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WFU and Economic Diversity

ipitytheblue

ipitytheblue

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Didn't see this posted; thought it may elicit some interesting opinions. Wake ranks #271 of 283 selective institutions in percentage of undergraduates receiving Pell Grants (and it's dropped 4 points since 2011).

NYT article
Full list of schools

Compared with other universities, Duke has not enrolled many low-income students. A recent academic study of 12 elite colleges — the eight in the Ivy League, as well as Duke, Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago — found that Duke gave some of the largest advantages in the admission process to students from families making at least $250,000 a year. Only about 12 percent of Duke students in recent years have received Pell Grants, the largest federal scholarship program, which is typically available to families in the lower half of the income distribution, earning $60,000 a year or less. By comparison, the Pell shares at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, M.I.T. and Columbia have each recently hovered around 20 percent. Federal data suggests that Duke also has fewer middle-income students, coming from families that earn too much to qualify for Pell Grants but still less than $100,000 a year. The difference between Duke and its peers amounts to several hundred lower- and middle-income students who have been missing from its campus every year.
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The California Institute of Technology and Notre Dame also stand out as colleges that have had very large endowments and low economic diversity (although officials at each school told me they were starting to increase their Pell shares). There are a few dozen others with smaller endowments per student but still enough money to enroll many more lower- and middle-income students than they do, including Bates, Brown, Bucknell, Georgetown, Georgia Tech, Oberlin, Reed, Tufts, Tulane and Wake Forest. Each of these colleges, like Duke, has decided not to enroll many of the talented working-class students who are qualified to attend — and each would prefer not to call attention to this policy. Duke says it is working to rectify the situation and has shown some early signs of progress, with an increase in Pell Grant recipients among the first-year students who arrived on campus this August. Yet Duke remains a stark example of the ways in which elite higher education replicates privilege at least as much as it provides opportunity. “We absolutely have some work to do,” Bennett said, “but we’re committed to doing it.”
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In using Pell Grants as the only barometer, wouldn't that ignore those on athletic scholarships from working-class backgrounds? My guess is that since Wake's student body is much lower than Duke's such that the percentage of those on athletic scholarships are higher, the resulting percentage of working-class students might actually be a higher number than is represented. Same when compared to other larger schools, and separate from the fairy colleges on that list like Bates, Tufts, and Oberlin that don't have full athletic scholarships. And wtf is Reed? Seems like a fairly flawed study in that regard.
 
JuiceCrewAllStar said:
2&2 are you arguing that Wake does, in fact, have strong socioeconomic diversity?
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I don't want to put words in 2&2's mouth, but I think he is arguing that student athletes may add to the socioeconomic diversity of the campus, yet they are not captured by the Pell grant metric. I agree with him, and as he points out, this may be magnified at a small school like Wake Forest. I assume student athletes are included when racial diversity is assessed, right?
 
no idea re: racial diversity

but if your best way into Wake as a non-rich person is via athletic scholarship then I'm not sure that really changes the problem being highlighted by being in the lowest 5% of this list
 
Wake is so small and has so many sports that adding student-athletes makes it look like Wake is economically diverse. Which may help explain why Wake doesn't accept many low-income students who don't play sports.
 
JuiceCrewAllStar said:
no idea re: racial diversity

but if your best way into Wake as a non-rich person is via athletic scholarship then I'm not sure that really changes the problem being highlighted by being in the lowest 5% of this list
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I think there are two separate questions:

1) Does Wake attract and/or admit low income students that attend the school? No.

2) Is there a diversity of socioeconomic viewpoints in the classroom? Maybe?
 
Athletes are already a set-apart class of students that mostly tend to spend time with each other vs non athlete students. Relying on them to provide the primary source of socioeconomic diversity isn't something that makes a lot of sense in that regard.
 
Wasn't this the desired outcome when they dropped the SAT requirement?
 
DeaconCav06 said:
I think there are two separate questions:

1) Does Wake attract and/or admit low income non-student athletes that attend the school? No.

2) Is there a diversity of socioeconomic viewpoints in the classroom? Maybe?
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I like this delineation when thinking about the issue, though I changed the bold above. I don't know for sure that the student athletes come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, they might, but for certain they do not have Pell grants, so they are not captured by the Pell grant metric.

Is obtaining socioeconomic diversity through giving full rides to student athletes the wrong approach? I'm not sure it is.

As an aside, it's interesting that Salem College is second in the country in Pell grant recipients, and that number has gone up 16 percentage points since 2011.
 
Which 100-200 perfectly qualified students should the admissions office give the boot in order to get more kids on Pell Grants ?
 
Didn't Wake get rid of "need-blind" admissions years ago? So whether or not someone can pay factors into whether or not they get accepted.

Rafi, I think you're asking the wrong question. Athletic programs are trying to win championships. They're not trying to provide "socioeconomic diversity" for the entire university. That's patronizing as well.

The question is if schools like Wake and Duke are rejecting low-income applicants who would be accepted otherwise.

Biff Ochocinco Tannen said:
Which 100-200 perfectly qualified students should the admissions office give the boot in order to get more kids on Pell Grants ?
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The question assumes kids on Pell Grants aren't "perfectly qualified."

(It also assumes there's such a thing as "perfectly qualified" as well.)
 
DeaconCav06 said:
I think there are two separate questions:

1) Does Wake attract and/or admit low income students that attend the school? No.

2) Is there a diversity of socioeconomic viewpoints in the classroom? Maybe?
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I remember sitting in torts class in law school in a class of about 40-50 kids. We're going over a hypo where an old woman had a riding lawn mower tip over on her after using the law mower for the first time after her husband died. On of my classmates legit fucking said, "it's her fault for not hiring someone to do it." I was one of three kids in the class that had ever even fucking used a lawn mower.

I think that my socioeconomic background was a huge part of why I stuck out in law school. Most of the kids were cool, but a few of them were super fucking cruel about it. I can still remember walking down the hallway wearing an old Wake Forest jersey that I'd got off the clearance rack; fucking son-of-a-congressmen classmate chimes in with, "you look just like one of the players, DDD." It was said in one of the most condescending tones I've ever heard another human being speak aloud.
 
PhDeac said:
Didn't Wake get rid of "need-blind" admissions years ago? So whether or not someone can pay factors into whether or not they get accepted.

Rafi, I think you're asking the wrong question. Athletic programs are trying to win championships. They're not trying to provide "socioeconomic diversity" for the entire university. That's patronizing as well.

The question is if schools like Wake and Duke are rejecting low-income applicants who would be accepted otherwise.


The question assumes kids on Pell Grants aren't "perfectly qualified."

(It also assumes there's such a thing as "perfectly qualified" as well.)
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Yes, Wake eliminated need-blind admissions several years ago, which can certainly affect this.

Maybe I'm asking the wrong question. I'm certainly not trying to be patronizing - can you explain why you think that? I've always thought that, ideally, each student brings some great qualities to a university. Perhaps they are elite athletes, dancers, painters, mathematicians, etc. So if a school focuses on their voice program, and the singers are economically diverse, then that's great - it adds to the diversity of the school overall. I would think the same applies student athletes.

As an example at Wake, the men's soccer program is much more racially diverse than it was in the 1990s, which contributes positively to the diversity of the school. Perhaps the school as a whole needs to follow the athletic department approach. As you state, they recruit to win championships, so they find the best student athletes they can, which results in a diverse group of students. A need-blind admission approach would likely result in increased diversity in the student body as a whole.
 
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