SubjectiveCoconut t1_iu1tggp wrote on October 27, 2022 at 10:39 PM

Reply to comment by [deleted] in [OC] Racial breakdown of students at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Stanford compared to students scoring 1400+ on the SAT by tabthough

This is true of college as a whole (and there are a lot of other wealth related inequities), but actually not for affording it, once you get into Harvard. These schools in the graphic all have really amazing financial aid.

If your household income is <120k for instance, you go to Stanford for free if you get in, flat out.

You are a bit screwed if you're properly middle class in a HCOL area esp. if your parents recently had a salary bump, but that's definitely not the same as low income students.

What is fucked up, is that a lot of the URM students at these places themselves come from insane amounts of wealth. The cross sectional view of race and wealth is probably a very different picture.

Far-Two8659 t1_iu1v76b wrote on October 27, 2022 at 10:52 PM

Sure, but you're missing the competitive piece. You have 10 students who have nearly identical academic records. You can admit 5. 4 of them come from significant wealth and are likely to bolster your endowment. 6 come from low income families and would qualify for full financial aid.

Of those 10, all 4 endowment boosters are getting in. Period.

SubjectiveCoconut t1_iu392gz wrote on October 28, 2022 at 5:59 AM

That's simply not true. Like the sheer amount of money these institutions have, you think you can bribe them with 1 or 2 million, or even 10 or 20 mil? Please.

Also the folks who work in admissions aren't at all the folks who work with the endowment.

The kind of wealth that can buy a Harvard seat can get in on soft power -- being a senator or a billionaire, and there aren't really a lot of those types. And tbh, that's not 100% a bad thing -- though I also can't defend the policy entirely. Because the reason Harvard is the ticket to a stable income and good life if you're from a lower class background is in a large part the connections you make there -- which involves meeting these types of rich kids.

As an aside, the competitive piece is why the URM component is larger in the final admissions. They're not being cut slack and let in because they're URM. There are just a lot of qualified kids. You could admit three times as many without lowering standards. And that means you can afford to optimize for diversity, to make the experience more enriching for the kids that attend.