When I was in high school, one student's parents (one doctor and one lawyer --- very financially well-off) took off work for one year just so they could claim having no income on the FAFSA documentation. She got accepted everywhere, winning across the places she applied over $300,000 in scholarships. The upper-middle class and wealthy can easily game this.

Edit: I should also add that the student and both parents were black. This probably played a large role in the offers.

That is fucking genius. Self identify as '<disadvantaged race>' and then quit your jobs, laughing all the way to the bank as the scholarships roll in.

You could renovate a house or something in the meantime, wrapping up your cash in that endeavor (little money in the bank on paper, except in the 'family home' while simultaneously having no income, offloading it as soon as the scholarships roll in.

Make it require 5 years tax returns.

Even then, 1 year off is a 20% income reduction on paper. 2 years would be 40%. Want to catch people voluntarily taking off work versus being 'legitimately' unemployed? (For example, is a realtor with no income during the housing crisis adequately poor?) Then, every university will have to hire people to do the analyses and make value judgements.

Long term, factoring in wealth creates all sorts of perverse incentives for parents that prioritize their children's education. It means in the present not taking promotions, even negotiating for lower salaries, and being priced out of better neighborhoods with better schools, all out of fear that doing otherwise will hurt their children's futures. And if their children succeed in getting a good education and a high-paying job, it comes at the cost of sacrificing their own children's futures.

Can’t this be taken into account by also considering wealth and assets, rather than by only income?

FAFSA seems to have been updated in recent years to evaluate not only income, but also wealth[1] (minus retirement accounts), including most types of US trusts[2].

[1] https://studentaid.gov/help-center/answers/article/fafsa-que...

[2] https://mcandrewslaw.com/publications-and-presentations/arti...

You'll also get people claiming estrangement from their parents.

It's like one of those AI algorithms that play games, if you don't plug all the holes, the AI figures out how to bunny hop or move all its troops out of range.

This is already done with first-gen college students having advantages in admissions. Income is highly correlated with race, but also confounded by the cost of living (say, cities vs. rural areas). A waiter in San Francisco might make $50k (well above the median US income) but basically be at poverty quality of life while raising a child in the city. Colleges also have access to databases on high school qualities, and so they have an idea of the rigor and depth of high school programs around the world, and thus know if a 3.8 GPA was hard earned or inflated. Basically there is a vast number of factors that adcoms try to control for, but it's not easy.

If you read College Confidential forums, you'll see how adcoms are well aware of all of these considerations and have been struggling to integrate them in an equitable and rational way for their entire careers.

The advantage of race is that it's not easily gamed. Using household income would incentivize families to try and minimize income in the years prior to college admission. Additionally, you'd have to deal with how income relates to cost of living (e.g. 100k in Alabama and coastal California aren't the same).

Race is really easy to game, nobody will actually verify your ethnicity.

Race can and is absolutely gamed all the time. Case in point: Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Just because it can be gamed doesn’t mean it’s not a good metric

Yes, but it’s harder to game. Income is vastly more fluid than racial identity, especially since in this situation it’s more advantageous for your income to go down.

Income and wealth are better predictors of “privilege” than race though.

So one is using a worse indicator.

Using a mix of income and wealth over several years to me is an appropriate indicator and cannot be easily gamed.

The fact that Will Smiths kids get a better chance to get into college than a similar applicant from a first generation immigrant family from Vietnam shows how broken race as an indicator can be.

That’s probably fair, though even rich black people have to deal with discrimination that rich white people don’t.

How is income vastly more fluid than a “racial identity” checkbox on a form? At least it’s sort of possible to verify.

It’s easy to lie and claim to be black, nobody will perform tests on you to verify this. You can be the whitest person in the world and get away with this (so many do).

A lot of financial aid is income based. Is there evidence of families doing this currently?

Anecdotal, but absolutely. I knew several people in undergrad whose parents did things like put assets into trust funds that would have been invisible to the limited means that colleges have at their disposal to audit. One friend specifically told me how his parents transferred ownership of their house to a blind trust they had established under a family member’s name and “rented” it back. This put their total assets well under the total amount to qualify for (a surprising amount of) financial aid. I’ve also heard of parents deferring a portion of their income for the four years their kid was in school, and receiving the deferred income in the years after their kid graduated.

Top schools these days give substantial financial aid to families whose incomes are well into the six figures (and assets into the seven figures), so it makes total sense that families just above the cutoff would use some dirty tricks to qualify.

Getting rid of the legacy admission system would help equality. Legacy admission is for preserving the generational class structure and keeping the disadvantaged down.

If that were true, then the rich kid/middle income kid performance gap would have declined or been eliminated once everybody got access to the internet, because everybody then has an internet connection, school textbooks, and paper.

Did this happen?

Thought provoking, but the cynical side of me says that this is easily gameable.

It’s probably not that gameable because universities already give aid on a need basis.

A real cynical view would say that top universities benefit more from accepting students from rich families than poor.

Need is gameable too

Why only income and not wealth? Many wealthy don't even work, just live off dividends.