intentionally excluded from it. But I don’t see how intentionally excluding yourselves is doing anyone any favors (except, perhaps, the people who’re trying to exclude you in the first place).
I can understand the confusion. The transition to our thoughts on private schools is partially to share my thoughts of the schools as they relate to me and my family. Namely, that attending such schools is not a high priority, but primarily because of the pricetag and not really because of the admissions system (except insofar as the admissions system might hurt Lain’s chances if she did apply).
The same is true of the elite public schools. I got into Berkeley based on nothing but grades and test scores. Nowadays it takes that plus having started your own social networking website. Contra Will, I don’t think this is intended to steer admissions towards a particular type of student; it’s that there are so many kids with 3.9, tons of AP credits, and 2100+ on the SAT that further weeding is required. In the past 35 years, while the population of the state has almost doubled, there’s one new UC campus.
Perhaps unfairly, I am willing to give public schools a greater benefit of the doubt when it comes to such things. Although I have been critical of the way that California has set up its higher education system.
This is true. We simply have a lot more kids who were taught to really strive for this level of achievement. This is largely good I think.
I don’t. I’d rather see kids get to be kids. Make explosives in chemistry class. Fail a little. Fail a lot.
What is interesting to me is when I meet people who attend super-elite and fancy private schools for K-12 and then go unto various state schools for university. This seems odd to me. Why spend the money on urban and fancy private schools to end up at UC-Santa Barbara, Oregon State, or SUNY-Oswego?
I’d rather send my kids to public school for K-12 and then to a private college or university. Depending on if I have kids and various other factors. You can never predict history.
Yeah, that is weird. I can understand private school then public college, but elite private school?
That’s the way it works on the rich branch of my family, though, I guess. They all loyally attend William & Mary but go to elite private schools in K-12. I’ve never understood that branch of the family.
I would say William and Mary is a rather elite university.
Despite my defense of the small liberal arts college and my feelings that it were not for me, I am not against public universities. The best public universities can easily compete with the elite private ones. I would say that William and Mary is up there with UVA, Cal, the University of Michigan, the state sections of Cornell*, the University of Washington, and Chapel Hill, maybe some others.
*Cornell was New York’s land-grant university. It is the only school I know of that is part private and part public. New York residents who attend the School of Agriculture, the School of Industrial Labor Relations, the School of Ecology, and maybe one other get to pay the equivalent of instate tuition.
University of pittsburgh is state-related, which makes it part public/part private. I think Penn State is also state-related…
We may not be increasing capacity fast enough, but we are giving the kids grant money and huge loans so they can compete with each other in the bidding war for the few seats that do exist. Thus solving the problem once and for all.
A few more things:
1. This is all part of the fact that a BA is now almost required for any chance at a middle-class or upper-middle class lifestyle. It is no guarantee but it creates more certainty than trying for one without a college ID. Most kids know this and well attend university or college even if they are really not into it or in need of higher education.
2. I remember hearing about an admissions person at Harvard or some similar school saying that they could easily fill 5-7 Harvards every year with the applicant pool. If this is true, it says something about qualifications and that there is a luck to the draw.
3. Branding. For better or for worse, being able to put a certain number of schools on your resume says something. People take it as short hand for smarts and excellence. Plus these schools tend to be very close and look out for their own.
On #2, I believe it. Harvard is a private institution wherein the connections and experience plays a significant role, which makes difficult expansion to bring in the expanded qualified applicant pool. I do think that states need to work harder at this, however. Expand the flagships and when you can’t expand them anymore pump up other schools so that your state residents have a place to go commensurate with their abilities.
On #3, this is true and it is really one of the few reasons I care what Harvard does. (Why I can’t say “Whatever” and ignore it, I mean.) It’s also one of the reasons that, for the upper Ivies at least, I would actually consider paying for our child to go there. It presents branding and networking opportunities that simply cann0t be achieved anywhere else. But it’s a pretty short list of schools that I would make this exception for.
I think the problem is a combination of what Mike Schilling and New Dealer said, the number of qualified students keep rising but the number of elite schools remains constant almost frozen. The qualifications necessary to get into Harvard and other elite schools keep rising because of this, the admissions people need a way to determine who gets and who stays out. This favors people who come from the right familial and socio-economic background, which leads to inequality.
There are solutions but each one is kind of hard to implement. We could increase the number of elite schools, that is colleges and universities that are seen as desriable to go to. I have no idea how we can change the status of a school though. Another solution would be to switch to entrance examinations as a way to get into a particular college. This would still favor kids from certain backgrounds but at least kids whose parents can’t give them the proper activities won’t be hurt as hard. Again, implementation is the hard part. We can wait to the entire system implodes but that would be undesirable.
I agree that this isn’t a problem that there really is an easy solution to. In part because the actors aren’t really bad people. Nor are they doing anything wrong on a general level. It’s just that what they’re doing has adverse consequences, in my view. So long as we consider a small set of schools such a desired thing for important roles in our society.
Most of the colleges and universities that people want to go to are pretty old by American standard. Many, especially the really desirable ones in the original states, were founded during the early to mid-Colonial period. Most of the rest were founded before the 20th century. Most of the elite schools were already elite before the 20th century. This meant that at least since WWII, the number of desirable schools has been fixed while the number of qualified kids increased. Even the vamped up State University systems were not able to handle the increase of qualifed students as California’s system of higher education aptly demonstrates. At least we have more elite schools and desirable schools than most European and Asian countries.
Another solution is that the elite and decent schools could increase their class size. There is no reason why Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Vassar, or even schools at my level like American University can’t be much larger. Many of them have the budget to expand and their are PhDs who need jobs teaching college students. However, if schools increase their student population to the levels of Flag Ship state schools than they would not be the same.
Seems to me that one possible counterattack against this kind of arms race is… affirmative action.
It doesn’t solve the problem completely. I’ve worked in an admissions office at a fairly selective institution (everyone who knows anything about me knows which one 😉 ), and the reality is that good grades and high test scores are a dime a dozen. That said, you might underestimate the value of something like 4H Club or whatever. A well-written essay about sheep breeding would have turned a lot of heads on the admissions committee.
That may be true at a stellar state school, but the 4H or FFA is evidently a net negative on Ivy League admissions. And affirmative action isn’t really their friend (most of them, anyway). Nor, obviously, its white counterpart (Legacy admissions).
I advocate for need-based affirmative action.
Ditto here. I think that’s the fairest way to do it. It means less looking at specific (this person fills the minority checkbox, this person fills the spitkicker checkbox, etc.). Although that’s more general. I have less of an issue with specific, influential schools reaching out for cultural balance (including race, but not limited to such).
Well, as I’ve already noted hereabouts, I went to a state school. The program I attended was a special, early-entry medical program, however. Even so, I still think well of state schools. Most people from my medical school stayed in my home state to practice, which was what the school was chartered to do. But I had different ambitions, and I managed to land a residency in New York City associated with a much more elite private medical school because that’s where I set my sights. From there I’ve managed to build a career that’s gotten me on staff at Boston Children’s Hospital, where I could happily stay for the duration.
As far as I’m concerned, I’d rather my kids go to a good state school where they will thrive and shine than try to succeed based on the fancy name on their diploma.
A related piece from the NYT on women and assortive mating. Women are more likely to be concerned about education levels, though concern is increasing on both sides.
It kind of makes sense that people want mates of similar educational backgrounds. Hopefully, you want a mate you can talk to. If the educational levels are really different than that might be a bit hard.