Thu 19 Jan 2006
There is much to blog about in the latest issue of the Record, but consider this line from an article last spring about the class of 2009.
Twelve to thirteen percent of the class are legacy students, a number which Nesbitt said has been constant at the College for 20 years.
This would suggest 65 to 75 legacies. Consistent with what we were later able to confirm. But the interesting part is that this number has been consistent for 20 years.
Hmmm. Thoughts:
1) I believe that Nesbitt is telling the truth, but it would be fun to look at the exact numbers. Are they available?
2) Is there a (maximum) quota here, as there is in International admissions? I doubt it. Why would the College turn down excellent legacy candidates?
3) Is there a (minimum) quota? That would be shocking. My first thought is to dismiss such speculation, but, then again, I was too stupid to realize that there was an International quota, so I might be misinformed again.
4) Why would the number stay constant for 20 years if there were not a quota, or at least a guideline?
5) Given the dramatic rise in the number of International students and in US students of color (as well as continued focus on athletics), the odds of getting into Williams if you are not in one of these categores has plummetted. I am too lazy to do the math, and the are certainly legacies that are athletes and/or of color, but there are only so many spots to go around.
6) It is interesting to note that the International quota is set at 6%, just about exactly one half of the legacy admission percentage. Is that a coincidence? Someone had to pick the 6% number and he didn’t pick it out of thin air . . .
7) Why doesn’t the Record write a story on this topic? I think that it is a scandal. Surely, I am not the only one. I had lunch with a recent graduate and he was shocked to learn about it.
I think that my big 2006 Williams project will be to form a alumni/student/faculty group whose purpose will be to urge the College to increase the percentage of International students by not penalizing them so much in the admissions process. Eps Against International Quotas, perhaps.
January 19th, 2006 at 7:22 pm
correct me if i’m wrong, but couldn’t it be that williams’ population has not grown dramatically, nor has williams alumni fertility (both assumptions i’m making). Thus, there is a constant sized pool of potential legacies, thus a constant acceptance rate (as alumni kids of one generation should not be so radically different from alumni kids of anotehr generation).
There are, admittedly, a lot of assumptions behind that logic, but isn’t it as possibly true as your theory of a quota?
January 19th, 2006 at 7:34 pm
I am speculating not theorizing.
Assume that we are using 20 years from 1985 to 2005. At the start of the period, all legacies are the children of male alums since, in 1960 and before the College was all male. It was also 1/2 the size that it is today or in 1985. In other words, it should have been X hard to get in as a legacy.
Now, the legacy applicants are, mostly, the children of the 1970’s. Now, at the beginning of this period, the College was still 1,000 students. But after the mid 1970s it doubled in size. So, leaving out intra-marriage. There should now be twice as many Eph families with twice as many children interested in Williams as there were in 1985.
All of the above is approximate, of course. Other things have changed. But, big picture, there should be twice as many legacy applicants now as there were in 1985. All else equal it should be 2*X hard for a legacy to get into Williams.
In terms of speculation, I wouldn’t be surprised if the College had some sort of informal guideline. I would expect that the average quality of legacy students is much higher now than it was in the 1980s.
What a great senior thesis this would make!
January 19th, 2006 at 8:39 pm
David:
You’ve still never addressed the glaring flaw in your “international quota” theory. If Williams has a cap on international enrollment and if Williams is at that ceiling, why would a college run by an economist continue to spend twice as much as its peer competitors on tuition discounts to attract more international demand?
Economists don’t give price discounts just for the heck of it.
January 19th, 2006 at 9:35 pm
While the percentages may be constant, it’s my understanding that the selection process has changed. Back in my day, while anyone who got into Williams certainly wasn’t dumb, there could be a slight lowering of the academic bar if you were a legacy.
Those days are gone. Today, you have to be in the top two (out of nine) academic tiers to be put in the “possible” pool. (And the top tier means you “walk on water,” as Dick Nesbitt says: have perfect SATs, are class valedictorian, etc.) If you make this academic cut, then being a legacy gives you a slightly better chance of being picked from this large pool. Anyone in the top two tiers can do the work at Williams; the sheer number of applicants is why the college now turns down perfectly qualified students, much to some people’s consternation.
I am perfectly happy with how Williams handles legacies: it’s not relaxing its academic standards, but is favoring students who know what Williams is and don’t expect it to be a miniature Harvard, for example.
Finally, not every possible legacy wants to go to their father’s or mother’s college. Given my family history, I would have been a Brown University legacy, but wanted nothing to do with the place. One of my college classmates had a son who was admitted to both Williams and Harvard, decided to go to Harvard, and had a grand time.
The important thing is that a student attends a college where he or she is comfortable and leverages the experience to the fullest. I was new to Williams and had a grand time. My daughter, seeing how much I love the place, talks about going to Williams (she’s 11). If she wants to and can get in, great. If not, she’s a hell of a smart and nice cookie, and will be a credit to wherever she goes.
January 19th, 2006 at 9:50 pm
The net present value of very smart, ambitious international students is high. Williams will lose a bit of money upfront since, on average, they require more financial aid. But Williams will, on average, more than make up for this loss via lifetime donations, admittedly from the most financially successful and generous 5%.
The fundamental economics of Williams do not lie in tuition dollars. Alumni giving matters more. The smarter, more ambitious your students, the more they will make. The more they make, the more they will give.
January 19th, 2006 at 10:34 pm
The factor that is being overlooked is that it is very likely that in general alumni, who have children or grandchildren that have been (or have a good prospect of being) admitted to Williams, are more likely to be or to become greater (probably much greater) givers to Williams than they otherwise would be or non-alumni parents or grandparents of Williams students would be.
January 19th, 2006 at 10:51 pm
David:
I must not be laying out the question properly. Let me try again.
Williams, Amherst, and Swarthmore all have roughly 6% international students.
Williams spends roughly double what either Amherst or Swarthmore spend on intl. tuition discounts to attract their 6%.
Why would Williams do that if they had a international students lined up to the hairpin curve waiting to enroll?
The answer: it takes heavy discounting (relative to the competition) to get to the current 6% level. The 6% is not a “ceiling”, it just happens to be all that can be attracted with the current budget. To go higher wouldn’t involve removing any quota ceiling. It would involve budgeting for more tuition discounts.
Swarthmore does have a de facto ceiling…in the form of a by-law tied to an ancient endowment gift that restricts international aid to “x” percent of the total aid budget. Thus, 6% is all they can afford, too. And to get to 6%, they need to make sure that approximately 45% of their international students are full-fare customers. They don’t have the option of further increasing the international aid budget without changing an endowment codicile through a legal proceding. I don’t know Amherst’s flexibility.
BTW, anyone interested in the international admissions game, here are some terrific links to the college counseling website at Raffles in Singapore. Raffles is one of the major SE Asian feeder schools to US colleges and Universites. This is one of the best college counseling sites I’ve ever seen:
main page
results for Raffles students in recent years
January 19th, 2006 at 10:53 pm
Let me try the Raffles acceptances link again:
applications and acceptances at US colleges
January 20th, 2006 at 8:02 am
hwc-
Do you have any information on the international application pool at Williams, Amherst, or Swarthmore? I would expect that Williams has a greater number of international applicants than either of its non need-blind competitors, or at least a relatively stronger applicant pool.
Another important point you’re missing is that Williams’ intl. need-blind status is supported almost entirely by several generous donations (including one, I believe, by the Bronfmans). To a certain extent, Williams’ policy decisions are shaped by alumni giving.
January 20th, 2006 at 11:27 am
I think Frank’s last point is the bottom line here. I did some Q&A sessions with local high schools on a whim with Admissions staff last year, and was suprised at how the legacy issue was the one place where a ‘bias’ was blatantly admitted by staff when queried. It is definitely on the minds of the staff as a means of solidifying the Williams Family — and, it would seem, ensuring both matriculation of good candidates and future/current(?) alumni giving. This implied that legacies admitted were more likely to marticulate. I dunno if that is true, haven’t read the recent admissions studies. Anyone?
January 20th, 2006 at 12:00 pm
Is there any evidence that Frank is correct, that post-rejection, legacy families give less money than legacy families whose children were accepted?
Not that I am aware of, but it would make a great senior thesis.
It is a fact that alumni giving, like all charitable giving, is very fat tailed. There are thousands of alumni who give small amounts (like me!). If a few of them get pissed, it does not matter much to the overall dollars. By far the largest amounts come from a much smaller number of wealthy families. I think that the College ensures that if your name is, say, Schow, your kid gets in. Note that there is a separate category in the admissions process for development admits. Rich/generous legacies go in that pile, not the pile with all we regular Ephs.
So, I do not believe that a decrease in legacy admissions to 6% or an increase to 20% would have a significant impact on alumni donations because, in any case, the really big givers are taken care of.
But it is an empirical question.
January 20th, 2006 at 12:19 pm
Noah:
The application numbers for internationals are really hard to find as that data is not included in any of the Common Data Set filings. So, you have to get lucky and catch a news article or press release from time to time and often you don’t get all the data points from the same calendar year.
For example, Williams had 889 international applications for the Class of 2008 or 16% of the total applications. This was double the number from the Class of 2005, the last year before the need-blind policy went into effect so the intended marketing purpose of advertising the need-blind policy was achieved. Doing a little math, I think Williams had 875 international applications for the Class of 2007. For the Class of 09, they accepted 81 international students or 8% of the total acceptances.
A number I found for Swarthmore was 670 international applications for the Class of 2007 or 17% of the total applications. I couldn’t find the exact number of acceptances for that year, but it has been typically in the 55 to 60 range, 6% to 7% of the total acceptances.
The acceptance rate for internationals is so low that even swings of several percent wouldn’t impact the quality of the accepted students. Eight percent, twelve percent, sixteen percent acceptance rates — what’s the difference?
For schools like Williams and Swarthmore, the cap on international student “quality” is still the point where accepted students also get into Harvard or Yale. For understandable reasons, the “name-brand” pull is so strong in international admissions that a liberal arts college is virtually never going to beat a brand-name Ivy League university in a yield battle. Fortunately, the international students come from well-defined feeder schools, mostly in the British tradition, with guidance counselors and teachers who are well aware of the quality of the top liberal arts colleges, so they steer appropriate students that direction.
The rapid rise in international applications is a factor in making it look like college admissions is harder than ever. For the most part, these no-prayer applications simply pump up the application numbers and push down the published acceptance rates.
The real limiting factor on international enrollment at any liberal arts college is not the number of applications or the quality of the applicant pool, but the size of international aid budget at the school. It’s all about the benjamins, and rightly so, when you consider the cost of a US education for an international student. Williams had lagged behind Amherst and Swarthmore in international recruitment for a number of years, so they did something about it. They increased the international aid budget and advertized “need-blind”. It worked. Smart marketing from a leading expert in college pricing and discount structures.
January 20th, 2006 at 12:56 pm
Noah,
You say, “I would expect that Williams has a greater number of international applicants than either of its non need-blind competitors, or at least a relatively stronger applicant pool.”
However, Williams has much more trouble appealing to international students than a place like Swarthmore, because Swarthmore has greater access to the outside world. International applicants are concerned about things like transportation and proximity to cities, two things that no amount of money Williams offers can change.
Swarthmore can point to an on-campus train station, and a major international airport less than 30 minutes away. Furthermore, the Berkshire climate is particularly intimidating to international students from milder weather regions.
January 20th, 2006 at 1:25 pm
04eph:
I agree. I have to give Williams very high marks for their minority and international recruitment efforts, successfully overcoming a real geographic liability in those applicant pools.
January 20th, 2006 at 6:42 pm
If international diversity is sufficiently valuable to Williams, it can pay international students out-of-pocket funds to attend, say $1,000,000 per semester per student - that ought to overcome misgivings about climate and lack of proximity to a big city.