[HN Gopher] Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at...
___________________________________________________________________
Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie
Mellon, Pitt
Author : Geekette
Score : 450 points
Date : 2023-07-19 15:44 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (triblive.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (triblive.com)
| screye wrote:
| Legacy admissions should not be legal in public universities.
| Massive public schools like UMass, Mich, StonyBrook, GATech,
| Minnesota, Penn State still take legacy admissions.
|
| It's nice to see CMU follow in the footsteps of other top private
| tech schools like MIT & Caltech that claim to not use legacy
| status. It's no surprise that Ivies, Stanford and most private
| colleges all heavily favor legacy. Afterall, a large part of a
| prestige university's job is lend an appearance of competence to
| the not-as-competent kids of the elite.
|
| source I used -
| https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/colleges-that-c...
| rank0 wrote:
| I have a hard time defining my own stance on this point.
|
| For example, my alma mater GAtech allows for automatic
| admissions of my immediate relatives provided they reach some
| bar like 3.5 gpa + 1400 SAT (math+reading).
|
| Do you think this should be illegal? It's quite clearly an
| attempt to create an enduring GT community. It's also clearly
| not the same as racially discriminatory admissions.
|
| I do see the argument that it's unfair...but should it be full
| blown illegal? "Non-legacy" isn't a protected class in America
| unlike race,sex,religion, etc.
| dbish wrote:
| Yes, that should not be allowed. The best should get in, not
| a relative.
| rank0 wrote:
| I concede that maybe it's not the way "things ought to be"
|
| But what's your legal argument for why this practice should
| be prohibited?
| causi wrote:
| I'm amazed it was ever legal in the first place. It's open
| nepotism.
| pitaj wrote:
| Nepotism has never been illegal.
| reaperducer wrote:
| In the private sector.
|
| In many governments, it is quite illegal.
| laiejtli wrote:
| Not sure how to phrase this. It's illegal in the US
| government, but it still exists all over unofficially and
| it's openly acknowledged standard practice in many NGOs.
|
| It's very difficult to get a job at NASA. I forget the
| exact number, but something like 75% of people who "work
| for NASA" are contractors and only a small minority are
| actual government employees. In order to get a full-time
| job, it helps to have previous experience usually in the
| form of a graduate fellowship. In order to get a
| fellowship, it helps to have undergrad summer experience.
| In order to get undergraduate experience, it's very helpful
| to have high school summer program experience. In order to
| get high school experience, you'll need to live in the area
| and probably have some connections which means parents or
| family who work at the NASA facility in question.
|
| In my experience, national labs were similar but to a much
| lesser extreme, often just because they're remote and
| sometimes antiquated and children of lab employees often
| can't wait to get away.
|
| When I worked at at the UN, (NGO, not formal government)
| coworkers were genuinely confused about how I got a job
| there with no family connections in higher places. I had
| the same conversation with several bewildered coworkers who
| plainly told me about their parent or uncle who got them
| their job. I was told that nepotism is much, much more
| common and openly acknowledged in Europe than in the US.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Making a distinction about the "private sector," but being
| vague for some reason about the country we're discussing?
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Making a distinction about the "private sector," but
| being vague for some reason about the country we're
| discussing?_
|
| I wrote "many governments" because I am not fully versed
| in the policies and laws of every nation on the planet.
| Perhaps you can fill us in?
| clnq wrote:
| The US. There is no other country.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Sure, but it's legal in many governments too. The classic
| example is the Office of the First Lady: an
| institutionalized nepotistic government position for which
| one qualifies solely by being married to the highest
| elected position in the US, the President.
| joezydeco wrote:
| As long as you keep it in the family.
| [deleted]
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| There's no need to be antisemitic, but I get what you're
| saying.
| sebmellen wrote:
| For much of their history, legacy admissions were a tool to
| keep out less desirable Jewish/Catholic/non-WASP applicants
| [0][1]
|
| [0]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23055549
|
| [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/13/us/legacy-admissions-
| coll...
| nerdo wrote:
| Nepotism is how groups function everywhere. The race-based
| admissions was a weird new thing, from a hyper-focused
| conspiracy that appears to be losing its grip.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Race-based admissions was a pretend way to remediate slavery
| and Jim Crow without spending any money or focusing on the
| harms done to the descendants of slaves. Almost everybody who
| thinks that the racism of Affirmative Action was a terrible
| thing _also thinks_ compensating the descendants of slaves
| for the unpaid work and legal segregation that their parents,
| grandparents, and great-grandparents (and so on, 10-20 times)
| endured would be 100x worse.
|
| The reason for AA was because you couldn't get anything that
| specifically calculated and addressed the harms of slavery
| and Jim Crow past the advocates of "meritocracy." Was the
| literal pricing of slaves not the ultimate capitalist proof
| of merit?
| nerdo wrote:
| So.. file a claim against the southern plantation owners
| who benefited in excess of the compensation paid? What's
| the relevance of any of this to anything?
| Y_Y wrote:
| I don't think this is nepotism, strictly speaking. The
| applicants aren't related or necessarily personally known to
| the people making the decision, they're merely related to prior
| graduates.
|
| It may be reflective of corruption and produce inequitable and
| undesirable outcomes, but nepotism is something else.
| drewcoo wrote:
| If nepotism were illegal, we would have a 100% inheritance tax
| across the board.
|
| There tend to be more laws pro-family than anti- for some
| reason . . .
| zenbane wrote:
| Why would "anti-family" laws make sense? People who come from
| stable families are statistically much much more likely to be
| happy, successful and contribute to society.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| They WERE, essentially, letting people buy their kid's admission.
| Maybe not directly, but if you're a rich alumnus, you have to
| suspect that your donation history will figure into your kid's
| admission or not.
|
| Even if the school says it doesn't, they could be lying.
| diamondfist25 wrote:
| Who needs these ivy leagues when u can get superhuman knowledge
| for $20 bucks!
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| "'[Legacy] has never been a primary or 'plus' factor in Pitt
| admissions of undergraduates.' [...] Pitt declined to say how
| many legacies are part of its entering classes."
|
| So this may not have been a radical move anyway, at least at
| Pitt. Call me when Harvard decides to do this.
| reso wrote:
| Hard to believe legacy admissions are legal anywhere. An obvious
| injustice--and efficiency drain--on society.
| firebirdn99 wrote:
| The games been rigged for far too long.
| bsder wrote:
| > Good. With the end of affirmative action, legacy status in
| admissions becomes much harder to justify.
|
| Placing University of Pittsburgh, a public university which has
| almost a 67% acceptance rate, in the same conversation with
| private universities that have acceptance rates in or near the
| single digit percentages borders on journalistic fraud.
|
| I would also say that Pitt, unlike a lot (most) of universities
| mentioned, had _many_ programs attempting to help those from more
| humble backgrounds get into the university. It used to have a
| very strong night school. It also had many programs in the summer
| for students who were "on the edge" of getting in but needed to
| learn some extra skills (like how to study, how to use libraries,
| extra classwork learning how to write, etc.).
|
| I don't know what kind of programs Pitt still has, though. So my
| information could be outdated.
| nancyhn wrote:
| The end of both legacy admissions and race-based admissions makes
| me feel hopeful that we're finally pivoting to a productive,
| merit-based approach.
| bluepod4 wrote:
| "Merit-based" is such a loaded term.
|
| What do you mean by that exactly? What are you envisioning?
|
| EDIT: Wow, a downvote. For this comment? Yikes!
|
| EDIT 2: Oh, I see. I was using the phrase "loaded term"
| incorrectly. I only meant that "merit-based" is a phrase that
| can mean a lot of different things.
|
| However, thinking about this more, I do still think it's a
| loaded term. Politicians and the adjacents have visibly been
| using it to push an agenda. (I'm not saying this agenda is
| right or not. But it's still clearly an agenda. I mean, that's
| what their jobs are: to literally have agendas lol.)
| thebradbain wrote:
| Except for, you know, Letters of Recommendation, which at top
| schools are often the deciding factor. All else being near-
| equal (or not), a letter from a Kennedy is going to get you
| into Brown versus say, a regular high school teacher that many
| of comfortable-but-not-connected suburban students applying to
| college will be using. Maybe a local lawyer, if you're special.
|
| Those are who families who scream "meritocracy" should be
| directing their ire at, not the applicants (usually with more
| impressive results and stories considering the background they
| grew up in, compared to--sorry!--a hum-drum suburban also-ran)
| _think_ they're better than, which ultimately is what a
| meritocracy boils down to.
|
| Ultimately the only answer that will give you, or your kids,
| peace is accepting the fact that schools will curate the
| student body they want. They've admittedly done a good job at
| it! Complain all you want about Harvard tilting the scales,
| they've done an amazing job maintaining their reputation and
| exclusivity. If they don't accept you, they don't want you. If
| they do, they do. It's that simple.
| underlipton wrote:
| The answer has always been to close the delta between the
| value of a Harvard degree and wherever else your kid can
| actually get into. The unspoken (or uncomfortable) aspect of
| that is that Harvard et al. receive outsize prestige because
| they're associated with outsize wealth, and access to that
| wealth through the personal and professional connections one
| can garner there.
|
| Wealth concentration in society is the fundamental issue.
| When median wealth is higher and the range smaller,
| influential families will have less with which to "bid up" a
| spot at Harvard. They might choose another institution, that
| "wherever else" we mentioned earlier. So now your kids are
| friends. Or maybe not (it's not such a big deal, since
| they're not THAT much wealthier than you are). This becomes
| the dominant paradigm.
|
| Decentralize education, as it were.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Exactly so. I know a guy who got into the top MBA program
| in the nation (U of C). He had no undergrad degree, but was
| born to a wealthy family. His wife was born to an even
| wealthier family, and he quickly after flunking out of
| undergrad within a few years found a career as an
| executive.
|
| Connect the dots on how all that works.
|
| (Curiously he insists he's a "pulled himself up by his
| bootstraps" type character)
| ecshafer wrote:
| I want to get rid of letters of recommendation as well. I
| would personally like to go off of only a single nationwide
| standardized test.
| tivert wrote:
| > I want to get rid of letters of recommendation as well. I
| would personally like to go off of only a single nationwide
| standardized test.
|
| That is not good. China has that, and I would not consider
| the culture it fosters healthy _at all_. What you then get
| is kids who _literally have no life_ beyond studying for
| the test and the results of _one point_ on the exam having
| a _massive_ effect on ranking and therefore outcome.
| dfadsadsf wrote:
| The problem with a single nationwide standardized test is
| that kids will spend an inordinate amount of time (and
| money) studying for it. Major downside is that time is
| mostly wasted learning tricks to answer questions instead
| of learning something valuable. People spend years studying
| for IIT exam in India and there is zero chance of scoring
| well on the test without prep.
| janalsncm wrote:
| The fact of the matter is that unless you pick names out
| of a hat wealthy people will always have an advantage.
| But standardized testing can reduce the correlation with
| wealth in ways that other factors can't.
|
| Yes, standardized testing isn't perfect. It is biased
| towards those with time and money to prepare. But it's
| also biased towards people who are good at problem
| solving, critical thinking, and a work ethic to actually
| do the preparation.
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| And because they spent so much time studying for those
| tests, they did not study real interesting skills that
| could be useful for their career later as well...
| TurkishPoptart wrote:
| Nope, these are "racist" now. I'm not going to explain why
| at the risk of getting downvoted.
| thebradbain wrote:
| I personally could not think of a more boring way to curate
| a student body, but even more so than that, I think that's
| completely unfair to the many, many way-more interesting
| people who make up top schools' student bodies: why does
| Jimmy Also-Ran with the perfect score on a single test and
| nothing else get to go to college while track-star Olympiad
| with a 4.0 doesn't?
| umanwizard wrote:
| Because universities are academic institutions, not
| track-and-field training facilities (or at least they are
| in countries that take education seriously, unlike the
| US). Who cares how boring it is?
| thebradbain wrote:
| I don't think it's a stretch to say an Olympiad 4.0
| student -- many of whom exist, I went to school with a
| few -- has a much more promising academic career than
| someone who managed to get good-not-great grades and a
| single perfect test score.
|
| Aside from the dedication of waking up to practice a
| sport every morning, think of how much time and
| discipline is it takes to balance being an amazing
| athlete with being a great student. They likely have all
| the mental fortitude and academic talent they need to
| succeed in college, no question, regardless of if they
| had a bad test day, or their pencil broke, or they had to
| use the bathroom and ran out of time, etc.
|
| Someone with As and Bs, maybe a C, who did nothing else
| of note and managed to get a perfect test score one time
| doesn't seem near as surefire a bet. If anything it shows
| you didn't apply yourself.
| janalsncm wrote:
| In this scenario where you have a track star with a 4.0
| and a "boring" student who happened to luck out and get a
| perfect SAT score, did these students take the same
| classes? Because maybe the reason the track star didn't
| do as well is because they don't know as much as the
| athlete.
| triceratops wrote:
| What's the difference between training for track meets
| and training for a standardized test? In either case the
| student is applying themselves to excellence in a very
| niche skill - running really fast, or taking a test.
| umanwizard wrote:
| The difference is that one has to do with academic study,
| and one doesn't.
|
| Edit: you're acting like performance on the test is
| completely arbitrary. Clearly, it should be designed to
| avoid this, and to actually test academic mastery. For
| example, someone planning to study physics should be
| asked to solve difficult physics and math problems.
| Someone planning to study history or literature should be
| asked to write long-form essays on those topics. And so
| on.
|
| I feel like a lot of people in this thread are only
| familiar with the American system and thus assume that
| "standardized tests" all have to be like the SAT, i.e.
| answering a ton of relatively basic multiple-choice
| questions as quickly and accurately as possible. That is
| not the case.
| dfadsadsf wrote:
| With that, the US is widely recognized to have the best
| universities in the world. A lot of countries claim to
| take education seriously, but the result is often very
| mediocre.
|
| Very few people will pick IIT or Beijing University if
| they are offered spot at Harvard.
| ativzzz wrote:
| People go to Harvard not for the excellence of the
| education, which I'm sure is good but is pretty much
| equivalent to top state public schools, but for the
| network and the signaling.
|
| Network - one of the best things you can do is put a
| bunch of intelligent, highly motivated people in one room
| and have them work on stuff together. Top tier
| universities are basically this. The actual education
| offered on top isn't that relevant as long as it's
| passable - these people will find a way to educate
| themselves
|
| Signaling - having Hardvard on your resume is a global
| signal of your status and opens up so many more doors by
| simply having it listed by your name
| largeluke wrote:
| There are plenty of academic opportunities at Harvard
| that are not available at state schools. Because they
| attract many of the top students in the world, they're
| able to offer highly accelerated or advanced courses that
| other schools can't.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Aren't plenty of PISA high-ranking nations from the East
| Asian countries to Germany highly reliant upon placement
| examinations in student educational destinations? It
| might not feel very American, but it's widely practiced.
| MandieD wrote:
| In Germany, it's all about Abitur results: comprehensive
| exams and portfolio of work in a few subjects you've
| chosen to focus on, and really only for a few high-demand
| majors like medicine or law (everywhere) and computer
| science (at the top tech schools); for every other major,
| it's a matter of getting decent marks that prove you're
| likely prepared for university. Not picking mathematics
| as one of your major Abitur subjects would probably be
| disqualifying for computer science.
|
| There's nothing like the SAT (single, high-stakes general
| aptitude test used nationwide); Abitur standards are set
| and evaluated by each state.
|
| While there's a reputational difference between, say,
| Technisches Universitat Munchen and Ostbayerische
| Technische Hochschule Amberg-Weiden, fees are the same at
| both, and cost of living of course is higher for TUM just
| because Munich is really expensive.
|
| At least in tech in Germany, there is nothing resembling
| the prestige merely attending MIT/Stanford/CMU carries in
| the US. Of course there's a network effect from studying
| at TUM or RWTH instead of OTH-AW, but not nearly as
| pronounced. There are no private, elite universities, no
| university-sponsored sports teams, no legacy admissions,
| no giant individual donors hoping to secure a university
| spot for a lazy/dull kid. Lazy/dull rich kids go to
| private high schools if they can't hack it in public
| university-prep school.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Thanks for the very comprehensive information. Curious
| what you think of this opinion about the lack of elite
| schools in Germany not being a good thing-
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36789051
| ecshafer wrote:
| The track star olympiad sounds like they have a bright
| career in track. I don't see what that has to do with
| academics.
| tssva wrote:
| A track star olympiad sounds like someone that has a
| sense of dedication and a work ethic that will serve them
| well in academics. A person who has scored well on a
| single test they had a long time to prep for but displays
| no other outstanding qualities seems like someone that
| might be overwhelmed and not able to keep up with the
| academic requirements of university.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| definitely doesn't play out that way at top schools lol
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Not to detract from your larger point, but these days, it
| might depend on the Kennedy.
| loeg wrote:
| They're all bad! https://www.joshbarro.com/p/the-kennedys-
| were-always-bad
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Even this random one seems weird and out of touch:
|
| https://www.insider.com/jfk-grandson-jack-schlossberg-
| viral-...
| onetimeusename wrote:
| We're not, we're heading towards tribalism. The concern about
| legacy admissions is more that the legacies may be
| disproportionately white more so than anything else. With
| limited data on other schools, Harvard recently reported that
| legacies actually had higher SAT scores than non-legacy
| admits.[1] That didn't stop people who wanted an alleged merit
| based admissions policy from continuing to call it a racist
| backdoor. Carnegie Mellon did not publish any stats on their
| legacy admits however.
|
| Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, universities have
| promised to continue to look at race as a factor that still
| complies with the SC ruling which means a backdoor for race.
| FWIW white students are the most underrepresented on elite
| campuses so it would be hard to argue that there are admissions
| policies favoring them.
|
| [1]: https://features.thecrimson.com/2021/freshman-
| survey/academi...
|
| [2]: https://stanforddaily.com/2023/06/30/stanford-to-expand-
| outr...
| dirtyid wrote:
| >reported that legacies actually had higher SAT scores than
| non-legacy admits
|
| About 30 points higher than non-legacy students whose average
| is brought down by affirmative action. VS Asian Americans who
| need to score 50-100+ points higher for comparable
| consideration, they're underperforming based on SAT merit.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| _Harvard recently reported that legacies actually had higher
| SAT scores than non-legacy admits..._
|
| So you agree that Harvard shouldn't need to factor in legacy
| status and instead use fairer metrics like SAT scores?
| onetimeusename wrote:
| Not necessarily. I am neutral on it. I see both sides of
| the argument.
|
| I do think legacy admissions should not be a strike against
| which seems inevitable now to prevent lawsuits and bad
| press. I also think legacy admits shouldn't be tarred as
| less qualified (a polite way to say dumber), affirmative
| action beneficiaries for white people, and spoiled.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| Now I feel like you're making up strawmen. Literally no
| one is saying anything about legacy status counting
| _against_ applicants.
|
| Even if that was a concern, applicants could simply...
| not mention their legacy status? Or better yet, the
| application itself could just not collect that data?
| onetimeusename wrote:
| I'd hope it's not a strawman.
|
| I do think legacy admission status counts against now.
| The SFFA lawsuit accused Harvard of using legacy
| admissions of being a backdoor affirmative action for
| white people because the legacy admits were so
| disproportionately white. I think my point is that in a
| highly racial context, the facts are thrown out.
|
| To your point, in California, there was a law that was
| passed in 2019 that requires reporting on legacy
| admissions now[1] so I think the school is obligated to
| collect this data (so idk what happens if an applicant
| omits it). And again, legacy admission status is accused
| of broadly being affirmative action for white people[2]
| without evidence.
|
| The reason it counts against now is that if a qualified
| legacy student is accepted, the data on students must be
| made public, by law or by public interest. The higher the
| percent of legacy admits, the more the school is accused
| of letting unqualified people in, facts be damned. I
| think that is because of a highly tribal view of school
| admissions.
|
| [1]:
| https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/california-
| lega...
|
| [2]: https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/affirmative-
| action-white...
| kevinventullo wrote:
| You claim "the facts are thrown out" but then don't cite
| a single hard fact which remotely suggest anyone wants
| legacy status to count against. Instead you are
| extrapolating that removal of legacy from positive
| consideration will eventually lead to re-adding legacy
| for negative consideration, but no one is actually
| suggesting this. You are completely making it up.
|
| The California law you cite only applies to universities
| that collect and consider legacy data in the first place.
| Thus, your claim that "if a qualified legacy student is
| accepted, the data on students must be made public..."
| does not hold if the universities simply drop legacy
| status from consideration altogether, which is the goal
| here. If they don't collect the data, they can't be
| accused of anything.
|
| Honestly, this manipulation of facts and narrative leads
| me to believe that you are pushing an agenda and not
| arguing in good faith.
| onetimeusename wrote:
| _but then don't cite a single hard fact which remotely
| suggest anyone wants legacy status to count against._
|
| Accusing it of being affirmative action for white people
| or for "the rich" pretty clearly means people want it to
| count against. I think you are deliberately ignoring that
| the SFFA lawsuit said this, politicians said this, and
| even people ITT said this and clearly these things
| reflect poorly on the university. There isn't any
| evidence that legacy admissions is affirmative action for
| white people or rich people though.
|
| _simply drop legacy status from consideration
| altogether_
|
| There isn't any evidence that legacy status counts for.
| You have never established that it does. Not one of the
| California schools in that article I cited says that
| legacy admits have an advantage. Here is Stanford's
| policy
| https://provost.stanford.edu/2020/06/26/admissions-
| considera.... CMU from the OP article said legacy status
| had no bearing on admissions for years. Harvard likewise.
| Their reasons for tracking legacy status are probably
| complicated. I concede at one point they were used to
| allow in less qualified students but that hasn't been the
| case for years. But tracking legacy status does not mean
| it is used to give favorable admissions. I do not believe
| it does and the legacy admits are probably qualified.
| That is clearly the case for Harvard. If you did not
| believe this, you are saying universities are lying about
| their policies.
|
| So since the accusation that legacy admissions is
| affirmative action for white people is disingenuous, I
| believe the people who continue to say that it is are
| actually the ones not arguing in good faith.
|
| edit: dropping legacy status from applications may not
| even change the percentage of 'legacy' admits and yet I
| am sure that universities know who they are. Including it
| on applications may harm the legacy applications because
| the universities are now under politically charged
| pressure which is what I am arguing would be wrong.
| nova22033 wrote:
| _actually had higher SAT scores than non-legacy admits_
|
| Is the SAT score the only measure of merit?
|
| The non-legacies are going to miss on the chance to make
| social connections with legacy admits who have a lot of
| connections...and access to a lot of resources..
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Yeah how often does that actually happen. Did Tommy Lee
| Jones' acting career really benefit from him being
| roommates with the son of Albert Gore, Sr.?
| kelipso wrote:
| The legacy admits will just go to some other college where
| some other suckerfish can hop on to get access to a lot of
| resources..so what's the big difference socially.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > The concern about legacy admissions is more that the
| legacies may be disproportionately white
|
| Disproportionally rich is my problem with legacy admissions.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Harvard recently reported that legacies actually had higher
| SAT scores than non-legacy admits.
|
| This likely indicates wealthy people can afford SAT
| preparation tutors.
| timmg wrote:
| It could also mean: smarter people make more money -- and
| they pass down intelligence -- both genetically and through
| teaching.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| [flagged]
| nancyhn wrote:
| Racism is bad and you should feel bad that you judge people
| based on their skin color.
| legolas2412 wrote:
| History also definitely shows that nepotistic or race-
| centered systems really did not work out fine. In fact the
| malinged systems made by rich white people were nepotistic
| and race-centered.
|
| What history does show us is that systems that reward effort,
| and not just someone's heritage are the ones that have led to
| best outcomes.
| ahtihn wrote:
| Does history show things working out better when other groups
| make rules?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I don't think that was the point of the person you are
| resounding to. I think the point was that no _single group_
| should make all the rules.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Only one of these is a good thing.
| loeg wrote:
| I don't think discrimination against asians was a good thing!
| makeitdouble wrote:
| There was an interesting piece in a NPR podcast on the
| effects on the more "elite" students:
|
| https://www.npr.org/2023/06/16/1182630192/the-indicator-
| from...
|
| Basically, when the top students couldn't enter the more
| selective schools, they'd go to private or a bit less
| competitive schools and compensate the difference in
| education/networking in other ways, making it a wash when
| looking at their income years later. In contract students
| who benefited affirmative action where getting a way better
| deal at the exit and saw more significant salary difference
| compared to those who couldn't attend the more selective
| schools.
| gbasin wrote:
| and it's probably not the one you think
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| > merit-based approach.
|
| There are still issues with this. Food insecurity being a
| primary one. But apparently universal school lunches is not as
| important to people as having a HUGE military budget. What kind
| of beast doesn't want to feed kids!?
|
| Edit: Apparently plenty even on HN. Wow. Color me shocked.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Now we just need widely agreed, easily measurable, non game-
| able definition of "merit". :)
| [deleted]
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| There are plenty of choices for higher edu. What's the benefit
| of forcing a one-size-fits-all business model on all of them?
| Why should small out of the way esoteric college - or any other
| for that matter - have to follow Carnegie Mellon or similar?
|
| This isn't being inclusive or diverse, it's assimilation at the
| institution/industry level. Yeah, ironic.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I agree with you that the end of legacy and race-based
| admissions is a good thing. I think it's dangerous to think
| that a meritocracy always leads to good outcomes when there is
| huge inequality. This best analogy I can give is the "sports
| stars" analogy. Professional sports is probably the most even
| playing field I can imagine - there is such a huge incentive to
| win games that pretty much all else besides skills on the
| playing field is ignored. But what it results in is a teeny
| tiny elite making millions, and nearly everyone else barely
| making enough to get by. So if the rest of the economy was like
| the sports stars world (and more and more of it is leaning that
| way), what reason do the rest of the 99.99% have to support
| this meritocracy? Sure, you can say it's an improvement that
| the best people are in charge, but if it's clear my genetic
| talents will prevent me from ever being a star, my incentive is
| really to tear the whole system down if none of those benefits
| ever make it my way.
|
| I think one contributing factor you see behind so much
| increasing social strife, the resurgent interest in unions,
| etc. is the belief that _unless_ you make it to a top job after
| a top school, you 'll barely be scraping by your whole life.
|
| Pure meritocracy in a "winner take all/most" economy leads to a
| very unstable society.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > Professional sports is probably the most even playing field
| I can imagine - there is such a huge incentive to win games
| that pretty much all else besides skills on the playing field
| is ignored.
|
| Match fixing has been a perennial problem in sports.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Why are the reward ratios in professional sports relevant to
| other occupations in society?
|
| > But what it results in is a teeny tiny elite making
| millions, and nearly everyone else barely making enough to
| get by.
|
| That is because a very small number of people can satiate the
| demand for almost all of the world's people for entertainment
| from watching sports. Simple supply and demand.
|
| It has nothing to do with meritocracy or how meritocracy
| distributed rewards. Making sure doctors/lawyers/engineers
| are appropriately qualified is not going to result in only a
| few getting the rewards, because their work does not scale as
| much (for the most part).
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > Why are the reward ratios in professional sports relevant
| to other occupations in society?
|
| My whole point is that the hollowing out of the middle
| class and the huge growth in objective measures of
| inequality in the US are precisely because many other
| occupations are looking more and more like "sports star"
| economies.
|
| E.g. just look at how the former "main streets" of many
| smaller towns in the US have been decimated. There used to
| be "local leaders" in retail in cities all over the US, now
| it's extremely difficult to compete if you don't have the
| scale of Amazon. Just look at all the recent stories about
| fears of AI taking jobs. E.g. it used to be that lots of
| people could get copywriting jobs. Now it looks like in a
| pretty short time frame that only the very, very best
| copywriters will be employable as so much other work is
| delegated to AI. Look at how most smaller news outlets have
| completely disappeared across the country. These smaller
| news outlets used to be fairly important factors in their
| community, but now they simply can't compete with the
| Internet giants for ad dollars.
|
| I can go on and on, but the "winner take all" dynamic of
| sports economics has been spreading to pretty much any
| occupation that faces competition over the Internet.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| That is true, but I do not see the connection with
| meritocracy. I see "winner take all" dynamics to be a
| property of economies of scale, which technological
| advances and computing have greatly enhanced.
|
| One might say meritocracy might lead to technological
| advances leading to economies of scale, but the solution
| to an increasing income/wealth gap would not be getting
| rid of meritocracy, but rather redistributing some of the
| wealth so as to provide a floor for quality of life and
| quality of opportunities (I would hope).
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > One might say meritocracy might lead to technological
| advances leading to economies of scale, but the solution
| to an increasing income/wealth gap would not be getting
| rid of meritocracy, but rather redistributing some of the
| wealth so as to provide a floor for quality of life and
| quality of opportunities (I would hope).
|
| Yep, that's pretty much what I was trying to say, so my
| apologies if I wasn't clear. I think the "quality of
| opportunities" is also a very important point - I made
| the argument elsewhere that there is no reason for many
| of the top schools to have such small class sizes in the
| first place. There is no reason with their huge
| endowments that they couldn't increase their class sizes
| and _still_ only admit highly qualified applicants. That
| 's still a meritocracy, but just ensures the "winners"
| are not arbitrarily selected by making the cutoff so high
| that you're making random decisions about who to admit
| (e.g. all ten of these folks had perfect SAT scores but
| we'll let this guy in because he had a "better
| personality").
| michaelt wrote:
| _> So if the rest of the economy was like the sports stars
| world (and more and more of it is leaning that way), what
| reason do the rest of the 99.99% have to support this
| meritocracy?_
|
| Pretty sure a big fraction of that 99.99% love the top sports
| stars.
|
| For example, major league baseball games have higher
| attendance than Single-A games.
| golemiprague wrote:
| [dead]
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > dangerous to think that a meritocracy always leads to good
| outcomes
|
| People who argue against meritocracy seem to forget that it's
| the only proposed alternative to the "birthright"-ocracy that
| civilization has been trying to pry itself from the jaws of
| for centuries.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Not really. Countries that are consistently at the top of
| world happiness rankings are ones that (a) both support a
| dynamic economy through meritocracy and (b) have high taxes
| and a broad social safety net that limits inequality.
|
| To put it another way, I'm not arguing against meritocracy;
| I'm arguing that it alone does not lead to good outcomes -
| i.e. I think it's necessary but not sufficient. It's like
| when people thought "bringing democracy" to all these
| countries without democratic institutions would be a good
| thing. Democracy _is_ generally better than the
| alternative, but only if there are broad protections like
| equality under the law for minority groups, otherwise it 's
| just the "2 wolves and a lamb deciding what to have for
| dinner" issue. Meritocracy is similar. It's generally a
| good thing but not if it results in a very small number of
| people hoarding all the spoils while everyone else barely
| scrapes by.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| The problem with merit is that it's impossible to determine
| because the circumstances of people around the world are so
| vastly different. If you have, say, 1500 spots for a new class,
| it's going to be impossible to select the best 1500 students.
| Some elite universities you may even have more than 1500
| valedictorians. So what to do? I say you just set a qualifying
| point to be considered and publicize it (as standardized as you
| can get, i.e SAT score or similar) and then put every qualifier
| in a hat and select at random until you fill your spots.
| Nothing else should matter.
|
| Of course this assumes that merit is actually the only thing
| universities care about, and I'd say that it's not.
| mlyle wrote:
| At the same time, we're getting rid of testing in admissions
| decisions.
|
| So instead we're in an era of squishy, difficult-to-judge
| metrics... and of course, the places where one could stand
| out-- interesting stories on one's transcript or essay-- are
| increasingly being evaluated by AI.
| elteto wrote:
| It's because schools want to retain a measure of control over
| who they let in. A true merit based admissions system (say
| min SAT score + lottery after that) is uncheatable and
| therefore schools have _zero_ control on who they have to
| accept.
|
| The only reason why Harvard has kept its mythos of being the
| incubator of the next ruling class is because, well, they
| accept the children of the current one. Those are most likely
| to become part of the next ruling class by virtue of having
| been born into it. It's an old boys club. There's no
| intrinsic property of Harvard that turns them into this
| incubator.
|
| And from the other side you have the brain dead equity idiots
| who are also against true merit systems, for equally twisted,
| but different reasons.
| el_nahual wrote:
| The cynical(?) explanation is that it is precisely _because_
| of the dismantling of standardized testing that getting rid
| of legacy admissions tenable...because it means schools can
| _still_ proxy for class in admissions decisions (except
| veiled as extracurriculars, or "oh, this student knows
| calculus" in boston/sf).
|
| If Harvard or USC were on the list I'd wager this to be the
| case, but MIT, Mellon & Pitt are serious schools so I believe
| them when I say it's in favor of increased rigor.
| ghaff wrote:
| Some schools probably have a higher academic floor. The
| other thing that happens is that a fair number of good but
| not spectacular students who nonetheless want to get into
| the best school they can will put somewhere like Harvard on
| their list even though they know it's a long shot. If they
| have so-so SATs (especially in math) they won't even try
| for MIT--and probably wouldn't like it anyway.
| mlyle wrote:
| I'm not sure it's deliberate, but I broadly agree with you
| that getting rid of tests favors class (despite the reasons
| purportedly being for equity). While you can buy small
| improvements in test scores, most things that have replaced
| tests in admissions decisions are easier to buy.
|
| > MIT, Mellon & Pitt
|
| MIT still requires SAT scores, so it's a non-factor there.
| zuzu89 wrote:
| this decision is not motivated by merit, it's entirely
| motivated by race.
|
| and they have no intentions of using a merit based approach for
| applicants because that would result in an even more white and
| asian dominant student pool.
|
| without the legacy pool they now have more wiggle room to juice
| their "merit-based" approach so that they can admit more blacks
| without getting busted for illegal affirmative action.
| honkycat wrote:
| Merit isn't enough.
|
| I went to a po-dunk school in rural Missouri. I would never be
| able to I compete with kids from a rich Chicago/NY school. In
| the same way a black kid from a poor inner city wouldn't be
| able to.
|
| This is part of the problem. The world isn't egalitarian. The
| poor will continue to get poorer, the rich will get richer.
|
| Solution? Lottery? Don't have a great one.
| criddell wrote:
| I agree with you. Saying something is merit based is only
| half of an answer. What exactly is and isn't meritorious?
|
| I'm not convinced that scoring well on tests beyond some
| point is a particularly good way of deciding if a student
| deserves a spot or not.
| abirch wrote:
| You're assuming that everyone is on an equal starting point.
| Wealthy people will be able to favor their kids.
| [deleted]
| dotancohen wrote:
| That is exactly my motivation to become wealthy. I don't need
| a nice number with lots of zeros. I need to secure my
| children's future, including their prospects for higher
| education.
|
| I see no problem with those who have amassed significant
| resources, being afforded use of those resources to their
| childrens' advantage.
| abirch wrote:
| I'm not disagreeing with you and I'm actively doing the
| same; however, I wouldn't say that our children gaining
| advantages would be considered "Merit-Based"
| Anechoic wrote:
| _pivoting to a productive, merit-based approach_
|
| For the right definitions of "merit", yes. I'm not confident
| we've figured that part out yet.
| abirch wrote:
| We can't even define the purpose of college. E.g., is it only
| graduating and Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs, ..., Mark
| Zuckerberg are all failures?
|
| Meritocracy works best if you have something to measure
| against.
| lisper wrote:
| I hate to burst your bubble but unfortunately this just kicks
| the can down the road. How do you measure merit? Because [EDIT]
| many measures of "merit" (was: standardized testing) can be
| (and often are) biased by race, cultural background, and
| economic status. For example:
|
| Student 1 has built a fully automated chip manufacturing line
| in his basement.
|
| Student 2 has build a robot that solves a maze in fifteen
| minutes (against the current state of the art which is a few
| seconds).
|
| Which one would you admit?
|
| Student 1 is the child of billionaires, and it's not clear how
| much of the work was actually done by him/her and how much was
| done by employees hired by the kid's parents.
|
| Student 2 lives in Sudan and built their robot out of locally
| available materials, in the process inventing a new kind of
| motor built out of coconut fronds.
|
| Now which one would you admit?
| moduspol wrote:
| We'll never have a perfect way to measure merit, but that
| doesn't justify the status quo. It would likely reject both
| students for a third student that checks the right
| intersectional boxes, even if coming from a more privileged
| upbringing than the other two students.
|
| We should be constantly improving our ways of measuring
| merit, not throwing up our hands and pretending it's
| meaningless to try.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| What kind of child, even that of billionaires, wants to build
| an automated chip manufacturing line? Maybe in Minecraft. Or
| in Roblox.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Student 1. He has the resources needed to move ahead. And
| unless my university can provide self help to the motivated,
| student 2 may not work out well here.
| anon291 wrote:
| I'm confused here. Both facts are salient (what was built and
| under which circumstances was it built) to any discussion of
| merit. The main complaint I see here is that admissions
| committees should use as much information as possible, which
| I doubt anyone disagrees with. What is racist is someone
| saying 'Oh, student 2 is black, thus without any further
| information, I'm going to assume he's poor and from Sudan'.
|
| Case in point, we had a very wealthy black student in my
| college. This woman was not disadvantaged in any way, yet she
| played the race card all the time in order to claim a
| disadvantaged background. I'm talking about a family that
| would take their kids to France and England to summer. That
| level of wealth, yet framing all her accomplishments as if
| she came from the inner city. That's disingenuous, yet the
| (now-gone) affirmative action camp would have gladly taken
| her checking the 'African-American/Black' checkbox as a sign
| that all her accomplishments should be judged on a poor
| disadvantaged upbringing. How is that not racist?
| boeingUH60 wrote:
| It's as if you're trying to make perfect the enemy of good.
| Standardized tests aren't perfect but they give less
| privileged kids the best choice at attending a good college.
|
| The kids of the upper class and the rich will always have an
| upper hand compared to the poor. However, standardized tests
| limit how wide the upper hand is. An upper class kid still
| has to study and pass the test, and the poor kid can also do
| that.
|
| If admissions become "holistic", poor kids would have little
| chances. Good luck to that poor kid competing subjectively
| with kids whose parents send them on impressive charity trips
| and get them unpaid internships at the most prestigious
| companies.
| lisper wrote:
| I think you are underestimating the extent to which
| standardized tests can be (and have been) biased.
|
| https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-
| nea/racis...
| caterpi11ar wrote:
| What is the evidence that the tests now are biased other
| than that different groups score differently?
| RhodesianHunter wrote:
| When your history ensures that some groups are
| socioeconomically disadvantaged, every possible method
| will be biased. It's unavoidable.
| kneebonian wrote:
| So why don't we focus on socioeconomically disadvantaged
| individuals instead of focusing on racial metrics?
| Brusco_RF wrote:
| Yeah the SAT is the worst admissions metric, besides all
| the other ones.
|
| What would you use in its place? You think grades don't
| have bias?
| thebradbain wrote:
| Interviews, transcripts, (optional) test scores, letter
| of recommendation, a set of common essays across all
| schools, and an optional supplemental section or
| portfolio to showcase any personal achievements not
| covered by the other standard categories.
|
| Oh wait! That exists -- it's called the Common App, and
| it's what most private colleges today use, from the Ivies
| to elite tiny liberal arts colleges with the largest
| share of students from the 0.1% that you've never heard
| of, like Pomona College.
| Brusco_RF wrote:
| They use it because it allows them to ignore standardized
| test scores and just do admissions based on their own
| preferences. They used less merit-based metrics because
| they don't WANT a meritocracy.
|
| Question. Which tells you more about a student:
|
| 1. An essay that was probably written by chatGPT then
| edited by the students parents
|
| 2. A test taken in a supervised, controlled, timed
| environment
| thebradbain wrote:
| 1. Would absolutely not get you in anywhere selective
|
| 2. Would absolutely not either
|
| I believe the whole concept of "meritocracy" for purpose
| of admissions is a lie-- choosing the criteria to measure
| against is itself a subjective act.
| kneebonian wrote:
| > I believe the whole concept of "meritocracy" for
| purpose of admissions is a lie-- choosing the criteria to
| measure against is itself a subjective act.
|
| Let me ask you. Do you also believe that requiring a
| display of proficiency in mathematics to get into the
| best schools is inherently discriminatory? What about
| requiring a demonstration of the capability to understand
| and complete basic subject matter material in the fields
| or reading, writing, or scientific literacy?
| thebradbain wrote:
| There's no shortage of people who meet any of that
| criteria!
|
| The whole point of a selective college is they have to
| select from a pool of already qualified applicants. There
| is no objective measure to measure against when you're
| splitting hairs. Even were you to limit it to "objective"
| requirements like test score and GPA, how do you decide
| between two students for one spot when both have the
| exact same scores?
|
| There is no shortage of perfect scores applying to
| Harvard. And yet a majority, or even a plurality, of any
| given class of admits didn't have perfect scores.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| _There is no shortage of perfect scores applying to
| Harvard._
|
| 1,000 people typically receive a perfect SAT score
| yearly.
| laverya wrote:
| Essays are _incredibly_ biased though! Do you really
| think that for some reason essays actually _have_ to be
| written by the person applying, and can 't be gamed with
| money? That an overworked public school teacher is going
| to write a better letter of recommendation than a private
| school teacher? That a rich kid is going to have worse
| extracurriculars, portfolio or achievements?
|
| The Common App is great, but it's not magically less open
| to bias than standardized test scores.
| Brusco_RF wrote:
| Not only that, but the person reading the essay is also
| biased and will select for students who align with their
| bias. It is a terrible admission metric.
| thebradbain wrote:
| It's naive to think schools don't have a system in place
| for this: separating piles into buckets of test score,
| ordering by grade, marking a certain number from each
| bucket as worth another look, then ordering by essay,
| marking a certain from each group, and repeat on any
| other metric.
|
| Many schools, selective or not, actually do this whole
| process -- multiple times, with each admissions agent
| doing a separate order of criteria, to ensure everyone's
| application gets read at least twice. The idea being that
| those with the most "let's give them another look" across
| the board are the most notable. Then from that shortlist
| the debates comparing each applicant, usually sorted by
| geographic proximity to each other, begin (at Harvard, if
| you're from Texas you're not really competing against New
| Yorkers for a spot, you're competing against other Texans
| for the XX number of Texan spots they usually admit a
| year).
|
| I did a short stint as a student worker in the admissions
| office of a very selective college in California (<5%
| admission rate, but not one many could name off the top
| of their head), and this is more or less how it worked
| bamfly wrote:
| > That an overworked public school teacher is going to
| write a better letter of recommendation than a private
| school teacher?
|
| LOL. My understanding is the _really_ good prep school
| college counsellors golf with one or more high-up folks
| in elite university admissions offices, and get the
| inside scoop on _exactly_ what they and their peers in
| other universities are looking for in any given year,
| such that they can even tune an essay or letter of
| reference for a given school based on that non-public
| information and advise students which schools to focus
| their application efforts on, based on their background
| & activities.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _letter of recommendation_
|
| We've gone full circle.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Transcripts aren't useful across different high schools.
| Rich kids have more connections for rec letters. Rich
| kids get professional essay help, and lying kids make up
| a good story. Kids and parents with lots of
| time/money/connections on their hands get a portfolio of
| community service etc built up. I knew these kids in high
| school with resumes like veteran philanthropists, and it
| worked.
|
| I think the only good one out of those is the interview.
| dionidium wrote:
| To the contrary, the NEA _wildly_ overestimates it and
| employs junk question-begging "disparate impact" [0]
| reasoning throughout. The article is full of stuff like
| this: _" There is a clear correlation, for example,
| between test scores and property values."_
|
| To the extent that society is meritocratic at all and
| intelligence is heritable (and it _is_ ), we should
| _expect_ test scores to correlate with all manner of
| measures of success, including property values. Articles
| like this don 't even take that question seriously. They
| just ignore it. It's proof by repeated assertion. It may
| be _fashionable_ to insist that this is prima facie
| evidence of bias, but that is a question of logic and
| _not a difficult one_ , whatever exceedingly average
| minds like Ibram X. Kendi think of it.
|
| [0] As a legal concept "disparate impact" is what it is.
| The law means whatever its authors intend it to mean. But
| as a matter of logic, it's embarrassing, and beneath this
| forum.
| nancyhn wrote:
| That's soft bigotry of low expecations. All you have to
| do is look at data that includes Asian Americans, which
| is always conveniently omitted from these racist
| narratives. Even non-Americans routinely do better on
| American standardized tests.
| underlipton wrote:
| It is not. GP is saying that the "expectations" in
| question aren't as applicable to potential as they're
| purported to be.
|
| >Asian Americans, which is always conveniently omitted
| from these racist narratives.
|
| Ironically, so is the diversity of the Asian American
| community.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| "Since their inception a century ago, standardized tests
| have been instruments of racism and a biased system."
|
| Standardized tests were invented in Sui dynasty China, in
| the early 600s AD, as a way of selecting officials for
| the imperial bureaucracy. They were invented precisely
| because they were more objective than the prevailing
| method of selecting officials - recommendations from the
| aristocracy.
|
| There is a long history of standardized testing being a
| means for rewarding merit, instead of more easily
| corruptible methods of selecting officials/students/etc.,
| such as recommendations. Just to illustrate my point: Do
| you know why Harvard abandoned standardized testing in
| 1926 as the sole means of determining admissions? Because
| "too many" Jews were passing the admissions test.
| Harvard's "holistic" admissions policy was invented for
| the sole purpose of restricting Jewish admissions.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| I think you're underestimating how biased literally every
| other possible metric of admissions can be.
| SamReidHughes wrote:
| They're not biased at all. People don't like them because
| they're accurate.
| nradov wrote:
| Everyone understands that standardized tests are biased.
| They are still the least bad way to identify students
| from underprivileged backgrounds who have high potential
| to succeed in college.
| jpadkins wrote:
| I am someone, and I don't understand why they are. Do you
| have a primer handy on this subject?
| nradov wrote:
| SAT scores are correlated with wealth. This CNBC article
| is a decent introduction to the issue, but be aware that
| anything you read on the subject is likely to be pushing
| a particular narrative so it's tough to find a neutral
| primer anywhere.
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/03/rich-students-get-better-
| sat...
| janalsncm wrote:
| The entire concept of an "admissions" department was
| based on the historical fact that too many Jews were
| being admitted and too few WASPs were. So they included a
| "character" criteria and fixed the problem.
|
| Now, too many Asians are being admitted based on test
| scores. Oh no! To fix this problem, Harvard consulted
| their history department and included a "personality
| traits" section. Is it any wonder that Asian students
| scored low on this?
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-
| enrollme...
| laverya wrote:
| Is there literally _any_ test in which:
|
| "Students of Color" receive scores in the same
| distribution as white/asian/hispanic students (same
| fraction of 1s, 2s ... 35s, 36s on the ACTs for example)
|
| AND
|
| Top scores are meaningfully distinct from the population
| average? (because the first condition can be trivially
| fulfilled by having everyone score the same)
| OO000oo wrote:
| This is so naive. Poor kids do worse in school because
| their lives lack the material and parental support
| necessary for quality education.
| bluepod4 wrote:
| I believe that GP would admit the child of billionaires.
| People who promote the meritocracy myth have an agenda and
| are sticking to it. Do you really think you can change GP's
| mind with logic?
| hnburnsy wrote:
| Is this a need-blind or need-aware institution?
|
| If need-aware, does the admitting class have enough full pay
| to cover the costs of those needing scholarships (wouldn't
| want to actually tap into that tax-free endowment)? If they
| need more full pay, then S1, if there are already enough full
| pay, then S2.
| [deleted]
| coding123 wrote:
| S1
|
| S1 definitely.
| zuzu89 wrote:
| depends on their race
| [deleted]
| jononomo wrote:
| standardized tests are not biased.
| jononomo wrote:
| Well, I'm getting down-voted even though I'm correct. This
| is one of the problems in our society generally -- people
| have decided that what they think is just must be correct
| because they assume that life is fair.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > Now which one would you admit?
|
| Why not both? I think a lot of the debate over college
| admissions misses the fact that so much of this is
| _artificial_ scarcity. Some of the big schools like Harvard
| /Yale/Princeton etc. could easily increase the size of their
| incoming classes many times, and still have them only be
| filled with highly qualified candidates.
|
| Top schools exist not just to educate, but to ensure that the
| social hierarchy is maintained. If it were purely to educate
| or to ensure diverse learning environments, the top Ivies
| could solve this easily by quadrupling the size of their
| classes, but then this would of course dilute the exclusivity
| that is the primary reason for these institutions in the
| first place.
| endtime wrote:
| How is that an example of standardized testing?
| lisper wrote:
| Good point. I've edited my comment.
| dfadsadsf wrote:
| Magic that happens in top universities in US is combining
| money (kids of billionaires) with smarts (kids with 1600 SAT)
| in one place. Both bring different skills to the table and
| result is disproportionate share of top scientist, business
| and political leaders produced by those universities (from
| both classes of people). Removing either group from
| university will just lead to university stopping being elite.
| Considering that number of billionaires is measured in
| hundreds (so only a dozen or so kids of billionaires enter
| universities every year), university may just admit that one
| kid.
|
| On Student 2 who build something in Sudan from stick and
| rocks. Unless he is from elite family he most likely did not
| get proper school education and won't be able to keep up with
| rigors of studying in top university even if he is very
| smart. Harvard is not really in a business of providing
| remedial education. With that if he is really smart and
| resourceful, he had a very good chance of doing very well for
| himself in Sudan (becoming entrepreneour, building soemthing
| local, become warlord, etc) and then his kids will be fully
| equipped to go to top university.
| Brusco_RF wrote:
| Yeah I see this take all the time. Admissions offices are
| allowed to take a student's means into account! So in
| deciding between two students with equal SAT scores, one from
| a Greenwich private school and one from South Tucson, the one
| from Tucson is the more impressive student.
|
| Affirmative action was misguided because it assumed that
| because one student was Korean and the other Mexican, the
| Mexican kid must be disadvantaged. Besides the fact that
| there's an inherently racist worldview baked into that,
| Newsflash! There are tons of poor Korean kids and rich
| Mexicans!
| criddell wrote:
| Why is SAT score a good way to decide which student is more
| deserving of a spot?
|
| There should be some SAT score floor. But beyond that other
| factors should take over. If the floor is at n and two
| applicants appear - one with a score of 1.1n and the other
| 1.2n, I don't think that's enough information to decide who
| should get the spot.
| Brusco_RF wrote:
| > Why is SAT score a good way to decide which student is
| more deserving of a spot?
|
| Name a better way.
| golemiprague wrote:
| [dead]
| dropofwill wrote:
| SAT score floor + lottery?
| Brusco_RF wrote:
| What makes you think that is better?
| SkyBelow wrote:
| Lottery is a metric that can't be gamed, if implemented
| correctly. It may not ever be the best system, but it
| also can't end up being what was a better system that was
| gamed into a worst system. It provides a certain level of
| consistent mediocracy between various other systems which
| rise and fall as they are gamed.
| [deleted]
| criddell wrote:
| Vox had an article about college lotteries earlier this
| year you might find interesting:
|
| https://www.vox.com/future-
| perfect/2023/4/19/23689402/colleg...
| Brusco_RF wrote:
| [flagged]
| caterpi11ar wrote:
| what are the other factors?
| tekla wrote:
| There is an incredible about of SAT prep that is free.
|
| It's a good way of figuring out who is intellectually
| capable. SAT scores have a very good prediction rate of
| success in college.
| criddell wrote:
| High SAT scores are only a good predictor against low SAT
| scores. Can you say that extremely high SAT scores are a
| better indicator of college success than very high SAT
| scores?
|
| I'm not saying SAT scores are useless, just that they
| should only be used as a filter and not for ranking.
| nancyhn wrote:
| Spot on. I don't see why this is so hard for people to
| comprehend and why they are fighting the obvious. That very
| basic level of nuance tends to be missing from these
| conversations.
| infamouscow wrote:
| > I don't see why this is so hard for people to
| comprehend and why they are fighting the obvious.
|
| It's because these people only see the world through the
| one-dimensional lens of skin color.
|
| Further, it's an attractive way to view the world when
| you're a complete idiot with nothing of substance to
| offer society. It leads these people to infecting society
| with parasitic and fallacious ideas that you see
| manifested in the extremes of both political parties.
| [deleted]
| rcme wrote:
| I hate these types of arguments that create an extremely
| contrived example. If we're making a choice between these two
| students, then you can't really go wrong. But that's not the
| choice being made.
| noobermin wrote:
| I fundamentally do not understand why merit is something you
| should focus on when it comes to admission into a university.
| The entire point of an education is to learn, may be you need
| the bare minimum to enroll but universities shouldn't be
| chasing the brightest students, they need an education the
| least.
|
| Just because thats how it should work in some people's heads as
| the ideal doesn't mean it makes any actual sense if you really
| interrogate the idea. Meritocracy makes sense after you have an
| education, it doesn't make sense before it.
| CrampusDestrus wrote:
| Resources are finite. If college courses were recorded
| lessons or they just gave you a theory book and an exercises
| book, then of course we could automate everything. Just sign
| up, pay your fee and take the exams and once you're done you
| get the degree, even full remote. Your taxes will go towards
| professors and a fuck ton of TAs for questions and exercises
| and to keep the infrastructure running.
|
| But we're not there yet
| worrycue wrote:
| > universities shouldn't be chasing the brightest students,
| they need an education the least.
|
| Or it can be seen as give education to the students that will
| make the best use of it maximizing value to society.
| nostromo wrote:
| Perhaps it's politically incorrect to say, but students learn
| best when they're around students that are of similar
| intelligence and motivation to succeed.
|
| Taking a brilliant kid and putting them around underachievers
| doesn't do anyone any good.
| OO000oo wrote:
| Students learn best when they have a quiet home to study
| in, 3 quality meals a day, parents who aren't working 3
| jobs they can ask questions to, parents who aren't fighting
| about paying the bills that month, good school supplies,
| etc.
| nostromo wrote:
| Agreed. So let's go solve those problems directly and
| stop pretending the solution is to put underachieving
| kids into top schools to make ourselves feel better.
| OO000oo wrote:
| I will only feel better when the working class controls
| the society it built.
| ativzzz wrote:
| Once they do that, they become the ruling class and the
| elites. Then their children are no longer working class,
| and are now the enemies.
| OO000oo wrote:
| In such a case, I won't feel better yet will I? So we'll
| try again...
| ativzzz wrote:
| Just like we've tried in the past again and again and
| again... and a few thousand years later here we are and
| we will keep trying :)
| OO000oo wrote:
| Exactly. A lot of progress was made in that time, so I
| have little patience for defeatism.
| nancyhn wrote:
| Conversely, putting someone who isn't well suited to that
| environment is setting them up for failure.
| indymike wrote:
| > Taking a brilliant kid and putting them around
| underachievers doesn't do anyone any good.
|
| In a meritocracy, those that do not achieve do not advance,
| so this is not a problem after a time. I was in the US
| Navy's Nuclear Propulsion program. It was the closest thing
| to a pure meritocracy. You didn't pass a test, do the work,
| or behave in line with expectations you were sent to the
| fleet. After a few months, only the capable and motivated
| were left. It was completely colorblind, completely free of
| social agenda. You could either do the job well enough or
| not.
|
| I watched a lot of wash outs where there someone would find
| a way to tip the scales in college to keep them passing
| along. I watched the following wash out: the son of a Navy
| Captain, a congressman's kid, a couple of sons of really
| rich parents.
| indymike wrote:
| > Meritocracy makes sense after you have an education, it
| doesn't make sense before it.
|
| This is really a truth. There really is no meritocracy if you
| gate who is allowed to have merit before you measure it.
| Regulating opportunity to control outcomes is the exact
| opposite of what should be done to have a true meritocracy.
| nashashmi wrote:
| I doubt merit based approach is the only way of conducting
| admissions. Merits don't count for as much as people think they
| do. A narrow pool of candidates come because of merit.
|
| A more reasonable selection system wouldn't just rely on the
| individual but also the support network. For example, I often
| hear "it takes a village to raise a _____ doctor". And that
| truth speaks volumes.
| julienchastang wrote:
| Good. With the end of affirmative action, legacy status in
| admissions becomes much harder to justify. [0] The number of kids
| entering elite universities via non-meritocratic avenues is
| incredible.
|
| > "[The researchers] examined four kinds of nonracial preferences
| --for recruited athletes, and for children of Harvard graduates,
| financial donors and members of faculty and staff. The
| researchers found that more than 43% of white applicants admitted
| to Harvard between 2014-19 fell into one or more of these
| categories. Nearly three quarters of them would have been
| rejected if they had been subjected to the same standards as
| other white applicants."
|
| [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/end-college-legacy-
| preferences-...
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Then they will put their money into another pay-to-win system.
| chmod600 wrote:
| "for recruited athletes, and for children of Harvard graduates,
| financial donors and members of faculty and staff"
|
| Athletes have merit. Arguably more than some academic
| departments.
| Larrikin wrote:
| Why should a top high school baseball prospect take up a spot
| at a college instead of a spot on a local A league team?
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Because they want to become a CEO and not a baseball
| player? Competing at athletics at the highest level is a
| good preparer for the executive world. Certainly having a
| high standardized test score doesn't make you a better CEO
| candidate.
| nazgulnarsil wrote:
| Not what you meant, but the answer is because they are a
| profit center for the college.
| chmod600 wrote:
| Why should a Political Science major take a spot at a
| college instead of joining a political group discussion on
| reddit? It's not like it's a real science and I don't see
| any merit in it, nor what it contributes to college.
|
| I'd much rather have athletes on campus even though I am
| not one. At least it provides nice facilities for healthy
| recreation (a lot healthier than just drinking a lot).
| BryanBigs wrote:
| Yeah I sure got to use the 75,000 seat football stadium a
| lot for pickup games when I was in school. It's not like
| you need 'athletes' on campus to build student rec
| facilities.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| Because money.
|
| Sorry. That's the reality that everyone fails to talk
| openly about when discussing athletics. It brings in a lot
| of money for the top schools like Stanford, Michigan,
| Texas, Alabama and so on. You find a way to replace that
| revenue, a lot of schools would be happy to get rid of it.
| But until then?
|
| I mean the B1G has a tv split of almost 100 million a year
| "per". Once all the former PAC12 schools unite with the
| B1G, that amount will be even larger.
|
| All that to say this, no one is throwing away 100 million a
| year. Maybe the elite schools you can get to stop athletic
| admissions? But that 2nd tier of state flagships that are
| taking all that in? I'm not sure they would go down without
| an epic fight.
|
| Now of course, we can question whether or not you need a
| men's baseball team to bring that money in? You probably
| don't. But they will all probably fight tooth and nail to
| keep football and basketball.
| xdennis wrote:
| But they're already filthy rich. Maybe I'm being too much
| of an idealist, but universities should be about
| education, not sport centers.
| belorn wrote:
| Maybe they should open up a casino instead. That would
| bring in a lot more money without needing to the through
| hoops of using sports teams to finance higher education.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| At some schools I'm quite sure that graduating athletes
| also end up making more money than their non-athletic
| counterparts, which - even ignoring the "big sports"
| aspect of it - makes them more likely to become future
| donors to the university.
| [deleted]
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Harder to justify?
|
| In an absolute vacuum, they were always the hardest to justify.
| There's absolutely no reason that they should have ever
| existed. I do still like the idea of employees of universities
| getting the benefit of their children attending for free,
| though... but then I also had no problem with affirmative
| action for many of the same reasons.
| Scarblac wrote:
| But also, why is meritocracy so above any criticism? Why is it
| considered so great?
|
| It would be fairer to just pick at random. Or even better, make
| sure everyone who wants a good education can get one.
| koolba wrote:
| The rationale for meritocracy is that a limited resource
| should be allocated to the individual that will make most use
| of it. Demonstrating that you understand the prerequisites
| and are studious is a pretty good indicator that you'll
| attend class and strive to learn more.
|
| Randomly picking students with zero minimum qualification
| would be a massive waste of resources.
|
| Randomly picking students above a given objective standard
| would be okay. Though arguably not as good as given the best
| of the best first dibs (depends on who you ask!).
| anovikov wrote:
| Beware. On the next iteration, education will simply lose it's
| importance in providing any sort of edge in life. Just because
| well, elites are hereditary, it's only about particular methods
| of maintaining their hereditary status. Education seems to
| about to cease to be that method. Which means, we will see all
| the same people on the same commanding positions in the society
| - except they will be uneducated/much less educated. Because
| why bother.
|
| A step like this increases the necessary level of violence
| applied to the society to keep the elites in their places and
| the masses in check. Because maintaining elites through
| educational attainment was the nicest avenue i can think of,
| all other methods will be uglier.
|
| A good society should know how to let the elites stay in power
| without getting everyone else too angry.
| CraigRo wrote:
| This statement is a bit misleading, as the criteria get to be
| hair-splittingly narrow when you are talking about a school
| with a sub 5% acceptance rate -- you could fill the whole class
| with valedictorians. Nevertheless, my experience is that in
| terms of finding a 'better' candidate:
|
| Legacy -- legacy preference is pitched as a tiebreaker. Most of
| the legacies are actually quite good, and many are exceptional,
| so perhaps 30-50% got in over some 'better' kid. But in many
| cases, those slots represent something like geographic
| diversity, or a legacy kid of a minority or a kid of some
| famous person, and they generally don't take dolts. So this is
| not a huge tip.
|
| FacBrat -- The kids of professors tend to be extremely and
| sometimes extraordinarily good -- their parents are Harvard
| professors, and that tends to rub off. Staff members less so,
| but it is politically hard to reject them if you want to keep
| their parents. There are more in the second category than in
| the first. So perhaps 60% of the kids get in based on this tip.
|
| Donor -- Not a lot of these that I know of. Even in the 1930s,
| the son of the President of IBM got rejected from Harvard and
| Princeton because he was a goof off. I seriously doubt that
| there are more than 10-20 kids/year who get in this way who
| wouldn't otherwise.
|
| Athlete -- This is where very few of these kids would get in if
| they were in the general pool -- 10% max I'd guess. A lot of
| them are very good, but that level of dedication to sport tends
| to eat time that could have been used for academics or other
| worthwhile pursuits.
|
| I've always been amazed that they recruit for Golf, Squash,
| Crew, Fencing, Diving, Tennis, Lax, and Water Polo... these
| sports are limited to prep schools and rich suburban districts
| ... not exactly equitable.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Your comment is pretty spot on about the admission dynamics.
|
| > Legacy
|
| I think it is more of a tip than you are making it out to be
| simply due to yield farming - the smart kid who has a Harvard
| parent is more likely to go to Harvard over Yale than a
| generic smart kid, so if you want to keep your admission
| rates as low as possible you tip legacy.
|
| > 10-20 kids/year who get in this way who wouldn't otherwise.
|
| They certainly exist, Harvard has the z-list.
| meetingthrower wrote:
| Hah just heard that come up in another context. Confirmed.
| Heard the price tag was $3m and you have to take a gap
| year.
| dionidium wrote:
| > _With the end of affirmative action, legacy status in
| admissions becomes much harder to justify._
|
| I just don't see this. In our society we believe it to be
| illegitimate to discriminate on the basis of race. We believe
| that to be a _special_ kind of uniquely harmful prejudice, one
| that fractures the deepest structures of society, and that it
| therefore clears the very high bar required for limiting
| freedom of association. That is what is at issue in the case of
| affirmative action, the elimination of which was not a broad
| referendum on the right to form elite social clubs.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| "However, we will sabotage our own elite social clubs as part
| of compliance with the new ruling with the hope that they
| will associate the pain with the current Supreme Court and
| thus hate them as much as we do."
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| We do not live in a perfect world.
|
| Instead, we live in a world where a collection of individuals
| has had the fruits of their labor stolen from them for most
| of the past 400 years, served in wars where promises were
| made and not kept upon their return, and are still being
| discriminated against in representative democracy.
|
| And when someone enumerates all the reasons that these people
| have been harmed, financially, spiritually, democratically,
| and physically... the people who are against attempts to
| rectify the situation given the tools available also have
| nothing but "fairness" to fall back on when attempting to
| justify their positions, because they'd rather sweep it under
| the rug and pretend like it's something that we should never
| address.
| intimidated wrote:
| You might not agree with the spirit of this an endeavor,
| but I have a yes/no question for you:
|
| If you were to wear your most clever, most creative writing
| cap, could you make a convincing case entirely contrary to
| your beliefs? I'm not asking whether you could write a
| convincing case against racial affirmative action, because
| I know you could handle that just fine.
|
| Instead, could write a convincing case that the group
| you're talking about owes some collective debt to the rest
| of society, rather than the other way around?
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| I used to be a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. Their
| entire case is "it's not fair" in the absolute sense.
| That because some white folks descend from people who
| didn't have anything to do with slavery that all should
| be absolved from participating and benefitting from
| systemic racism.
|
| It's not an intellectual argument. It's an argument from
| performative and wanton ignorance.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| Sins of the father isn't a popular position in this
| country. It's also a very hard way to get elected.
| thebooktocome wrote:
| The popularity of the sentiment seems to depend crucially
| on who precisely the father is, and what the sins were.
| kelnos wrote:
| While we don't engage in mass slavery anymore (well,
| except for those who are incarcerated), there's still
| plenty of racial discrimination going on today. Even if
| we decide that we're not going to talk about reparations
| for slavery anymore, and things like that, there's still
| plenty that needs to be fixed that's going on right this
| minute.
| xdennis wrote:
| It's quite revealing when you say that "fairness" (scare
| quotes) is not important.
|
| But that's not the only/main reason. The proponents of
| affirmative action are guilty of the very thing they say
| they're against: racism.
|
| When individuals are victims there's a system to deal with
| that. But you can't have "justice" for people based on
| birth, skin color, &c. You would have to have the same
| baseless criteria for discriminating against people. But
| instead of separating into "inferior" and "superior" you
| want to separate into "victims" and "culprits".
|
| The solution is to treat the shortcomings, not the people.
| If black people are doing less well in school, then it
| might be that the real reason is that poor people are doing
| less well in school, and the solution would be to deal with
| that, not based on race.
|
| You say 400 years, but the United States didn't exist 400
| years ago. Are the descendants of Greeks (in the US)
| enslaved by Greeks owed compensation? Are the descendants
| of Europeans enslaved by Africans owed compensation?
| kelnos wrote:
| > _The proponents of affirmative action are guilty of the
| very thing they say they 're against: racism._
|
| I think you don't actually know what "racism" is.
|
| AA is definitely a form of discrimination based on race.
| But that's not the same as racism. And I suggest you
| might want to engage in some introspection and think
| about why you've decided to go for the "shock value" in
| phrasing things how you have.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| I think it's clear that you don't want to treat the
| "shortcomings" with any solution that requires something
| tangible. The only time governments ever treat people on
| a per-person basis are during the census, during voting,
| and during the outcomes of trials. That's it. All other
| solutions are class based in nature.
|
| I never said "black people." That's a you thing. And I'm
| an American citizen who knows that we've ALREADY had
| reparations for Japanese-Americans who were held for a
| few years during WWII but won't do the same for people
| whose ownership we can directly trace because we've still
| got the records of ownership and sale.
|
| So if you're going to be flippant, go do it with someone
| who doesn't understand history, because your argument is
| silly.
| thebooktocome wrote:
| > You say 400 years, but the United States didn't exist
| 400 years ago.
|
| As a historical fact, West Germany and East Germany both
| paid reparations to Holocaust survivors, despite neither
| being legally identical to the German Reich.
|
| If for various reasons you find that unconvincing, it's
| also the case that the Funding Act of 1790 has the
| federal government assume the debts of the colonies.
| elil17 wrote:
| But favoring legacy status in admissions is a form of racial
| discrimination because non-white people are much, much less
| likely to have legacy at elite institutions.
| hnboredhn wrote:
| Harvard posted that 70% of their legacy admits were white
| and 30% non-white. That's higher than the population of 18
| year olds but maybe not as extreme as some would think.
| [deleted]
| randyrand wrote:
| I don't think racial discrimination is the right term for
| discriminating based on things that _happen to_ correlate
| with race.
|
| Everything correlates with race. Height, disease, money,
| eye color, divorce, number of pokemon cards, you name it.
|
| You may as well call it eye-color discrimination, height
| discrimination, pokemon card discrimination, etc, as well.
| It just makes no sense at that point.
|
| So what exactly is the point of calling it racial
| discrimination then? Isn't every single policy racist then?
| hx8 wrote:
| > I don't think racial discrimination is the right term
| for discriminating based on things that happen to
| correlate with race.
|
| I agree, but we shouldn't be blind to discrimination that
| correlates with race, because enough of it can be
| equivalent to racial discrimination at a population
| level.
| elil17 wrote:
| Legacy doesn't just correlate with race - the fact that
| legacy admissions are so heavily skewed towards white
| people is because of past racial discrimination. It's a
| grandfather clause of sorts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wik
| i/Grandfather_clause#Origin).
| digging wrote:
| > I don't think racial discrimination is the right term
| for discriminating based on things that happen to
| correlate with race.
|
| Fortunately for people of color, it is. You don't have to
| _say_ you 're discriminating based on race in order to be
| doing so, and the law acknowledges this. That is how
| gerrymandered district maps can get struck down on the
| basis of racial discrimination. We do actually get to
| look at reality when we are deciding if an act is racist.
| belorn wrote:
| gerrymandered district maps can get struck down on the
| basis of _intention_ of racial discrimination.
| Correlation and intent are two very different concepts,
| and it is very dangerous to assume that everything that
| correlates do so by intent.
| digging wrote:
| > it is very dangerous to assume that everything that
| correlates do so by intent.
|
| Yes but it is much more dangerous to assume that
| correlation _can 't_ imply intent. Because sometimes it
| does.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> gerrymandered district maps can get struck down on the
| basis of racial discrimination
|
| Under current interpretation of civil rights laws,
| district maps can get struck down on the basis of racial
| discrimination if they are not sufficiently
| gerrymandered.
| cataphract wrote:
| Well, depends on the day. See the Trump v. Hawaii (the
| Muslim ban case). In this case Trump did say he wanted to
| ban muslims, but it didn't even matter.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| I mean why would it? The law explicitly stated he's
| allowed to ban immigration and travel of non USA persons
| based on whatever he feels like. Non USA persons don't
| get the same rights especially around entering the USA.
| te_230349493 wrote:
| Legacy admissions discriminate by class (if you are well off
| to be part of a donor family, you get a leg up) or by birth
| right (if you were a lucky enough sperm to be part of the
| family of a prior attendee, you get a leg up).
|
| How is the principles of giving preference to a particular
| class or birth right any different than giving preference to
| race? All three fly in the face of meritocracy. Yet to not
| allow this means that one has to invoke government
| interference of private criteria.
|
| So it seems logical that there are two reasonably argued
| sides. It seems that if you want to follow a more libertarian
| model and allow a private learning institution "the right to
| form elite social clubs" as you put it (surely there is more
| function to a university than networking!), you would
| likewise allow it to set other policies as they may, such as
| allowing preferences for race. Conversely, if meritocracy is
| the goal, enough to force a private university to change
| their criteria for admissions, then all three admission
| practices would be problematic.
|
| The cherry-picked groupings don't make sense to me. Class and
| birth right favoritism is okay but race based favoritism is
| not? Why? On the surface, this smacks of protection of
| elitism and a class based society, which pretty much nulls
| all commentary from various peanut galleries arguing that
| ending affirmative action is about meritocracy.
| [deleted]
| viscanti wrote:
| >Legacy admissions discriminate by class (if you are well
| off to be part of a donor family, you get a leg up)
|
| "Nearly three quarters of them would have been rejected if
| they had been subjected to the same standards as other
| white applicants."
|
| It looks like simply having alumni or professors or donors
| for parents is not translating to the academic records one
| would need to get in on merit alone. But we would expect
| that having more money to throw at education would lead to
| somewhat better academic records. So while the argument
| seems a bit flawed, it also seems like one would never get
| rid of all economic factors. If it's possible to throw
| money at education to positively impact outcomes we'll
| always see a higher percentage of wealthy people making it
| by "merit".
| bena wrote:
| "Class" is often a way to discriminate by race without
| explicitly doing so. You can't enslave a people for
| generations then let them go and say "Our bad, I guess
| we're equal now, you're on your own now".
|
| Like, they were exploited and nearly every free-person in
| the United States either directly or indirectly benefited
| from that exploitation. And after the practice was ended
| those who benefited, including a lot of those who benefited
| greatly, got to keep the spoils of that exploitation.
|
| And you're right, ending affirmative action wasn't about
| meritocracy. Protecting legacy admissions serves the same
| purpose as ending affirmative action.
|
| Personally, I believe that there's a way to do affirmative
| action without violating meritocracy. Just, all other
| things being roughly equal, make sure you're not picking
| all white dudes. Stop inventing excuses to exclude people
| who don't look exactly like you.
| vkou wrote:
| > On the surface, this smacks of protection of elitism and
| a class based society, which pretty much nulls all
| commentary from various peanut galleries arguing that
| ending affirmative action is about meritocracy.
|
| All this makes a lot more sense when we recognize that the
| push to end AA came from a political movement that is all
| about protection of elite privilege. It is fine with the
| deck being stacked in its favour, which is why it opposes
| any efforts to counterstack, and why it is very quiet on
| the subject of legacy admits.
| dionidium wrote:
| Whatever you think in theory, in practice we have an actual
| legacy of the extraction, relocation, and enslavement of a
| particular group of people on the basis of race. We fought
| a civil war about it and it remains the most enduringly
| contentious and difficult conflict -- the defining
| conflict, in many ways -- in our nation's history (right up
| through today).
|
| It will always be a topic deserving of special
| dispensation.
|
| The question, therefore, is really quite simple: 1) does
| that legacy justify a similarly targeted set of rules
| designed primarily (and maybe exclusively) for the group
| most harmed by that racial legacy; or 2) does our
| Constitution in fact demand that _no such racial
| preferences_ ever again be practiced on this soil?
|
| That's really the debate.
| sokoloff wrote:
| > It will always be a topic deserving of special
| dispensation.
|
| I completely disagree. Still after another 50 years?
| Another 150 years? Still 1000 years from now? 10,000? At
| some point, it _has_ to be eliminated as a special
| dispensation topic. When exactly that is, and whether
| that is in the past or the future can reasonably be
| debated, but to conclude that it should be permanent is
| well beyond reason, IMO.
| digging wrote:
| > At some point, it has to be eliminated as a special
| dispensation topic
|
| If white supremacy would stop being perpetuated, we could
| stop worrying about the effects of white supremacy. But
| the discussion doesn't _have_ to end after a specific
| timeframe just because you feel uncomfortable with it.
| sokoloff wrote:
| When someone in the future inevitably asks "what was the
| United States of America?", it will be long past time...
| dionidium wrote:
| I am not so differently inclined. What I mean to say is
| that as long as we exist this will always have been a
| part of our history and as a result addressed in
| Amendments to our foundational documents. Those
| Amendments are an indelible form of special dispensation.
|
| You can't say that about anything related to
| organizations playing favorites with the kids of former
| members. It's by comparison comically irrelevant.
| kelnos wrote:
| We get to stop talking about it once racial
| discrimination stops happening, and we've managed to
| right the scales when it comes to past discrimination.
|
| If we can do that in 50 years (doubtful) then we can stop
| talking about it. Ditto for the other time frames you
| mention.
|
| Even then, we shouldn't really stop talking about it.
| Forgetting our history increases the likelihood that
| we'll slip back into old patterns and do it again.
| Clubber wrote:
| >The question, therefore, is really quite simple: 1) does
| that legacy justify a similarly special set of rules
| designed primarily (and maybe exclusively) for the group
| most harmed by that racial legacy; or 2) does our
| Constitution in fact demand that no such racial
| preferences ever again be practiced on this soil?
|
| Yes to both conflicting ideas, how about that. AA was
| under consideration in the mid aughts and the SCOTUS
| essentially said it was a special exception, and not to
| be permanent, but they would allow it at the time.
|
| https://gspp.berkeley.edu/research-and-
| impact/publications/w...
|
| _In her opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger, Justice Sandra
| Day O'Connor concluded that affirmative action in college
| admissions is justifiable, but not in perpetuity: "We
| expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial
| preferences will no longer be necessary to further the
| interest [in student body diversity] approved today."_
|
| _We conclude that under reasonable assumptions, African
| American students will continue to be substantially
| underrepresented among the most qualified college
| applicants for the foreseeable future. The magnitude of
| the underrepresentation is likely to shrink--in our most
| optimistic simulation, somewhat over half of the gap that
| would be opened by the elimination of race preferences
| will be closed by the projected improvement in black
| achievement._
| underlipton wrote:
| This is a straining of the issue with discrimination, which
| cannot be divorced from its history. Corrected:
|
| It is illegitimate to discriminate on the basis of race _to
| the advantage of those previously, explicitly advantaged by
| their race._ We believe that to be a special kind of uniquely
| harmful prejudice, one that fractures the deepest structures
| of society, _because part of the country 's attempt to uphold
| this prejudice lead to the single bloodiest war in the
| country's history._
|
| Affirmative action was upheld for more than a half-century in
| recognition of these incontrovertible truths, and was only
| overturned with the rise of a Supreme Court whose
| partisanship would be unprecedented, if it had not been
| preceded by the courts that gave us Jim Crow. No one even
| voted this change in.
| boplicity wrote:
| > we believe it to be illegitimate to discriminate on the
| basis of race.
|
| If there is significant and lasting harm done on the basis of
| race, should there be significant and lasting action taken to
| correct that harm?
|
| What if such harm continues today, as it does in our society?
| wpietri wrote:
| It is both wild to me and totally predictable that a
| reasonable question like this would get downvoted on HN.
|
| If people are interested in this particular phenomenon, I
| really recommend Mills's "The Racial Contract". [1] A
| contractarian philosopher, the book is about how the
| literal centuries of social contract philosophy somehow
| never got around to mentioning race. His well-supported
| conclusion is that there was always a second implicit
| social contract, which he calls the racial contract. But it
| has an epistemological dimension where one of the rules is
| that we avoid discussing, avoid even seeing the racial
| contract.
|
| This sort of downvoting of even basic questions, let alone
| answers, is exactly part of that epistemological erasure
| that he talked about.
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/Racial-Contract-Charles-W-
| Mills/dp/08...
| wredue wrote:
| No. That is what the racists say is the problem with
| affirmative action.
|
| Affirmative Action is more like reparations. It's a system to
| elevate classically suppressed races to the levels they
| should be at but are not due to systematic racism.
|
| Meritocracy is itself racist assuming it's built on a
| foundation of systematic racist wherein it is virtually
| impossible for suppressed races to actually gain merit.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Whenever this obvious bs excuse is used, the glaring
| question becomes of why are Asians suppressed by it?
|
| If it's about classically suppressed races and systematic
| racism, it's pretty hypocritical to be penalizing Asians.
| Especially when recent years have also seen a surge in
| people pretending to care about racism against Asians.
| kelnos wrote:
| Because racism can have different effects depending on
| who is perpetrating it.
|
| The recent surge in racism against Asians has been mostly
| about verbal and physical violence directed against Asian
| people. For the most part, Asian people haven't been
| missing out on educational and professional opportunities
| because of it.
|
| That's not been the case for other manifestations of
| racism. There's really no hypocrisy here; you just seem
| to have adopted this very narrow, binary view of racism's
| effects and what needs to be done to correct those
| effects.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Are you making the ridiculous implication that systematic
| racism against Asians hasn't existed prior to recent
| events?
|
| >For the most part, Asian people haven't been missing out
| on educational and professional opportunities because of
| it.
|
| Yes, no thanks to you! Apparently being willing to throw
| away our childhoods studying to make up for racism's
| effects means we deserve to face more racism.
| CrampusDestrus wrote:
| [flagged]
| kelnos wrote:
| False. We already know what happens when AA policies are
| banned from university admissions. California enacted
| such a ban in 1996, and "the percentage of Black,
| Hispanic and Native American students attending selective
| colleges in the state plummeted".[0]
|
| [0] https://www.sciencenews.org/article/california-
| affirmative-a...
| [deleted]
| s17n wrote:
| The point is that legacy admissions have always been an
| egregious injustice. One effect of affirmative action was to
| (partially and imperfectly) ameliorate the admissions
| situation. Now that's gone.
|
| As far as the freedom of association goes, that's not an
| argument in favor of legacy admissions but it is possibly an
| argument that the government should stay out of it. Given the
| central role that universities play in our society, and the
| fact that they depend on government support, I think it's a
| complicated question. Ultimately I think it's also an
| uninteresting question - the important thing is building a
| societal consensus legacy admissions are wrong and should
| end.
| mc32 wrote:
| Depends. Often well to do alumni donate significantly to
| their alma maters which grow their endowments and allow the
| institutions to offer more in terms of scholarships.
|
| That said, I agree with removing this priv.
| kulahan wrote:
| I never really understood the complaint. Rich people spend
| massive amounts of money to send their kid to a school.
| That massive, completely unnecessary investment is then
| reinvested across the students attending the school, who
| come from all different backgrounds.
|
| This is, in effect, one of the most common ways wealth is
| redistributed in the US. Why is it so bad? Maybe we should
| _limit_ it, but the actual practice itself is probably more
| good than bad.
| Shacklz wrote:
| > This is, in effect, one of the most common ways wealth
| is redistributed in the US. Why is it so bad?
|
| Because the government could simply tax those with wealth
| more and use taxation as a means of redistribution. Like
| most western countries do.
|
| Anand Giridharadas dissects this topic rather
| convincingly in his "Winners Take All", see also his
| infamous google talk:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_zt3kGW1NM
| sib wrote:
| >> the government could simply tax those with wealth
| more...Like most western countries do
|
| Not sure where you're getting your data, but, looking at
| Europe as a proxy for "western countries" not including
| the US, in 1990, 12 countries in Europe had a wealth tax,
| while, as of 2019, only 3 did. Weather taxes were
| generally considered a failure.
| oatmeal1 wrote:
| > Because the government could simply tax those with
| wealth more and use taxation as a means of
| redistribution.
|
| I don't think the word "simply" applies when you are
| suggesting the government take money from billionaires
| with their armies of lobbyists and redistribute the money
| to the masses.
| saghm wrote:
| So because billionares will try to fight legislation to
| keep them from trying to make things more equal, instead
| we should have them just voluntarily give their money to
| universities, as if that somehow isn't even more
| susceptible to being spent the way they want rather than
| to make things more equal? I admit I'm biased in favor of
| using taxes instead of university donations to
| redistribute wealth, but even for a position I disagree
| with, this seems like a fairly weak argument.
| kelnos wrote:
| Using taxes would be (IMO) ideal, but that just isn't
| politically feasible in the US. I'm not sure I'm
| convinced that university donations from the wealthy is
| anywhere near as good when it comes to wealth
| distribution, but it's pointless to say "doing this with
| taxes is better" if we don't have those taxes and can't
| have those taxes.
|
| > _So because billionares will try to fight legislation_
|
| They don't "try". They succeed. Time and time again.
| Maybe at some point they'll stop succeeding, but I'm not
| going to hold my breath.
| rank0 wrote:
| Enlighten me. Which G20 nation has better economic
| conditions than the United States?
|
| According to this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o
| f_countries_by_average...
|
| The PPP adjusted median income is highest in the US (not
| counting Iceland/Luxembourg for obvious reasons).
|
| And as a follow up, how stable is the government in your
| example countries? The US has the worlds oldest document-
| based government. The rest of the "western countries"
| have constantly collapsing systems/borders with the
| exception of France who has historically done
| exceptionally well in this regard.
|
| TL;DR - Why should we take notes on wealth redistribution
| from other societies which are less successful?
| lmm wrote:
| > counting Iceland/Luxembourg for obvious reasons
|
| Obviously you wouldn't want to count any cases that
| contradict your claims.
| rank0 wrote:
| Lol. The US is hundreds of times larger than those
| countries. It does t even have to be about the US...
|
| Do you really think it's reasonable to compare Luxembourg
| with its 600k population to a country like Germany which
| has 84M citizens?
| alex_young wrote:
| I think it's worth pointing out that income inequality is
| much worse in the US; the Wikipedia page you referenced
| reflects this somewhat: "2020 average wage in the United
| States was $53,383, while the 2020 median wage was
| $34,612."
|
| If you define 'better economic conditions' as meaning
| more wealth in total, sure, the US is at or near the top.
| But however, if you're interested in knowing how most
| people are doing, the reality is that many of our
| European friends are better off than we are.
|
| The one example I'm personally aware of is Switzerland,
| which has a wealth tax and relatively low overall
| taxation. People they tend to live longer lives than we
| do, they have more disposable income, great
| infrastructure, a pristine natural environment, local
| manufacturing, and they have hundreds of years of
| political stability.
| rank0 wrote:
| Median (not average) PPP income is highest in the US.
| See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income
|
| While it's true our income inequality is larger, the fact
| still remains that the median American makes more money
| than the median European (or any other comparable
| region).
|
| Ask yourself: Is it better for everyone to be richer and
| have high inequality? Or is it better for everyone to be
| poorer but more equal?
|
| EDIT: Switzerland is a good point. They are a prosperous
| and highly educated society! It's just tough to compare
| in my mind because the US or EU is hundreds of times
| larger.
| firebirdn99 wrote:
| A lot of the costs in modern college programs over the
| last 20 to 30 years has been due to increase in
| administrative personnel, building up sports programs,
| etc.
|
| Modern colleges appear more like resorts than educational
| institutions. The presidents of these colleges also make
| massive amounts of money, many of even public or state
| college, which is highly disingenuous.
| sangnoir wrote:
| The fundamental question is: do we want admissions based
| on merit (or not)? Saying "Yes" and then carving out an
| exception for the wealthy is dishonest (IMO); if the
| answer is "No, admission is not on merit" then we need to
| talk about what other considerations would be fair game.
|
| Also, implicit in your argument is that universities
| getting more money is always a good thing - I take
| umbrage at that prior as universities should _not_ be
| driven by the desire for perpetual capital growth.
| oblio wrote:
| This perspective seems naive. Rich people tend to not
| spend a lot of money on stuff that doesn't make them more
| money.
|
| So if they do spend a lot, they think it's worth the
| expenses, including the "charity" part.
| somethoughts wrote:
| Yes perhaps the unstated benefit of elite private schools
| is the long term relationships formed between children of
| legacy (i.e. generational wealth) and highly capable and
| hungry individuals who are getting in on merit alone.
|
| The two problems I see with legacy admissions is that:
|
| 1.) It has never been explicitly stated as a policy. If
| it were an upfront "get one admission for every 10 full
| price admissions/tuitions you buy" that would seem
| fairer. That said - I can see why a private school might
| be hesitant to be so transparent...
|
| 2.) The schools need to grow in order to keep the
| percentage of new admits to legacy admits constant as
| every generation of graduates is likely to produce at
| least 2x increase in legacy admits.
| xp84 wrote:
| > every generation of graduates is likely to produce at
| least 2x increase in legacy admits.
|
| If you're implying that people are having kids at the 2
| per couple replacement rate, US is below that.
|
| Also it's forgetting that each couple likely took up 2
| ivy league seats during their college years, so even if
| mom went to Yale and Dad went to Harvard, but their 2
| kids both go to Harvard, that would be consuming 2
| "legacy admit" seats which is 1x the number of seats from
| last generation.
|
| My hypothesis is disproven though, if it is super common
| that ivy leaguers very frequently marry outside the ivy
| league, then 1 becoming 2+ with each generation would be
| a problem.
| DragonStrength wrote:
| They should be allowed to behave however they want, but
| whether we consider that behavior sufficient for non-
| profit status and tax-exempt endowments should be on the
| table. Donations for admission of your kids feels
| especially gross when talking about granting tax-
| advantaged status to institutions. It's a change in how
| we view them, to be sure, but questioning our
| expectations of tax-exempt non-profits seems like exactly
| what we want the government doing.
| pnemonic wrote:
| > reinvested across the students attending the school
|
| I do not know this for a fact, but I WILDLY doubt what
| you said here, and I cannot imagine what could possess
| anyone to believe this. Especially at so-called "elite"
| schools.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _That massive, completely unnecessary investment is
| then reinvested across the students attending the school_
|
| You're confusing legacy and donor. My only issue with
| children of donors getting on the Dean's List is the
| donation's tax deductibility. Legacy, on the other hand,
| isn't linked to resource contribution.
| consp wrote:
| You can do one without the other. The biggest problem in
| my oppinion is the lack of the mentioned redistribution
| for the first 18 years of the poor sob's life who lucks
| out since that's way more important than the extra money
| for the already extremely wealthy institutions.
| dogleash wrote:
| > The point is that legacy admissions have always been an
| egregious injustice.
|
| To whom? Anyone who would have been accepted to CMU or Pitt
| but for the legacy apps will be accepted to another school
| and still be able to get a high quality education.
|
| What harm is caused? They have a slightly worse starting
| hand in status posturing games during the short period of
| their lives where anyone gives a shit where anyone went to
| school?
|
| I'm not saying it's the ideal world or anything. But
| "egregious"? C'mon
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Anyone who was rejected because they didn't have the
| right parents because the spot went to someone else
| because they did have the right parents.
| bena wrote:
| I have not seen this argument used when discussing the
| striking down of affirmative action.
|
| That anyone who doesn't get accepted to a school "because
| of affirmative action" could still "be accepted to
| another school and still be able to get a high quality
| education".
|
| Why protect an institution like legacy admissions that is
| about as far as meritocratic as possible?
| rayiner wrote:
| Look at the list of people appointed to run executive
| agencies, serve as judges, etc., and see the degree to
| which our society is run by elites from a handful of
| schools. The Supreme Court that issued this decision has
| one Justice who didn't go to either Harvard or Yale.
| xp84 wrote:
| This is a really thought-provoking reply. I appreciate
| it.
|
| The thing it makes me wonder, though: Isn't this
| unmerited dominance of Ivy Leaguers in our society the
| real problem that both AA and the discussion about
| legacies, is purporting to "solve" or "improve"?
|
| It seems like every society has elites, and we're trying
| to put a thumb on the scale (or remove other thumbs on
| the scale really) in hopes we can propel the brightest
| (poor/nonwhite/non-upper-class) kids into the elite
| category, but I worry that this is doomed to make little
| difference because no matter what, not everyone can
| graduate from Harvard or Yale. No matter what there will
| be people just as smart/virtuous/etc as the ones admitted
| to Harvard and Yale who were just unlucky.
|
| I feel like it's more of a problem of humanity -- that we
| tend to be tribal and exalt some people based on things
| like what school you went to. Many of the most
| intelligent and thoughtful people I've worked with
| dropped out of college or didn't go at all.
| wpietri wrote:
| Consider two extremes: positions in the next generation's
| "elite" are randomly selected vs auctioned off. In the
| latter case, you quickly develop the problem of a
| parasitic elite who uses that elite power to extract
| wealth to buy places for their kids in the next
| generation.
|
| The essential reason America exists was we said "hell no"
| to a parasitic, hereditary elite, the British "nobility".
| So I think it's very in keeping with the American
| experiment to prevent the reemergence of that sort of
| elite. I'm not sure we should have an elite at all, but
| to the extent that we do, I think college admissions
| should absolutely not favor people based on wealth or
| family ties.
| nradov wrote:
| From a purely legal standpoint, the affirmative action issue
| is really about government funding and has little to do with
| limiting freedom of association. Schools that take federal
| funding can't violate the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection
| Clause. Private schools that wish to continue their
| affirmative action admission programs are free to do so
| provided they forgo government funding.
| bluepod4 wrote:
| I understand. But things are never "purely" legal though.
| rhaway84773 wrote:
| I'm not in favor of affirmative action for a whole host of
| reasons.
|
| However, if we consider discrimination against group A to be
| illegitimate and yet that discrimination and it's negative
| effects to people of group A remain widespread, actions to
| remedy that discrimination, which in many cases will indeed
| require treating people of group A differently, is not
| automatically illegitimate.
|
| Just like we consider violence to be illegitimate, but at the
| same time we draw a massive distinction between violence by
| an offender and violence done in self defense.
|
| While that's true in general, as far as affirmative action
| specifically is concerned, as the legacy removals in response
| to the ending of affirmative action indicates, affirmative
| action was essentially colleges paying lip service to
| reducing harm while using it to justify all sorts of
| inexcusable practices (like legacy).
| xkcd-sucks wrote:
| It's kind of begging the question to assume multigenerational
| family ties to a university are "not merit" when a big part of
| a university's value proposition is social networking: One
| doesn't go to Harvard just to take courses; one goes to Harvard
| to bump shoulders with the scions of dictators / diplomats /
| "captains of industry" etc. Personally I didn't understand that
| at the time, would have rejected the notion on principle, and
| still don't really like it, but is definitely worth
| consideration
| michael1999 wrote:
| The word "merit" is flexible, but not so flexible that it
| encompasses the mediocre children of well connected people.
| That's the entire point of "merit" based admission.
|
| You are right that much of the value in Harvard is the
| network, but that's not the branding.
| spullara wrote:
| It would be interesting to see if there is a reason to go to
| Harvard without legacy admissions. There certainly is a
| reason to go to MIT for example where they don't have it.
| jchw wrote:
| What that sounds like to me is that we give (/continued to
| give) national accreditation to elite clubs that care more
| about status than genuine merits.
|
| Obviously organizations that want to do this should be free
| to in some form, but does it really have a place anywhere in
| the education system?
|
| Not all universities seem to be this way. While any measure
| of merit will definitely be flawed in some way, there are
| certainly universities that live and die not on elite status
| but on elite results. In some ways, it's going to be a proxy,
| because people who are better off will naturally perform
| better. But on the other hand, at least selecting people
| literally based on how well they perform academically is more
| meaningful to the function of education than selecting people
| because they're related to someone of high status.
|
| I never felt like university was for people like me anyways,
| but there are DEFINITELY some kinds of organizations that get
| a sort of special status, e.g. churches, universities, etc.
| where it feels like we should be scrutinizing them more.
|
| Maybe I just don't understand, though. But, that's what it
| feels like to me.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| The public makes a huge investment in Harvard, both directly
| through grants and indirectly through waived taxes. Is
| subsidizing social networking with and among the privileged a
| good use of public dollars?
| kaibee wrote:
| Well, you get smart kids who actually earned their spot
| connected to the rich kids with money. The first group
| isn't as privileged as the second group. This certainly
| isn't the best system, but if it was removed, would
| something better naturally emerge, or would we just further
| reduce social mobility without any benefit?
|
| /realpolitik
| bradleyjg wrote:
| It seems like your model here is that we eliminate alumni
| preferences at Harvard, rich kids stop getting in but
| that has no impact on their future elite status. The
| smart kids miss out on connecting with them and end up
| the only real losers in the change.
|
| I think you should consider another possibility---that
| things like getting into Harvard is how rich kids end up
| being elite. Take those things away from them and many
| will still be wealthy but they won't be elite. They'll be
| the guy working a mid level job (or none at all) that
| just happens to have a really sweet house and vacations
| in Aspen.
| xp84 wrote:
| > wealthy but they won't be elite. They'll be the guy
| working a mid level job (or none at all)
|
| I think a super rich kid who can't quite get into say,
| Harvard, but instead goes to some other school, is _not_
| going to be unemployed or pushing paper in middle
| management, they 're still going to work for the family
| firm, start a business with family money, or cross-
| pollinate among the other elite families.
|
| Furthermore, if the would-be legacies can't get into
| Harvard and Yale, the most likely outcome I foresee is
| that they start to cluster at other schools (say Amherst,
| Tufts, BU[1]), gradually shifting the character and
| reputations of those schools and getting us right back
| where we came from.
|
| I don't really think that is a bad thing, and think it's
| probably best to stop doing legacy admissions. But I
| think there's no way this will result in reshaping of
| class in our society to where the elites are usurped by a
| bunch of smart, diverse (merit-admitted) kids from the
| wrong side of the tracks. Best case it gives a boost to
| the best non-Ivy schools at attracting the descendants of
| the Harvard and Yale set, potentially to the point of
| altering society's definition of which schools are the
| most elite.
|
| [1] forgive any errors in my choice of schools - I just
| googled top universities in New England and skipped over
| ones I know are Ivies.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| If Harvard wants to be a networking club for the rich, that's
| fine, but then it should be cut off from public funding.
|
| Cutting off public funds would obliterate Harvard's research
| output overnight. NSF, NIH, NASA, DOE and other government
| agencies fund virtually all fundamental scientific research
| in the United States. Without government funding, most
| professors (at least in science and engineering) would
| immediately leave for places where they could access public
| funding.
|
| Harvard should decide what's more important to it: networking
| or world-class research?
| janalsncm wrote:
| Being able to sit down for dinner with a college professor is
| already a huge advantage. Those kids don't need an additional
| boost.
|
| Looking back, my dad was a mechanical engineer and it
| definitely helped me. Especially in math and science. He
| showed me the math he was doing and as a kid seeing math done
| at a professional level helped me appreciate what actually
| mattered. As a result I really cared about those subjects and
| I did well.
| yannyu wrote:
| Then we might as well admit that "merit" is heavily
| influenced by starting conditions instead of pretending that
| everyone has "equal opportunity". How many times have I heard
| from people that the USA is about "equality of opportunity"
| and not "equality of outcome"? Legacy admissions is directly
| contrary to equality of opportunity, and undermines the idea
| of meritocracy in university admissions that people have been
| crowing about in anti-affirmative-action rhetoric.
| tivert wrote:
| > How many times have I heard from people that the USA is
| about "equality of opportunity" and not "equality of
| outcome"? Legacy admissions is directly contrary to
| equality of opportunity, and undermines the idea of
| meritocracy in university admissions...
|
| Understanding "equality of opportunity" to be literal and
| absolute is nonsense, because to do so would require
| hobbling people with natural talent (for instance), since
| not all people have the opportunities created by those
| talents (there's a famous sci-fi short story about that
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron).
|
| IIRC, rejecting "equality of outcome" in favor of "equality
| of opportunity", means rejecting explicit policies to pick
| winners and losers.
| rayiner wrote:
| Why does legacy admissions being bad justify racial
| preferences? Two wrongs don't make a right.
| vkou wrote:
| > Two wrongs don't make a right.
|
| This is nonsense, in _any_ moral framework worth its
| salt.
|
| Consider a simple situation:
|
| 1. Lying is wrong.
|
| 2. Someone's running from a mob that wants to kill them.
| They went right.
|
| 3. The mob stops, and asks you if the person in question
| went right.
|
| 4. Two wrongs don't make a right, so you tell the truth.
| Or don't say anything, and let the mob go off in the
| correct direction and chase that person down.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| Your example is backwards. Lying is the right, and truth
| is the wrong in your example.
|
| So in arguing for two wrongs are OK, you are suggesting
| you'd direct the mob to the person running away (maybe
| they were a person you didn't like, or were of privilege
| you resent).
| vkou wrote:
| > Lying is the right, and truth is the wrong in your
| example.
|
| Lying is wrong! Except, according to you, when it leads
| to good outcomes!
|
| It sounds like outcome-driven morality is what you're
| pushing for..? Then what's the problem with AA? _Not_
| using it to compensate for structural disadvantages is
| being in the wrong in its case...
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| "Lying is wrong" is a non-sequitur - like West is to the
| left. It is morality for 5 year olds or Sam Harris.
|
| >Then what's the problem with AA? Not using it to
| compensate for structural disadvantages is being in the
| wrong in its case...
|
| AA fails on that criteria as well. It isn't compensating
| the people who were wronged and the burden falls on
| people didn't do the wrong. Poor asian immigrant gets
| kicked out so Harvard can virtue signal and put a black
| face on their web page and course catalog. Never mind
| that kid is a wealthy immigrant from Kenya.
|
| And to make it even worse, the AA admits do worse, drop
| out at higher rates, and drop down to lesser majors
| because many aren't academically competitive. They would
| have done better if they were matched on merit to
| schools.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| Do you have data to back up the implicit claim you're
| making that dropping affirmative action will, all else
| equal, result in a larger number of lower-income people
| attending schools, and that affirmative action policies
| weren't aiding non-immigrant Blacks?
| kelnos wrote:
| On the contrary, when California enacted a ban on AA in
| university admissions in 1996, enrollment of minorities
| plummeted. Sure, maybe some of them would have dropped
| out, and some may have changed majors, but at least they
| would have had the opportunity, and certainly some would
| have been able to take advantage of it.
| jchw wrote:
| I think the debate regarding affirmative action is very
| simple and not unexpected at all. Here's how I view it.
|
| To start, in America I believe that most of us believe that
| the "default" behavior should be to avoid unfair
| discrimination, especially for protected classes. I think
| most people would agree to at least this, it's a pretty
| generic and obvious statement.
|
| Therefore, when we deviate from this for some reason,
| generally, it REQUIRES a healthy amount of thought: the
| baseline should be at least a strong hypothesis to begin
| the conversation. The world is very complicated, so simply
| assuming something does what you expect it to because it
| intuitively sounds like it does is generally not a
| reasonable position.
|
| And of course, the idea behind affirmative action,
| hopefully put into words that people feel is fair, _is_ a
| sort of discrimination, but the intention is of course to
| try to adjust for past disgressions and injustice to try to
| "re-balance" opportunity. So unlike the four-letter-word
| that was discrimination in historical contexts, it is not
| based on racism[1], for example.
|
| So does affirmative action work? It seems to do roughly
| what it is supposed to do, although honestly a huge problem
| is that it's sort of tautological. Of course it _works_ ,
| at doing what it's meant to do. Some have argued that it
| could potentially harm students by leading to a "mismatch",
| but the evidence is mixed and in any case it probably
| causes more good than harm in terms of outcomes. I am not
| an expert on this though, and I have not been into the
| studies for a while.
|
| The real question that I think causes so much strife and
| pain is the one that hurts to try to answer: is it worth
| it? And _that_ is not easy to answer, nor does it have an
| obvious objective answer. I truly believe that most of this
| argument boils down to proxies for this particular
| question. Some people who have a particular egalitarian
| bend to their views on life and society might blanket
| oppose such a policy on an ideological basis, whereas
| someone who is strongly anti-racist is highly likely to
| prefer such policies even at high cost.
|
| Cost? By that, in this case I mean in terms of going
| against the basic belief of not discriminating. Ideology is
| important to people even when there isn't a discrete cost,
| but in this case the micro and macro views are very
| different. On the micro level, someone who is less
| qualified will be preferred over someone who is more
| qualified, on the basis of factors outside of their
| control. On the macro level, population demographics
| change, generally reducing biases.
|
| There's a lot of finer points. Like clearly, on the micro
| level, when someone "less qualified" according to some
| criteria passes due to affirmative action, the idea is that
| it was beyond their control in the first place that they
| were less qualified, which may very well be true. And on
| the macro level, statistics may not tell the full story:
| demographics are a measurement of people, and people are
| not fungible. The numbers surely look better on paper, but
| one must wonder sometimes if it's actually doing what it
| looks like it's doing.
|
| You might think that I am staunchly opposed to affirmative
| action based on my framing of this, and the truth is, I
| simply don't know. I think that it's potentially very
| powerful, but it also is damn scary to wield institutional
| discrimination even if it's supposed to be a force for
| good. This isn't exactly a slippery slope situation, of
| course, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
| I've personally flip-flopped probably a lot of times. All I
| can say is that I sort of hope people don't just assume
| this is the right way to solve all of the problem of
| injustices, or maybe even more importantly, that merely
| instituting policies like this doesn't "solve" America's
| history with racism and sexism; and I don't think most
| people believe that it does. For some of those things, I
| think only a lot of time will truly be able to heal most of
| that, and it's going to leave a pretty nasty scar.
|
| Of course, beyond the fairly straightforward debate is the
| culture war bullshit surrounding it, but to me it's mostly
| noise. I look forward to a future with less influence from
| Twitter and news organizations so that people can go back
| to discussing things at least slightly more like human
| beings.
|
| [1]: Using racism in this context to refer to the fairly
| strict definition of being related to beliefs about races
| rather than about discrimination.
| importantbrian wrote:
| Yeah, I think part of the problem is that people don't really
| understand this. I have taken classes at a community college,
| a directional state school, an R1 and my master's degree is
| from a highly selective school. My n=1 experience is that the
| coursework from any accredited program is largely the same.
| The professors at the state school were actually better than
| at any of the other schools from a pure teaching perspective.
| The biggest difference between them was the profile of my
| classmates. The entire value that Harvard et al. provide is
| the name brand and the alumni network. The education itself
| you can get anywhere.
| esafak wrote:
| So be sure to network when you get there. Socialize! Attend
| the parties! It's not just for fun's sake.
| tekla wrote:
| Not necessarily true. The more prestigious schools have
| more budget to hire better professors, but more
| importantly, can fund top class research that costs ALOT of
| money.
|
| Your random college probably can't afford a research
| nuclear reactor, but MIT sure as hell can if they want.
|
| Getting a position as a undergrad on those research
| projects is incredibly competitive.
| chaxor wrote:
| You're incorrect about better professors, but the extra
| money does allow for _ease_ of research.
|
| The only reason research is perceived to be better at
| certain institutions is due to the extra money, which
| allows _ease_ of research.
|
| Most researchers at any university can have the same
| ideas, and be equally intellectually qualified (if not
| _more_ intellectually qualified at non-ivy league
| universities, explained in a bit) to do the research.
|
| The difference comes in the availability of specific
| labs, with extremely expensive equipment, to perform
| tasks for collaborators. At ivy league universities, the
| graduate students effectively get to treat their work as
| if they were a manager who contracts out every price of
| work needed. Need cryo TEM of some samples? Send it down
| the hall, don't worry about it for a week, and then get
| nicely formatted results done for you by staff scientists
| that perform this service for the university daily. Need
| statistics to be done? Send it by email to the team,
| they'll let you know when it's done, etc.
|
| Other universities don't have this luxury, but I would
| say it _improves_ their capabilities as a scientist;
| hence my argument that non ivy league universities have
| more intellectually capable scientists. For example,
| instead of sending that sample for TEM, they learn how to
| do TEM, but not on a fancy new system; rather, the one
| that uses a car battery and a circuit board that you have
| to understand well enough to add some extra solder when
| needed.
|
| I've worked in several different universities, _and it 's
| definitely still surprising to me_, but the level of
| incompetence from grads coming out of ivy league
| institutions is astounding sometimes.
| spullara wrote:
| MIT is different though as they don't have legacy or
| athletic admissions.
| meetingthrower wrote:
| False. They do have slots for athletes.
| toast0 wrote:
| > more importantly, can fund top class research that
| costs ALOT of money.
|
| That's important if you're at the college to do research;
| but many people attend college to get instruction. Top
| class research says nothing about top class instruction.
| melagonster wrote:
| but some people try to find top class instruction of
| research. what's can better than hiring best researchers,
| give them foundation for research and require they
| teaching students how to research in same time?
| importantbrian wrote:
| The University of Kansas is an AAU school and has an
| acceptance rate of 92%. Most R1s are big state schools
| who admit almost everyone who applies. You do not need to
| go to an Ivy League schools to get top notch research
| instruction.
| importantbrian wrote:
| > The more prestigious schools have more budget to hire
| better professors
|
| Better by what metric? It has not been my experience that
| instructional quality is in any way correlated with
| budget or prestige.
|
| > Your random college probably can't afford a research
| nuclear reactor, but MIT sure as hell can if they want.
|
| Idaho State has a research reactor. As does Kansas State,
| Missouri S&T, NC State, Ohio State, Oregon State, Penn
| State, Purdue, Reed College, Texas A&M, Cal-Davis and
| Cal-Irvine, Florida, Maryland, UMass, Missouri, New
| Mexico, Texas, Utah, Wisconsin and Washington State.
|
| You don't have to go to MIT to get onto good research
| projects in that field. And that's true of every field.
|
| MIT is also a bad example because as the sister comment
| points out they don't have legacy or athletic admissions.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Have to agree about the professors. They aren't there to
| teach, they're there to do research.
|
| I found that despite being in regular 2 v 1 tutorials, a
| large number of professors are simply not that interested
| in teaching.
|
| The best tutors ended up being PhD students. They knew
| how stuff actually worked, and had been through the
| material recently enough to understand how undergrads
| might not get it.
| ghaff wrote:
| MIT doesn't have athletic scholarships. But I'm pretty
| sure they weight athletics like they do many other non-
| academic activities (e.g. music).
|
| ADDED: If you're national class in a sport, they'll
| probably try to figure out a way to admit you so long as
| you meet some set of qualifications which mean you
| probably won't flunk out. (MIT tries pretty hard to keep
| people from flunking out.)
| meetingthrower wrote:
| They have slots. Coaches have a certain number of slots,
| but yes there is a minimum academic performance that they
| have to adhere to. If you're recruited you know it.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > Better by what metric?
|
| Sometimes, by material.
|
| If the class can be taught from a textbook, the
| instructor may be irrelevant. The best classes at my alma
| mater were being taught by professors who handed out
| paperback copies of their as-yet-unpublished textbook, or
| had us work from the first-print editions they authored,
| or who's "textbook" was the aggregation of notes they'd
| collected over the years.
| importantbrian wrote:
| Your experience is wildly different than mine then. The
| worst professors I had were the ones teaching out of
| their own book.
| largeluke wrote:
| I did both community college and Harvard undergrad. My
| experience is that while some intro classes were similarly
| structured, Harvard offered far more accelerated options
| for people who are prepared for it. You're right that the
| student body is a huge difference though.
| sterlind wrote:
| on the other hand, people go to MIT to interact with
| brilliant classmates and faculty. MIT's value proposition is
| that the smartest people are there, and funding will find
| those people (and vice versa) on the merits of their
| intellectual abilities.
|
| On the other hand,
|
| _> One doesn 't go to Harvard just to take courses; one goes
| to Harvard to bump shoulders with the scions of dictators /
| diplomats / "captains of industry" etc_
|
| is correct about Harvard. Harvard is much more about elitism-
| qua-elitism. Sure it's academically selective (if you're not
| from a political dynasty), but that's just because the
| intellectual elite is only one of many kinds of elite they
| carry about.
|
| I think this is a true insight about Harvard, and the other
| ivies that give a "Gentleman's C" to plutocrats' children,
| but I think it deserves to be destroyed. I'd prefer Lincoln
| Lab to the Skull and Bones.
| kiba wrote:
| We're still creating a meritocratic elite, based on capacity
| limit and price of admission. Not everybody get to have an
| elite education, or afford such an opportunity.
|
| Ideally, high quality education would be democratized and made
| accessible to anyone who want it regardless of their means to
| pay.
| michael1999 wrote:
| The word merit doesn't stretch so far as to include mediocre
| children of wealthy parents. You are welcome to call it an
| elite education. But the whole point of the word "merit" is
| to distinguish it from mere parental wealth and connections.
| kneebonian wrote:
| > Ideally, high quality education would be democratized and
| made accessible to anyone who want it regardless of their
| means to pay.
|
| We already have that for the most part, I can find courses
| from half a dozen of the worlds best universities online for
| free right now.
| xp84 wrote:
| Bingo. At this point, you _can_ acquire a better education
| on most topics through self-directed free routes like that
| as long as you 're motivated. Or for some areas there are
| things like bootcamps, the best of which teach the actually
| marketable skills much better than colleges.
|
| I'd argue that college ceased being primarily about
| education a long time ago. College in my humble opinion is:
|
| * Place to rub shoulders with elites (mostly only applies
| at Ivies, or at prominent schools within certain niches
| probably)
|
| * Proving you have sufficient grit and responsibility to
| endure adversity and get things done - or more accurately,
| some in society are willing to use it as a decent filter to
| exclude those who are lazy and unmotivated. Notably, this
| has a high false-negative rate, meaning lots of
| hardworking, motivated people _don 't_ attend or graduate
| from college due to money, time, cultural expectations of
| their social group, etc.
|
| * Least important: A filter to exclude people who
| apparently can't be taught. Has the same false negative
| problem, some fall through here because their schooling
| sucked and they didn't learn how to learn.
|
| Only that first aspect is really related to whether
| minorities need a boost or legacies need to be brought to
| an even playing field. Education itself is easy to get at
| many schools, and is often better than these fancy
| 'research schools.'
| l33t233372 wrote:
| > Ideally, high quality education would be democratized and
| made accessible to anyone who want it
|
| It pretty much is. Hardvard undergraduate classes aren't
| substantially higher quality than at many other state
| schools.
| twoodfin wrote:
| Opens a ton of slots for race-neutral preferences that can,
| say, pull in the top performing students from otherwise
| underperforming urban and rural districts.
| [deleted]
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| [flagged]
| networkchad wrote:
| [dead]
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| While I believe you are trying to make a good faith insight
| porn comment and I don't think you should be (inevitably)
| downvoted, I am skeptical of the methods of the "rather
| popular podcast" that led them to make such a claim.
|
| Also, I'm not sure if it's the gotcha you think it is. If I
| were you, I would take a long hard look at claims like these,
| and how even when they are not true, well, an item that says
| "So and so claim turns out to be not true" is itself
| propagating the untrue claim. It will illuminate for you the
| true way Reddit is quite toxic, and why among many reasons
| content moderation and publishing are hard.
| rafram wrote:
| > A rather popular podcast
|
| > Unsure if they said
|
| > But either way, its quite astounding
|
| You're not making a terribly strong case here. What's your
| source? What does "most disfavored" mean? Is there actually
| anything to show that Jewish students are favored in college
| admissions?
| jlawson wrote:
| I'll help. Of Harvard students:
|
| 39.7% are white. (American white population share: 59.3%.
| So whites are already dramatically under-represented).
|
| 17% (43% of 39.7%) of all students are white and legacy.
|
| So of all students, 22.7% are white and not legacy.
|
| Harvard class is 10% Jewish overall (American Jewish
| population share: 2.1% [2], so they are 5x over-
| represented)
|
| Jews are nearly all counted as white. If they're legacy at
| the same rate as other whites, about 4.3% (43% of 10%) of
| total students are Jewish legacy, while 5.7% are Jewish
| non-legacy.
|
| Subtracting 5.7% from 22.7%, that means that 16% of Harvard
| students are white non-Jewish non-legacy.
|
| The US is 59.3% white [1] and 2.1% Jewish [2], so 57.2%
| non-Jewish white.
|
| 57.2% of population is funneled down to 16% of the slots -
| this is a massive under-representation; non-legacy non-
| Jewish whites basically cannot get into Harvard. Their
| chances are 4x (!) lower even than the overall population's
| very low chances.
|
| No other major ethnic group is nearly this under-
| represented in the Harvard non-legacy admission process.
| This is the result of this group being disfavored.
|
| Source is the article above, and Harvard's own statistics,
| available from many sources. Here's one [0]
|
| [0] https://admissionsight.com/harvard-diversity-
| statistics/
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the
| _Unit...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews
| ericmcer wrote:
| Why did they lump athletes in with those other three groups.
| Athletics is the ultimate meritocracy. If athletes are a
| significant portion of that 43% it dilutes the whole argument.
|
| If 10% were alumni/donors/faculty it would still be outrageous,
| no need to pump up the numbers.
| xdennis wrote:
| > Athletics is the ultimate meritocracy
|
| ...but not in education.
|
| The US system of making athletes waste time in university is
| quite unique and ridiculous.
| kulahan wrote:
| I like that we still emphasize education even if you're
| going for a job that doesn't even require you to know how
| to read.
| oblio wrote:
| Don't they basically get a free pass for regular courses
| as long as they behave and provide results?
| nocsi wrote:
| Yea.. These students also generate capital through ticket
| sales and rally alumni to donate. Unless a non-producing
| sport.
| mabbo wrote:
| > Nearly three quarters of them would have been rejected if
| they had been subjected to the same standards as other white
| applicants.
|
| That's kind of insane. Over 30% of white students at Harvard
| would have been rejected if not for those programs.
| hunson_abadeer wrote:
| > With the end of affirmative action, legacy status in
| admissions becomes much harder to justify.
|
| I've heard this repeated nearly verbatim in a couple of places,
| and it's such a puzzling framing. Why was this practice any
| less ethically challenged prior to the SCOTUS decision?
| chaostheory wrote:
| Not sure why this wasn't mentioned more often but it's
| because of donor money. Donor money that funds things like
| new cafeterias and other facilities ultimately benefits
| everyone at school and helps keep tuition prices in check,
| also complicates the ethics ie if they didn't have enough
| donors, then tuition will go up and it'll be even less
| affordable
| digging wrote:
| But there's no actual evidence that ending legacy
| admissions will dry up donor funding that I've seen.
| Jotra7 wrote:
| [dead]
| hunson_abadeer wrote:
| Yeah, it would be sad for Harvard to get unaffordable.
| chaostheory wrote:
| Noted your sarcasm, but it would be sad for Harvard and
| its ilk to get EVEN MORE unaffordable for anyone not
| upperclass.
| hunson_abadeer wrote:
| I think the argument rings hollow to me mostly because
| it's not that Harvard _has to_ charge this much. I 'm
| sure they could be providing the same quality of
| education for 1/5th the price. In fact, with the
| endowments many of these schools have, they could
| probably go tuition-free for a couple of decades and
| still be fine.
|
| They charge this much essentially because they can (govt-
| subsidized loans), and because it helps them maintain a
| certain reputation.
| svachalek wrote:
| The idea is that affirmative action gave a non-merit
| advantage to minority students, while legacy admissions gave
| a non-merit advantage to white kids. (Left out of course, are
| the white kids from non-elite backgrounds.) People want it to
| be "fair" by removing more non-merit policies since one has
| fallen. But I think this thread brings up a good point, as to
| what it is that places like Harvard are actually selling.
| kyleblarson wrote:
| Yeah right. Just as schools are already working around
| affirmative action rulings to continue to effect actual
| institutional racism, they will find a way to continue to give
| legacies a leg up in the admissions process. With the size of
| endowments of top schools these days they effectively operate as
| for-profit hedge funds that happen to have educational
| institutions attached. Does anyone seriously think a school would
| say "thanks for that library you donated but your grand kid only
| has a 3.8 gpa so maybe look at state schools."
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| They didn't say they're eliminating open "donations for
| admissions" systems. They said they're eliminating legacy
| admissions, i.e. "Your parents went here so you can get in,
| too". It effects multi-generation middle class families more
| than the really rich ones.
| balderdash wrote:
| This is not going to have the effect people think. My experience
| is that legacy admissions are more or less a tie breaker. Legacy
| candidates that gain admission due to their legacy status are
| well qualified candidates (+ you often get the added benefit of a
| higher yield).
|
| HOWEVER, where less than qualified candidates do gain admission
| is when there is a significant donor involved (there is often a
| meaningful overlap with alumni for obvious reasons, but not
| necessarily). Getting rid of legacy admissions will not change
| this dynamic. So really the only people that are going to lose
| out are legacies that are "on the bubble" from a resume
| standpoint whose parents aren't rich...
| chmod600 wrote:
| I'd like to see more numbers for context. How many students were
| favored by legacy status, and approximately how much favoritism?
|
| They often mix legacy numbers with athletes for some reason... I
| guess to make the numbers more dramatic? Or maybe because
| insecure intellectuals look down on athletes in general?
| code_runner wrote:
| What difference do the numbers make if the policy is better? If
| it changes 1 or 100 outcomes, in my mind this is absolutely the
| correct call.
|
| Numbers would be great and they should definitely produce them,
| but I don't think they would change my thinking they legacy
| admissions is negative.
| chmod600 wrote:
| The news likes to stoke outrage and context (especially
| numerical context) helps moderate it.
|
| Also, small problems often have different solutions than
| large problems. Solutions that don't scale are fine if the
| numbers are small.
| code_runner wrote:
| My point is that this is just an objectively good thing
| because it's the "right" way to handle things. Even if the
| "wrong" way has minimal impact.
| numbers_guy wrote:
| I was just watching a podcast interview in which a British-German
| professor employed at an Ivy League university in the US, was
| talking about the elite universities in the US, and how there is
| no equivalent in Germany. [1] The interview is in German, but
| what he is basically saying is that the American attitude is to
| very openly and purposefully create and maintain this system of
| elitism and everyone is openly in competition with each other.
| All of this is alien to us here in Germany.
|
| At first glance it seems like we got the better deal. But then
| you think more about it more. All the German elite send their
| kids to study in the US instead of studying in Germany, because
| there they get to network with the elite kids from all over the
| world. But this is not a very good thing for Germany. First of
| all, we have less say in how he next generation of elite in our
| country think. Secondly all the smart and talented people in
| Germany who cannot afford to emigrate get no chance to mingle
| with these elite kids.
|
| So if we had a system of elite unis here in Germany it might on
| some level be better.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4Y9SomH9Nc
| alephnerd wrote:
| A buddy of mine at Stanford invited me to one of their CS/Eng
| Grad Student Socials a couple years ago.
|
| There was a pretty large clique of Germans there. Over drinks,
| I came to find out all those Germans attended the same
| university (TU Munich), and more specifically, attended the
| same handful of elite private Gymnasiums.
|
| Even though they all attended a public university which doesn't
| have legacy admissions, these children of the elite still
| networked and knew each other since grade school.
|
| The same thing happens in the UK (did you attend an independent
| or comprehensive school?) as well, and even Canada to a certain
| extent though a lot of this was also driven by housing prices.
|
| The US is probably going to revert to this kind of elite
| signaling.
|
| P.S. all those Germans were blonde and blue eyed except for one
| Turkish German who was clearly uncomfortable and was chatting
| with us Americans and Asians instead.
| elteto wrote:
| You obviously got it wrong. The parent commenter explained
| that there is no elitism in Germany, because a professor said
| it in an interview, in German. Don't you know that Germany is
| the sacred, holy land, unique amongst all other lands on
| Earth, where elitism doesn't exist? You must have confused
| them with Austrians.
| numbers_guy wrote:
| The children of the elite are not studying CS at TUM. The
| parent commentator made a good point that gymnasiums is
| where a lot of elitism happens, but I was talking about
| universities and I do not think we were talking about the
| same "elite" demographics. Moreover, my OP was about how
| having a culture with elitist elements can provide a ladder
| for talented but not connected individuals, which is
| lacking in Germany, because for the most part there is a
| bigger divide between the educated middle class professions
| are the truly wealth capital owners in this land.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Elites all around the world send their kids to schools to study
| in the U.S., or places like Oxford. Presumably more countries
| besides the U.S. or the U.K. have systems of elite
| universities. Even if Germany had such schools, you think your
| elites would be content with them? The problem isn't with
| educational egalitarianism, it's with global hegemony and your
| country's elites trying to sidle up with the facilities of the
| hegemon. Don't get rid of your egalitarianism to cater to the
| fickle whims of your elites.
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| _We Don't Do Legacy (2012)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36774369 - July 2023 (106
| comments)
| hotdogscout wrote:
| [flagged]
| gnicholas wrote:
| Admissions rates for legacy students are much higher than for the
| general applicant pool, sometimes by an order of magnitude. But
| that raw comparison doesn't shed much light on how much the
| legacy status actually helps, as opposed to the differences among
| legacy applicants and the general applicant pool.
|
| Is there any data that shows how these students compare to other
| students who are comparable in terms of family income, high
| school type, GPA, SAT? I would assume that all of these variables
| could be significantly different for children of alumni
| (especially of elite institutions, where admissions is most
| competitive), so it would be helpful to know what these numbers
| look like after removing some obvious confounders.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I've seen it before and IIRC the SAT for athletes is terrible
| and the SAT for legacy is not that worse than average white
| admission. Can't find that source right now, but here is
| another one showing identical SAT between legacy and non-
| legacy. [0]
|
| I am biased to this hypothesis probably as a legacy who also
| had higher test scores than the average admit, went to a shitty
| public school, etc. Another underdiscussed motivation for
| legacy admissions is that schools view it as a signal that you
| are more likely to attend so if they admit you they can keep
| their admission percentages lower.
|
| [0]: https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-why-elite-
| colleges-...
| fritzo wrote:
| > "I do think there was a time when perhaps legacies needed a
| boost" -Dean Emeritus of Admission Mike Steidel
|
| Is there any way of charitably interpreting Mike Steidel's words?
| I have a tough time reading anything here but classist bigotry
| preserving the status quo :-/
| its_ethan wrote:
| I mean he's speaking about the past - so he's saying _perhaps_
| sometime in the _past_ it was _maybe_ needed, but he 's saying
| that it's not needed anymore.
|
| It's just a way to not have to specifically say something
| negative about the college, even if it's about the college's
| past. He's not preserving bigotry, he's just trying to not
| tarnish the brand.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Status quo, maybe, not not explicitly bigoted. Building a
| culture through generations, a sense of loyalty to an
| institution and a lifelong interest in seeing that institution
| flourish (and be funded) is a reasonable goal of a University.
| mlyle wrote:
| Yes, there are charitable ways.
|
| You make an institution stronger (in fundraising, in love for
| the institution, in traditions, etc) by creating
| multigenerational relationships. When you're asked for money,
| it may be "eh, whatever it was my college" or it could be
| "Yes-- it's where my grandpa, pop, and I all went."
|
| But there's a lot of negative consequences, too.
| thexumaker wrote:
| Good get rid of Affirmative Action, get rid of Legacy status.
|
| Athlete's are fine. Having to go to a college with a bad football
| team always sucked personally so let's keep that pipeline up.
| draw_down wrote:
| [dead]
| AnnikaL wrote:
| The title on HN (currently "Children, alumni no longer have
| admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt") is a little confusing;
| children and other relatives of alumni don't have an admissions
| edge. This isn't about some sort of early college program!
| dsiegel2275 wrote:
| It is a bit surreal to see this headline hit the top of HN, as I
| sit in a CMU owned office building, looking out the window at
| Univ of Pittsburgh buildings.
| gumby wrote:
| Curious how many selective schools don't have legacy admissions.
| Most schools will take anyone regardless.
|
| I tried downloading the "common data set" mentioned in the
| article but for some reason their site only lets you download the
| submission form, not the database itself.
|
| I couldn't have benefited personally as my parents' institutions
| were in different countries from the US and my university is a
| non-legacy one anyway.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Im kind of surprised how much media attention and outrage
| admissions to schools generates. one year of out school, the
| whole thing just is so irrelevant. Idk who really cares what
| these small subset of schools does. There are so many public
| schools that offer education and opportunities and even those are
| blown of proportion.
| boeingUH60 wrote:
| Very good decision. Let's see if them Ivy Leagues with enormous
| endowments would follow...likely not because that'll cause a big
| drop in gifts and donations.
| kypro wrote:
| > likely not because that'll cause a big drop in gifts and
| donations.
|
| This is a topic that I haven't had much interest in so sorry if
| I'm being dumb here, but I struggle to see how this could be a
| good thing?
|
| I guess the way I'm seeing this is that if you're too not smart
| enough to get into these universities but are lucky enough to
| have parents with lots of money, you can basically bribe your
| way in.
|
| While this seems unfair on the surface, and I suppose it is
| from certain lenses, it is surely also in effect acting as a
| "stupid rich person" tax for higher education?
|
| I mean to your point here, if Ivy League universities receive a
| big drop in donations wouldn't that practically guarantee
| they'll either need to charge higher tuition fees to those less
| fortunate who get in on merit, or they'll need to lower the
| quality of their education?
|
| Could someone help me out here? I'm aware I'm saying something
| stupid. I don't see how this could possibly be a good thing for
| those less well off who get in on merit? Are they not in favour
| of their education costs being partly offset by large donation
| from wealthy people?
| asmor wrote:
| or we could just... tax the rich instead? the not stupid ones
| too?
| kypro wrote:
| Pragmatically speaking "tax the rich" isn't going to happen
| and these kind of de facto "wealth taxes" are far easier to
| implement.
|
| Here in the UK we have a problem with public health care
| funding and I have no idea why we don't simply offer
| priority service for rich people who are willing to pay
| stupid amounts of money for priority service. In doing we
| could redirect that extra funding to those who need it most
| but can't afford private health care.
|
| I guess exploiting the stupidity and vanity of rich people
| seems like a much more pragmatic (and arguably fairer)
| solution than trying to implement wealth taxes or 70%
| income taxes.
| kweingar wrote:
| Ultimately the existence of elite universities is the root of the
| problem. Most colleges take a huge majority of the students who
| apply, so neither legacy students nor affirmative action make too
| much a difference for them. Universities should be more like this
| and less like incubators for the ruling class.
|
| All of the drama recently revolves around wealthy students being
| denied their rubber stamps or underprivileged students being
| denied their golden ticket. It's bad that college performs these
| functions, so let's work to fix that.
| rank0 wrote:
| Is your argument that we should not have elite universities in
| the US? Seriously?
| twixfel wrote:
| Exactly, the universities are extremely wealthy and could in
| principle choose to use that money to increase intake, but then
| it dilutes their status as a luxury brand, so they don't do it.
| But what business is it of the university to be a luxury brand
| anyway? They should be simply maximising the public good, and
| that means taking way more students with the huge endowments
| they have.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| Don't legacy admissions often mean that their parents have
| donated significantly to the University?
|
| In a sense wouldn't that just mean that those students are
| essentially paying a very high premium to attend there and
| subsidizing the education of all the other students?
|
| I'm not against abolishing them but I do wonder if this will have
| any impact on alumni donations.
| nashashmi wrote:
| They do not have an outsized impact to admissions. What has an
| outsized impact is the connections a person has with the
| university. And those connections can come from significant
| contributions.
| waswaswas wrote:
| It doesn't even have to be large sums, but the existence of
| legacy admissions creates goodwill between the university and
| its alums that broadly motivates consistent, modest donations.
|
| Legacy admissions are also a way to increase yield (percentage
| of students enrolled versus accepted) which is one of the many
| ranking-driven stat games.
| azernik wrote:
| That's a separate category of admissions advantage - "dean's
| list" or "donor" is usually what it's called. "Legacy" is just
| children of alumni regardless of whether they've donated, and
| "staff" or "faculty" is relatives of workers.
| koheripbal wrote:
| Exactly, this will likely increase donations.
| kradroy wrote:
| In the article: > "The pros are certainly fundraising
| development. I think people like to think that if they give a
| lot of money to a university, their children will get special
| preference," he said. "I can sort of understand the other side
| saying it's unfair to other applicants."
|
| The quoted person doesn't deny it helps, but people like to
| think it helps.
|
| Also, please don't donate to your university. You paid them for
| an education, food and housing. You don't owe them anything
| else. Compound interest on their takings is your contribution.
| HeavenFox wrote:
| AFAIK, legacy admission and donations are two separate
| "tracks", if you will.
|
| Donations are when the "donation office" giving a list to the
| admissions office.
|
| Legacy admission is when the student ticks a box on the
| application.
|
| The former is to recognize past contributions, where the latter
| is more for future contribution (if your whole family went to
| Harvard, presumably you will be more likely to give money to
| Harvard)
| tough wrote:
| > The former is to recognize past contributions, where the
| latter is more for future contribution (if your whole family
| went to Harvard, presumably you will be more likely to give
| money to Harvard)
|
| So it's just a checkbox to say you're already on the sect
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| Its a valid point, but its one the government does not care
| about.
|
| If you are a public funded institution, you charge the same for
| admission to all students.
|
| The moment the university stop taking public funds, you can
| have your wealthy students subsidize the less well off
| classmates.
| [deleted]
| hnboredhn wrote:
| I'd actually love to see more data on this. My cynical take is
| that now people donate to schools they didn't even go to - and
| are concentrated anyways in a few big donations a year. So
| banning legacies could still just allow wealthier people to buy
| their in, even if not their own former college.
| ahi wrote:
| Large alumni donations can and often do increase the cost of
| education of all the other students. They frequently lead to
| large capital investments that then have uncovered operational
| costs. I used to work for one of the wealthiest universities
| with 100s of millions in capital improvements annually that
| couldn't provide functional HVAC and a fresh coat of paint to
| the buildings it had.
| LegitShady wrote:
| This is a little bit ridiculous. There is no connection
| between alumni donations and capital investments except
| decisions that university leadership chooses to make. The
| issue isn't the donations, its the university leadership
| thats choosing to make large capital expenditures. The
| donations could go to other things and do go to other things.
| Any blame you're putting on the donations actually belongs to
| the people running the university. Blaming unwise spending on
| donations without mentioning who is making those decisions as
| the root of the issue is ridiculous.
| francisofascii wrote:
| > university leadership that's choosing to make large
| capital expenditures
|
| SUNY Binghamton recently received a private donation of $60
| million, with a rule from the person donating it had to be
| spent on a new baseball stadium. Do you think the
| university leadership should have declined the offer?
| pc86 wrote:
| If it costs more than $60 million to build the stadium,
| sure.
|
| What good is a $60 million donation if it costs you $100
| million on something you weren't going to buy in the
| first place?
| Brusco_RF wrote:
| Because now you have a $100M stadium that you only paid
| $40M for. That stadium generates revenue. You just need
| to make sure the numbers work
| pc86 wrote:
| > You just need to make sure the numbers work
|
| The entire point of this thread is that universities
| aren't doing that, because they're accepting $100 million
| donations with quarter-billion dollar lifetime price tags
| tied with them.
| davewashere wrote:
| This is lower tier D1 baseball in the Northeast, so
| revenue is going to be minimal.
| w0m wrote:
| > There is no connection between alumni donations and
| capital investments except decisions that university
| leadership chooses to make.
|
| Not (always) true. Direct example with Carnegie Mellon -
| David Tepper was upset the business school (his alma mater)
| was appearing to fall behind in recruiting, so he donated
| ~100m but tied it to the business school getting a new
| building/quad. Total cost to the university was well north
| of 200mil; and their hands were functionally tied in how it
| was spent.
|
| Yes, I know this is an outlier and yes, university
| leadership _could_ have said no - but you 're risking
| pissing off a doner who's given 100m+ over the years and
| will likely continue giving (and you know Tepper will
| continue guiding further capital expenditures as he sees
| the need).
| pc86 wrote:
| What risk in there in pissing off the donor if the
| donor's gifts all cost you at least that much? If someone
| offers me $100 million but conditions it on me spending
| $101 million, it doesn't really matter how upset they get
| with me because I was never going to come out ahead in
| that deal anyway.
| Given_47 wrote:
| Now also called the Tepper School of Business!
| LegitShady wrote:
| Those are all decisions the university leadership made.
| David Tepper (?) doesn't run the school - the university
| leadership decided to make those decisions to get the
| money. They could have said "this isn't sustainable", and
| their hands weren't tied.
|
| "Your $100m gift will cost us $200m, we can't accept it
| as currently stipulated".
|
| All university leadership decisions that they failed on.
| tough wrote:
| yeah way easier to blame the donor for his pesky asks
| simiones wrote:
| How often does anyone donate millions of dollars with no
| strings attached, especially to a university?
| LegitShady wrote:
| If someone offers you $5m and in return you have to spend
| $25m, you can choose not to go -$20m by just not
| accepting the $5m under the terms proposed. Thats fiscal
| leadership.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Another option in this case is to find other donors to
| make up the rest. Maybe one can have the largest lecture
| theatre named after them, or the street renamed, or
| choose the art, etc.
| RhodesianHunter wrote:
| I think you're referring to small incremental donations
| while their person you're replying to is referring to the
| giant "you must name a building after me" ones.
| LegitShady wrote:
| Naming a building after someone doesn't have a financial
| aspect.
|
| If a gift requires further spending later and the overall
| benefit is net negative, its up to the university to
| negotiate terms or turn it down.
|
| It's all university leadership failing to steward their
| university.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| It means a new building. And are you saying that if
| admitting a legacy kid or taking a restricted donation is
| net negative they shouldn't do it? They just need to know
| in advance if the future donations from the family will
| be worth it? How simple!
| LegitShady wrote:
| Again if a gift will create a big long term financial
| obligation that will end up making it a net negative, it
| is obviously the role of leadership to choose whether to
| implement it or not.
|
| Taking into account fictional future donations and
| communicating with donator and explaining the issue is
| called negotiation. Being convinced to make bad financial
| decisions in fear of losing a donator is again, a failure
| of leadership.
|
| If someone offers you $10 if you spend $100 later you're
| better off not taking it, even if you could have bought
| something with that $10. That basic financial stewardship
| is the role of university leadership to deal with. They
| failed.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| That's because the money goes to everything except education.
| The "admin" is a curse to everything it gets involved with. I
| went to a public university and I remember our CS classes
| over subscribed because the UnI wouldn't fund two additional
| TAs, meanwhile our Chancellor got a 300k fence to prevent
| protesters from getting close to his university funded house
| protesting "his mismanagement of funds and corruption".
| darth_aardvark wrote:
| Go bears!
| melvinmelih wrote:
| > They frequently lead to large capital investments that then
| have uncovered operational costs
|
| The problem is not the high amounts, but most donations can
| only be used for a specific purpose, so even though the
| endowments are high, the actual working capital will be a lot
| lower.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Plausible. OTOH, a institution can Just Say No to somebody
| who insists that their donation be used for something which
| is un-needed. Or will be an ongoing maintenance money pit.
| Or that _sounds_ plausible...but the complexity of the
| strings attached to the cash is not worth having to keep
| track of in perpetuity.
| ARandumGuy wrote:
| Most universities have really messy financials. A lot of
| money gets spent on projects and programs that don't directly
| benefit the education students receive, or the research
| output of the university. Things like sports investments,
| ballooning administration staff, or flashy construction
| projects. At the same time, TAs, grad students, adjunct
| professors, and other staff are frequently underpaid and
| overworked.
|
| There's a lot of room to debate on what colleges should spend
| their money on, and what they should be providing. But
| American universities are not strapped for cash, and should
| be spending more of it on things that directly benefit
| students and researchers.
| philwelch wrote:
| > sports investments, ballooning administration staff, or
| flashy construction projects
|
| Construction projects are typically the result of specific
| earmarked donations and sports investments often create
| lots of income. NCAA Division I programs should be thought
| of as a side business that generates revenue for the
| university.
|
| Administrative staff is the major problem here. It's also
| where most organizations tend to dump their excess revenue,
| and since the US has been aggressively subsidizing demand
| for universities for decades, they've had a ton of excess
| revenue to dump into administrative staff.
|
| > TAs, grad students, adjunct professors
|
| Most academic fields produce significantly more Ph.D.'s
| than there are tenure track positions or other full time
| professional careers. As a result, the grad student or
| Ph.D. exists in a competitive-verging-on-exploitative labor
| market. The typical grad student or adjunct is in the same
| position as the aspiring actor who has a day job in LA
| waiting tables. People always claim that this is because
| there aren't enough tenure track positions, but I think
| that's backwards. Why would you open up a tenure track
| position when you have a plethora of Ph.D's who are
| apparently willing to work as adjuncts? If the universities
| didn't produce as many Ph.D's in the first place, the labor
| market would be more competitive and they would need to
| offer tenure track positions.
| kelipso wrote:
| Universities shouldn't have side businesses, don't they
| have some non-profit status that's specific to education?
| They should be heavily restricted to education and
| research alone.
| philwelch wrote:
| I'm not a huge fan of the NCAA system myself. A lot of
| universities don't have major sports programs, and that's
| a respectable choice on their part. But NCAA sports are
| tremendously profitable for the universities that invest
| in them. No Division I school would actually save money,
| in the long run, by defunding their football and
| basketball teams.
|
| And when it comes to side businesses, sports pale in
| comparison to endowments.
|
| Edit: Just to clarify, my only point here is that
| criticizing these Division I schools for how much they
| spend on their sports programs is fallacious. If you have
| a different criticism of college sports, that's fine but
| I'm not sure why you're addressing it to me.
| Given_47 wrote:
| Yea same I'm a big hoop nerd but the mainstream
| collegiate sports especially basketball make my eyes
| bleed. Literally infuriating to watch idk how people do.
|
| But something like Duke Basketball has been tremendously
| beneficial to Duke-in terms of brand awareness. Same with
| UT Austin and their football brand ($7mm on new locker
| room is insanity tho).
| kelipso wrote:
| Who cares about making money or not, plenty of ways to
| make money, but that's not the purpose of a non-profit
| organization dedicated to education.
| chaostheory wrote:
| Less revenue for the school means higher tuition costs
| for everyone and less scholarships.
| kelipso wrote:
| No, more revenue means that revenue goes to paying for
| non educational stuff, admin bloat, etc.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| >No Division I school would actually save money, in the
| long run, by defunding their football and basketball
| teams.
|
| Tulane might be a counterexample to this especially since
| the 80s (although not lately)
| joshuamorton wrote:
| > or flashy construction projects
|
| My experience discussing this with some Deans of (large,
| top 10ish) institutions is that space and (qualified,
| tenure track) faculty are basically the hardest things to
| find, and space is probably harder. Lots of things require
| space (including, for example: student services), but space
| is limited, and classrooms and research and administrative
| space often take priority. And creating space is difficult,
| it takes years to build a building.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I only know a _little_ dirt about the one I worked in and
| it was pretty bad. The redirection of funds, the word
| games, and so on ... I would have a better chance of making
| improvements I desired by making little paper airplanes out
| of hundred dollar bills and trying to hit areas I though
| needed help.
| tough wrote:
| > I would have a better chance of making improvements I
| desired by making little paper airplanes out of hundred
| dollar bills and trying to hit areas I though needed
| help.
|
| It was certainly an amusing visualisation lmao
| ethbr0 wrote:
| The US federal government should do the same thing to
| public universities (US definition) that they did to
| insurance companies via the ACA -- cap administrative
| overhead.
|
| For every dollar in tuition, >Y% must be spent on
| qualifying direct educational expenses. E.g. teaching
| faculty salary, etc.
|
| If a college fails to meet that threshold, and spends too
| much on non-qualifying costs, they are required to rebate
| the difference to students.
|
| If a college refuses to do this, they're no longer eligible
| for federal educational money (Pell grants or loans, etc).
|
| Then let colleges optimize themselves to get under the
| limit.
|
| It caused a lot of scrambling and long-overdue efficiency
| improvements in another legacy, slow-to-change industry
| (health insurance).
| dublinben wrote:
| The colleges will just respond in the same way that the
| insurance companies did, by jacking up prices. Raising
| the amount they're charging for premiums / tuition allows
| them to still maintain or grow their total overhead
| amount, even at a lower rate.
| cyberlurker wrote:
| One would hope consumer choice would come into play and
| students would start shopping around for the best deal.
| EatingWithForks wrote:
| This didn't work in the same way it doesn't work with
| insurance: students are limited by more than just price
| alone. Location matters a lot (a student may be staying
| with their parents). And also if all univiersities raise
| their prices in this way, there's nothing the students
| can do.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Doubtful.
|
| The only reason the cost of college is high is because 18
| year olds that know nothing about finance don't have to
| pay for it now because they can get loans.
|
| You take away the loans, and you take away the ability of
| the college to charge whatever it wants and kids keep
| paying.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Are 18 year olds today significantly less smart than 18
| year olds 50 years ago? No. So why is tuition so much
| more expensive? In 1970 tuition at University of
| California schools was about $1000, inflation adjusted.
| You could easily make that at a summer job.
|
| So what has changed? States have stopped funding for
| schools. A lot of tuition used to be covered by tax
| money, which spreads out the cost to everyone and over
| many years. Now, it is a very abrupt cost to a small
| group of people.
|
| The prior funding model also had the benefit of a
| progressive tax system. Wealthier people paid into it
| more than poor people. Now, students have to rely on
| unpredictable financial assistance like grants and
| scholarships, and take on predatory loans to cover the
| difference.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > So what has changed? States have stopped funding for
| schools.
|
| Yes - but more importantly, schools got more expensive,
| because people had more access to debt.
| underlipton wrote:
| That's not an issue particular to university funding,
| though. Access to - and use of - debt has gone up across
| the board, for any and all big-ticket items, both for
| private and public purchases. There's a problem far
| larger than expansion of credit access, and it has to do
| with attitudes at the uppermost reaches of the planning
| of our economy as to how to distribute wealth - not just
| by geography or interest, but even by temporally.
| Decisions made 40-50 years ago to put the cost burden on
| future generations are literally paying interest today.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| I'd question whether insurance companies jacking up
| prices for purposes of growing headcount was a major
| trend.
|
| In the ACA aftermath, I believe you saw more insurance
| companies exit markets because they couldn't be
| competitive and profitable on prices with standardized
| plans.
|
| Which is its own problem and led to a lot of limited-
| insurer markets, but a different one.
| Brusco_RF wrote:
| I stopped reading after the first sentence.
|
| Our current health insurance laws should NOT be a model
| for anything, ever!
| psychlops wrote:
| You made it past "The US federal government should"?
| ethbr0 wrote:
| What would you have done differently, in an attempt to
| evolve a complex, layered, and ossified industry that
| absolutely cannot stop providing service for even a day?
| Brusco_RF wrote:
| I'd start by removing the subsidies and special rules
| around student loans. That makes colleges compete on
| price again which puts downward pressure on tuition.
| Jotra7 wrote:
| [dead]
| vmladenov wrote:
| Repealed the McCarran-Ferguson Act at the time instead of
| waiting until 2021 to do it?
| residentraspber wrote:
| The waste is unreal. When I was in Uni, I used to sit
| outside and work in a little side-of-a-building park area
| where, every spring, I'd watch the grounds crew pull up
| perfectly good looking flowers and plant slightly better
| looking ones in the days before a "parents weekend" or a
| big admissions event.
|
| They would just toss the "old" flowers in the dumpster
| enkid wrote:
| People don't want to donate to fixing something old, they
| want to donate to making something new, even when fixing
| something old is way more effective.
| ghaff wrote:
| Nothing like how private companies like Google operate. /s
| 1234letshaveatw wrote:
| What about smaller, recurring donations? Does that increase
| the cost?
| evancox100 wrote:
| Probably not, because they don't come with the string
| attached that "you must build a new building and name it
| after me to receive this donation".
| ticviking wrote:
| Seems simple enough to get someone that vain to cough up
| an annuity to pay for maintenance and some admins for
| that building, "we'd hate for your building to wind up
| like poor Jefferson Hall, we can't even afford to
| pressure wash it every 5 years."
| jstarfish wrote:
| Yeah. Stadiums and landmark buildings don't work this
| way, so why universities diverge is beyond me.
|
| Whoever pays for _upkeep_ should get the naming rights.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah. Even if a modest donation is earmarked to, say, the
| athletic department, the school has a lot of flexibility
| to move unrestricted money from one pocket to the other.
| For significant even if not huge donations though,
| schools really would like unrestricted gifts in general.
| sangnoir wrote:
| "..and the building (a dorm) must not have any
| windows"[1]
|
| 1.
| https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/22/nightmare-
| of-t...
| balderdash wrote:
| Isn't that more of an indictment of the administration than
| of alumni donors?
| noobermin wrote:
| Honestly, relying on donations doesn't seem tenable without
| discrimination. The only way out is to treat it as a public
| good and fund it as one.
| mason55 wrote:
| I think the question is whether the donations create more
| resources than what is used up by a legacy admission.
|
| For example, imagine I donate $1B to the university, with two
| stipulations. First, they admit my child to the CS program.
| Second, they use the money to perpetually expand the size of
| every incoming CS class by 10 students.
|
| In that respect, the legacy admission is a net good. Yes, for
| four years there's a spot that's used up by my kid, but even
| during those four years there are 10 additional people got
| into the program who wouldn't have otherwise.
|
| I realize it's not that easy, it doesn't work like that, and
| the size of classes at places like Harvard are not limited by
| the how much money Harvard has. But it seems like there could
| be ways to keep some kind of legacy admission program which
| also create a net good.
|
| Maybe every legacy admission should be required to fund a
| perpetual scholarship for one financially disadvantaged
| student? That's both expensive enough to be rare and
| beneficial enough to be hard to argue with.
| gizmo686 wrote:
| Why tie it to legacy though?
|
| The university could just offer a secondary admissions pool
| with a higher tuiting cost.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Then your $1B is provably not a donation, and hence
| subject to taxes.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| It's already not a donation if it is tied to a benefit to
| a specific person in your family.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The "provably" in my comment is meant to indicate that
| people would actually be afraid of falsely claiming
| donations which are really payments to increase m chances
| of their kids' admission, since they could be proven
| guilty of tax evasion.
| kansface wrote:
| They could, but they make more money by keeping the
| clearing price unknown.
| pirate787 wrote:
| Carnegie Mellon is a private university, and obviously
| there's already a strong public commitment to college
| education through subsidizing the student directly.
| underlipton wrote:
| It's a private university founded with the intent to be a
| public good. It exists ostensibly to be a counterweight to
| the ills brought about by the concentration of wealth and
| power under its founders, in recognition of their outsize
| influence on society.
| lisper wrote:
| So... get rid of private universities entirely?
|
| I'm sympathetic to your position, but that doesn't quite seem
| like the wisest course of action to me.
| justapassenger wrote:
| They're more contributing towards enormous endowments than
| subsidizing others education.
| kolbe wrote:
| Princeton can and does do this because of their donors:
|
| https://admission.princeton.edu/how-princetons-aid-
| program-w...
| haroldp wrote:
| This is the way many public universities without legacy
| admissions actually function as well. They have a high
| published tuition, but if you are a half decent student, there
| are many discounts and scholarships that can reduce it
| significantly. Only less qualified students pay full price.
| LanceH wrote:
| They love to tell this story. It's absolutely laughable how
| limited scholarships are for actual academic performance.
| meroes wrote:
| Just trying to gauge opinions. Is roughly half off tuition
| for 3.5+ GPA acceptable? That's been the most generous I've
| seen
| ameister14 wrote:
| I think that depends on the school - Georgia Tech is free
| for high academic performers from Georgia, for example.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| For non-Georgian's reference, the HOPE scholarship
| essentially funds Georgia public college tuition with
| lottery receipts, subject to merit only.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HOPE_Scholarship
|
| It's changed a bit over the years (+/- qualifications and
| coverage), but generally does what it says on the tin --
| keep a high GPA and graduate in a reasonable amount of
| time, and most of your tuition is paid for.
| dabluecaboose wrote:
| God forbid you come from a competitive high school,
| though. Some kids can't get into Georgia Tech simply
| because of the quota system. A kid with a 3.8GPA will
| surely get in from Tri-Cities HS, but not from Milton HS.
|
| If that's the case, your options are somewhat limited for
| a comparable tech/engineering school.
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| Most of these universities are already rich as hell, with their
| small class sizes they can easily support the current structure
| just off the interest on their endowments. Really, i think the
| current structure actually benefits rich legacies more than it
| does their much more talented poorer counter parts since the
| poorer counter parts can get VC funding much easier in todays
| climate if they demonstrate they have a great idea but this
| won't happen because most of the systems in America are rigged
| to make money flow upward.
| geodel wrote:
| Well they've gotten enough money now to appear virtuous
| onwards.
| lozenge wrote:
| What's the point of the donations to maintain an institution,
| if the institution's effect is to further entrench the
| advantages held by the already well-off and well-connected
| legacy admissions?
| 1234letshaveatw wrote:
| Please do tell- which institutions effect is as you describe?
| stcroixx wrote:
| Yes, but as it's a finite resource, it's also taking a spot of
| someone deserving on merit. Schools will have learn to operate
| without free money.
| banana_feather wrote:
| >I do wonder if this will have any impact on alumni donations.
|
| Wonder not. "[T]here is no statistically significant evidence
| that legacy preferences impact total alumni giving."
|
| https://production-tcf.imgix.net/app/uploads/2016/03/0820191...
| dotancohen wrote:
| Lack of evidence is hardly evidence of lacking.
| banana_feather wrote:
| You are confused; evidence of absence is not absence of
| evidence. Unless you can point to a problem with the
| methodology, failure to discover a relationship between A
| and B is indeed evidence that A and B are not related.
| You're suggesting they would have to prove a negative for
| there to be evidence.
|
| "Using annual panel data covering 1998 to 2008 for the top
| one hundred universities, we show that, after controlling
| for year, institution size, public/private status, income,
| and a proxy for alumni wealth, more than 70 percent of the
| variation in alumni giving across institutions and time can
| be explained. The coefficients all have the expected signs
| and there is no statistically significant evidence that
| legacy preferences impact total alumni giving."
| vhold wrote:
| "Prior to controlling for wealth, however, the results
| indicate that schools with legacy preference policies indeed
| have much higher alumni giving. These combined results
| suggest that higher alumni giving at top institutions that
| employ legacy preferences is not a result of the preference
| policy exerting influence on alumni giving behavior, but
| rather that the policy allows elite schools to over-select
| from their own wealthy alumni. In other words, the preference
| policy effectively allows elite schools essentially to
| discriminate based on socioeconomic status by accepting their
| own wealthy alumni families rather than basing admissions on
| merit alone."
|
| So it's likely that if fewer people from wealthy families
| become alumni then alumni giving will go down.
| banana_feather wrote:
| They actually investigate this starting on p. 115 and find
| no significant short-term decrease based on observations
| from institutions that ceased consideration of legacy
| status.
|
| I think the more important point this comment misses is
| that the family's wealth isn't going anywhere and their
| kids will still go to college, so it stands to reason that
| the alumni will still give, they'll just be giving to e.g.
| Arizona State instead of Harvard, which seems like a net
| positive to me. If people are being honest about their
| concern that donations from wealthy alumni are good because
| they subsidize education, those fears are totally allayed.
| savanaly wrote:
| That doesn't answer the question though, does it?
|
| https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-
| evidence...
| bumby wrote:
| The article clearly says there's no evidence of a "casual
| relationship between legacy preference policies and total
| alumni giving."
|
| Can you explain your point further? Maybe you are aware of
| better data than what was used in the cited study?
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > better data
|
| I am personally aware of a very large donation to MIT
| with the express purpose of admitting the high schooler,
| and I am less acquainted with a similar situation at
| Harvard. I have personally seen another alumni
| development quid pro quo, not a monetary donation, at
| MIT. Honestly it seems like common sense that the two are
| related. The mistake from a scientific point of view is
| how to define legacy preferences and how to measure such
| impacts. It is certainly there, it's an interesting
| question as to how to measure it.
| banana_feather wrote:
| >I have personally seen another alumni development quid
| pro quo, not a monetary donation, at MIT. Honestly it
| seems like common sense that the two are related.
|
| You're comparing apples to oranges. The question is
| whether consideration of legacy status in admissions is
| causally linked to greater alumni giving. What you're
| asking is whether wealthy parents are willing to pay
| bribes to get their dull children into particular
| institutions. The two aren't comparable, because rich
| parents don't need to be alumni to pay bribes.
| bumby wrote:
| At the risk of sounding glib, I was asking for data and
| not anecdotes.
|
| > _The mistake from a scientific point of view is how to
| define legacy preferences and how to measure such
| impacts._
|
| The paper looked to define legacy preferences using
| multiple datasets where the school measured the
| importance of alumni relations in admissions. The
| datasets had to agree for a legacy admission
| classification (e.g., both say that alumni relations are
| "very important" regarding admissions). The measure used
| in the studies that showed no evidence was the level of
| alumni donations. It's pretty easily quantifiable. Other
| studies cited show that when legacy admissions were
| abolished there was not a statistically significant
| change in alumni donations.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Maybe the individual legacy preferences don't influence
| it but the knowledge they exist does. For instance, there
| is no statistical likelihood of winning the jackpot from
| buying a lottery ticket and people keep buying tickets
| when they don't win - but if the jackpot just got
| removed, do you think that would affect people's choice
| to buy a ticket?
| bumby wrote:
| Wouldn't that still cause a correlation between schools
| that have legacy scholarships and alumni giving? In your
| lotto ticket example, there is a correlation between the
| jackpot and the number of tickets sold.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| laiejtli wrote:
| I went to a second-tier public school that never had legacy
| admissions. Is it really a big deal? Or is this largely symbolic?
| Do you see kids in your classes who are rich and visibly a level
| below everyone else intellectually or emotionally? (I did meet a
| few students who were born rich and enrolled in my second-tier
| university after failing out of first-tier universities, so that
| might be my exposure to the practice)
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| This is exactly what bothers me. This talk about Legacies and
| even AA for top schools is downright insulting to people like
| me that worked hard at second-tier institutions and are just
| ignored afterward as a result. We make up the vast majority of
| college graduates, why don't we get even a fraction of the
| support or attention?
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| > Do you see kids in your classes who are rich and visibly a
| level below everyone else intellectually or emotionally?
|
| Not at all. The purpose of legacy admissions is predominantly
| to get students who could go to plenty of universities at your
| tier to go to your university, based on the fact that their
| parents are alumni. You do end up with a minority-within-a-
| minority population of rich students who are only there because
| they share a last name with a building, but frankly those
| students are also valuable to the rest of the student body from
| a networking perspective.
|
| I'm opposed to the change. The value in a university education
| is not just from "going to school". You have the prestige of
| the university (helped by attracting noteworthy alumni),
| networking opportunity (helped by having current students with
| connections through their parents), academic quality of the
| student body (having the rich kids subsidize merit-based
| scholarships boosts this, too).
|
| On the whole, legacy admissions (and preferential admission of
| rich kids in general) benefits the student body as a whole.
| It's the raison d'etre of private schools, and eliminating it
| maybe lets in another say ~1-5% of your student body's worth of
| students who wouldn't have gotten in otherwise, in exchange for
| lowering the value of getting in for everybody.
| ghaff wrote:
| >Is it really a big deal?
|
| Probably not in general. At least outside of a relatively small
| number of schools. IMO, what you're seeing is a bunch of
| schools that really don't take legacies much into account (if
| at all) all coming out of the woodwork to put themselves on the
| side of the angels without having to actually change any of
| their policies.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Gonna hurt alumni contributions. Which matters more to schools
| with smaller endowments.
| lacrimacida wrote:
| Legacy admissions can be gamed too with modest donations just
| enough to make the system gameable. With large donors it's a
| different story though, those do help the universities and the
| number of students who enter this way is a pretty low ratio.
| underlipton wrote:
| It's funny to me how cynical and skeptical HN is about diversity-
| related admissions, but how quickly everyone jumps to point out
| the positives of legacy admissions.
|
| These aren't people who are being objective. We are now mask-off
| with regard to how this is simply an emotional matter centered
| around what is most advantageous to whatever group. The least we
| could do is be open about the role of self-interest here.
| dublinben wrote:
| Don't you think there's just as much self-interest behind the
| the primary argument of relying exclusively on "merit"? This is
| likely being promulgated by a demographic who over-indexes on
| this dimension and is lacking in any other that may be included
| in a holistic admissions process.
| underlipton wrote:
| >Don't you think there's just as much self-interest behind
| the the primary argument of relying exclusively on "merit"?
|
| Oh, absolutely.
| az226 wrote:
| If they were admitting legacy students who were hundreds of
| points lower on the SATs and bad grades, then yeah, it'd be as
| bad as affirmative action. But in practice it's only ever used
| to break ties.
|
| If affirmative action was implemented the same way legacy
| admissions is, I doubt the lawsuit against Harvard would ever
| exist, and opposition essentially non-existent.
| underlipton wrote:
| >If they were admitting legacy students who were hundreds of
| points lower on the SATs and bad grades
|
| They are.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Or people are less emotional about wealth. (Or people _are_
| wealthy.)
| philip1209 wrote:
| Next step: Ending use of athletic ability in admissions.
| ghaff wrote:
| Why should athletics be uniquely disadvantaged among activities
| that aren't exclusively academic? Perhaps you think that a test
| result is all that should count though in which case we'll have
| to agree to disagree.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| I'd assume it's because academic ability and knowledge makes
| more sense for determining admissions in an academic context,
| and has a higher chance of being relevant after the student
| graduates. This is unlike athletics where unless you go pro,
| the skill becomes functionally useless once you enter the
| workforce.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| > the skill becomes functionally useless once you enter the
| workforce.
|
| This is laughably false and makes me think you've either
| never participated in organized athletics or have never had
| a job. The most important trait for success in the
| workforce is grit. The same is true for athletics at the
| highest level. Yes, some of the athletes made it on
| genetics alone but the vast majority had to work incredibly
| hard to become a college athlete. Being a successful
| athlete translates very well into the workforce.
| ben7799 wrote:
| This is the standard justification sales and MBA types
| use.
|
| They are missing that it takes grit to get through a lot
| of tough degree programs as well. People in those degree
| programs constantly talk about those who move over to
| easier degrees in business as lacking grit.
|
| Sports is mostly used as an in-club in the workplace. If
| you work in an engineering first company it's crazy to
| see the dichotomy from how sales values past athletic
| accomplishments versus how R&D does.
|
| It is also beyond bizarre how often high school and
| college athletic success is not correlated with health &
| fitness once high school/college is finished.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| > it takes grit to get through a lot of tough degree
| programs as well.
|
| We're talking about college admissions here though. How
| can you tell if a high schooler has grit? I can tell you
| that academic success is not the only answer. I got a
| perfect 36 ACT, 1600 SAT, and a high GPA and completely
| lack grit. I just succeeded in school by doing the bare
| minimum and having a high IQ. Should these schools just
| be trying to accept the people with the highest IQ?
| Searching for people who are the absolute best at what
| they do seems to be a much better measure of grit to me.
|
| And your sales analogy seems a bit flawed. Why is it
| strange that different segments of the business value
| different things? Sales is mostly about just cold calling
| potential clients until someone bites. It makes tons of
| sense that the org values the grit and teamwork that
| organized sports builds more than the R&D org does.
| ghaff wrote:
| And teamwork. (Which admittedly doesn't apply as much to
| some sports.)
| ghaff wrote:
| But schools will also take into account things like being a
| concert pianist, volunteer activities, etc. You can argue
| that they should just admit the "smartest" students as well
| as they're able to determine same but basically no
| university does that. Selective schools do obviously look
| at academics; it's just not the only thing they look at.
| nluken wrote:
| I go back and forth on this. Athletics definitely have outsize
| influence on college admissions that should be diminished, but
| surely it should still count for something, right? Most people
| wouldn't argue against considering artists' portfolios and
| musicians' performances in admissions. What makes athletics a
| less important pursuit?
| msla wrote:
| > Most people wouldn't argue against considering artists'
| portfolios and musicians' performances in admissions.
|
| I would, unless it was an arts college.
|
| The point is, schools are institutions with a purpose. For
| most of them, that purpose is education, not playing games.
| Therefore, being able to play games shouldn't have any
| relevance in whether you're admitted to those schools.
| simplyluke wrote:
| The presence of athletics at these institutions clearly
| demonstrates that it's part of their purpose, just as the
| sciences, humanities, and arts/music are.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Sure but we are talking about what the purpose _should
| be_ not what it is.
| collinc777 wrote:
| Culturally, the separation of athletics and education is going
| to be extremely difficult to accomplish.
|
| Although not everyone is a fan, Football is the cornerstone of
| American culture.
| motohagiography wrote:
| People against athletic admissions have zero clue about what
| excellence requires and means. It's an attitude I can only
| describe as disgusting because it creates a prejudice against
| people who have actually worked at something and taken risks to
| succeed. It is equivalent to banning music scholarships.
|
| Who benefits from removing those who actually develop a
| physical competence and commit to training and competition?
| msla wrote:
| > Who benefits from removing those who actually develop a
| physical competence and commit to training and competition?
|
| The people who are there for academics, as opposed to being
| there to play a game.
|
| There are only so many places in a class. Reserve them for
| people who go to a school to learn.
| kelipso wrote:
| If you want to play sports, go join a league and practice
| excellence or whatever..
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Some of us come from parts of the world where these things
| simply do not exist. So it is a very, very foreign concept.
|
| So you're good at sports, or some instrument, or whatever.
| That's nice - but why should it give you an edge over other
| people when it comes to school admission?
| janalsncm wrote:
| Would you say the same in reverse? Should baseball teams also
| not discriminate based on athletic ability? Academic
| excellence requires dedication and commitment as well,
| perhaps we should reserve a few spots on the team for strong
| students.
| nluken wrote:
| Not sure if you're being serious but that is indeed how it
| works at many places. I was straight up told that I could
| get a spot on some schools' track teams over others who
| were faster than me because my test scores would increase
| the team average
| janalsncm wrote:
| Sorry, I should've been more clear. I am referring to
| sports at the highest levels, just like Harvard is
| academia at the highest level. Maybe it sounds like a
| joke but that's only because it's so ridiculous to even
| consider.
| philip1209 wrote:
| The federal funding going to these universities is to
| subsidize education, not athletics.
| rank0 wrote:
| The people receiving athletic scholarships to elite
| universities have accomplished something amazing. It requires
| extreme dedication, teamwork, sacrifice, and an understanding
| of competition/iterative improvement.
|
| Applicants who are equally successful in other pursuits also
| get credit as they should. An elite artist/musician, community
| leader, or committed activists are valuable to society and
| universities should be free to encourage extracurricular
| excellence in their student body. They are also free to not
| hold those values and admit purely on test scores + gpa if they
| like.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Sports programs at university pay for themselves. They pay for
| themselves because people buy tickets to games, which they do
| to see exceptional athletes.
| ghaff wrote:
| Maybe at schools with big football/basketball programs. At a
| school like MIT which was being discussed yesterday, sports
| certainly do not directly pay for themselves.
| jcranmer wrote:
| Football and (men's) basketball pay for themselves. The other
| sports do not. At many smaller universities, not even
| football and basketball can achieve net revenue for sports.
|
| Source: look at databases like
| https://www.sportico.com/business/commerce/2021/college-
| spor...
| Brusco_RF wrote:
| I get that. I just never really understood why higher
| education and semi-pro athletics are so deeply linked
| together. They are totally different things!
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > Sports programs at university pay for themselves.
|
| I don't see why this even matters (besides the fact that it's
| not really true except for the biggest sports at some of the
| biggest sport schools).
|
| The debate is over whether it's fair that some students get
| the benefits that come with being an Ivy League grad without
| having the academic prowess to otherwise be admitted. Whether
| or not they are able to cover their costs is immaterial to
| that discussion.
|
| I actually heard someone else make a similar argument for
| children of big donors, i.e. that schools rely on those big
| donors for their missions. And I'm like "You're just arguing
| that you're cool with nearly all forms of corruption and
| bribery as long as the money is put to a good use."
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| It boils down to this: If you have some fraction of your
| students who get in, not on their primary merits as
| students, but for some other reason that benefits the rest
| of the student body in some way, eliminating that fraction
| of the students benefits a handful of students who were at
| the very top of the waitlist to get in, at the cost of the
| benefits those preferentially selected students provided.
|
| In both athletics and the kids of rich donors cases, I'd be
| happy to defend that being a bad trade-off. The networking
| value of the rich kids going to the same university as me
| far outweighs the slight increase in average academic
| prowess of the university (emphasis on slight: remember,
| these are students who ranked below every other student in
| the merit-based application pool).
|
| Athletics is a smaller effect size than the rich kids, but
| at the end of the day by providing very valuable labor to
| the university for approximately free, they completely pay
| for the sports programs (some of which the merit-admitted
| enjoyed, such as having a very large gym open 24 hours a
| day), in addition to feeding money back into the
| university, subsidizing everyone else's education. Couple
| that with the fact that these students are
| disproportionately NOT taking up seats in the most
| competitive programs, and it's still a net positive for the
| student body.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| > providing very valuable labor to the university for
| approximately free
|
| Which is perhaps exploitative of the student athletes,
| who should receive more of a cut of that the revenue they
| produce.
|
| > they completely pay for the sports programs (some of
| which the merit-admitted enjoyed, such as having a very
| large gym open 24 hours a day)
|
| Is that universal though? Not all schools' sports
| programs do as well, and isn't it a wasteful distraction
| for colleges to be spending tens of millions on stadiums
| and scoreboards instead of academics? It just seems like
| another example of excess infecting an institution of
| learning.
|
| Obviously campus sports is an age old tradition. But the
| amount of excess just feels like a phenomenon orthogonal
| to its original role. If schools are going to be lavishly
| investing in school sports, why not also school music
| scenes, school art galleries, school esports, school drag
| car racing, basically taking any competitive, prestige-
| driven, money-making aspect of society and stuffing it
| into an academic setting? And then optimizing for
| admittees who can fulfill those lucrative roles?
| vkou wrote:
| I can make the same argument for AA. A diversity of
| backgrounds and perspectives, including students who
| managed to overcome a lot more adversity than the average
| rich kid, or white-collar family admittee will make for a
| better, richer learning experience for everyone.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Which is why Harvard had AA. Turns out government funded
| institutions are banned from discriminating based on race
| though. But discriminating based on wealth, parental
| social status, or athletic ability is still cool.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| As well you should.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Arguably a lot of categories would pay for themselves, but
| I'm assuming you don't have a Youtuber or pro gamer program
| at Carnegie Mellon for instance.
| [deleted]
| ZoomerCretin wrote:
| Do legacy admissions not pay for themselves?
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| I didn't say anything about legacy admissions. In fact, I'm
| all in on not-exclusively-academic-merit based admissions
| for private universities. I will happily trade a few
| bottom-of-the-rung merit-based admissions in exchange for
| students that either benefit me in some way (by subsidizing
| my education and/or providing good networking
| opportunities) or try and make up for the mistreatment of
| disadvantaged groups.
| paxys wrote:
| Sports programs at the top ~20 universities pay for
| themselves (and that too just the top sports). The rest are a
| money sink.
| urmish wrote:
| what business is the university in? Education or selling
| sports tickets?
| vkou wrote:
| > Sports programs at university pay for themselves.
|
| Then spin them out as a sports club, owned by the university.
| Don't waste the athlete's times with classes, and don't waste
| class space with athletes that can't cut it.
|
| (The reason that doesn't happen is because the athletes will
| actually start asking for a share of the billions of dollars
| earned by the club.)
| [deleted]
| ellisv wrote:
| This is good, although I probably benefited from it because one
| of my recommendation letters was from an alumnus.
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| I hope this continues. Then, we will see legislation pass to re-
| classify endowment funds as hedge funds. CMU has $3 Billion of
| assets in its endowment portfolio.
|
| Endowments have been getting a free ride in terms of tax
| treatment, disclosure, and other activities that are regulated
| for hedge funds. Now that they're upsetting the elite class, the
| class will respond by re-classifying endowments as hedge funds.
|
| Affirmative action isn't the only racist policy that universities
| have been practicing. They've also been racially discriminating
| tuition subsidization. With re-classification of endowments as
| hedge funds, their activities will become transparent. Scrutiny
| over subsidized tuition will become possible. Black students
| receiving a disproportionate amount of subsidy, for instance,
| will be an act of racial discrimination, and financially
| regulated entities like hedge funds cannot racially discriminate.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Endowments let institutions weather out political mood swings
| and changes in enrollment. Any institution that serves a
| purpose besides "being a branch of the government" needs a war
| chest of some kind, and if they can use the proceeds to make
| student lives better, why not have a large endowment?
| [deleted]
| LatteLazy wrote:
| At university (UK, nowhere amazing) I was admitted on merit as a
| straight A student. My tutor had been forced to be the admissions
| officer for the school of Physics that year against his will. So
| he decided to have some fun and admitted everyone. I was
| scandalised when he told us this, I'd worked like a dog to EARN
| my place.
|
| But he simply said "Anyone who can pass year 1 should get to do
| year 2, the same for year 2 and year 3. And anyone who passes all
| of them should get their degree." and I found this logic hard to
| argue with.
|
| The result was that we had admitted 10 people with no maths
| qualification to a Physics degree. 8 failed, transferred subject
| or otherwise left. But 2 passed and got their degrees.
|
| 2 People got a life changing experience, I was no worse off and
| neither was the university. And this taught me an important
| lesson about opportunity. Ever since, when I am applying a
| standard/requirement to deny someone an opportunity (say a job
| interview, a date, or anything else) I stop and think hard about
| whether it's really necessary or if I am just being prejudiced.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| Wesleyan as well: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/19/us/wesleyan-
| university-en...
|
| I'm guessing ivy leagues won't let go that easily.
| bdastous wrote:
| I wonder whether this applies to actual donors.
| bluepod4 wrote:
| "Merit-based" means many different things. Explain yourselves.
| Racing0461 wrote:
| Did they also end discrimination against asian and white men?
| colpabar wrote:
| [flagged]
| fastball wrote:
| That's not how that works at all.
| colpabar wrote:
| I live there, yes it does
| low_tech_punk wrote:
| Can we end education resource scarcity please. More open courses
| by schools and less credentialism by employers could make these
| debates irrelevant.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Underrated point. Weird to see how in HN, the bastion of self-
| taught hackers, autodidact polymaths, and people who think
| secondary education is a waste of time and money, try to argue
| in favor of the entrenched credentialist power of universities.
| rank0 wrote:
| There's not a scarcity of education. Anyone is free to attend
| community college with guaranteed transfer to a larger state
| university provided they meet their GPA requirements.
|
| EDIT: I do agree with you about employers overvaluing
| credentials though. Ultimately that's not something you can
| unilaterally remove in a free society.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| It's glad to hear that children will no longer have an admissions
| edge at these schools. I thought it was absolutely ridiculous how
| they were letting 8 year olds into college campuses.
| qwertyuiop_ wrote:
| Does this mean they won't take a call from well connected
| politicians and billionaires ?
| efficax wrote:
| Admission for the children of faculty and staff (esp. if tuition
| is waived) is such an incredible benefit for the people that work
| at these institutions that I hope that is not also being
| abandoned. Legacies/big donors/alums sure, I don't care, but I'd
| hate to see university workers lose one of the best benefits they
| get.
| dbish wrote:
| They should get free tuition for their kids but that shouldn't
| guarantee them a spot and take away a spot from someone more
| aligned to the school's selectivity.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| i'm ok with this seeing as professors don't exactly make a lot
| of money, or if they do its because they dedicate 120% of their
| time doing so
| efficax wrote:
| Right? my wife is tenured at a big college and I make more
| than double her salary as an SWE. we're not going to have
| children so the benefit doesn't apply to us but i've seen it
| used to, for example, get a janitors kids into a college they
| would normally never afford (jesuit colleges offer this for
| staff across a network of other jesuit colleges, so for
| example you could be at loyola and your kids could go to
| fordham so long as they meet some academic requirements)
| dehrmann wrote:
| I'm amazed at how schools with legacy and donation-based
| admissions can maintain high rankings when you never know if
| someone with a degree from there just got it because their
| parents donated $5M. Before someone says "the student still has
| to graduate," Harvard has a 97% graduation rate.
| collinc777 wrote:
| The ranking systems are likely flawed and measure things
| outside of merit, or measure merit in a non-holistic way.
| dbish wrote:
| See also the massive grade inflation at these schools
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| The rankings effectively measure prestige. Someone with $5
| million to give to a university will very likely have a
| prestigious career, even if they're completely incompetent.
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| I mean it is just like the YC model, 1% of the companies will
| give outsized rewards which will more than justify investing in
| the 99%. Same way, Harvard is probably propped up by the 1% of
| kids who it takes in who do great things and the rest can just
| enjoy the privilege of being alumni of such a "great
| institution". These top institutions take in not only unworthy
| rich kids but also the cream of the crop in science, leadership
| etc...
| JoshTko wrote:
| Private colleges fundamentally drive inequality. Access to elite
| university is essentially pay to play because all admission
| criteria advantage the wealthy.
| dbish wrote:
| Not the Iveys. They have very large scholarships if your family
| can't afford it and you get in.
| JoshTko wrote:
| I'm referring to admission. Athletic achievement, high impact
| volunteer work, high impact internships, high SAT score,
| number of AP, essay writing, all of these require $$$ to be
| compete at the top level. A poor kid that has to work summers
| and part time during the school year cannot compete.
| dbish wrote:
| That's why you base it on SAT and the like, and drop the
| other stuff. Studying for the SAT doesn't have a huge
| impact
| psychphysic wrote:
| It's weird to me that "stop being racist" some how has led to
| universities considering giving up legacies, "prestige"/donation
| based admissions and even athletic admissions.
|
| If it's the case that affirmative action was being used to mask
| other unfair practices that will be utterly ghastly.
| az226 wrote:
| It's all about woke optics.
| hotdogscout wrote:
| [flagged]
| nkjnlknlk wrote:
| > If it's the case that affirmative action was being used to
| mask other unfair practices that will be utterly ghastly.
|
| That has actually been the case and stance many leftists took
| on AA. I think it was, at one point, recognized as a bandaid on
| a deep, bleeding wound. Neither a correct nor sufficient
| solution but it was the only one that could get through the
| door.
| gizmo wrote:
| I recently came across a somewhat provocative defense of legacy
| admissions. The argument is that the iveys are great because they
| bring together the children of the rich and powerful (legacy
| admissions with connections) with really smart and hungry
| students (children of the middle class, mostly).
|
| It's arguably a good deal for both. Smart kids get access to
| wealth and power and they get to learn how the world works. This
| is the one thing they can't get anywhere else. And the legacy
| students get the prestige and credibility of having gone to a top
| school, as well as access to hungry students who are eager to
| take advantage of the opportunities that come their way.
|
| When Harvard becomes an institution of merit will it still be
| worth the price of admission? I'm not so sure.
| [deleted]
| yodsanklai wrote:
| I think that even without legacy admissions, you'll still get
| many/mostly wealthy kids there. You can see that in elite
| institutions which are purely meritocratic.
| dbish wrote:
| Is MIT still worth the price of admission? I would certainly
| say so and they don't do legacy, and I would trust the
| Princeton/Harvard line on a resume a lot more if it was
| guaranteed they didn't get in because of non-academic reasons
| (like parents, sports, etc.)
| nemo44x wrote:
| MIT still has standards and you need to be able to play at a
| very high level there. Most everyone is too dumb to go there.
| The others not so much.
| philwelch wrote:
| MIT and Harvard are almost completely different. The promise
| of MIT, as I understand it, is sort of a ruthless no-
| compromise academic excellence. The promise of Harvard or
| Yale is that you are going to be inducted into the American
| ruling class. These are different goals.
| dbish wrote:
| For students, sure, but when being hired (or funded) they
| all have similar "elite" tier intelligence/potential,
| nothing about ruling class
| bamfly wrote:
| Might not be crazy to prefer someone with that ruling-
| class cred/connections (even if not, themselves, of that
| background) in certain very-lucrative sales positions. Or
| investing. Or law (especially the varieties that tend to
| pay very well). Or lobbying. Or just about any halfway-
| important position in a non-profit. Or the C-suite of a
| corporation, and more-so the bigger it is.
|
| And so on.
|
| Lots of cases where "oh, I sailed with her nephew one
| Summer when we were both at Harvard" or just being able
| to credibly wear any of several "in-group" school colors
| ties and talk the talk is worth more than 10 extra IQ
| points or whatever.
| philwelch wrote:
| In tech, sure, but that's because it's tech. How many MIT
| alums are on the Supreme Court?
| dbish wrote:
| Lawyers are certainly an old profession stuck in old
| ways. I agree
| tivert wrote:
| >> MIT and Harvard are almost completely different. The
| promise of MIT, as I understand it, is sort of a ruthless
| no-compromise academic excellence. The promise of Harvard
| or Yale is that you are going to be inducted into the
| American ruling class. These are different goals.
|
| > For students, sure, but when being hired (or funded)
| they all have similar "elite" tier
| intelligence/potential, nothing about ruling class
|
| Being suited to "ruthless no-compromise academic
| excellence" may actually tend to make one _unsuited_ to a
| whole host of "ruling class" jobs, so maybe they're not
| so similar after all.
|
| IMHO, people who are personally focused on intelligence
| (especially when they're "intelligent" themselves) tend
| to overestimate its value in a lot of endeavors. Even in
| academic sphere, I understand a lot of extremely
| successful scientists are intelligent but not _that_
| intelligent. Their success comes from their attitude,
| personality, and other factors.
| esotericimpl wrote:
| [dead]
| MengerSponge wrote:
| Legacy is a weak proxy for rich, though. There's a separate
| entrance for rich-rich kids: donors are evaluated based on the
| size of their gifts and their ability to continue giving, and
| their kids are given preferential admission.
| philwelch wrote:
| The benefit of legacy admissions isn't just that you can get
| into Harvard if your dad went to Harvard; it's the promise that
| if you get into Harvard, your children will also have a better
| chance of getting into Harvard. If you're not a legacy admit
| yourself, the practice of legacy admissions means that once
| your family has climbed high enough up the American class
| ladder to get _you_ in, you're going to be able to pass that
| down to your children. Which of course means that _ending_
| legacy admission sort of welches on the deal and takes us
| marginally closer to a low-trust society in which these sorts
| of implicit promises are worthless.
| slackfan wrote:
| > will it still be worth the price of admission? I'm not so
| sure. As an alum of the harvard-for-working-people extension
| school at the Ivy, I can say it already sure isn't. The
| education is mediocre, and the administration is more
| interested in growing admin budgets than any real education
| whatsoever.
|
| Ve Ri Tas indeed.
| eniotna wrote:
| What you're paying for is essentially to signal to employer
| that you've been able to make it into a very select club which
| is in turn acting as a proxy for
| intelligence/conscientiousness. As long as the seats are be
| limited, it will be worth the cost.
| londons_explore wrote:
| True - but if some other place existed which said "We only
| let in 50% children of harvard students and 50% really smart
| people", would that place turn out to be more desirable to
| hire from?
|
| I suspect so... Those connections are perhaps more valuable
| than great exam grades.
| lofatdairy wrote:
| >It's arguably a good deal for both. Smart kids get access to
| wealth and power and they get to learn how the world works.
| This is the one thing they can't get anywhere else. And the
| legacy students get the prestige and credibility of having gone
| to a top school, as well as access to hungry students who are
| eager to take advantage of the opportunities that come their
| way.
|
| I'm not 100% convinced by this argument, insofar as that kids
| with wealth and power will probably end up at Ivies anyways
| (and they tend to make up a large percentage of the students,
| legacy or not). They've had access to private tutors, went to
| private schools like Exeter or Andover (or usually at the very
| least a magnet), and grew up surrounded by other ambitious
| young people in major power centers like NYC, Boston, or DC.
|
| The number of public school students you meet is just shocking
| low, even among non-legacies.
| bamfly wrote:
| Just look at who runs the government at the highest levels--
| elected, and appointees, both. Heavy representation of Ivies
| and other elite schools... sure, OK, not surprising, but you
| look farther back and more often than not, yep, expensive
| prep school, rich-parish catholic private schools, or (less
| commonly) a well-into-the-top-1% public high school (usually
| with selective admission--basically by definition, since you
| can't realistically do _that_ well, as a school, without it).
| Notably, the latter option is simply _absent_ if you don 't
| live in the right places, which tend to be rich, expensive
| ones, near or in a handful of major cities.
|
| If you're in a normal-ass public school--even a good, but not
| _exceptionally_ good selective-admission one--when you 're 16
| because your parents couldn't afford the straight-up costs,
| or relocation & other maneuvers (e.g. resume padding), to get
| you into a top _secondary school_ , let alone university--
| many doors of possibility in your life have already begun to
| swing shut, whether you realize it or not. It's not
| _impossible_ you 'll get into those kinds of positions
| despite that, but... your odds are even worse than one might
| suppose, had one not noticed this tendency.
|
| (of course, it's worse still for certain other pursuits--for
| some sports and musical instruments, if you're not already
| _damn_ serious about it and receiving excellent [$$$]
| coaching /instruction by age 8 or so, then that's already
| effectively cut off for you as a possible future career.
| Decide at 14 that's your passion and give it your all? Too
| bad, you're already too far behind, learn to enjoy
| participating as a hobby on weekends.)
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > The number of public school students you meet is just
| shocking low, even among non-legacies.
|
| at least at Harvard, a substantial majority are from public
| schools - generally bougie suburban ones, yes, but still
| public
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| People who are born at a level tend to stay at that level
| throughout their entire lives. This is just as true for the
| rich as it is for the poor. It doesn't mean that the rich are
| good and the poor are bad, it's that people tend to go through
| the lives they've had prepared before them.
|
| Given that this is the case, legacy admissions should be relics
| of the past. People who are born with extraordinary access to
| capital don't need more help.
| coryrc wrote:
| Won't more of them just go to state schools and mix with the
| smart kids there?
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| I think this may have been true in like, the 1920s, when it was
| very difficult to connect merit and capital but today it's
| fairly easy and the justification doesn't really make sense.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| This is correct. I have three friends that went to HBS and
| got very high paying careers. Being friends with the CEO's
| son was not why they got the jobs.
|
| They administrators at these schools really tipped their
| hands when the Full House admission bribery scandal broke.
|
| They were not upset that someone paid to get into a school.
| They were upset that someone didn't pay them to get into a
| school.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| This is definitely true, but we can go a step deeper. You have
| to think about what Harvard's goals are. Maximizing academic
| success is not very high on the list. The real goals are
| maximizing career success, donations, and cultural
| cachet/prestige. When legacies are considered with these goals
| in mind they make a lot of sense. Legacies are likely to have
| successful careers due to their parents resources and power,
| they're likely to donate too because of all the resources they
| have.
|
| So yes, legacies are the main value add at Harvard type
| institutions for the non legacy students, but even if they
| weren't, admitting them aligns with the universities goals. If
| we're considering the "fairness" of admissions we have to look
| through the perspective of what admissions is trying to
| accomplish. We can get into equity vs equality, but at the end
| of the day accepting legacies does probably maximize Harvards
| chances of achieving its goals, and many would say that makes
| the process fair.
| tivert wrote:
| > This is definitely true, but we can go a step deeper. You
| have to think about what Harvard's goals are. Maximizing
| academic success is not very high on the list. The real goals
| are maximizing career success, donations, and cultural
| cachet/prestige.
|
| Exactly. Harvard is about being the source of the next
| generation of elites. IIRC, they're far more likely to admit
| the captain of the high school football team over an
| otherwise similar nerd with better grades/test scores,
| because the captain is demonstrating leadership potential and
| is more likely to be some next-gen big shot.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Ok, then why have classes at all? Why have any tests? If
| college is just a country club for young adults, just auction
| off seats to the highest bidder and be done with it. You'll
| get an elite mix of those with the most "potential". It also
| has the benefit of full transparency. A seat at Harvard costs
| $4 million cash. Don't have it? Too bad you wanted an
| education but Harvard has to look out for their own
| interests.
|
| Well, Harvard is going to look out for Harvard but Americans
| have to look out for our own country. And what is best for
| the country is not to have a snobby elite club, but to
| develop the minds of kids to solve the most pressing issues
| of the 21st century.
| tylerhou wrote:
| Because you need to maintain some pretense that Harvard
| grads aren't incompetent. That's also why they admit at
| least a few academically inclined students.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| Yeah it is almost like the opposite situation described
| in this thread.
|
| It is the super rich that are hoping their child will
| become friends with the next Bill Gates. Not the next
| Bill Gates hoping he can meet a spoiled rich kid
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Bill gates was one of the spoiled rich kids. But ignoring
| that the relationship goes both ways. The legacies want
| to be surrounded by people who are legitimately smart,
| high achievers. The smart high achievers want to be able
| to network with the legacies as they are what gives the
| institution prestige and make the alumni network
| valuable. Having only legacies or only meritocratic
| acceptances would be worse for both groups.
| pop12121 wrote:
| I think the argument is worth considering. At the same time, it
| seems easier in the age of internet for kids of merit to
| attract sources of funding, and I expect funding will still
| find their way towards massive untapped concentrations of
| merit.
| curiousllama wrote:
| > will it still be worth the price of admission?
|
| Definitely. Will it still be the same value you're getting?
| Perhaps not.
|
| Notably, some schools like MIT already don't consider legacy,
| and are still worth the price.
| ars wrote:
| Because MIT is more of a technically school, not a networking
| school. Networking schools are more likely to be business
| schools.
| hot_gril wrote:
| I agree with that assessment and have always considered the
| criticism of donor/legacy admissions as simple jealousy.
| Nothing wrong with taking some donors who are going to open up
| opportunity for regular students, even though I personally
| wouldn't want to be one of those kids with rich donor parents.
|
| The bigger flaws with Ivies and Stanford (but imo not MIT or
| CMU) are in how they don't really pick the regular students
| based on merit either. I went to a top high school and saw many
| classmates go to those; most of them were about average but
| managed to pad their resumes or play some diversity card, while
| most of the real gems went elsewhere. I really thrived going to
| UC Berkeley and think that had to do with the genuinely good
| students around me. Still, it was obvious how the neighboring
| Stanford uni had way more money and connections floating around
| for the number of students, meaning less need to fight over
| resources (on the flip side, Cal taught me how to fight when
| needed, which was more important for me).
| petesergeant wrote:
| I read the same argument, but that sounds like a much better
| argument for donation-led places (which is also a thing),
| rather than hoping for the knock-on effect of legacies.
| ecshafer wrote:
| I doubt that the mixture of rich and smart kids actually
| happens that much. I didn't go to an ivy, so I can only
| speculate. But I imagine the rich kids hang out with each other
| and the poor smart kids hang out with each other.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Not an Ivy, but at Stanford, they seem to mix.
| purpleblue wrote:
| This is an easy thing to quantify. MIT does not have legacy
| admissions, so you can do a comparison between Harvard and MIT
| to see the effects of legacy admissions on career growth.
| bumby wrote:
| There is at least one interesting study that tried to test
| this. They took students who were admitted to prestigious
| universities. They tracked those who attended as well as those
| who attended "lesser" schools instead. They found no real
| difference in success later in life, so it may be confusing
| cause and effect. People get into prestigious universities
| because they know how to be "successful" and are not
| necessarily successful because they went to the prestigious
| school. In other words, prestigious schools are good at
| selecting for people who would be 'successful' regardless.
|
| The one caveat that did get a benefit were low socio-economic
| students, who did see a measurable difference in success.
| That's a class you didn't mention in your post. The thought is
| that it's precisely due to the network effects.
| Infinitesimus wrote:
| Can you link to the study?
|
| I'd be curious about how success is defined here. Career is a
| pretty narrow lens to define it by so I'd hope for something
| more expansive.
|
| Many of the benefits of having friends in high places are
| outside of traditional career ladder. The expedited (insert
| annoying process here), the vacation you're invited on, the
| unintentional influence you have on some big thing because
| you happen to be an ear to the decider, etc etc.
| bumby wrote:
| There's been a few studies. [1] is one framed in economics,
| so it measures earnings. You're right, though, that
| earnings is probably an overly blunt measure of success at
| best. I think the difficulty in measuring quality of life
| statistics is that much of it is difficult to quantify, so
| studies fall back to easily quantifiable metrics.
|
| Edit: [2] expands the measures to include educational
| attainment and family outcomes. Reference [3] relates to
| socio-economic class, while [1] relates to race/ethnicity.
| [3] was the one I had in mind during my original comment.
|
| [1] Krueger, A., 2012. Estimating the Effects of College
| Characteristics over the Career Using Administrative
| Earnings Data Stacy Dale Mathematica Policy Research.
|
| [2] Ge, S., Isaac, E. and Miller, A., 2022. Elite schools
| and opting in: Effects of college selectivity on career and
| family outcomes. Journal of Labor Economics, 40(S1),
| pp.S383-S427.
|
| [3] Dale, S.B. and Krueger, A.B., 2002. Estimating the
| payoff to attending a more selective college: An
| application of selection on observables and unobservables.
| The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 117(4), pp.1491-1527
| ghaff wrote:
| Earnings is probably a reasonable proxy for something
| like a business school. I'm not sure it's great for a
| liberal arts college. Way back when, I looked at some of
| this stuff and you're right that figuring out what
| outcome(s) to fit to is challenging. Undergrad GPA is
| pretty clearly _not_ what you want either but generalized
| career or life success is pretty hard to quantify.
| ghaff wrote:
| >People get into prestigious universities because they know
| how to be "successful" and are not necessarily successful
| because they went to the prestigious school.
|
| It also depends on what the "lesser" schools are. I expect
| that if someone missed out on the significantly random
| admissions lottery to get into Harvard but were admitted to
| Dartmouth, Cornell, or Williams (or even UMass Amherst)
| instead, I expect that if they'd have done well at Harvard
| they'll do just fine.
|
| I expect for the lower socio-economic students, the delta is
| probably related to being among fellow students who maybe set
| a bit higher bar than other schools would.
| bumby wrote:
| > _I expect for the lower socio-economic students, the
| delta is probably related to being among fellow students
| who maybe set a bit higher bar than other schools would._
|
| That's one explanation, but not the guess that the study's
| authors had:
|
| > _" One possible explanation for this pattern of results
| is that highly selective colleges provide access to
| networks for minority students and for students from
| disadvantaged family backgrounds that are otherwise not
| available to them."_[1]
|
| [1] Dale, S.B. and Krueger, A.B., 2014. Estimating the
| effects of college characteristics over the career using
| administrative earnings data. Journal of human resources,
| 49(2), pp.323-358.
| ghaff wrote:
| I could see that from the list of the colleges. Certainly
| it would be a lot easier to fall through the cracks at
| Penn State than at more elite schools. It's probably also
| true that your experience at large state schools in
| general is probably more a function of what you make of
| it than smaller, more selective schools.
| letrowekwel wrote:
| Admissions are easy to do right. Just give anyone with a valid
| educational background (like college/high school completed) a
| chance to participate in a strictly observed live exam, which is
| then graded anonymously. 100% fair, leaves no place for
| discrimination. This is how many countries do it in Europe and it
| just works.
|
| But what about economically disadvantaged minority groups? That's
| easy to fix too. Just give schools in poorer areas lots of extra
| funding and resources, and their skills should improve, so that
| they do well in exams without any ridiculous "positive
| discrimination" based on skin color or ethnicity. As a bonus you
| also help poor people who may not belong to a disadvantaged
| ethnic minority, but still suffer from same lack of
| opportunities.
|
| Of course all this requires money, which the 1% isn't willing to
| give. But from anyone else's perspective it's plain stupid that
| the system first fails to give people of poorer background proper
| education, and then tries to fix this by discriminating based on
| ethnicity, which only partially correlates with poverty and bad
| schooling.
| elteto wrote:
| We will never have this because neither side wants it:
|
| Schools do not want it because they lose total control over who
| they accept. Harvard wants to accept the children of the
| current ruling class knowing that they will become the next
| one, and in doing so keeping alive the mythos of Harvard as
| ruling class incubator.
|
| The other side, which we can call the affirmative action
| supporters, don't want it either because they see it as a
| racist by proxy system. And also because it turns out that
| Asians and Indians (and others too) would do exceedingly well
| with this system.
| nickff wrote:
| > _" Just give schools in poorer areas lots of extra funding
| and resources, and their skills should improve, so that they do
| well in exams without any ridiculous "positive discrimination"
| based on skin color or ethnicity. As a bonus you also help poor
| people who may not belong to a disadvantaged ethnic minority,
| but still suffer from same lack of opportunities."_
|
| Many poorer areas already receive extra funding, but their SAT
| results are still well below those in richer areas with lower
| school funding. There are many examples of this, and a number
| of potential causes have been described (including selection
| bias, rich parents volunteering more, and others). One example
| of this is the District of Columbia.
|
| https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/per-pupi...
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| What do you put on the exam? Harvard isn't just looking for
| academic success. They're looking for the next generation of
| leaders. How do you test for that?
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