It feels like with fewer foreign students college's will have to open more slots to those who can be reasonable ready to be successful and also pay full rate.

It would have been helpful to model the effect of legacy status while accounting for academic indices.

Looking at this without consideration for two factors (number of applicants and the number of applications per applicant) is borderline malpractice.

I can’t pull older numbers on my phone at the moment but in the last 12 years the number of applications to colleges (applicants*applications) has risen 50%.

So correct for the reality that…

1) that immediately skews your denominator and changes your percentages.

2) the upper middle class students are the most likely to apply to the most schools (because they can and don’t have the other paths)

3) more and more marginal students who previously would not have gone to college are getting encouraged to apply.

And their model is just breaking.

The price portion of this hits hard. My oldest starts college in 2 year and then his younger brother follows 2 years later. We make enough to not qualify for need based aid but not enough to just write a check, merit based aid + a meager 529 and our savings is their only hope besides debt.

Further, both are male, hetero, only 1/4 hispanic, and my wife and I are not drug addicts or alcoholics so they'll get nothing from the "whole student" review. There's a huge swath of the population in this boat. The middle/upper-middle class pays for everyone else as always.

"The published cost of attendance is a fiction almost no one pays."

"Net effect: a $175k household with a house and a 401(k) is judged "full pay," pays near-sticker from already-taxed income, and receives essentially nothing."

I never know how to resolve these two statements. In our case, my daughter happened to choose a good public university. Maybe that is what they mean.

Pretty much the whole thing in a nutshell is the one chart showing the same student as Asian, 25%, White, 36%, Hispanic 77%, and Black 95%.

This is institutionalized racism. Perhaps Affirmative Action was needed in the past to kickstart the disproportionate enrollment demographics, but it was past due to get rid of it.

The most interesting part following SCOTUS' ruling is that Harvard said it wouldn't change their ways, and nobody enforced the ruling.

How likely is it to be a certain demographic given certain stats? Pretty much says it all.

The race factor is irrelevant in practice. Even more so when you look at literature indicating that your success is actually more predictive from high school success than college attendance.

In other words, if you get into Stanford you will likely succeed even if you don’t go.

It puzzles me why US colleges are allowed to consider anything other than standardized test scores.

For all these completely anonymous, AI-generated investigative pieces that are hitting the front page of HN every week, I'd love to see the prompts. Because I suspect they say more about what the proprietor of the site is trying to achieve than the article itself.