Students suing elite U.S. colleges seek 'wealth favoritism' information

This reminded me of something back when I was in high school in my Latin American country. There used to be this locally known international university-application-consultant and one of the things he mentioned for the "satisfaction guaranteed" of his services was being familiar on which Universities needed to increase their Latin American demographics and how to use that in the applicant's favor to increase the chances of a successful college and scholarship application. This was mostly targeted to students at bilingual or international schools whose families were already wealthier than average.

> shared the same life experiences regardless of their race

Where I grew up bilingual/international school students live in an isolated bubble separate from the rest of students. So they grow up with the study plans, standardized tests, music, tv shows and pop culture from their international school's country.

So probably that's why their life experience might have been more similar to those in the U.S. This is only a small fraction of the students though.

For example a high school student from American School of my country might know about the SAT test prep, Ivy applications, college application essay writing, and be familiar with US issues. All of those which would be mostly unknown by students outside that circle. Making others less likely to successfully apply.

Presumably need blind admissions skew high income to begin with just because some parts of America verge on third world and illiterate without even taking other factors into account, but I also have to assume their financial aid practices are carefully designed, perhaps with full US government support (FAFSA is a hilarious thing in many respects), to further distill out an appropriately wealthy distribution of admits.

The fact that government money and aid can go to these schools that are so instrumental in the creation and sustenance of elites has always been a farcical betrayal of the democratic ideal.

Very curious how far they've gone to prevent documentation of the kinds of things plaintiffs would know doubt like to know from ever existing to begin with.

(As an aside: as an advisor of PhD students in computer science, I sometimes have to train students out of these habits. Research doesn’t happen if you’re used to getting the shallow answer more quickly, or if you’re afraid to be wrong.)

Anyway the claim in the lawsuit about lost money is really just theoretical - most of the top schools collaborate in developing methods to determine how much aid a student should receive. The lawsuit is claiming that if the top schools could not "collude" on aid, students would have gotten more of it.

However I think that is a massive assumption that is not going to play out the way they would like. These schools reject 100s of qualified people every year that would gladly take a spot with current aid packages. There might be an occasional superstar that schools do compete over, but your average small town middle class 1600 SAT kid is super fucking replaceable.

Hell I could see aid being lower if schools didn't "collude", because being part of this need blind consortium is good PR. The lesser schools that give lesser aid are the ones that supposedly don't collude.

Legally it will be an interesting case though - the reason these schools are allowed to work together on aid package formulas is because they practice need blind admissions, which really only the top unis do. The lawsuit argues that admissions is not actually need blind, because of preferential admission for wealthy donors and some other admissions dynamics that are more common and inadvertently factor in wealth.

That makes this discovery highly relevant to the case, and while I think need blind status will be ultimately upheld, I'm sure the schools don't want the info getting out.

Interestingly, the initial lawsuit is based purely on public info and a handful of salty (unclear why) students. There isn't private info about people's aid packages or anything like that supporting it as far as I can find. I suspect the people suing realized they had an argument the schools weren't actually need blind, and that is what they actually wanted to challenge, so they dug up an argument about supposed low ball aid packages because the need blind schools form an aid consortium.

A lot of the articles about the lawsuit have left out critical details about what is actually being claimed, the claims make no sense until you realize this is actually about challenging need blind status. Here is an article that does touch on the key issues: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/10/us/financial-aid-lawsuit-...