Admission by Affluence: How Harvard’s ‘Diversity’ Leaves Out Students From Schools Like Mine

According to FAS spokesperson John Chisholm, “Harvard admits students not high schools.” But with one in 11 students coming from just 21 schools, it’s hard to believe him.

Clearly, Harvard knows exactly what type of students it seeks to admit — the wealthier, the better. For all of its talk of diversity, Harvard is dramatically failing to admit students from underprivileged economic backgrounds. And as a student from an under-resourced high school, I can say firsthand that despite its recent efforts, Harvard isn’t doing enough to reach out to students like me.

The Crimson’s recent article on feeder schools lays their overrepresentation bare. Access to elite education is so concentrated that more than half of the schools that regularly see students matriculate at Harvard are located in just three states: Massachusetts, New York, and California. And again, there’s that jaw-dropping fact: over 9 percent of Harvard’s student body comes from .078 percent of public and private high schools in the United States.

This inequality isn’t a statistical anomaly — it’s by design.

The average tuition of the 12 private institutions was $64,308, a staggering $51,508 higher than the average parent contribution at Harvard. Although some of them have financial aid programs, they often only benefit about a quarter of students.

Many such institutions have special relationships to Harvard. In exceptional cases, the University may even send interviewers to their doorstep — a far cry from the thousands of schools that would rejoice at the thought of sending even a single student to the University.

Before I came to Harvard, I had never even heard of the concept of a “feeder school.” And even if my friends and I had, there was no way we could have imagined traveling thousands of miles from our families in El Paso to attend a swanky boarding school in Massachusetts or California.

The public feeders aren’t much better. Four of the nine are situated in some of their cities’ wealthiest districts, and another four use standardized test scores or similar processes as admittance criteria — scores that are highly correlated with family income.

A quick Google search for iterations of “Harvard low-income outreach” returns results for two programs, both described with a vague, underwhelming paragraph. What’s worse, both initiatives seem to be predominantly student-run, raising serious questions about why the work of paid, professional recruiters isn’t more visible.

It’s understandable that Harvard and other elite universities may be more secretive about their admissions processes given the end of affirmative action, but with such damning data readily available, more transparency is clearly in order.

Without robust statistics on low-income recruitment or representation, the efficacy of such programs is all but a toss-up. The information should be stored in a single, easily accessible location, so we can see precisely what Harvard is — or, more likely, is not — doing.

The current array of programs did nothing to improve my personal admissions experience. In my recollection, a lone Harvard recruiter visited my hometown of El Paso once a year. They didn’t bother visiting my high school, which ranks 1195th out of 1987 in Texas and where 80 percent of students are on free or reduced lunch.

Instead, I had to travel half an hour, making my way to the wealthier side of town. There, Harvard courted the attention of the kids at a school with better funding and more prominence, known for sending a handful of students to Ivy League universities each year.

El Paso is hardly a small city — it ranks as the 22nd most populous city in the country — but it barely receives any outreach from elite universities. And when it does, recruiters invariably focus their resources on wealthier neighborhoods. This must change.

Harvard’s reliance on just a handful of high schools highlights the exclusivity of its admissions pipeline. If Harvard is serious about being truly inclusive — especially in a post affirmative action world — it must prioritize socioeconomic background in its vision of diversity. Until it does, its promises of diversity will ring hollow, and the cycle of privilege will only perpetuate itself.

Harvard claims it wants students like me — so why is it so intent on cozying up to the same set of schools year after year?

Correction: November 19, 2024

A previous version of this article misstated a statistic about the proportion of feeder schools located in Massachusetts, New York, and California.

David I. Gonzalez ’25, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a double concentrator in Psychology and Economics in Kirkland House.