Where Do Ordinary A Students Go, Now?

Elite colleges and universities have made diversity a priority. A Pomona or Oberlin will trumpet, “Domestic students of color make up the majority of the admitted class at 52.3 percent.” The Ivy League is not far behind. Brown University proclaims: “Forty-seven percent of the members of this year’s admitted class identify as students of color — the highest percentage in Brown history.”

*In what follows, “students of color” is a placeholder for students accepted because of their valued, because historically marginalized, group identity. A white trans-gendered student might have been accepted under this rule, or even a white, poor, rural student, even if they don’t show up in the “students of color” count. This post focuses on the ensemble of cases where group identity, rather than academic accomplishment, tipped the scales toward admission.

What has transpired represents a real change from ten, fifteen, or twenty years ago.

My purpose in this essay is not to praise or condemn the change, but to evaluate its consequences. Elite college capacity did not expand over this period. If students of color went from, say, 15% of the entering class, years ago, to 50%, even as their proportion of the applicant pool increased only modestly, then students of some other description, who used to occupy those seats, must have been displaced.

This essay examines who those displaced students might be, considers where they might now attend college, instead of a Pomona or a Brown, and speculates about the consequences of the shift. I assume throughout that the shift in elite admissions, and the consequent displacement, is ongoing, and will hold for the foreseeable future.

I will describe the displaced students, who must now attend some other kind of college, as OASWAP: Ordinary A Students of White and/or Affluent Parentage. Let me define this group further. I insist on the ideological neutrality of these definitions.  This is not a rant for Trump or any other kind of rant.

Ordinary A student: someone, generally from a public school, whose academic record shows them to fall between the 93^rd and 99^th percentile. Because grade inflation is rampant in the public schools, this needs to be a student whose grades are echoed in and validated by their SAT or ACT test scores.  In SAT terms, these students typically score above 650 on all components, but below 750 on each component; no 800 scores here. (The percentiles corresponding to these scores can be found on the College Board web site.)

*My reasoning: on the old 100% grading scale, a 93 or above marked the boundary between an A-minus and an A grade.

These A students are nonetheless ordinary, first, because there are a lot of them.  With 3.3 million high school seniors, each percentile holds 33,000 students; therefore, 200,000 is a good upper bound population estimate for OASWAP. It’s an upper bound, because not all students with test scores in this range have white or affluent parents; just many of them.

These students are ordinary, second, because they are not extraordinary in any respect.  No perfect SAT scores here; no 99.9^th percentile scores either.  No degree from a prestigious private high school. No illustrious parentage. No extracurricular stardom. These students might have played varsity sports, or been an officer in a school club, but none of them got a state championship in anything. To use a familiar metaphor: these are the top students, minus the academic 1%.

These students are ordinary, third, because their life stories are conventional and mainstream. Their parents will often have a college education and good jobs; most of these students grew up in a nice suburb with a good school system.  Culturally, these students benefitted from the standard set of middle class virtues.  Their parents told them, and they believed: school is important.  You have to work hard to get ahead.  Do your schoolwork, every bit of it. Pay attention to deadlines.  Prepare for exams. Go all-in. School is your ticket up.

No hard luck tales here.  No sob stories.  No tortured identity quests. No grinding poverty. No insults of class. Nothing out of the ordinary: just capable, hard-working middle class kids from advantaged, but not truly privileged backgrounds.

White and /or Affluent parentage. Here I have to tread carefully.  First, reread that statement of middle class virtues.  Do those remind you of Tiger Mom discussions, and other stereotypes of Asian students? Yep; lots of Asian kids in the OASWAP group.  Or do those virtues remind you of third generation Jewish immigrant stories?  Yep, lots of those kids here too.

But, factually, which population still numerically dominates the set of safe neighborhoods with good public schools? Which group still dominates the population of college-educated parents with good jobs? Those neighborhoods, and those jobs, reflect the population dynamics of a generation ago: they continue to be very white, and even WASP. If that were not true, there would be no cause for affirmative action, and elite colleges would not be trumpeting their admission statistics for students of color.

Some of you may still be reading with a frown of suspicion, so let me try again. This ain’t no Bell Curve story.  This is to acknowledge, accept, and foreground the biasing effect of socio-economic status on test scores and grades.  If it is true that performance on the SAT is heavily confounded with socio-economic status, then it follows directly that a high proportion of A students will come from advantaged socio-economic backgrounds—the aforementioned safe neighborhoods with good schools. Kids from affluent middle class families have to be over-represented in the ordinary A student group. Not because they are more intelligent than any other ethnic group, but because they have enjoyed the advantages of affluence, and also the cultural advantages associated with growing up in a safe neighborhood with a good school system, and because they are so numerous. They got the word, and they had the resources to act on it. Pay attention in school.  Study hard.

Quantifying the Displacement

Let’s be clear: schools like Pomona and Brown, the top liberal arts colleges and the Ivy League, were never easy admits for the ordinary A student. But in the modern era, OASWAP have always aspired to gain entrance to such schools, and have always made up a high percentage of the applicant pool, so that a fraction regularly did gain admittance. But, given a fixed capacity, and a much greater weight on diversity in admissions decisions, there must now be fewer OASWAP admitted than before. How many, in raw numbers?

My rule of thumb is 35%, computed as 50% students of color now, versus 15% in bygone days.  Next, I compute the fixed capacity for elite admissions as follows.  Take the Ivy League, plus Stanford and MIT, plus a couple more top-ranked universities (your pick: Duke? University of Chicago? Johns Hopkins?). These will accept about 30,000 students per year (see toptieradmissions.com for this number and for other useful statistical summaries).  Pomona, Amherst, Swarthmore and the top dozen liberal art colleges will accept another 10,000 students. Actual enrollment is less, because of ample overlap across schools in acceptances, but it is convenient to work with acceptance letters, which is what OASWAP students are now less likely to receive.

By multiplication, combining 35% and 40,000 yields a capacity reduction of 14,000. These are acceptances which are no longer going out to the OASWAP group. This is the raw count of students whose older cousins might have gained acceptance to a Pomona or Brown around 2000, but who must now go elsewhere.

Keep in mind that the academic 1%–the 20,000 extraordinary students at the 99.5^th percentile and above—contains enough bodies to fill the remaining 50% of elite college slots not being allocated on diversity grounds.  Of course, these extraordinary students are also getting rejected more often; to validate the idea of “holistic” admission criteria—not at all the dread racial preference!– it helps when an elite college also rejects a kid with an 800 SAT score. But the 1% continues to have much better odds than the OASWAP student.

Consistent with the biasing effect of socio-economic status on grades and test scores, the academic 1 percent is likely to be the scions of the societal top 1 percent. These will often be kids who went to elite private schools, had the funds for private tutoring, had the funds for that bodacious community service project overseas, yada yada. Many legacy and donor applicants will have this profile as well. Accordingly, the Pomona or Brown student who is not a student of color is more and more likely to be a legacy or donor admit, a wealthy heir, or a star athlete or musician.

The top 1 percent, the extraordinary students, have always accounted for a substantial portion of elite college admissions.  But there used to be thousands of slots remaining, 14,000 on my count, for the 98^th percentile student with a well-rounded extra-curricular profile; or the 97^th percentile student who wrote an insightful essay; or the 95^th percentile student who played the tuba, in years when the college band needed one; or the 93^rd percentile student overall, but a girl, one who had super-strong science grades and test scores, and a compelling letter of recommendation from an alumnus.

But today, we can fill the essay, the tuba, and the extra-curricular slots from the population of extra-ordinary students. We can find a girl with perfect science test scores, who also has tip-top verbal scores; we can get a state champion in the tuba competition, who also has 99^th percentile test scores; we can choose among a slew of students who wrote an insightful essay, and admit the one who has research publications to his credit as well; and so forth. By definition, there are over 3000 students at the 99.9^th percentile, 6000 above the 99.8^th percentile, and so forth.  It’s a big world, and tens of thousands can claim extraordinary talent.

Where do the 14,000 displaced OASWAP students go?

Continue to Part II