6 ms·

How do you determine the class of student being admitted?

• HWR_14 4y ago
  Geography and parental income would be good proxies.
  • giraffe_lady 4y ago
    Anything else those would be good proxies for themselves?
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • HWR_14 4y ago
      I assume you have something in mind.
  • anonporridge 4y ago
    Unfortunately, parental income can be a terrible proxy. High income doesn't necessarily indicate wealth or high class. It usually indicates highly educated, high level working class, like doctors and software engineers. Families with generational wealth often have very little direct income. All wealth is in assets that they borrow against, which doesn't count as income. Even when they take income or realize capital gains, they often do it erratically, so it can be fairly easy to game a university admission that looks at parental income by avoiding income for the years universities request.
    • heavyset_go 4y ago
      I grew up with kids of wealthy families that were able to get student aid based on their parents' incomes, which were low to non-existent.
      • anonporridge 4y ago
        Meanwhile, I know people whose parents had very high incomes, but didn't actually have any real, accessible wealth saved, didn't save for their children's education, and had slept walked into too expensive of a lifestyle to divert any of their income. Because their parents made too much, they got zero financial aid and ended up covered in mountains of loans because their parents didn't actually have the money to give them. To be fair though, the fault in this case lies exclusively on the irresponsible parents who had the option to provide for their children's education, but opted to leave them to the wolves.
    • andirk 4y ago
      Parental income is a terrible proxy? The abilities of ones guardians growing up is a huge factor in what opportunities someone is offered and a lot of that is dictated by how much money is available for the child. Other aspects like the intelligence, love, care, wit of the parents and child may be larger factors, but that's not something one can quantify on a form.
      • sokoloff 4y ago
        My oldest will be applying to college in 2027. If it would maximize their chances of admission, I could arrange for my 2026 income tax return to show any 5 or most 6 figure sums that I needed. If I really needed to, I could do the same for 2025 as well. Showing a household income of $75K in that year/those years won't change the more comfortable financial situation they grew up in.
      • closeparen 4y ago
        Brilliant and accomplished people don't always pursue wealth. In certain subcultures it's crass, uncouth, one might even say low class to pursue something too practical or employable, to be too interested in material things and conspicuous consumption. These people aren't rich on paper but they are rich in genetics, habits, attitudes, values, vocabularies, media diets - and they raise brilliant, accomplished kids. Affirmative action for high academic performers subject to low family income would be an almost perfectly tailored handout for this cohort. Filtering on parental education level might knock most of them out & get better at targeting kids who outperformed their circumstances in more surprising ways. But is the legibility or surprisingness of the kid's outperformance really the point? I think maybe what you'd want to do is give some slots in the meritocracy to kids who are not outperformers at all, but chosen randomly, without regard to academic performance.
        • sokoloff 4y ago
          Is a random selection without regard to academic performance really a "[slot] in the meritocracy"?
      • PeterisP 4y ago
    • HWR_14 4y ago
      I assumed by class they were speaking about the delta between doctors/software engineers at Amazon and warehouse workers at Amazon. I assume generationally wealthy families applying to colleges are already identified by admission departments and their less qualified children's admission is (and would remain) predicated on donating to the library fund.
  • closeparen 4y ago
    That's a great way to get a class full of front-line gentrifier families whose breadwinners are academics, journalists, artists, nonprofit staffers, political aides, social workers, etc. Class is not income, and finding the highest-performing kids from lower-earning families and neighborhoods is an almost perfect strategy for demonstrating the gaps. Of course that's my own background, so I'd take it!
    • HWR_14 4y ago
      Those of course aren't perfect proxies! We can add more factors to account for that. But it's a start.
      • closeparen 4y ago
        Parental education level would be much better.
        • HWR_14 4y ago
          That adds another datapoint. And the schools attended. A lawyer with a JD from Yale and an undergrad from Harvard is in a different class from someone from a low-tier lawschool.
• mc32 4y ago
  (Parental) Income bracket is not a bad place to start + parental educational achievement.
• psychlops 4y ago
  The amount of income their family is unable to hide?
• willcipriano 4y ago
  Average annual income in the zip code that they spent the most time in high school in.
• kube-system 4y ago
  There's a number of factors that could be used, but skin color is probably not as good as several others.
• Manuel_D 4y ago
  How do you determine the race of a student? "Class" can be designated by objective measures like family income, whether or not parents are university graduates, etc. By comparison, how do you determine if an applicant is Black or Latin? Do you have them prove ancestry all the way back to Africa? Brazil is experiencing this issue [1]: > And that's when this story gets even more complicated. Because in order to "prove" that he was Afro-Brazilian, his lawyers needed to find some criteria. He went to seven dermatologists who used something called the Fitzpatrick scale that grades skin tone from one to seven, or whitest to darkest. The last doctor even had a special machine. > A few weeks ago, these race tribunals were made mandatory for all government jobs. In one state, they even issued guidelines about how to measure lip size, hair texture and nose width, something that for some has uncomfortable echoes of racist philosophies in the 19th century. 1. https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/09/29/495665329/for-affirmative-action-brazil-sets-up-controversial-boards-to-determine-race https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/09/29/495665329/...
  • steveBK123 4y ago
    Race is by definition self-reported, and is easily gamed, as recent high profile stories show. 1950s America everyone wanted to be white. 2020s America everyone wants to identify as something else. This should tell you how the incentives have inverted. Class is also easy to game and hard to define. And what is class - educational attainment, income, labor vs capital, all 3, 2 out of 3? How do you conclusively determine educational attainment of parents beyond what they self-report, in an automated, accurate, low-cost way? Income could be low for high status jobs like professors, journalists, non-profits, etc. Some of the highest status people you meet in blue cities have seemingly little income but high income. Assets are self reported and hideable. Is a plumber who didn't graduate high school but runs his own business making $90k in a LCOL area where homes cost $150k upper or lower class? What about a plumber working under someone else in a HCOL area making $120k but where homes cost $500k?
    • Manuel_D 4y ago
      Educational attainment is pretty easy to judge. Parents almost certainly have linkedin profiles. Census data also asks for education attainment. Incomes and assets are also attainable via tax info. Sure, they can cheat on income taxes, but usually that's making $100M in assets look like $60M. Just based on address they can at least determine the value of your home. An applicant attending Deerfield Academy that reports a family of low income and no parental education is going to ring some alarm bells, and probably isn't going to pass muster. We don't need to conclusively define class, but we can at least quantify it relative to other applicants. Is the plumber making $90k upper classic? We don't need to pin a label onto it, but we can say they're higher than someone making $40k a year and not as high class as someone making $500k a year.
• kome 4y ago
  not a great indicator, but good enough proxy for class: family income. class is, of course, not about income. class is about your position in the productive system and ownership. very rich people might have NO income at all. but let's say that for most, family income is a good enough proxy.
• kelseyfrog 4y ago
  Easy: The proportion of their or their parents' income which comes from labor as opposed to earnings on property.
  • happyopossum 4y ago
    So an athlete with a $250m contract would be lower class because all of his income is from labor? That’s ridiculous.
    • kelseyfrog 4y ago
      We probably have very different definitions of class that's causing this confusion. The definition of class I'm using is laid across a spectrum from those who sell their labor on one end to those who make money from the ownership of property on the other. The reason I use this definition is because the economic relations are reflected in social relations. The social relations one has when they primarily live off the earnings of property are qualitatively different from those who don't - this difference forms the basis of class. Know that this isn't an idiosyncratic definition - the cradle it was born in was the same cradle that bore sociology itself.
  • klyrs 4y ago
    My cousin couldn't afford to go to college because his mom made peanuts and his dad ran off. Couldn't get financial aid because he needed both parents' tax returns. Forcing kids to prove they're poor means rejecting poor kids with absentee parents. Antisocialism is the root of so many of America's problems. Tax wealth, seize inheritance, and don't charge for higher education. Guillotines only work for the people who can afford them.
• andirk 4y ago
  Income. It's widely available and often already submitted for scholarships. To say income===class is a generality but it's pretty close.
• Mikeb85 4y ago
  I mean, it basically boils down to money. Set prices high enough and you get those who can afford it. And if you've always been elitest, then alumni admissions will all be upper class as well.
  • closeparen 4y ago
    Elite schools practice need-blind admissions and have generous need-based financial aid. The more elite the school, the higher and gentler the taper to full price as you go up the family income scale. Poor kid gets a full ride anywhere. Middle class kid gets a full ride from Harvard, half off Chicago, sticker price at Northeastern. Only the mediocre private schools (or stingy rich parents) actually price kids out. Almost all of the SES filtering is based on grades, test scores, and essays.
• aiisahik 4y ago
  Many people have given answers to this very good question. But I'm going to ask another: WHY does the admission process need to take into account the social class of the student? - Fairness? College admissions at Ivy Leagues are not a fair process. It advantages legacies, donors. - Diversity? Then why not also account for race or national origin too? - An attempt to fix the inequities of US society? Why do this at the college level when 90% of the scars of a poor childhood are already set in stone? Why do it with a student class of only 5000? Why not admit 50,000 into Harvard each year then? Ivy Leagues' admissions standards are designed to optimize one thing only: the prestige of the institution. That's it. That's why it has mostly rich kids but also a few poor ones to make it look like it's an egalitarian place. That's why it admits some black and brown students even if their SATs are not that high - so it can make it look like it's an institution that promotes racial justice. Society should not look to Harvard and Yale to fix all its racial and economic inequity problems. Parents of Asian kids should not look to Harvard and Yale as the ultimate universal badge of academic merit - it's not. Harvard and Yale are going to look after their own interests - and it's all about prestige. And yes I went to both an ivy league and state university. I know the game.
  • PeterisP 4y ago
    > That's why it has mostly rich kids but also a few poor ones to make it look like it's an egalitarian place. The way I see it, the admissions design goal for prestigious universities is to ensure that the smartest students in the country and the richest students in the country get the same indistinguishable diploma - their diploma - and that way they sustain and reinforce both their prestige and funding.
  • danielscrubs 4y ago
    Meritocracy basically. You want the hardest working and/or smartest at the top in your country to compete with other countries. Let them work hard, take taxes and distribute to the other classes pensions. Everyone wins. Having PhDs that are presidents seems like a great indicator that the democratic system is not corrupt.