An admissions case study from the WSJ, part 2

We’re examining a Wall Street Journal article about a young woman who applied to a lot of very selective colleges and didn’t get into most of them. You can read part one here.

What about her demographics? Since this was the Wall Street Journal, they had to make a bit of culture-war hay out of her story. She’s a middle-class white girl from a public high school in Texas. Let’s talk about each of those traits in turn.

Middle-class

So nobody in her family was a major donor. That path into the class was closed to her, but not to others. Let’s remember that admission is zero-sum. There are only so many beds, and the heirs will get some of them.

The next question is: could her family afford to pay full tuition?

Here’s what an anonymous dean of admissions said in response to a survey in 2011:

“The last thing we look at is money—whether the student has the money to pay—because we are a tuition-driven institution. This probably applies to 10-15% of the applicant pool. Also, although this question remains till the end, it can determine a student’s acceptance.”

Does ability to pay really matter at these schools with nosebleed-inducing rankings?

Yes. Harvard’s expert witness in the Students for Fair Admissions case said Harvard could not adopt a class-based admissions process because it would increase financial aid costs too much. $42 billion only goes so far these days, I guess!

Was she maybe too rich to get some low-income benefit? Those don’t help Asian and white kids much, as we know from that same 2011 poll of deans of admission, so it probably was not a major factor.

White

She’s not an underrepresented minority. She faced less of a penalty than she would have if Asian, but there was no thumb on the scale for her either. We’ll know more about affirmative action in October, when the Students for Fair Admissions cases against Harvard and UNC go before the Supreme Court.

What if she had some other ethnic identity? What is the optimal way to report one’s race for college admissions? We can discuss it in a one-on-one session, which you can book here.

Texan

Texas is a big, populous state, and applicants are usually competing with others from their own region. If she were from a sparsely populated state, like Wyoming, the competition would have been less stiff.

Public high school

She attended McKinney High School, and that did her no favors. I’m not speaking about the quality of the school, which may well be excellent. But it isn’t a feeder school. Between 2018 and 2020, it sent one kid to Princeton, none to Harvard, and none to MIT.

Feeder schools become so via a positive feedback loop: they send the kids colleges want (i.e. rich and/or smart ones), the colleges let more in to encourage a good relationship with the school, the counselor encourages smart and/or rich kids to apply and enroll at the favored college, and so on. Harvard’s dean of admission said under oath that he is trying to form “hundred-year relationships” with such schools.

Do you want to hear more insights from the Harvard litigation, and discuss how we can apply them to benefit your kid? You can book a one-on-one session with me here.

In the next post, we’ll consider this young woman’s application: her essays, list of schools, and intended major. I’ll also explain what advice I would have given her, if she were my client.