The Proles at the Private School
I’ve been trying my best to avoid blogging about the college admissions process and all its assorted issues because, frankly, I spend enough time thinking about those issues as it relates to myself. But MeganMcArdle had this to say about the incredibly generous financial aid packages that Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League are offering:
“So those schools are less than 2% of the total American school system,” he said. As far as I can tell, that disparity has only grown in the intervening years; thanks to unfavorable demographics, getting into college now is much more competitive than it was in my day. As long as you’re drawing half your student body from schools that charge tens of thousands of dollars a year in tuition, playing with your financial aid package is the poverty-fighting equivalent of sending a complementary fruit basket to the local orphanage at Christmas.
While it’s true that Ivy League schools, despite their strikingly egalitarian financial aid policies (zero loans, all grants for families earning up to 50-60 thousand, very generous after that) mostly draw from the upper crust, private schools themselves also offer quite a bit of financial aid. While I’m sure Megan will use her own private high school as an example, at my own high school, over half the kids receive some form of financial aid. Of course, these numbers vary from high school to high school andultimately we shouldn’t use percentage of students from private high schools as a proxy for class diversity — we should just use income numbers.
It’s also unreasonable to expect Ivy League schools to be truly reflective of the country’s income numbers — dispute the level correlation between inteligence and income all you want, but it’s certainly true that there are more qualified applicants in the top quartile or quintile than in the other ones. But in so much as Ivy League schools can be egalitarian, they are taking all the right steps and should be commended for doing so.
