There is an ongoing thread on
Ivy league admissions. The ivies and other very prestigious schools can afford need-blind admissions. The article below describes how need-aware admissions work at a selective private college. It discusses the correlation of SAT scores with family income but ignores research showing that SAT scores are more correlated to parental education than wealth and that the correlation to income is weak when parental education is accounted for. The article suggests that higher SAT scores of rich kids is due to test prep, but test prep has not been shown to raise scores substantially, and it is accessible to low-income students, as discussed in a blog post
SAT Prep for the Ultra-Rich, And Everyone Else.
What College Admissions Offices Really Want Elite schools say they’re looking for academic excellence and diversity.
But their thirst for tuition revenue means that wealth trumps all.
By PAUL TOUGH
New York Times
SEPT. 9, 2019
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Like most enrollment managers, Pérez contracts with an outside financial-aid-optimization company to perform econometric modeling on his applicant pool. The company he worked with, the year I was following his progress, was Hardwick Day, a firm based in Bloomington, Minn., that, after a recent round of consolidation in the industry, is now a division of a giant higher-education consulting company called EAB. Hardwick Day’s predictive models allowed its analysts to identify, based on the behavior of past students, precisely what tuition each individual applicant would probably be willing to pay. A white student from Danbury with, say, a 3.1 G.P.A. and a 1,200 SAT? Hardwick Day’s models might predict that if Trinity offered him a $15,000 discount, he would accept, but if it offered him a $5,000 discount, he would go to the University of Connecticut instead.
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