More On Ivy Admissions

While researching Wednesday's post on foreign students, I ran into this essay from last July at Forbes by Michael Nietzel, President Emeritus of Missouri State University, How The Admission Practices Of Elite Colleges Perpetuate The Advantages Of The Wealthy. Again, received opinion by writers like David Brooks of the New York Times and The Atlantic has been that the elite colleges are meritocratic, admissions are driven by SATs, grades, and extracurriculars. Nietzel's argument is that the numbers simply don't point in that direction.

While only 10% of students scoring at the 99th percentile on the SAT/ACT from middle-class families attend an Ivy-Plus college, 40% of similarly high-scoring students from families in the top 1 percent of the income distribution do so.

. . . The authors [of a recent Brown University study] estimate that this higher admissions rate leads to 103 extra students being admitted from the top 1% in a typical Ivy-Plus class (of 1,650 students) relative to a theoretical benchmark where students are admitted at the same rates across the parental income distribution based on their test scores.

The study quantifies the effect of the admissions "baskets" that Jerome Karabel discusses in The Chosen, especially for legacies, applicants from private "feeder schools", and children of major donors.

Legacy admission policies exerted the largest effect, with legacy applicants admitted at higher rates at all levels of parental income. The biggest boost was given to high-income legacy applicants, who are five times more likely to be admitted to an Ivy-Plus college than peers with comparable credentials who are not legacies. Legacies would account for 47 of the 103 extra students admitted from the highest income levels.

The authors also found that while children of alumni at a given Ivy-Plus college are much more likely to be admitted at that college, they are no more likely than non-legacies to gain admission at other Ivy-Plus colleges, suggesting that they do not have stronger academic credentials.

The weight placed on non-academic factors like extracurricular activities, leadership capacity, and personal traits had the next largest effect, accounting for 31 of the 103 extra top 1% students. Among students with similar SAT/ACT scores, those who attend private high schools tend to obtain much higher non-academic ratings (but similar academic ratings) than students attending public high schools.

Tellingly, the preference for private school applicants extends to athletic admissions as well:

The remainder of the high-income admissions advantage was due to athletic recruitment, yielding another 25 extra students from the top 1% because recruited athletes come disproportionately from high-income families.

Karabel explains this, at least in part, by noting that colleges recruit for upscale sports like rowing, skiing, and lacrosse, for which many public high schools do not have programs, but prep schools do. The study concludes that by eliminating legacy preferences, a more egalitarian review of extracurriculars, and a more egalitarian athletic recruitment policy,

those three changes would increase the share of students from the bottom 95% of the parental income distribution attending Ivy- Plus colleges by 8.7 percentage points, equal to about 144 students in a typical Ivy-Plus college class.

This gives at least a hint of the relative sizes of Karabel's "baskets" for legacies, preppies, and recruited athletes: if those were eliminated, 8.7% of the current Ivy-plus student body would be replaced by students not from the top 5% of family incomes. But based on the information I cited in Wednesday's post, this leaves out the nearly 25% of foreign students in typical Ivy-plus student bodies, so, leaving racial preferences and children of celebrities and politicians aside, we're looking at over 30% of Ivy-plus student bodies who've likely been admitted via non-meritocratic applicant categories. And, because these are the ones paying full fees and likely future big donors, they're preferred customers.

I've always had a lurking question in the back of my mind, ever since the president of my Ivy undergraduate instution remarked something to the effect of, "We know that our smartest students always earn grades in the B and C range". He blurted this out, but he never expanded on it, and putting it in perspective, I can see why he wouldn't -- it's a clear effect of admitting something over 30% of the student body on a basis other than grades, test scores, and non-preferential extracurriculars. If your most profitable customers aren't your smartest, you're going to skew the whole program to accommodate them, not just admissions.

This also begins to explain another phenomenon I saw as an Ivy undergraduate: the "hot shot", except in "shot", we substituted the "o"with an "i". The expression would be "Bob Throckmorton is a hot [shot}," which implied basically that he was going to be fast-tracked through whatever program was involved -- it usually had something to do with grandiose social schemes in areas like international relations, energy policy, or urban studies. Somehow, Bob was going to get special treament, though it was also understood that it was less through his own merit than through some sort of patronage; whatever it was, Bob was predestined to be an important guy.

I don't know how you'd conduct a study that gave insight into this, but I'll bet that a lot of hot [shots] wind up in cabinet-level jobs. This is probably one reason we're in the mess we're in.