College admissions news: Week of September 21st

A weekly digest of college admissions news for your family

Revenge of the nerds

Princetonians lost bragging rights this week as MIT unseated them as the top university in U.S. News' annual rankings.

U.S. News recently changed its formula, adding “Earnings by Major” to its assessment of America’s top schools. The move rewards institutions with large populations of STEM students, especially those in data science and quantitative finance.

The Tigers aren’t the only ones U.S. News has declawed. The University of Michigan Wolverines and University of Washington Huskies also dropped in the rankings. U.S. News’ new salary metric only tracks recipients of federal financial aid, systematically disadvantaging public universities.

Public universities have fewer federal financial aid recipients because state governments already subsidize their low sticker price for in-state residents. Purdue dropped nine spots (vacating the Top 50), while Maryland and Washington fell seven.

In this year’s remake, only the nerds on financial aid made the final cut.

What this means for families

Not much, honestly. If we could ban college rankings entirely, we would. Families are much better served building college lists based on their life goals and out-of-pocket cost than arbitrary rankings. Purdue is the same school it was last week, with its $9,992 yearly tuition.

Grandpa got you into Yale

A new report from Class Action has good news for alumni students aiming for the most selective schools. 

While legacy preferences have fallen considerably since Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard aired Crimson’s dirty laundry in the court of public opinion — and in regular court — elite private schools remain committed to admissions by bloodline.

Eleven of the fifteen most selective private universities continue to use legacy preference in admissions decisions. In case you missed it: Stanford University turned down millions in California student financial aid to keep legacy preferences late last year. In 2023, Stanford revealed that 13.6% of its undergraduate class had ties to alumni or donors. That number was almost identical to Harvard’s legacy admission rate, first revealed in 2018.

Ask any college president why they prefer legacies, and you’ll get the official answer: tradition. Ask the same question after three drinks, and you’ll get another: money. Whether legacy preferences actually increase donations is mixed, as we point out in our recently published report.

But it doesn’t really matter: schools believe admitting alums’ kiddos increases donations, and are unlikely to change their nepotistic ways any time soon.

What this means for families

You can’t put your name on a decades-old diploma. But researchers at Opportunity Insights found that roughly a third of the advantage of legacies doesn’t come from heredity after all. The things admissions officers judge by hand — extracurriculars, personal qualities, and leadership — matter almost as much. And any family can build these with a gifted counselor's help.

Horatio Algers heads to community college

The underlying philosophy of American higher education is based on a simple premise: the most qualified students should go to the best colleges.

But a new paper has a bone to pick with the justification for this practice: spending more on smarter students doesn’t drive better economic outcomes for society overall. Instead, it picks winners and losers, and correlates highly with family income.

The facts of this study aren’t new, but they're rarely laid out in such startling detail. Elite private schools spend upwards of $50,000 on a single student's education. Less selective schools spend a fraction, often by an order of magnitude — an average of $11,700 per student.

Efforts to narrow this gap, such as test-optional admissions, often draw fierce criticism. See: University of California professors' complaint that students are woefully unprepared in mathematics. What’s missing from the argument is what happens next: do those same woefully unprepared students end up at schools that prepare them? Or are they simply forgotten?

In an earlier study, students who enrolled at selective UC schools with SAT scores averaging in the 14th percentile of their classmates finished their degrees sooner and earned more than classmates at less-selective public schools. Worth considering at the very least.