/Things you can't say
(And there are actually studies that tie intellectual curiosity to SES. Hart & Risley's book Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children covers this very rigorously.)
A recent issue of Harvard's alum magazine talks about how about 35% of their undergrads going into 'finance'. I can't imagine anything less intellectual curious -- especially at the entry level.
Just because something is more easily measurable (ie, a math or engineering exam) does not mean it is less intellectually interesting. http://www.xkcd.com/451/
I meant at all top colleges, not just at MIT and Caltech. I agree with you about Harvard.
There are differences in how kids are raised. Working-class kids are raised to respect rules and follow orders, hence adornments like "the bell" in high school. Upper-middle- and upper-class kids are encouraged, in school, to be creative and critical thinkers.
I think whatever difference this engenders fades in the mid-teens, when the types of people who attend elite colleges tend to develop independent minds regardless of how they were raised.
Agreed. The differences come from the parenting styles of high-SES parents, not the money itself.
"I think whatever difference this engenders fades in the mid-teens"
The personality characteristics may or may not fade over time, but by the time kids reach their mid-teens the academic differences between high-SES and low-SES students are so great that most low-SES kids could never get into an elite college. We're talking a reading-ability gap of three or four grade levels, slightly less for math since most high-SES parents don't have their kids doing math over the summers.
Let's consider IQ, for example, on which there's ample data. IQ is more highly correlated to academic accomplishment (~0.5) than economic/occupational success (~0.4). SES is the success of the parents, which has got to be less predictive of IQ than success of the individual. While IQ is clearly not the right definition of "student quality", the non-IQ components are traits like creativity, ambition, and willingness to work hard. Creativity is probably independent of SES, and the latter two traits, in aggregate, favor working-class students over the rich.
If you take classes over the summer you will notice the student quality is much higher, for mostly the reason that the students there are the ones with the most money instead of the best grades (since scholarships don't cover summer classes.)
If you're talking about high school summer programs, I can speak from experience on this one. I've attended CTY, Mathcamp, and MO(S)P. The first two are probably not affordable to most working-class families (MOP is free to those who qualify). The students at these programs are indeed, as a group, better than elite college students, but this is because these sorts of summer programs are actually a lot more selective than Ivy League undergraduate programs, not because many of them are expensive.
It obviously depends on how you define student quality. If you define student quality as the college GPA of the student then I don't think SES is a great predictor. However, what I was responding to was the sentence:
"virtually every professor at an elite college will tell you that admitted students are noticeably worse each year."
When I hear this, I suspect that the professors are defining student quality as whether or not students have the personality traits typically imparted by high-SES parents (such as intellectual curiosity), not whether students are able to ace their final exams.
I went to CTY too, and I agree that the quality of kids is higher than at the elite colleges, and I agree that it is because the programs are more selective. However, part of that is the fact that the higher you raise the bar, the more SES matters-- because at some level you need every advantage you can get (both SES and IQ, not one or the other.)
Honestly, though, I don't believe that it's easier for low-SES students to get into Harvard now than it was in 1993. It might be easier for them to attend, because of more generous aid packages, but I think that it's a lot harder for them to clear admissions. It's probably easier for them to be admitted than it was in 1950, but tougher than it was in 1993.
Perfect SATs and high school grades are no longer enough to get into a top college. Extracurriculars and internships (during high school) are much more essential now than in '93, because everyone has near-perfect numbers, and these factors break the tie. These "soft factors" are obviously much more SES-loaded, in favor of the rich, than grades or test scores. Very rich parents can buy a resume that makes Ivy League rejection improbable, assuming the kid takes his prep high school courses, and his SAT tutor, seriously.
Professors who complain about student quality are not comparing 2008 to 1950, but to the 1990s and possibly '80s, so the stretch over which the comparison is made is one in which the barriers to entry, for hard-working low-SES students, became higher due to all the soft-factor garbage that Ivy League colleges now require, all of which is much easier for the well-off to game.
Incidentally, the complaint often heard from these professors is not that students have become stupider, but that their minds are narrower and that they tend to be strivers and game-players rather than aspiring scholars. It seems like this change in student body character would result, at least in part, from the increased focus on so-called "leadership" and ticket-punching garbage between 1993 and 2008.
One point I will concede to you is that it's nearly impossible 4 years of one's life, in earnest, to intellectual development, as opposed to mere career training, if one doesn't have an assured sunny future, and that fewer students at elite colleges have such futures. This might explain the rise of the pre-professional college student. You might want to correlate this with SES: In the golden era of undergraduate education, elite college students had awesome futures locked up and could devote serious time to intellectual development, for its own sake. Now that they're insecure strivers without assured good futures, they've turned into pre-banker douchebags who ask what will be on the test, cram and forget everything they learn. I'd counter this argument by noting that the social change is not in the SES of those who attend elite schools (there's no data to support a downward shift) but rather is the fact that, due to the past three decades' sociological contraction-- in spite of economic expansion-- upper-middle-class college students no longer have nice futures locked up to the extent that they would have had in previous generations.
Sorry that I took so long to reply. I disagree. Elite colleges favor minority students over white and Asian students, but they don't have any program favoring low-SES Asians and whites, who are by-and-large screwed because their admissions still hinge on having the right extracurricular merit badges, which are difficult to attain and game due to their low SES.
A poor white student from rural Wyoming or West Virginia might have a geographical advantage, due to state quotas. However, a working-class white applicant who grew up in Chino, CA, or a second-generation, relatively poor Vietnamese student who grew up in Chinatown, NY, have little or no chance of ever being admitted to an Ivy League college, even with near-perfect SATs and high school grades.
There's a paradox one notices when comparing elite college admissions in 1993 vs. 2008. Admissions to top colleges are much harder to attain, but actually a lot less meaningful. The noise in the admissions process seems to have quintupled, due in part to the (often successful) efforts of wealthy parents to beat the system, and the relative inability of admissions offices to detect and counter this trend.
Top colleges are 2-3 times more selective in 2008, with acceptance rates at the Ivies down into the single digits. At the same time, virtually every professor at an elite college will tell you that admitted students are noticeably worse each year, while professors at state schools notice the students getting much better.
I blame the Common Application, which has made it easier to apply to 10+ schools, making the process noisier and, consequently, creating a lot of anxiety on the part of students who previously had a lock on at least one top school (and moreso, on the part of their parents). This led to a positive feedback loop; it bolstered the admissions-gaming industry, which made the process even noisier, which led to more anxiety... ad nauseum.