Where would colleges find underexploited talent?

David Leonhardt writes in the NYT about how wonderful it is that Amherst, a super small  liberal arts college, has increased its share of Pell Grant winners (bottom half of income distribution) from 13% to 22%. 

Mr. Marx says Amherst does put a thumb on the scale to give poor students more credit for a given SAT score. Not everyone will love that policy. “Spots at these places are precious,” he notes. But I find it tough to argue that a 1,300 score for most graduates of Phillips Exeter Academy — or most children of Amherst alumni — is as impressive as a 1,250 for someone from McDowell County, W.Va., or the South Bronx.

My impression is that the thumb on the scale to get students from the South Bronx and to a somewhat lesser extent from a coal mining district of West Virginia is bigger normally than 50 points. A 1300 isn't likely to get you into Amherst. The reality is that there are very very few South Bronx kids with what it takes to be competitive at Amherst, so schools like Amherst get into bidding wars with each other over them already. The more Amherst tries to drive up its share of Pell Grant winners from the South Bronx, the more Swarthmore's goes does.

About a decade ago, the press got worked up over how Caltech had only zero or one black student in its freshman class. "Look how many blacks MIT has!" It never occurred to the pundits that if Caltech were harangued into getting more black students, they'd just wind up spending a fortune to take some away from MIT. Nobody ever gets that. The assumption is that Caltech should merely create more Caltech-type black high school seniors.

In contrast, I think the most underexploited center of potential talent are kids from broken families, especially boys, who don't have two parents to prod them to jump through all the hoops that the multi-year college admissions brownie-point collecting process requires. 

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer