> we can assume that very little of that 5% is coming from the really truly poor
No, you can't, not when it's the whole basis of your argument. My impression at an elite university was that if anything the upper-working class was least represented; there were plenty of students from the top, and some from the very bottom.
If you're going to claim that Harvard or MIT's financial aid is poorly targeted, you need to actually provide evidence for this.
Upper working class and lower (perhaps) to mid-middle class families are traditionally screwed by the general financial aid system. They're too "rich" to quality for a lot of stuff for the poor, but aren't making enough to pay for these sorts of colleges out of pocket. And at least as of the '80s, if your parents did't pony up the expected amount, if you couldn't earn it yourself you were f*cked.
That said, MIT and Harvard have recently changed their systems; don't remember about Harvard, but as I recall MIT's aim is to eliminate crushing student debt. But I don't know how this plays out for them or in general for the expected parental contribution.
Ah, yes, by and large no one from a broken family attends MIT, at least as of the '80s, since both biological parents are or were expected to contribute and that very seldom works out, on top of all the other things divorce does that crushes children.
Harvard no longer charges anything (no family contribution, no student contribution) if your family is below ~60th percentile in income (currently around $65k/yr). Not sure if that's the range you have in mind with "mid-middle class", but it covers everyone in the middle quintile or lower. Between $65k and $150k they have a sliding scale, with full tuition charged over $150k.
Stanford has the most generous tuition exemption I think, charging $0 tuition if your family makes under $100k (~80th percentile). They throw in free room & board under $60k, too, so you effectively get paid to go to school in that case (paid only an amount sufficient to cover living expenses, but still something).
However, two universities providing free education to people around the median income or lower is hardly a replacement for the once-free public university system.
Yes, I was one of those upper working class kids who got screwed over by the system.[1] I got into but could not attend my first choice (Rose-Hulman) because I could not afford it and the financial aid package did not cover even half the cost of attendance. I dropped all efforts on second choice schools when I got the acceptance letter, because I never imagined I would not be able to go due to cost. I ended up at a Florida university that barely anyone outside the state really knows.
[1] There are, or at least were, a bunch of other aid/social support systems that screw over people in this band as well. I would not be surprised if this is contributing to wealth inequality.
This is disingenuous. Documentary evidence is restricted by privacy laws, but the anecdotal evidence is self-evident. That's why the evidence they do show, eg about the 70% in the top quartile, makes sense and is consistent with your comments (100-70-5=25).
Most "diversity" is from black lawyers, hispanic diplomats, and "poor white" children of liberal arts PhD's.
Well, my anecdotal experience disagrees with yours; I met the children of bricklayers and postmen and gardeners, not of liberal arts PhDs. I don't think I'm asking for an impossible standard of evidence; an income breakdown of financial aid recipients across whatever line the article author considers "truly poor" doesn't seem like it would inherently violate privacy laws.
Yes, but so what? Data itself is not evidence of relevance. Nor does lack of "data" imply lack of relevance. We know the requested data will not be forthcoming, so be-moaning the lack data is an empty gesture. It also ignores the data that is present.
But, you said there isn't any actual data, just anecdotes. So without any actual measurable, quantifiable data, the above shouldn't be considered scientific and could be incorrect.
There are questions worth asking that can't be answered (for now or forever) by science. Your comment betrays a kind of narcissistic empiricism the devalues anything outside it's own power.
> If you're going to claim that Harvard or MIT's financial aid is poorly targeted, you need to actually provide evidence for this.
I reject the question. It's not "financial aid," it's "perfect price discrimination." What other vendor demands to look through all of your financial records, including asking the IRS to verify facts, before figuring out exactly how much money you can pay?
Isn't the purpose of these donations to help your children, and their children, to get into the school? To establish your family as part of the tradition of that institution? To say that you like what that school is and does and that you want to connect yourself and your descendants to it?
Not really - most schools are pretty explicit (behind closed doors) about what it costs to get your kid in...submit an application, admissions looks at how qualified the candidate is, tells development, and they come up with a "suggested donation" a at Harvard a kid with good grades and SATs etc that would be a shoe in for say a top tier small liberal arts college (but wait list/rejection at Harvard) might cost ~$500k to $1M...so when you see people making really large donations it usually has more to do with legacy...or believe it or not appreciation for the opportunities afforded to them by their alma mater...that being said the whole notion of student aid is skewed by inflated/fake tuition prices...it's like paying $500 for an aspirin in the hospital the Medicaid patient paid 2% of that price, the Medicaid patient paid 10% private insurance 50% and cash 80-100% how much does an aspirin cost?
So either my high-school classmate was extraordinarily lucky to get admitted in spite of the fact that there was nothing spectacular about his academics/extra-curricular activities, or he was admitted because his father was alumni. Call me a cynic, but I'm still leaning towards the latter.
In reply to you and yajoe, obviously it doesn't hurt to be the child of an alum. But first MIT has to decide if you can do the work, e.g. the calculus and calculus based physics all students must take.
That sets a pretty high bar. The last time I checked, which was before the Great Recession changed the game and increased applicants, MIT was getting 13,000 applications a year despite the extreme amount of self-selection, of which they judged 3,000 could do the work. From that they construct a class of around 1,100 students.
Nice to clarify that, is there a list that seperates higher education institutions based on the preference of legacy admissions? Maybe someone at wikipedia could add legacy admissions yes or no in the right side panel of each university there is data. Ofcourse then universities will just say they don't consider legacy but they will do this anyway under the table...
Transparency on the alumni relations of each student is the only way to go I guess...
The most brutal school for admissions, where they look only at the students' performance and not at creating any kind of "well-rounded student body," is Cal Tech. I don't know how the others fall under them, but Cal Tech is on top of that particular list.
It should be noted, though, that this does not mean Caltech is unconcerned with a "well-rounded student body". They just do not use that as a factor when they are actually processing applications. If they want to change the demographics of the student body, they do so by trying to change the demographics of the applicant pool.
For instance, when I was a student there (class of '82), the biggest demographic problem within the student body was the severe imbalance between men and women. The undergraduates were only around 15% women. That's frustrating for pretty much everyone.
Caltech addressed this by trying hard to (1) get more qualified women to apply, and (2) convincing more of those who were accepted to choose Caltech over the other schools that accepted them. Essentially, they would treat a bright high school girl with a talent for math, science, or engineering the way schools with effective sports programs treated outstanding high school athletes.
Nowadays, around 40% of undergraduates there are women.
Indeed it is, and their requirements for all students go a fair amount beyond MIT's, including rigor. E.g. the last time I checked a few years ago you must show up on campus knowing single variable calculus and they start you on Apostol, although there's a later more practical track.
Similar to another poster, the only person admitted to MIT from my high school 10 years ago out of a class of 1200 from a wealthy suburb was the daughter of an alumnus who ran the interviews for the region. I just find it hard to believe Legacy doesn't play a factor even if there is no checkbox on the admission forms. The father stopped running interviews the year she got in.
Even Harvard, Stanford, and Yale each admitted 3 people that year (which, interestingly were different people -- it's as if they colluded to induce enrollment).
> Isn't the purpose of these donations to help your children, and their children, to get into the school?
There is certainly a subset that thinks like that. "Legacy" admission to a top tier school is probably not doing anyone any good, but that is a separate can of worms.
But to your point above: There are a serious number of donors who believe that they are doing a small part in improving society. As an example: Few people outside of tech know the name Cecil Green, but his donations have had lasting effect on several generations of students.
> Well it presumably helps the donor and his family.
Only in some ways. Folks definitely know they are legacy admits, and it wasn't clear to me that the resulting college experience helped either the donor or the family compared to more sensible placement.
As for the university, it might help in the short run financing, but eventually the admissions committees might notice that the legacy folks are taking up spaces from future donors of higher caliber.
Well then you really can't talk about a "meritocracy" with a straight face. Unless you define "merit" to mean "your parents have lots of money", which is a big part of how many people would argue "merit" is truly defined in the "real world" (along with race and gender).
The implicit premise of the author is incorrect. The majority of these donations are not about helping the poor. If some of the money ends up doing so, well, that's gravy, but not the motivating intent.
I think the author is trying to imply (somewhat ineffectively, imo) that because Ivy Universities are now seen as bastions of progressive thinking, that perhaps people think giving them money would further the progressive cause, whereas in reality, it is contributing to the widening wealth gap.
All that reducing donations to selective research universities will do is to reduce the quality of research. Given that universities like MIT and Harvard form the scientific backbone of the United States, I hesitate to condone the idea of sacrificing that for the sake of reducing Ivy League "elitism."
It shouldn't be a situation where we have to pick 1 option out of 2. If you really want to reduce the socioeconomic gap in education, spend more money on public education as a nation. Donations from wealthy donors with next to no affiliation to local community colleges won't solve anything.
Scientific research at elite Universities is largely funded by grants. Research grants even subsidize education at some places.
So reducing donations to the University is not likely to have a huge impact on research (at least in my field - biomedicine). If you want to donate to research, a better bet is to donate to one of the research foundations that disseminate grants to universities, and even better, to a foundation that restricts the amount of the funding that can be applied to administrative costs (which are often as much as 40% of the amount funded).
In the United States, most scientific research is funded through government grants from agencies like the Department of Energy, Defense Department, or the National Science Foundation. Comparatively little research is actually funded from the endowments/operating budget of the universities themselves.
Please don't make such a blanket statement. Donations do indeed fund scientific research directly. When a faculty member is hired, they get a "startup fund" to get through their first few years before they have grants, most of which is donated money. There is also a lot of research which is not "billed" to a grant, but is still meaningful, and supported by "internal funds" which are smaller university fellowships for pilot projects. These internal funds are also the only source of funding outside the physical sciences (for areas like humanities and social science) and are almost entirely provided for by donations.
The amount of funding that the University supplies directly is obviously dependent on the field, and it's own traditions. However, in biomedicine, when a new prof has "startup" funds, these are often linked to their contributions to teaching and "service", i.e. admin, pastoral care, etc; they can later "buy-out" their service obligation by raising grants equal to their salary and costs, or more. So the "startup" funds are usually not entirely paying for research.
What is funded through the endowment, though, is university infrastructure, including laboratories. Also, building maintenance if funded through research grants, that is the dreaded "indirect costs". The steep cut in federal support for research means that universities need to find other avenues to maintain their building stock.
Most people don't donate to an alma mater just to support financial aid for lower-income students, nor just because they want to establish their family as a legacy; they donate in order to improve the institution and the quality of education, research, and inspiration it produces. It's a way of paying it forward, much the same philosophy as why people might go into education.
The whole article is based on the assumption that people make donation to universities as charitable donations. I find that a bit unrealistic. Give money to universities are gesture of appreciation from alumni, gain more opportunities of networking/recognition from the university for the donor and his/her family, etc. For donations with the pure purpose of helping the poor, there are other institutions for that.
The dynamism of America partly depends on new entrants into the uber-elite of money and power. (Poor kids becoming super rich within one generation. They shake things up and change the way things are done.
This is partly a result of:
1. Poor kids getting into elite universities
2. The existence of highly elite universities
If you provide less funding to the Harvards and MITs of the world do you really expect them to keep getting better and better?
And if the overtime become "less awesome" then the benefits one derives from attending will decline.
In that case, the poor kid that managed to get into Harvard, etc (or any of the Ivys, they all provide great financial aid) wouldn't benefit the way today's attendee does. The path for that poor kid to break into the uber wealthy just became harder.
The Mark Zuckerbergs, Steve Schwarzmans of the world make America dynamic. Poor or middle class kids that break into the uber wealthy and disrupt the way things are done.
Non-elite universities don't make that path easier - regardless of how much money you throw at them.
Elite universities provide poor kids with things we need:
1. Status / credibility - maybe not important in tech, but definitely important in high-finance, politics, etc
2. Exposure to those who come from families that have done really well
3. Access to leading faculty and research opportunities
You can throw tons of money at non-elite colleges, they still will not be able to provide the above. I'm not saying that non-elite universities are useless - they are incredibly important for having a healthy middle class.
But what makes America great in my opinion is that every few years 5-10 kids that grew up poor make it to the top, change our world, and kick those that were complacent while at the top out.
If you contribute $5,000,000 to Harvard or MIT, the marginal number of students from lower-middle-class and down backgrounds that would be admitted over the next 10 years would change by 0. They are already need-blind.
There are other valid reasons to donate to a university, but the really big names aren't going to start recruiting more poor kids if they only had a little more money.
Agree completely. At the margin, $5m won't make a difference, just like at the margin donating $10 to cancer research won't make a difference. But that $5m check along with many other checks does make a difference - both in helping these school achieve even higher levels of excellence and in their ability to fund poor and middle class student tuition.
Elite institutions with big endowments get so little of their operating budget from tuition that I don't think it's outrageous to expect one to break ranks eventually and go tuition-free.
Then I will happily give, and I expect a lot of deep pocketed alumni feel the same.
I believe Stanford University gets something like 40% of its annual budget from tuition (other top universities are similar). That's not huge, but it's big enough to make it totally infeasible to simply stop charging tuition.
For better or worse, these figures aren't quite as significant as they seem, because a lot of alumns restrict what their donations can be used for. E.g. the Widener one for Harvard's main library, which was fantastically restrictive even for that, and also required a swimming test since a son died in the Titanic disaster (not that being able to swim would have made much difference in water that cold).
So, yeah, the interest could pay for all the tuition, except X of it is restricted to the law school, Y to the med school, Z to arts and sciences but not in any way that it can contribute to tuition, etc.
Ah, and tuition money is particularly valued, because it's unrestricted....
It could, except that Harvard already uses a lot of the interest on that endowment to cover expenses. If they didn't have the endowment, tuition would have to be a lot higher.
Now would also seem to be a bad time, certainly MIT and Harvard are really hurting for operating and capital funding. Brand new Olin College (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_W._Olin_College_of_En...) had to drop their full tuition offering to all students in 2009.
Tuition isn't really the issue. Most top schools have needs-blind admissions, so conditional on getting in, you will get funding if you need it.
Inequality stems from the fact that by the time they reach college admissions, students from richer families are already more qualified (at least in the eyes of admissions committees). Addressing this would require either changing the admissions process, or helping students from poorer families to become better qualified prior to the admissions process.
It's totally an issue. If you're a transfer student, you'll find that the few universities that go on about how proud they are to be need-blind and offer a great education to everyone!...now all consider need in admissions, or don't offer to meet your need even if you do get in.
Considering many low-income students start out at a community college, taking even one credit at one effectively locks you out from virtually all prestigious universities. It used to be the case that you COULD go from community college to a fancy private, but it's all but impossible these days.
Combine this with what you mentioned in the second part of your comment, and low-income kids are screwed both pre and post high school. It also screws over kids of all income ranges with highly dysfunctional/abusive families (who won't help with college, didn't support your pre-college academics/extracurriculars, won't sign your FAFSA, etc), since the only thing you can afford is a community college in those cases as well.
Just because money benefits the rich disproportionately, it does not mean this money is not well spent. This is because the students at fancy colleges are not only richer, but also smarter, more ambitious, and harder working, on average. Furthermore, donations don't only benefit students, but researchers working at those universities.
So while giving to fancy colleges is not necessarily the best use of money, it is not enough to show that the students there are privileged. If the students at those colleges were only there because of their privilege, then the author's point would make more sense.
This post made me wonder why there isn't a Watsi for post-secondary education. Why not make a service where people could contribute bursaries directly to students or community colleges?
One reason is that community college is already really well priced, and low-wealth students are currently eligible for financial aid at most institutions (community college and other colleges)
If your goal is to help increase the # of high-achieving, low-income students at highly-selective colleges, you could choose to support a program such as QuestBridge. They find / link low-income high school students -- who otherwise wouldn't have the means or access to even apply to many of these schools -- with partner universities.
I'm not sure if the article is trying to persuade potential donors to instead consider "lesser" colleges which might have more socioeconomic diversity. I guess it becomes a question of supporting: fewer low-income students at "better" schools; more low-income students at "worse" schools; or a totally different strategy to level the economic playing field in higher education.
The last paragraph of the article answers your question: "If you want to do something useful for low-income people, give them money. If you want to do something useful for the education of low-income people, give some money to an institution that educates kids from low-income families. That could be a community college or a public charter school or an afterschool program or neighborhood school or whatever you like."
These elite colleges (like the ivy leagues) will often place significant weight on "family legacy" factors when deciding whether to admit students. What more do we need to say?
I would argue that perpetuating hierarchy is almost the point of big donations. Yale alums are invested in making sure their alma mater's endowment keeps pace with that of Harvard and Princeton. Etc. The other part is tribalism. If you're a Harvard alum you donate to Harvard because you believe in their mission and want to help them carry out that mission. Other schools can depend on their own tribes for the same.
I don't think donors are confused about these motivations.
Does that really apply to people with outstanding skills in, e.g., programming? I can't imagine something less relevant to programming than formal education. It's not a good indicator for me.
Until big business changes - or heck even hiring at facebook - you need that piece of paper. It's absurd a lot of times - forced to take a lot of meaningless classes just to get a piece of paper that isn't worth a hole lot vs real world experience.
No, you can't, not when it's the whole basis of your argument. My impression at an elite university was that if anything the upper-working class was least represented; there were plenty of students from the top, and some from the very bottom.
If you're going to claim that Harvard or MIT's financial aid is poorly targeted, you need to actually provide evidence for this.