I see this as a problem. The current system is continuing long-standing inequities.
It is, but those kids have an advantage … because there are still a ton of those kids for a relatively small number of slots at highly selective schools, it isn’t like those kids are definitely in. You can play the game and still lose. And I think admissions staff is very aware of the game - which is why it can be really hard for middle class urban white people to get in, but you’ll get that farm kid from North Dakota or that black kid out of Alabama who gets in without playing the game. Though whether those kids fit in a succeed when they weren’t groomed for it is another question.
Yes, but any system will do that. It’s the nature of systems. The POINT of privilege is that you can make systems work for you. A flat lottery would maybe help, but even then, people would leverage the system (at the very least, a flat lottery would have two pools–needs aid and doesn’t need aid–because schools have to have a certain % that are full pay.) And then their would be the issue of yield: once they had their list, are they able to offer $$ to the kids they really want? If so, the game will be about getting on that list.
Most of the highly selectives have a 4 year graduation rate north of 80%, many above 90%. Once they take a kid, they are pretty committing to supporting them as needed. It’s a big, big advantage of those schools: your local state school or CC doesn’t give a shit if you flunk out or get depressed or disappear.
One big problem you run into when trying to reform college admissions is that whatever hoops currently exist for people to jump through, how ever arbitrary it is or whatever negative values it reinforces, it winds up being perceived as an effort test so its really hard to dismantle.
It’s like the wonderlic test in the nfl draft. It’s pretty obviously a stupid way of measuring anything about how good a 20 year old kid will be at playing in the nfl, but if you don’t do well on it it’s a sign that you didn’t care enough to prepare yourself for it. So if the nfl stopped using it the teams would get mad that they lost a measuring stick for how much players care and aspiring players get mad that they don’t know how to proce they care anymore
To address this part of your OP, I read an interesting argument a while back that pointed out that college rankings do not typically factor affordability into their lists. Colleges would therefore pour tons of money into creating state-of-the-art labs and theaters and sports facilities, because remaining competitive in college rankings was much more important to them than keeping the admission affordable. The author suggested that if college rankings were to place better weight on affordability, and rank which college, for example, offered the best facilities with a fair sticker price, that colleges would actually have an incentive to keep their costs down.
Hence a consultant now advising a friend’s kid that service trip in an LDC is a negative indicator because it is highly correlated with people who are financially better off.
Apparently saying that you worked at McDonalds or Dunkin Donuts is now a positive.
I’m salivating at the idea that consultants will soon be telling our Asian friends to put their kids to work in fast food instead of Robotics team!
Mission trips, specifically, have a bad rep. You can imagine how tedious the 1000th essay about how an upper middle class kid paid a lot of money to go to a poor country to work in an orphanage and was amazed to discover poor kids are “normal”, whatever that means, is.
It’s not that it’s bad to be well-resourced. They live or die by the number of well-resourced kids they get. They just don’t want the well-resourced kid with a White Savior complex.
They will likely get through (though my cousin failed out of Vassar with a year to go due to mental health issues), but that isn’t the same as fitting in and succeeding. Michelle Obama talks a little about this in Becoming about her Princeton experience. I think she figured out how to fit in and succeed, but it isn’t necessarily easy. (I ran into a middle class Mom of a Harvard kid in my travels…she said ‘its a little tough when your friends can just fly to Vail for the weekend - and just borrow one of the parents private planes to do so - and you don’t own skis’)
I know what you mean, but I hear that SO much from people who basically don’t think brown kids should go to PWIs. They would never say that, or even think it that way, but that’s the subtext.
In my experience, some fit in and some don’t. But even if it’s not the best possible college experience, the opportunities for a first generation/low income student with a degree ( and internships and career placement support) at a top school just can’t be compared to their local university. The kid who doesn’t know anything about the professional world but wants to enter the professional class needs to go a school where that’s the expectation more than anyone. Living at home and going to Local University means you never get out of the normal of your community.
A friend’s daughter attends an exclusive New England prep school and I hear some of the same stories of privilege from the friend (who, by the way, works at the school in IT partly for the 90% tuition discount). The daughter gets horse riding lessons and is invited by friends on expensive vacations. It must be weird for the kids who are not as well off.
Oh, yeah. I’m not suggesting that brown kids shouldn’t go. Just that it may be as much of a slog to be there as it was to get there. And it isn’t just brown kids. Some of those schools have a lot of wealth wandering the campus, lots of legacies, lots of tribalism. We were warned off one school with the words “its the type of place where you need to carry the right purse.”
Haha! My daughter visited three prep schools in the Boston area. All three “student guides” who gave us the tours had one or both parents with their own Wikipedia pages. Two had their parents’ marriages announcements in the New York Times. One had their home featured in a design magazine (renovation budget $9M).
We are upper middle class people. We might as well have been animals in the zoo to these kids. Hell the Admissions officer we talked to whose own kid attended the school admitted that fitting in was a real problem for his white upper middle class kid
Not to mention that, leaving aside completely the issue of college applications, mission trips are often fucking pointless, because they tend to provide the one commodity that poor countries have plenty of: cheap, unskilled labor.
Obviously it’s different if the person has a specific, desirable skill or qualification, like nursing or an engineering or medical degree. But no high school kid is going to be able to go to a village in underdeveloped countries and design and build a new water bore, or fix cataracts. If you’re on a mission trip, chances are that you could have provided massively more help by simply taking one-quarter of what you spent on your airfare, and just sending it as a donation.
First, I said that some people with high school only do well - but the numbers are the numbers.
Second, you are considering a college education as a trade school as opposed to an entry to all sorts of other opportunities.
You have something against psych degrees, and it is true, a psych degree only isn’t that good in getting you something in your field.
But both my daughters have psych degrees. The first one has an econ degree also, the second one a German degree. The first one went to grad school, got a PhD, and now teaches marketing in a leading business school. The second one is not doing project management. They both have incomes well into the six figures.
The value of any degree is partly in the timing. Look at all the people who flocked to CS departments in the late '90s and graduated right in the middle of the Bust. Or petroleum engineers who graduated in the face of the oil bust. My son-in-law got a law degree, unfortunately in 2009.
I’m well aware of the cliche of the college grad working at Starbucks or waiting on tables, but the numbers show it is a good investment.
On our trip around the country we stopped at a CC in Wyoming (Western Wyoming, I think) and I was blown away by it. Beautiful place, dorms, really the equal to many 4 year colleges in living experience. (And dinosaurs, why we stopped!) California CCs (and New York ones) are more like high schools.
As I said, both. More people means more applications, easier to apply means more applications also.
But that’s my complaint. Using ‘typical’ or ‘average’ college wages is useless in determining if you should go to college, because the difference between majors is so large that using an aggregate of all of them as a generic excuse for going to college is really misleading.
What is the average salary of, say, the bottom 10 majors in terms of salary? What is the average if you take out the Ivy Leagues? You mentioned law. Law is an extremely bimodal field, salary-wise. There are two peaks for law degrees - one around $180,000, and another around $50,000. The higher peak is for graduates of Ivy League or BigLaw schools, who typically wind up in corporate law or giant law firms in New York or DC. The lower one is for everyone else who graduated from state schools, or who didn’t graduate at the top of their class, and they often wind up doing things like divorce law out of a strip mall office or something. If they get a job in law at all.
Telling people to go to state law school because the mean salary for lawyers is $91,000 is essentially lying to them with numbers. And that’s just the difference between schools in the same faculty. If you tell someone to go to college because you’ll make more money without qualifying it by faculty and school is also lying with numbers. Any statistic that includes engineers graduating from Harvard is not going to be valid for someone contemplating a degree in English from state U.
What we should be offering instead is particular advice: “So, you are thinking about going to state U? Here are the salary statistics for state university grads by faculty. Choose wisely.” Instead they are told to go to college, take anything they want, and it will be a good financial decision because college grads make more. So the poor kid takes out loans to get a degree in sociology or social work or History or English or gender studies, and set themselves back a decade financially.
And woe be to the ones who can’t find a job so take more loans to get a graduate degree, which is where the loan money gets really large. Or tgey are told to pursue a Ph.D and become a profesdor, and if they are ‘lucky’ spend a decade or two as an adjunct making peanuts with no benefits while trying to pay off $100,000 in student loans.
If you come from a weathy enough family that they can pay your way through college and support you after, by all means take one of those degrees, or use college to ‘find yourself’ or become a more well-rounded person. But if you are someone like me who had no help and no resources, going to college and taking the wrong major can be a life-destroying choice. Or at least, a choice that will leave you far behind your peers who made smarter decisions.
Wow. Just wow. If you chop off top earners, the average goes down. That goes for high school grads also. Don’t count the master plumber, or the top mechanic at a shop, or the baseball players who got drafted before college and the average goes down also.
Yeah, the kid who has a straight D average but who can take apart and put together a car blindfolded probably should become a mechanic and not go to college. Our school system has a vo-tech high school for these kids, and it is great. But your average kid deciding whether to go to college, who might be enticed by getting a salary right away, should know that on the average they will do better with a degree.Maybe a 2 year degree will be best, but something.
Some state law schools are pretty good. The one my son-in-law (and Elizabeth Warren) went to is a top 20 school.
He’s working for the state and making a bit more than $50K. He didn’t want to work 100 hour weeks, so Wall Street was right out.
My daughter, in the hated field of psychology, didn’t pay a penny for grad school and got money, just like I did in Computer Science. Business school and law school and med school is where you pay and pay.
Talent helps you with a degree, but it also helps you without a degree. Let’s worry about the majority of kids who aren’t brilliant in some field or another.
I don’t think this right, at least for many programs. When I was in graduate school in physics, the school paid me. TAs and RAs, stuff like that. Not a huge amount but enough to live on, and better than me having to pay them. It’s the same for my niece, who is currently a grad student in math.