Nesbitt notes that “Only about 10 percent of our students come from families in the lowest two quintiles of the national income distribution, while more than 70 percent come from the highest quintile. ” He refers to this fact as a “disturbing revelation.”

Well . . .

1) This should hardly be surprising, much less a revelation. Higher income applicants, admittees and enrollees have always dominated the process at Williams and places like it.

2) What does Nesbitt, or anyone else, expect the distribution to look like? Why would he expect 20% of Williams students to be drawn from the bottom 20% of families sorted by income?

I am not sure that Nesbitt believes this, but the ethos at places like Williams is often one of radically egalitarianism, both in expectation and in outcome. Nesbitt — again, I don’t know what he really thinks but will use him as representative of this view point — believes that every little baby in this great country of ours is born with the same likelihood of achieving, by age 18, the sort of academic credentials that Williams values.

For good or for ill, that is not the way the world works. The things that Williams cares about (ambition and high IQ) are precisely the sorts of things that are associated with high income. If you are ambitious and have high IQ (and work full time), then you are unlikely to remain in the bottom 20% of the income distribution.

Moreover, IQ and ambition (and discipline and work habits and . . .) are transmitted from parents to their children. Reasonable people disagree about how much of this transmission is nature (my daughters are smart because their mother, from whom they get half their genes, is smart) and how much is nurture (my daughters love learning because I read to them most every night), but the transmission is undeniable.

As always, these are all just probabilities. Thousands of poor 18 year olds in the US are as smart as anyone at Williams and Williams should do everything it can to convince them to come, including giving them a free ride, as well as giving the most desirable among them Tyngs.

But there will never come a day when 20% of the students at Williams come from families in the bottom 20% of family income.

I disagree with your conclusion, David. 20% of a Williams class is 100 students. Take the 5 best liberal arts colleges. Add the top 10 private universities and assume their undergraduate enrollment is 4 times the size of Williams. That is around 5000 students. There are 5000 deserving students in the bottom 20% of the income distribution for these institutions. The failure is not on the part of students or their families, but rather Williams and Harvard for not doing enough to find these students.
R

I am not sure if the word “deserving” is useful in this discussion. Williams looks for kids who are at the top of their high school classes, who take the toughest classes their high schools offer and who do very well on national tests like the SAT and APs. If you do this, you are an Academic Rank 1 or 2.

Now, how many students from families in the bottom 20% of the income distribution are AR 1s or 2s?

Answer: Very few.

Proof: By contradiction! If there were a lot of students like this, then Williams (and Harvard) would be accepting them. Now, there will be some cases where such students are unaware of Williams (and Harvard?), even though Williams sends a letter to virtually every high scoring student in the nation. Everything should be done to find such students and make them aware of Williams. I am happy to spend money on things like Questbridge to help accomplish this goal.

But it is nothing but the purest fantasy to pretend that there are thousands of such undiscovered diamonds in the rough in the US. There aren’t.

The harder cases involve the AR 3-5. How much of a preference should poor students (as opposed to URMs, tip athletes, legacies, et cetera) get in this context? Well, that is a hard question, worth discussing. But I just want to establish the fact that, in the absence of signficant (indeed, completely unrealistic) amounts of (class-based) affirmative action, you will never see 20% of Williams drawn from the botton 20% of families by income.

David is making two points, I believe:

1) The goal, namely, of having the Williams student body more closely reflect the income distribution in America, is a bad one.

2) Even if said goal were a worthy one, it would be extremely difficult to reach it, because poor people are lazy and stupid. (As opposed to the thrifty, hard-working intelligent rich people.)

I think the virtues of the first argument can be debated on both sides. Argument #2, however, is silly and easily disproved. Although wealth (not income) can easily correlate towards a better education and increased opportunities, there’s certainly a mixed bag of evidence regarding intelligence, and “ambition” probably skews in the other direction. Otherwise rich families would never have listless children who squander away their inheritances. Frequently, in fact, children of extremely hard-working parents are less ambitious because their parents were more concerned with putting in hours at the office than putting in time at home. The value of hard work is best demonstrated through poverty: it’s easy to learn to do a good job when you have to in order to make ends meet; to learn the same lesson if you’re comfortable and don’t have to work is much more difficult.

The first point, however, is a more interesting one to tackle. Should Williams’s goal to be to match the general population in terms of racial and economic background? Clearly, we wouldn’t want to reflect American in certain ways (otherwise we’d have a bunch of stupid, obese white people who hate foreigners) but our decision to choose certain aspects and others has consequences.

If we choose to only admit fairly smart people, that means we value intelligence as an attribute. If we choose to only admit people who have a wide range of skills, it means we value people who are not single-minded. Both of these values means the average Williams student will be smarter and more multi-talented than the average American. By choosing to say that one’s socio-economic status is not important, certain implications follow, namely, that the average Williams student will also not have the same socio-economic background as the average American.

So if we divorce socio-economic background from our criteria, we are left with a blank slate. Unlike intelligence or talent, we cannot simply say we want people with “more” of those qualities. Instead, we want to minimize the impact of one’s socio-economic background as much as possible, because it is not a quality we wish ephs to reflect unifomly.

If we don’t want ephs to reflect it uniformly, by definition, we should have each quintile represented, correct? Simply saying “make it look American” would mean that most people at Williams would be poor, with one or two students per class extremely well-off. Although I think that would be a more moral goal, it would be more difficult to reach than the current “make each quintile represented” goal. America doesn’t have wealth concentrated equally among five groups of people: instead, the people at the top possess most of the money. Yet moving, if even only incrementally, towards a more even distribution of wealth, has to serve the purpose of minimizing the emphasis Williams places on a student’s socio-economic background. That’s a good thing, right?

One thing I would argue is that there might be a large pool of intelligent, hard-working kids who go to less-than-stellar schools which don’t offer college level AP classes. Again, we’re talking about a pool of 100 students at Williams here, out of around 22 million households in the lower quintile in America. I’m sure we can find a few…nestled among them.

Reed asks:

Should Williams’s goal to be to match the general population in terms of racial and economic background?

No, no, no. A thousand times No! For starters, if you wanted to do this, you would need to dramatically decrease the number of Asian American and Jewish students at Williams. Both groups of about five times overrepresented. Since no one I know is in favor of this, a general policy to make Williams “look like America” must be rejected.

Note that this “representation” approach is very different, at least conceptual, from the standard argument for diversity (both economic and racial). Recall that the standard (and correct!) argument is that diversity improves everyone’s education.

Fine, but the key issue is what happens on the margin. Right now, only 10% (200) students at Williams come from families in the bottom 40% by family income. The issue is not whether having these students is a good thing. It is! They (besides being virtually as fully qualified as their richer peers) add diversity. The enrich class discussion. They help educate their peers.

All well and good. The question is: Does williams need another 100 such students, applicants that it currently rejects because they are not as qualified as other (more wealthy) applicants? I don’t think so. The first 50 poor students are critical — just try imagining Williams with only rich people. The second 50 are helpful. The next 100 add a bit to. But, on the margin, we don’t need another 100.

(And, to the extent that you believe we do, please point out the 100 students (or at least the category of student) currently on campus that we should reject — despite their superior high school records — so that you can admit these extra 100 poor students.)

I think Reed’s Proposition 2 is not an accurate rendering of Dave’s position or my response.

Dave, you are flat out incorrect. According to a recent working paper by our very own Gordon Winston and Cappy Hill, there are enough such students in existence and it is the colleges themselves that fail to find them.

The critical number is 5000. Are there 5000 such students in every matriculating class? The answer is unequivocally “yes.”

David,

You set up a lot of false propositions, make some very insulting arguments about the qualifications of different groups of people, and generally pissed me off a whole lot.

Reed did a good job explaining why your original argument was disturbingly circular and lacked any sense of the distribution of opportunity that Reed just briefly mentions (such as availablity of AP classes) in his response. We could go in more depth, but you have moved on towards some other straw men to build up (reed answered your question about making Williams look like America in his final paragraph, btw). Admissions does not rank its entire application pool and then just take the top 1000 students, it decides student by student. Often, schools get it wrong (Williams took me, Brown didn’t. Williams rejected a friend, Brown took them. Are those schools really looking for someone that different? No. But “merit” is a loose term). As the head of harvard admissions said, and I belive this would be true at Williams, they could reject everyone they accepted, take a completely different pool of students, and they’d still be unbelievably smart. Deserving people will not get into Williams any way you slice it. The question is not who is deserving (10,000s, if not 100,000s deserve a Williams education, if not every student who wants it “deserves” the experience), but who is offered such an education.

Far too often, wealth and race are enormous factors in that offering. Nesbitt does not go into details about how it does, and there are gazillions of studies looking into that.

I also really don’t know how you come up with your numbers that 50 poor students are critical, 100 helpful, the rest marginal. What is that based on? I’d beg to differ, considering how often many students talked about how wealth and class are the unspoken divide at Williams (and at other schools). I think Williams needs those students. I know, considering the background of some of my fellow Ph.D students, that those students exist and haven’t heard of Williams.

(Also, I’m concernd with conflating race and class. A rich minority student may not bring a class diversity to campus, but does bring racial diversity. A poor white student brings class diversity, but not racial diversity. Both are valuable.)

(i’m also sick of having the “other”, in this case lower income students, educating the elite privileged student. The “others” job is to be a student, just like everyone else on campus. When the “other” is forced to be a teacher in a way fundamentally different from the traditional student, THAT is when people start feeling that Williams is not “their” college. Those students should be at Williams because they are exceptional students and they are, not because they need to teach the wealthy traditional student how to behave around poor and/or minority people.)

Before getting on to our areas of disagree, I just want to make clear that (I think!), Rory, Reed, Richard, I and others all agree that Williams should do everything within its power to ensure that the applicant pool is as complete as it can possibly be. We are all eager, I think, to do everything possible to ensure that all sorts of students apply to Williams and that this goes double for students who might not (because of class, race, geography, whatever) have heard of Williams or ever considered applying.

If this means spending tens of thousands of dollars on Questbridge, then spend it. If this means hiring another 10 admissions officers to travel the country, stopping at every out-of-the-mainstream high school, hire them.

This is not a debate over whether or not Williams should try to “find” such applicants. Williams should do everything possible to “find” them, to include them in the pool.

The debate is over how much of an edge, if any, to give them in the admissions process. On that, I suspect, we will disagree.

PS. If Richard (or someone else) could give a cite to the paper that he is talking about, that would be great. I know (and like!), Winston/Hill’s work on this topic, but can’t figure out which article he is talking about.

My argument is absent any “affirmative action.” There are enough qualified students who come from families below the 2nd decile in the income distribution to fill 20% of the spots available at the very best institutions. Do we want a perfect map between the population and the enrollment? Different question that I don’t particularly have an opinion on, my point was purely factual. The paper I quoted is:

Access to the Most Selective Private Colleges by High-Ability, Low-Income Students: Are they out there?

I don’t know how to link to stuff like this in a post, I’d appreciate if someone could teach me, though.

Any HTML question is best answered by checking out Diana Davis’s handy tutorial. Standard HTML tags are accepted in the comments at EphBlog.

The paper in question is here.

Thanks for the citation! One of the purposes of this seminar is to bring such work to everyone’s (or at least my!) attention.

I need to read this paper, but question: If there are a lot of students like this out there, why doesn’t Nesbitt admit them?

I believe the simple answer is: you can only admit those who apply.

I believe Shamus has mentioned this before: his experience as a teacher in a poor, urban, largely minority environment shows that:
1) kids don’t know about Williams
2) kids believe that places like Harvard and Stanford are not interested in them
3) their families can’t afford it

I will take his experience to be true of Black students in the Delta, White students in Appalachia or the Plains, and Hispanic students in the Southwest.

These bastions of elagitarianism and liberal thinking are probably viewed by poor students the same way that I think of country clubs: filled with arrogant, rich, condescending white people who have very different backgrounds than my own.

If we don’t do a better job of getting our hands dirty and really sending representatives into these communities, then we will never get them to apply. What’s the poorest community in your immediate vicinity and how many times have you made contact with their guidance department? (that was a royal “you” and I know I would have to answer “never”)

1) Thanks to Richard for the excellent citation. I have skimmed but not studied the paper. I believe that, despite the write up, it largely validates my point. Consider just Table 1 on page 13. In a perfect world, 40% of the SAT scores above 1420 would come from the 40% of applicants in the bottom two quintiles of family income. Alas, in the world in which we live only 13% do. Now, I am happy to get into all the messy details on this paper if anyone wants to, but, big picture, it seems like the 10% of students at Williams that come from the lowest quintile incomes is ballpark consistent with the applicant pool. Perhaps Nesbitt should be trying harder and the number should be closer to 13% or even 15%, but nothing except a lot of affirmative action will get that number much above 20%.

2) Perhaps it would be useful to consider a concrete but hypothetical case, almost certainly very similiar to ones that the Williams Admissions office is considering right now.

How about applicants from Newton South High School in my own lovely Newton, Massachusetts? NSHS has sent dozens of students to Williams over the years, including my own lovely wife. It is one of the best public schools in the state but still has a fair range of family incomes because Newton itself has a reasonably diverse housing stock (as well as bussed in students from Boston).

So, how much of a push should Williams give to an applicant from NSHS who has a (reported!) family income of $45,000 versus one with a (reported!) family income of $200,000?

My answer: Very little, perhaps as much as legacies do now, about 50 points in combined SAT scores. I am would be interested to know other people’s opinions. Larger advantages would certainly lead to having more students with lower reported SAT scores.

As someone who attended a rural high school in Virgina, I can tell you that there is a huge lack of knowledge about Williams in most high school around the country. The only person who even had heard of Williams was my latin teacher, and that was because he was originally from Connecticut. This neatly coincided with Williams snatching up the #1 ranking from USNews.

I think this debate hinges entirely on whether LSE applicants should get a “boost” from the admissions office or whether admissions could simply try to increase the overall number of applicants from the lower quintiles. I suspect that the admissions office is currently running at 100% capacity in terms of how many students can apply and be processed in order to end up with a class size of 500. Obviously, if 30,000 kids applied to Williams for a class of 500, the admissions office would be overwhelmed.

So I think that David’s point, namely, that “underqualified” applicants from the lowest quintile are being admitted is not correct. The problem isn’t that we’re letting in unintelligent people: the problem is that people from that quintile simply aren’t applying to Williams in the first place.

This gets back to the Williams public relations offensive that I have discussed earlier. Essentially, Williams deliberately keeps a low-profile, which affects everything from admissions to alumni giving. If Williams were to try to increase its profile, it could certainly get more LSE applicants.

Yet it curiously does not. Instead, it partners with questbridge to keep the profile low while targeting specific students who could benefit from a Williams education.

There’s a tradeoff between being able to maintain relative anonymity and being able to attract qualified applicants from across the country. If I hadn’t heard of Williams, and I was a star student (hypothetical alert!) at a small high school, though I might be eph material, I’d never get the chance to find out because of a lack of knowledge.

Again, the problem here isn’t that substandard students are applying to Williams and getting preferential treatment; the problem is that students who aren’t from the traditional bastions of Williams feeders don’t even know the school exists. Thus, several prestigious high schools in NoVa send multiple people to Williams each year, but there’s little if any representation from the Shenandoah Valley or the Southwestern corner of our commonwealth.

Reed writes:

So I think that David’s point, namely, that “underqualified” applicants from the lowest quintile are being admitted is not correct.

Hey! I did not (mean to) say that! Right now, I suspect that the Williams admissions office gives some (small) boost to LSE applicants. I do not think that the boost is a big one nor that it is a bad thing.

I claimed that if you tried to get the percentage of LSE students at Williams to be anywhere near the national distribution, you would have to use an large and unjustified amount of affirmative action.

I am sure that both Dick Nesbitt and Jim Kolesar would love to hear about a half dozen (reasonably priced) ways that Williams could significantly raise its profile and/or attract more qualified applicants (LSE and otherwise). Please provide a listing of your favorites. I think that this is harder to do than you imply.

I am certain that if another 10 thousand people applied to Williams, the College would find a way to process those applications.

I still don’t agree with David’s conclusion. First, not every COHFE school is the same. Williams should beat UPenn and Cornell for students and compete on equal footing with Dartmouth and Brown. Besides Amherst and Swat, there aren’t any LAC’s we should lose out to.

The total COHFE enrollment number is about 110,000. I think the undergraduate enrollment against which we compete is closer to 40,000. Accounting for non reporting of income and making some reasonable guesses to get the number of individuals above 1350 (120,000 total test takers with a score above and 14% of these takers in the lower 40%), we have 16800 scorers above 1350 and in the lower 40% of income. This is about 40% of the enrollment of 40,000.

The answer is: it’s tight, but doable for the very top schools. Especially since poor students are more likely to never take the SAT.

Richard claims that “Besides Amherst and Swat, there aren’t any LAC’s we should lose out to.” You mean that no student under any circumstance should/would ever choose Pomona or Carleton or Wellesley or Bowdoin or . . . What if one of those colleges offers them a Tyng-like prize or even a merit award? [Same thing! -- ed.]

There is a pool of high-scoring low-income (bottom two quintiles) students. It is X big, where X is some number way less than 40%. Now, it is true that Williams could steal a bunch of these students from other schools. There is some amount of money that would make almost all the LSE students admitted into Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Stanford to choose Williams instead.

But the aggregate pool is what it is. Right now, Williams is getting close to the same share as other elite schools. I am eager to discuss whether Williams should try to take more than its share from this pool. But we should not pretend that the pool would allow all elite schools to do this at the same time.

With regard to your example, I am not sure what you mean by “[a]ccounting for non reporting of income.” Winston/Hill play a little loose, I think, on page 15 when they imply that counting every sibgle non-report as coming from the bottom two quintiles is reasonable. In fact, income non-reporting is much more common among richer people, at least in other contexts. But the authors provide a discussion of this point in their Appendix, with interesting Williams specific data, so I don’t want to dwell too much on it.

Again, we all agree that Williams should do everything it (reasonably) to get every student in the country with SATs above 1300 to apply. Assume that this has been done, that the pool is virtually complete. If the current admissions process then produced a class with 13%, rather than 10%, from the bottom 40% of LSE, I would be satisfied.

If you look at the data, and I’m not sure it is publically available, but every school has its “post application” questionaire that it sends out asking where students applied, were accepted and matriculated. We don’t lose out to Bowdoin or Carleton. Wellesley is a special case, but the real competition when I was there was Middlebury, but I think that was a blip more than a trend. So yes, include Pomona and Carleton but that isn’t that big a shift. The number is still about 40,000.

As for accounting, only that there is no statistical bias either way. I get about 16,000 with SAT’s above 1350.

That means there are just enough to spread around 40,000 and get an exact match to the population at the very top. This neglects individuals who don’t even take the SAT (dropout of the process before it begins). I admit this is tight, but I think 20% is low-end reasonable, up to 30% at these schools that include Harvard, etc. And we don’t need to steal them away.

Well, leaving the exact empirics to one side, perhaps this is another case of EphBlog iterating to agreement. We all agree that:

1) Williams should do everything that it reasonably can to increase the pool of applicants, especially those scoring above 1400 on the SATs.

2) Poor students should not be disadvantaged in the application process, at least.

3) Without any affirmative action beyond a small amount (comparable to that given to legacies), Williams should be able to admit a class in which 20% come from the bottom two quintiles, double the current portion. This isn’t the 40% that a perfect mirror would give us but would be more than enough to satisfy any concerns about economic diversity.

So, now, it would be great to get a sense of how economically diverse the pool of applicants is today. How many >1400 SAT applicants were lower LSE? How many of them did Williams accept? How many of those came?

Does that 10% of the low-income students include international students? If not, note that virtually all international students (6% of the student body) would be considered low-income by US standards.

I don’t agree to privilege the SATs nearly as much as you want to do. Especially in regards to class and race diversity, I find them a very doubtable way of accounting for intellectual/creative/valuable-to-Williams potential.

And this is coming from someone who accounts for much of his success in getting accepted to schools on superior test taking abilities.

Rory,

To that least: as I mention elsewhere, I think we have seen an incredibible SAT-inflation in the last 20 years or so.

What this boils down to is that the SAT is highly trainable, and that parents will spend their $ sending kids to SAT courses, boot camps, and the like.

Similarly across a range of activities. Williams is full of the result, though, as the Alum Review article on admissions notes, the profile alone does not make a good candidate.

I question the result. If you can figure out the structure of the SAT and similar tests on your own– and use that to train yourself– you’re valuable. If you spend three to five weeks of the summer at a SAT camp– and therefore got the score– well, what else could you have spent that time doing?

Reading Ralph Elison? Learning a language? Hiking the Whites? I’d prefer students who did the latter.

Rory,

To your earlier post:

I understand– and have had– the frustrations all of us can feel in such a discussion, especially when we feel our perspective just isn’t being heard.

But I hope we will respond not just with emotion– not that emotion is not an instinctual and often effective guide– but with thought and reason.

We’ve seen quite a bit above that challenges the remark of David’s that you refer to– or, at least, challenges the interpretation that you and others make of it (on my interpretation of your interpretation…).

What I wonder is, is there a way to move your perspective and David’s perspective towards consensus?

My instinct is that you both have underlying wishes and goals for Williams– which may differ– and may not. Is there a process through which to align those goals and move towards a consensus which would serve Williams?

I fundamentally believe so. I believe that David and you believe in the future of Williams, and I highly suspect that both of you would rather find ways to further Williams future that further your own private “agendas.”

In the case of the lowest quintile, etc., we can argue details for days– and there is certainly some value to that. But I think that what David may be suggesting is more like: there aren’t enough “jewels in the rough” out there for it to be our primary concern, and if we continue our current focus on that task instead of other issues, we will compromise core goals.

Here in Warren County, we have two seniors with near perfect profiles: a Varsity Tennis player recently admitted to the Naval and Coast guard academies; a science student with perfect SATs and ACHs. The first student is from a military family; not interested in anything but a military career at this point. The second was frankly “turned off” by the “conservatism” of the northeast schools, looking for something more “socially creative.”

We can read both of those many ways; and I’m a sure believer that there are many “diamonds in the rough” among the lower quintile who aren’t being reached, and techniques to go forward with that. I’m a believer that Williams could do more. But at least among those who have such “perfect profiles,” the competition is incredibly intense, and Williams is not going to up its yield without serious changes in approach.

And one message I take from David’s perspective is, barring that occuring, that the search for lower-quintile students may hurt the institution. Take that for what you will; argue against it, or at least give counter-scenarios, as I will.

My concerns turn somewhat differently when I hear concerns about Williams being “ours”– because I have never thought of Williams as being anything but that. I don’t like to mention that I was a Tyng too much– but the short history of how my cohort of Tyngs was introduced to campus (elsewhere) certainly is a process of “inclusion” in which we were firmly told that Williams– and its future– were ours– and that we were here because we were important to the institution, its mission and its future. More than half of that group were URMs, and I would say that in the coming years, all were firmly convinced of their future and of their ability to “own” Williams. From years before and past, some are already Williams professors.

That sense of ownership has many implications– from a sense of basic comfort and inclusion, to the level of committment and involvement one takes, to the willingness to take on tasks and “own” them, to a certain sense of stewardship and responsibility. Both Phil Smith and Phil Wick did a very good job of giving that to at least the Tyngs– I should mention many others– regardless of class or race.

I heard here some time ago, this that may not have been the case for later Tyngs. But the lesson is that effective outreach that hands the institution to its future generations is– well, fundamental. Every such institution survives by “freshman inclusion.”

Barriers such as “writing a paper to conform to the expectations of a white male professor,” mentioned elsewhere, noted. That issue was discussed at the MCC in the spring of ‘89 and in ‘90: the only way it will be solved is to hit it head on, to establish some sort of peer tutoring, or part of the Writing Workshop, which makes students aware of the cross-cultural issues and adjusts writing– in both directions. (Which occasionally asks professors to pause and consider their methods of evaluation).

I can’t find an easy way to dealve into the “just to be a student” argument that has arisen on WSO, though I understand the perceived patter of consecention that prompts it. But surely learning is a process, and not a simple acquisition and transfer of information; surely that is a highly co-operative process in which “peer effects” and “what you learn from others” is just as important as the classroom; and surely no one is being forced into tutorial relations with others?

The point to me would be have the right arrangements to acheive the right result; to involve all students in filling in each others skill sets; to bring recent alumni back to the houses as “tutors,” perhaps, to oversee such processes and add their “peer effects.”

I don’t have time to repeat how I see the inclusion of students from every country as fundamental to Williams’ vision. In a multilateral world, I cannot imagine Williams’ maintaining its position of leadership, unless the leadership of multiple countries take Williams as their own.

Re: David’s perspective and your own, I think Williams could do much more to improve the process of “inclusion” of URMs, etc. I think that a little bit of structured effort spent on introducing them to Williams, “including” them in circles and policy, introducing them to each other and other people, would go a very long way.

In short, the numbers don’t matter once you’re at 10%; the structures, the process, and the consequences do. And I’ll go so far as to challenge David’s statement: in fact, “doing everything we can” to recruit qualifies students in the lower quintile– simply to acheive numbers– is not effective. Some part of those dollars, and those efforts, would be better spend building a more coherent and integrated campus, on programmatic efforts important to those students and their interests, in encouraging them to take and own formal and informal positions in (student) governance.

If that is done, I then believe that Williams would be in a much better position to distribute its image to the New South, mid-West, Pacific States, etc. And to convince the elites of other nations that Williams is a good place to send children for an “international education…”

Again, too much of my vision; I will just mention that I don’t believe the coming House System (I’m intentionally using an anachronism) gets us there.

The question remains: is there a consensus position between you and David?

How about hard, dirty, dangerous manual labor of long hours because the student needs the money? Or these days do students flaccidly leave that type of work exclusively to those inferior segments of society whose prospects are limited?

Frank obliquely references one of the challenges that exists at Williams that this argument has direct relevance towards: student-aid packages. In addition to the easy divide between public and private high schoool kids, it was also easy to see the difference between kids with aid packages and those who had a free ride. Some people worked at the cafeteria, others worked around campus, but it was a clear divide between the well-off and the less.

I remember the students who worked for OIT being annoyed the day the administration informed us that financial aid students would be “chosen” to work at Jesup, rather than the existing volunteer system. Many people were frustrated that fairly well-paying jobs would be distributed to people who were unskilled. In the end, I don’t recall any drop off in service. (The STCs, as they were called then, were not the brightest lot.)

With lower quintile students comes an additional appreciation for actual work on campus, a quality Williams would greatly benefit from. Imagine if every student were required to work a job on campus. It’s certainly something I wish some of the kids I went to school with had done.

At least currently at Williams there are many students working campus jobs who are not on financial aid. Williams tends to be generous about finding work for students who want it, whether or not their financial need is truly pressing. As Williams can afford to pay a couple extra students each year, I think the College’s eagerness to hire student workers is fantastic, as it has greatly reduced any stigma that may have at some time accompanied working a campus job.

Back in the day, it was not easy to tell a students wealth. There were clues, of course. Not many freshmen with cars on campus were on financial aid. (My suitemate had a shiny new BMW.) Not many freshmen who worked at Baxter were not on financial aid. (My entrymate was one of the last workers at the infamous Baxter “flume”. Surely, someone must have a picture of that which we could post!)

As a non-financial aid but not wealthy* student, family income seemed to be one of the least important factors in student affiliations. As best I could tell, there was, for example, zero correlation between, say, family income and roommate groupings formed for sophomore year.

One of the reasons that Williams forced everyone to have (more or less) the same meal plan — even though students varied widely in the amount of food they consumed — was that doing so ensured that wealth did not impact something do direct as dining hall decisions.

*In a Williams context. Then as now a family in the top 1% of the US income distribution is around the 80th percentile (numbers pulled out of nowhere) of the distribution at Williams.

David R asks us “Are Nesbitt’s suggestions enough to bring the LSE students in?”

No. I just realized that Richard and my fascinating dialogue on how many LSE students are, hypothetically, out there is completely beside the point. D’oh.

The College has troble admitting more LSE because it has a great deal of trouble identifying who the LSE are. This is the subtle subtext of Nesbitt’s discussion. Note his plan to:

Lobby the College Board for access to self-reported income data to simplify identification of low-income prospects. Currently the College Board withholds this information.

In other words, the College does not have access to family incomes! It is not a part of the Common Application. (I also doubt that the College Board will be passing the (self-reported!) data on anytime soon.)

Nesbitt can only (easily) increase the number of students from group X if he can easily identify who is in group X and who is not. For football players, URMs and wealthy legacies, he can. For LSE, he can not.

He can guess by looking at where applicants go to high school, the SES of their parents, whether or not they requested a fee-waiver and so on. But these are guesses. Moreover, while it is one (unlikely?) thing for an applicant to fudge her racial status, it is probably much easier for her to do things, like request a fee waiver, that may erroneously signal LSE status.

I hope to have a longer post on this at some point, but the basic point is that, however many high SAT LSE students are out there, Williams will not find it easy to significantly increase their percentage in the class because it has no easy way of cleanly identifying them.

On a totally separate point, I would wager that a very large percentage of the high SAT LSE students that we are talking about are the children of Asian immigrants. (Not that there is anything wrong with that, of course!) Indeed, I suspect that a lot of the Academic Rank 1’s that the College rejects are 2nd generation Asian and, while not exactly LSE, at least below the Williams median. It would be fascinating to see Hill/Winston’s data cross-classified by race.

A lot of minority LSE’s in the AR of 1 or 2 don’t know about Williams. If they do, they will still go to the college that gives them the most money/scholarships. All things being equal, they might prefer a school with an urban presence or a larger minority pool.
I helped recruit students for Stanford while I was there. There were a significant number of LSE 1 & 2 ARs, but Stanford, U Mich, the Ivies, and the UC system just gobbled them up. Whenever I mentioned Williams to one of these students, the first response was “Williams? Where is that?”, quickly followed by why? Why would they go to Williams if they had 1400+ SATs and Harvard, Stanford, Cal Tech, U Mich, Berkeley, and Yale had shown interest? I love Williams as much as the next rabid alum, but an LSE who has bucked the odds and has reached that level of success is not likely to think that the Williams’ experience of smaller classes and more attentive professors will make or break their college experience.
The LSEs I met during the college admissions process were not looking for comfort. It wasn’t as if they’d been getting oodles of attention and small class sizes in high school anyway. Williams’ selling points were luxuries I know I felt I could ill afford unless the whole “most people don’t know Williams, but people who NEED TO KNOW will know Williams” thing panned out.
It pains me to admit this, but I would not have attended Williams had Williams not come through with a superior financial aid package. My decision to attend turned on financial aid (i.e., it wasm’t my decision at all).

In courting diversity can Williams reasonably expect to be able to extract the inherent sweet of diversity and leave the sour?