They may have a point. Didn’t Chelsea Clinton attend Stanford?
Inside Higher Ed reports:
Is Stanford Letting In Too Many Wealthy Students?When The New York Times (courtesy of Raj Chetty at Harvard University) a few years ago decided to examine the issue of wealth and higher education, the figures for Stanford University were striking:More than half of Stanford undergraduates came from a family in the top 10 percent of wealth in the United States.- Thirty-nine percent came from the top 5 percent.- Seventeen percent came from the top 1 percent.- And 3.5 percent came from the top 0.1 percent.And how many are from the bottom 20 percent? Only 4 percent. (Stanford is quite diverse by looking at racial and ethnic groups, with white students making up 32 percent of the population, Asians 23 percent, Latinx 17 percent, Black 7 percent and Native Americans 1 percent.)As the above numbers indicate, Stanford has a very wealthy student body. And so do most of the other hypercompetitive (in admissions) private colleges.Faculty at the university have been studying the issue, and the Faculty Senate recently adopted two proposals designed to de-emphasize wealth in admissions.The first proposal is designed to reduce the influence of wealth in undergraduate admission and to increase the socioeconomic diversity of the undergraduate class. It urges university leaders “to devote resources to improving data collection by modifying Stanford’s application to require applicants to list those who advised or read their application, and to describe their relationship with those people.” The Faculty Senate also wants to establish “an improved data system to evaluate the effect of admissions on philanthropic support to the university and to initiate surveys to track the distribution of income and wealth levels for parents and undergraduates.”In addition, the Faculty Senate called for “improved communication that will enhance Stanford’s efforts to publicly describe and demystify the admission process and to reduce disparities among those who can or cannot afford, for instance, private counseling.”
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY