04-12-2015, 07:41 PM
I completely support Stanford's decision. I was able to attend Stanford on precisely this kind of program in the 1970s. My dad was a poorly paid teacher, my mom didn't work, and my older siblings had cleaned out the savings. Stanford wound up being the least expensive choice for me, because of its generous financial aid program.
Stanford's generosity to people like me, though, doesn't change the fact that college admissions inherently discriminate against low income people, simply because low income people go to low income schools and get very unequal K-12 educations. The classic study on this is here:
http://www.tcf.org/assets/downloads/tcf-carnrose.pdf
Colleges like Stanford, in tier 1, take 75% of their student from the top income quartile in the nation. The fact that they give ample financial aid to the 3% that they admit from the bottom quartile is, then, only part of the story. Those kids tend to have stories like mine--having a teacher in the family or access to some other resource that lets relatively poor people get a decent education despite the abominably bad public schools they have to attend in their poor neighborhoods. Certainly not typical of the bottom 25%.
Stanford, by the way, has always been better than the Ivies in this regard--the first to do need-blind admission, for example, and their financial aid reaches much further up the ladder. But until Stanford starts admitting a lot more low income students, its financial aid program will have a limited impact. Need blind admission almost guarantees they won't--it would almost take affirmative action for the poor to actually make a difference. Â
Which brings us to the real subject of this board. Athletics scholarships--for all their problems--probably do more to promote students from the lowest economic quartile than the other parts of the financial aids program. The extraordinary measures that Athletics Departments go to help students from underprivileged backgrounds succeed at elite universities like Stanford would need to be replicated for a great many non-athletes if elites were to play a bigger role in promoting social mobility.
Stanford's generosity to people like me, though, doesn't change the fact that college admissions inherently discriminate against low income people, simply because low income people go to low income schools and get very unequal K-12 educations. The classic study on this is here:
http://www.tcf.org/assets/downloads/tcf-carnrose.pdf
Colleges like Stanford, in tier 1, take 75% of their student from the top income quartile in the nation. The fact that they give ample financial aid to the 3% that they admit from the bottom quartile is, then, only part of the story. Those kids tend to have stories like mine--having a teacher in the family or access to some other resource that lets relatively poor people get a decent education despite the abominably bad public schools they have to attend in their poor neighborhoods. Certainly not typical of the bottom 25%.
Stanford, by the way, has always been better than the Ivies in this regard--the first to do need-blind admission, for example, and their financial aid reaches much further up the ladder. But until Stanford starts admitting a lot more low income students, its financial aid program will have a limited impact. Need blind admission almost guarantees they won't--it would almost take affirmative action for the poor to actually make a difference. Â
Which brings us to the real subject of this board. Athletics scholarships--for all their problems--probably do more to promote students from the lowest economic quartile than the other parts of the financial aids program. The extraordinary measures that Athletics Departments go to help students from underprivileged backgrounds succeed at elite universities like Stanford would need to be replicated for a great many non-athletes if elites were to play a bigger role in promoting social mobility.