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Audie Cornish talks to Caroline Hoxby, an economics professor at Stanford University, about her study on expanding college opportunities for low-income students. They discuss how providing low-income applicants with more information about selective college can improve application and acceptance rates.
Basic Marketing May Be To Blame For Fewer Low-Income Students At Top Universities
A study released last week by researchers at Harvard and Stanford quantified what everyone in my hometown already knew: even the most talented rural poor kids don’t go to the nation’s best colleges. The vast majority, the study found, do not even try.
A bunch of private colleges have been in a financial aid arms race for years now, offering bigger and bigger merit scholarships to lure the best students.
This is nice for the students who get big merit scholarships. But it’s not so nice for everybody else. Colleges have to come up with the money for those merit scholarships somehow — and they’ve done it in part, by jacking up tuition. (We did a story on this last year.)
“This is not a healthy situation if what we are trying to do is utilize the limited resources that we have to educate students,” S. Georgia Nugent, president of Kenyon College, told me today.
Big College Merit Scholarships Are A Problem (If You Don’t Get One)
Only 34 percent of high-achieving high school seniors in the bottom fourth of income distribution attended any one of the country’s 238 most selective colleges, according to the analysis, conducted by Caroline M. Hoxby of Stanford and Christopher Avery of Harvard, two longtime education researchers. Among top students in the highest income quartile, that figure was 78 percent.
The findings underscore that elite public and private colleges, despite a stated desire to recruit an economically diverse group of students, have largely failed to do so.
Many top low-income students instead attend community colleges or four-year institutions closer to their homes, the study found. The students often are unaware of the amount of financial aid available or simply do not consider a top college because they have never met someone who attended one, according to the study’s authors, other experts and high school guidance counselors.
Law school applications are headed for a 30-year low, reflecting increased concern over soaring tuition, crushing student debt and diminishing prospects of lucrative employment upon graduation.
Law Schools’ Applications Fall as Costs Rise and Jobs Are Cut
And others you can go to cheap, but first you have to get in.
In the case of GW, the university — for at least a decade — has been submitting incorrect data on the class rank of new students. For the most recent class of new students, George Washington reported that 78 percent of new students were in the top 10 percent of their high school classes. The actual proportion of such students is 58 percent.
George Washington U. admits to submitting false data on class rank
Higher education experts say that giving students an opportunity to explore the real world helps them mature. And early research reveals that once they restart their academic studies, they actually perform better than those who go straight from high school to college.
An estimated 1.2 percent of first-time college freshmen take a gap year, most of them male students, according to the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California Los Angeles.
“These are still small percentages,” said John Pryor, director of the cooperative institutional research program at HERI. But college admission officers say the gap year is gaining momentum.
The idea of a four-year college partnering with a two-year college isn’t new. But rarely is the four-year institution a large, private university with selective admissions that offers advising throughout the student’s time at a community college. It is rarer still for the four-year school to award credit that students can use to finish their associate degrees.
But students in the DePaul Admission Partnership Program are guaranteed a spot at the nation’s largest Roman Catholic college if they finish their community college studies with a 2.0 GPA, and they receive $2,000 a year after transferring if they achieve a 3.0.
DePaul’s community college partnership aims to streamline transferring
A new survey of admissions officials at the 75 most competitive colleges and universities (defined as those with the lowest admit rates) finds that there are distinct patterns, typically not known by applicants, that differentiate some holistic colleges from others. Most colleges focus entirely on academic qualifications first, and then consider other factors. But a minority of institutions focuses first on issues of “fit” between a college’s needs and an applicant’s needs.
New research on how elite colleges make admissions decisions
