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Just a few days ago, Stanford’s faculty senate voted to recommend a few measures that they believe will lead to greater economic diversity at the school, which they cite as out of balance. You can read some stats about the household income distribution at Stanford in the above mentioned article, but suffice it to say that Stanford is full of rich kids. More than 50% of students come from the families in the top 10% of family household income, and 17% come from the top 1%. 3.5% of kids come from the top 0.1% of household income, which means that there are roughly 250 kids on campus whose parents make $3M or more per year. This is juxtaposed against the just 280 kids (4% of students) who come from households that make less than $19K per year, or the bottom 20% of income.
One of the recommendations that the faculty has made is that applicants be required to reveal who, if anyone, helped them prepare their application to Stanford. The theory must be that rich kids get help preparing their applications, and poor kids don’t get that help. If the admissions officers know this, they can discount the impressiveness of the rich kids’ applications, and end up accepting more lower-income kids. Income disparity problems solved.
Will Stanford know that you got help on their application, if you don’t reveal it? Of course not.
It wouldn’t be truthful for us to say that we, at Union Hall Advising, are not a biased party in the argument for or against this measure. Our business is helping students build personal narratives that appeal to college admissions officers. And while we do pro-bono work for some lower-income students (as most IECs do), most of our clients have the money to pay for advising. But let’s put that bias aside for a minute and just look at how problematic the Stanford faculty suggestion is, recommend a few other ways that Stanford could achieve its goals, and maybe question the real reason for the proposal.
The argument against this recommendation starts and ends with enforcement. That’s because a requirement like the one proposed is virtually impossible to enforce. Will Stanford know that you got help on their application, if you don’t reveal it? Of course not. There is no way for them to know, beyond what they may already suspect under the current system. So should the school expect that applicants will voluntarily reveal something that will, by design, hurt them in the application process? No. At Union Hall Advising, we already recommend that our students not share that they are working with us - not for the sake of colleges - but to ensure that the student’s relationship with their school counselor remains intact. There is nobody more important than that counselor and we would never want that person to believe that someone else has supplanted that role. Stanford, or any other school, is secondary to this consideration.
So, apart from just setting thresholds for acceptances by income, how can Stanford help balance out the income inequality that is bothering professors, assuming the administration really wants to? We can think of a few ways:
According to Stanford’s most recent stats, 23% of undergraduates attended private school (although this is probably higher, since they break out International students into their own bucket even though most of them likely attended private school in their home countries). That’s 2.5X higher than the national average here in the US (where just 9% of kids are enrolled in private school). If the faculty is concerned about privilege affecting applications, why not apply it to the high school you went to? Certainly kids in top private schools are getting something that kids in public schools, especially low income schools, are not. Of course, Stanford still wants its share of kids from the top private schools, so don’t expect this to change.
To be clear, we have absolutely no issue with legacy preference in admissions. Legacy is a valid consideration for colleges. But Stanford has one of the highest rates of legacy admissions in the country among big-endowment schools, according to Bloomberg News. Nearly 18% of Stanford’s latest class were legacies or related to Stanford donors. Is it likely that many former Stanford graduates are sitting in the lower half of the nation’s household income distribution? Doubtful. When you give preference to legacy candidates, that is like giving preference to wealthier applicants. We don’t expect this to change, either.
Again, to be clear, we have no issue with schools giving preference to athletes. Despite all of the hand-wringing about athletes, they are providing something that schools strongly desire - success on the field. And it’s no easy feat to be a recruited athlete at a DIV1 school. These kids work in ways that are beyond impressive, even if they are not scholarly pursuits. And although Stanford has reduced the number of sports it will recruit for, the fact remains that athletes good enough to be recruited - in any sport - have spent a lot of money getting to be that proficient. If you don’t know what it costs to become that good in a sport, we can tell you it is tens of thousands of dollars and often as much as six figures. These kids are going to be wealthier by nature. Is Stanford ready to concede its sports prowess? Probably not.
But maybe income diversity isn’t the only reason for the faculty’s suggestion. Again, recognizing our own bias, we have wondered whether something else is driving this recommendation. Instead, might the faculty at Stanford be a bit underwhelmed by the academic quality of the undergraduates at the school (as ridiculous as this sounds)? These are surely all very smart kids, but given that Stanford is the most difficult school in the US to get into as an undergraduate, maybe the faculty believes they should be better. Maybe the reason they want to know who got help with an application is because what they are seeing in the classroom can’t possibly match how these students come across in the application process. We can imagine the argument: “you’re only accepting 4% of kids - and these are the chosen few you are accepting? I would have expected better.”
Maybe what the faculty really wants is not just a more socio-economically diverse student body, but also one that is more academic-leaning. When you accept a lot of athletes and legacies and development cases, it leaves fewer spots for those truly outsized scholar-types. When Dartmouth announced it was dropping a number of sports teams last year (a decision that has now been reversed), the school indicated that it wasn’t about budgeting, but about freeing up spots in their class for non-athletes. Maybe the Stanford profs want the same thing. Surely the faculty could have come up with more sure-fire approaches to improving economic diversity than by proposing a measure about application help that is not enforceable and is likely to have little impact relative to other possible measures.
