What college admissions offices really want - Elite schools say they’re looking for academic excellence and diversity. But their thirst for tuition revenue means that wealth trumps all

Lots of interesting information in this article.

On perverse incentives:

[The] U.S. News algorithm rewards [colleges] for spending a lot of money: Higher faculty salaries and more spending on student services lead directly to better rankings. If you reduce your expenses, your ranking will fall, which means that next year your applicant pool will probably shrink. So instead you keep your spending high, which means you need a lot of tuition revenue, which means you need to keep admitting lots of rich kids.

The researchers Nicholas A. Bowman and Michael N. Bastedo showed in a 2008 paper that when colleges take steps to become more racially or socioeconomically diverse, applications tend to go down in future years. “Maybe — just maybe — the term ‘elite’ means ‘uncluttered by poor people,’ ” Boeckenstedt wrote. “And maybe that’s the problem?”

It turned out that offering grants — even relatively small ones — to students with high family incomes made it significantly more likely that those students would enroll in your college. (If you called the grant a “scholarship,” it worked even better.) And if a well-off student was willing to pay, say, $30,000 of your $40,000 tuition, that was still a pretty good deal for your college. [...] Beginning in the early 2000s, the practice of giving out merit aid evolved first into an arms race and then, more recently, into what is beginning to look like a death spiral.

if you pick any two freshmen at the same college, they are very likely to be paying completely different tuition rates. Those rates are based not on the true value of the service the college is offering or even on the ability of the student’s family to pay. Instead, they are based on a complex calculation, using sophisticated predictive algorithms, of what the student is worth to the college and what the college is worth to the student.

On test scores:

Students who enroll at DePaul having chosen not to submit their scores do indeed have much lower ACT and SAT scores than students who submitted their scores. [...] But nonsubmitting students do just as well at DePaul as the submitters do.