Is Harvard not allowed to admit the students they want? It’s the same situation in my local prestige college… very disproportionately slanted towards local kids that have been attending summer programs and the children of staff and faculty. So what?
Universities like Harvard typically like to market themselves as being the height of meritocracy, going so far as to proudly declare their miniscule acceptance rates. It's hard to square that with a very obvious preference for students from a specific background regardless of merit.
> market themselves as being the height of meritocracy
This is how they market themselves to the general public, but everyone knows that Harvard and its admission policies were designed by and for the ruling class to educate their children and build connections. A Harvard degree would have no value if it selected based on merit alone.
A meritocracy would turn a school like Harvard into a factory for upper middle class people like doctors and lawyers and defeat its purpose. Harvard wants to educate presidents and CEOs.
Would you please explain the logic for the dishonesty as you explained the logic for diverging from meritocracy? Surely there is a good reason for such an allegedly respectable institution misleading the public that pays its bills, yes?
One reason that Harvard and the other ivies like legacy students is that they’re who grow up to be big donors.
Edit: I’m willing to assume that Harvard’s admissions and development offices know what they’re doing, considering that they’ve been wildly successful for centuries.
If this is true (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_preferences#Economic_im... suggests it's disputed), the effect is probably marginal, and in any case, Harvard has the largest academic endowment in the world. It seems unlikely that it needs legacy admissions to stay afloat.
The other big thing is that these schools want to admit people they know will matriculate (they don’t want to over enroll or under enroll). Presumably, legacy applicants are statistically more likely to matriculate and hence there is a preference.
When I was applying to schools, I remember reading that the policy UPenn used for legacies was that only those who applied early decision got any sort of statistical advantage over other candidates. If you weren’t ready to commit via early decision, your odds were the same as the general population.
They are allowed to, but I think it's great to get this news out there. The prestige of Harvard mostly comes from the selectivity, but understanding what traits they are selecting for may change the perceived value of such a degree (i.e. is this because you know somebody who works there, or because you are in the top .01% of academics)
I wonder how Obama got in, but I can see why. He's a skilled peson and I can't fault his presidency too much. So they probably select the right people? Maybd ALCDs are just generaly better prepared specifically for Harvard?
Gonna disagree here. I know a bunch of Harvard grad ALCD's. One is a great person, and a good doctor, smart, but not outstandingly so (was a football player). Another very nice person, athlete and legacy, is a school librarian. Another (athlete) works at a competing university in the development office. Another is a school teacher.
I'm struggling to come up with an ALCD I know who is outstanding in their field. The best I can do is an athlete who is now a successful politician, though I wouldn't describe her as an intellectual giant
The smartest Harvard grad I know is now a professor at a different Ivy, but he was more like the Good Will Hunting kid (but writing rather than math)
Well, they pretend to care a great deal for certain groups of people, but numbers like this show who they actually care for. It’s the duplicity that bothers me personally. If they’d just be honest I’d have more respect for them.
I'd be more interested in what the numbers look like after they've accounted for admissions I would call "extra-academic". If they want to reserve 50% of their admissions for specific reasons, I'm fine with that. If the other 50% don't appear to be inline with their stated goals, then to me that's cause for concern.
Expecting Harvard to forego legacy and faculty admissions and scholarships to students that maybe wouldn't get in otherwise is expecting Harvard to not be Harvard, which may be expecting too much.
They were using racial quotas on general admission to try to correct for the fact their legacy admits were overwhelmingly not representative and not based on merit. Their stated goals of diversity and inclusion are a fiction meant to preserve a classist institution.
This isn’t quite true because their racial admission bias was far stronger than that needed to make up for all the nepotism (legacy donor athlete etc) admitees.
I would expect the children of Harvard students to perform above the general average academically and the children of faculty even moreso. Educational attainment is very much an heritable trait. On any practicable merit based admissions system there are still going to be considerably more applicants than open spots.
Harvard also doesn’t want to become a school exclusively for the children of successful Chinese immigrants which is what it would be if it went strictly by test scores and GPA. And for what it’s worth, those Chinese parents don’t want it to be either. As others have noted one of if not the main advantage of attending an ivy is networking with the kind of people whose families can ensure them a spot at Harvard and beyond.
You're saying it shouldn't matter because legacy admits have a 'heritable trait' of educational attainment in one breath, then saying there's no way to compete with Chinese students in the next.
I understand where you’re coming from, but I think if you read what I wrote charitably you’ll find there’s no essential conflict.
One possible source of confusion is mistaking “heritable” for genetic. But a heritable trait can be cultural too. For example a child with Spanish speaking parents is considerably more likely to have the speaks Spanish trait. Similarly, Asian immigrants to the USA have an admirable cultural bias toward studying hard and their average test scores have skyrocketed over the past couple decades, far too quickly for it to be a genetic effect.
Now you're lumping Asians, who the admissions system has systematically and openly disadvantaged, with legacy admits by both calling their ability to attend a school as a heritable trait. Yet in one case it's actively discriminated against, and the other it's given preferential treatment. If the goal were to control against the 'heritability' of educational obtainment, wouldn't the primary factor in admissions be weighting parental educational obtainment negatively?
they're funnels for the political and judicial elite. Eight out of nine of the current supreme court judges graduated from Harvard or Yale. A country being run by nepo babies rather than the most capable is kind of concerning
I'm not sure you've identified a cause instead of a symptom.
If Harvard stopped accepting legacy admissions and donors and elites as much, would that mean that the other people would get those political and judicial appointments, or would Harvard just lose status as an important institution?
Another way to look at it is whether those Harvard attendees are being appointed because of Harvard, or because of the connections they made with sufficiently powerful people also destined for similar positions at that time? Of you reduce those people, eventually you may reduce the effectiveness of going there, not increase the ability of non rich people that go there getting those positions, as Harvard itself maybe isn't the most important factor.
Personally, I think it's mostly just nepotism, whether Harvard or Yale or whatever, and reducing the effectiveness of nepotism from going to Harvard will just cause people that would benefit from it to shift to a different institution that does the same. If you want to combat nepotism, stopping g people from meeting at one specific place may be the hardest and least effective way of doing so.
If your goal is to promote non legacy people to positions of power, maybe just encourage more of those people at Harvard while also keeping the legacy people, and make nepotism work in your favor.
Ok, so, "nepotism in Harvard is good, because without nepotism Harvard will not be Harvard and nepotism will emerge in another institution, and in the end it will be the same."
Not quite. My position is that nepotism is bad but I think while we can reduce it I think it's impossible to eliminate based on human nature, but maybe we can use that to the benefit of society.
Rather than make ineffective one of the many pipelines that elites use to meet each other and form connections which they use in their nepotism to enhance themselves and their friends, perhaps we can use it to promote a more representative set of elites through that nepotism.
Does that count both undergrad and law school or are you just looking at their undergrad education? Because Harvard and Yale also have two of the top law schools, so it’s not surprising the lawyers they produce tend to be in the upper echelon. It’s like how MIT grads are heavily represented in top tech positions.
Because despite being privately owned, universities enjoy many benefits due to their role as public institutions. An obvious one is their tax-free status.
They get nonprofit tax status and huge amounts of federal research funding. They're also a feeder for folks who end up in powerful leadership positions in society, and if they get the right to shape society, society also obviously reserves the right to shape them back.
Aside from being egregiously hypocritical and unfair -- the practice promotes foundational rot and moral cretinism among the nation's most powerful and influential, at the expense of society at large. By providing fake credentials to boost the careers of e.g. this person:
> Is Harvard not allowed to admit the students they want?
No, they are not allowed to use racial preferences to make up for historical (and experiential) racism, even through they would prefer to.
Clarence Thomas seemed to be making the argument that the reason they are not allowed is because a racial categorization is just racism, but also seemed to indicate that considering the actual harms of slavery and Jim Crow wouldn't be racism. That would indicate that he would uphold legacy admissions if they had to decide it, because they're specific, instead of racist. But that would be about the descendants of slaves, not "minorities" or "people of color."
Liberalism is just the ideology of capitalism. US conservatives and “liberals” are both liberals in the philosophical sense, with mostly cultural differences.
It shouldn’t be a surprise both factions seek their material interests.
there is basically no overlap between the people on admissions committees and conservatives. Look up on linkedin who does admissions at ivy league schools. Hint its not stuffy old white guys.
I don't think the intent is "whataboutism" it is about outlining the structural inequality in the system that affirmative action and race based systems are supposed to attempt to mitigate. We can argue about discriminatory criteria on effectiveness, fairness or legality, but it certainly is an important date point in that discussion.
If that’s your take, great. I agree. I don’t believe that’s why legacy admissions are being brought up now, though.
I think people are trying to make the case that legacy admissions are another form of affirmative action that largely benefits white americans.
They’d be wrong, of course. Legacy admissions are classist, not racist. Being white inferred no advantage under their legacy admissions policy — in fact, the opposite, because combined with race-based affirmative action, it left even fewer slots available for non-legacy white applicants.
Screaming meritocracy until the finger is pointed at my particular group.
No way to justify legacy admissions which are racist at their core (blame the historically racist US population) with a thick coating of 'classism' used as cover.
> The study also found that roughly 75 percent of the white students admitted from those four categories, labeled 'ALDCs' in the study, “would have been rejected if they had been treated as white non-ALDCs,” the study said.
That's not the right comparison. You compare white people to another ethnicity, not to a program. 100% of white legacies that got in because they were legacies got in because they were legacies. That represents 75% of the people who are white legacies, and 31% of white Harvard students.
So the comparison is between e.g. black Harvard students and white Harvard students - would more than 69% of black Harvard students have gotten in even without racial preferences? Maybe, maybe not, but I guarantee you don't know. You're just using Affirmative Action as a euphemism for black, like a racist would. And in addition, racial preferences have been struck down by the Supreme Court, I hope you know, so that means that 31% advantage now stands out there alone, rewarded because one fell out of status quo genitals.
I am the only one who thinks doing identity policies is harmful? For every person that you do not base stuff exclusively in their performance someone is out.
Obviously not, the clear majority here is anti affirmative action so don't make it out like it's a controversial marginalized position in this context.
Anyway though what performance? We're talking about college students they don't do anything yet. But how about for example the fact that black people are more likely to be misdiagnosed and undertreated unless the doctor is black. If you care primarily about harm, with that in mind, getting the percentage of black doctors higher than 5% is something you'd be concerned with, I would think.
> That's not the right comparison. You compare white people to another ethnicity, not to a program.
Yes it is, because the entire point of showing these statistics about white legacy students is to “shut up” people arguing against affirmative action by going “see, white people get their own form of preferential treatment too!”
What it basically means is working class White middle Americans need not apply. Which is unfortunate, because there is a lot of potential talent there.
That's the apparent implication; however, we actually have no data on _who_ might have replaced those 75% otherwise. Given the population metrics of the United States, it's highly likely that a different group of mostly White People would have taken their place.
Nah, I'm not working class and neither is my wife. We're professional children of professionals, but neither went to an Ivy. Both good athletes, but DIII not DI.
Neither of my 2 kids, both with honestly ridiculously good grades (one had perfect ACT too) and what I thought were decent extracurriculars (all-state bands, scholastic divisional all-stars) got into even what I once considered second rate schools (Tufts, Bowdoin, Carnegie-Mellon, etc)
Now, we didn't do any of the paid college admissions stuff, first because I still can't believe a valedictorian with a perfect ACT should need anything more to get into Brown, let alone BU, and secondly because I'm philosophically opposed to the whole "top college" thing anyway
Let's be honest, they're kicking ass at the schools they got into, and to paraphrase an old expression, they already started life on second base, they'll be fine regardless
I just wish we didn't live in world that sees which college you attend as some innate measure of your quality as a student or your potential, because they is demonstrably untrue, yet the myth persists
The A stands for "athletic recruits". It's weird that it's grouped together with the other three categories. (Relatives of alumni/major donors, and the children of faculty.)
But I Googled how much of Harvard's funding comes from donations by alumni, and it's 26%.[1] So maybe the real problem is the admissions office is almost certainly, at some point, making a calculation about how likely a prospective student is to graduate and then gratefully make donations.
Perhaps a better way would be to be upfront about pricing, and honestly sell seats at auction prices to qualified applicants, plus discounts for some students to hit economic and demographics diversity targets.
This was the main criticism of AA. The minorities admitted because of AA were usually neither poor or from the working class. Example of that: the Obamas.
AA was the only reason why the legacy entry system was still allowed to continue.
As discussed in oral arguments in the "STUDENTS FOR FAIR ADMISSIONS, INC. v.
PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE" supreme court case, the 14th amendment does not protect against legacy as an admission criteria unless it can be proven to be a proxy for race.
43% of ALDC, 30% real academia talents to keep the school ranking high and yes this group is what really matters in the end as far as USNews' ranking for academia 'excellence' goes, the rest left for diversity.
recipe for nearly all prestigious universities I feel, not sure how the recent AA court decision will impact these combinations.
The article doesn't mention the grades and test scores of legacy students are as strong as non-legacy admitted students.
"Among the admitted legacies, grades and test scores were indistinguishable from non-legacy students. Both groups had an average SAT score that surpassed 1430. Once on campus, legacy students tended to have slightly higher college grades, but their involvement in campus activities, merit awards, academic recognition and on-time graduation rates were indistinguishable from non-legacy students. In sum, legacy students, on average, were about as academically strong as non-legacy students, neither superior nor inferior."
This is an important point. I do agree wealth and access to privileged resources are too concentrated, but it's silly to assume that the child of two Harvard graduates, due to education, genetics and preference, wouldn't be a better candidate for Harvard than a random person
I can pretty confidently tell you that for every student admitted to Harvard with 1430 SAT there are at least 10 more students out there who were rejected with at least as much score. SAT score and grades are merely a necessary condition to get in, but they haven't been sufficient in a very long time.
"legacy admissions" don't exist as an official thing, it's not like any school explicitly states how many legacy students it will admit. It's a term to address the phenomenon of those related to alumni being more frequently admitted
It totally is an official thing or was when I applied. Statistics on legacy vs non-legacy admission rates and how legacy status was factored (the nature of the advantage you got varied by school) in were readily available when I was applying to schools.
I think the argument is the opposite... they start with one or more orders of magnitude of qualified applicants in excess of capacity. and to meet DEI goals, only X% of those accepted can be white anyway. how they actually pick from the qualified applicant pool is fairly arbitrary to begin with. so as long as whatever on-campus KPIs they track for the legacy-admit population are the same, why does it really matter?
I was not personally a legacy admit to my college (so no skin in the game really), but fwiw I don't think it's an entirely illegitimate thing to select for. most schools have their own distinct culture and consider that an important thing to preserve. I imagine families that try to send their children to a specific school over multiple generations probably feel a stronger connection to that school than the typical graduate, so putting a thumb on the scale to help them seems like an approach that could work.
if anything, I'm more upset about how recruiting for college sports works.
So these schools have goals to increase diversity but they want to preserve their culture? Those are competing goals. Eliminating legacy admissions would be a lasting increase in diversity.
I don't see those two as mutually exclusive, prima facie, unless you see "culture" as a euphemism for "perpetuating white supremacy". it certainly can be, but it can also be things like haverford's honor code, which only works when a critical mass of students find it meaningful. or it can be totally innocuous traditions like u chicago's annual scavenger hunt. elite schools can accept being each other's close competitors, but they can't accept being indistinguishable substitutes for their +/- 1 peers on the us news leaderboard.
Legacy admissions have a close to zero chance of increasing diversity. The entire point is that people who are just like former students get preference. By definition it's the opposite of a program to seek out those who have a different life experience than the status quo.
No, it won't. Plenty of legacy admits are "diverse" now. And with increase of standards from banning affirmative action, legacy status will be the best chance of many from "diverse" backgrounds.
Do you have data supporting your claim that "plenty of legacy admits are diverse"? By definition the legacy admissions are very similar to previous attendees. You need to explain how that would increase diversity.
You brought up diversity, so what kind do you mean? Going forward, post affirmative action, just by test scores and gpa almost all students admitted at top schools will be asian or white. But there have been five decades where significant numbers from other races have attended these top schools and their kids and siblings can benefit from legacy admissions. (For example, this year ~15% of Harvard freshman were Black) Legacy admissions will absolutely increase this kind of diversity. If you get rid of it, it may further slightly benefit asians over whites, but I am not sure this increases "diversity".
Just test scores and GPA have never been the only factor and never will be. For example universities aren't looking for robots who are just good test takers. I'm surprised you're speaking on this subject but seemingly haven't done the homework and aren't aware of what existing practice is and what the ruling still allows.
Going forward almost nothing will change in outcomes. The ruling said universities are allowed to use a student's life experience of racism as a factor. Harvard already highlighted this in their public response to the ruling. That's not race but it is a very strong proxy for race isn't it?
Legacy admissions can only maintain the status quo so there will be no increase in diversity if legacy admissions continue. To increase current diversity levels you would have to put some effort into it. The status quo rarely changes organically when it comes to gaining or losing power.
The original study does address whether ALDC applicants are "as good" as typical applicants -
> Overall, our
results show that only one-quarter of white ALDC admits would have been admitted if they
had been treated as a typical applicant.
And on athletes -
> Being a recruited athlete essentially guarantees admission
even for the least-qualified applicants. An athlete who has an 86% probability of admission—the average
rate among athletes—would have only a 0.1% chance of admission absent the athlete tip
But the article doesn't deal with whether recruited athletes as a category are diverse. Probably, they are diverse and these statistics mean something remarkably different from the knee-jerk narrative in the article and many comments here.
Article doesn't, but the study it's based on does. Recruited athletes are less-diverse than the general applicant pool:
> For example, recruited athletes, legacies, and dean’s interest list applicants are all over 68% white, yet the share of non-ALDC applicants who are white is less than 41%. All other racial groups see higher representation among non-ALDC applicants and admits than in any of the corresponding ALDC applicant and admit categories.
My anecdotal understanding is that "recruited athlete" often functions as a way for rich people to get their kids in. Get your kid on an expensive-and-niche sports team in high school -- lacrosse, water polo, etc -- and that puts them into a much-smaller pool of students that can be "recruited" by the college team.
You're looking at a misleading data point on two levels.
First, note that the 75.5% figure in that table includes Hispanic/Latino people, which not all sources will -- importantly the study I was quoting doesn't include these under "white", so we can't compare those numbers. There's a different row in your table that excludes those to get 58.9% white. This alone gets us back to the ALDC group being disproportionately white.
Second, it doesn't matter if 75% of the US population is white, but rather what percentage of the college-admission aged US population is white. (Not that people outside of the 17-23ish bracket don't apply to Harvard's undergraduate program, but I suspect that they do so in insignificant numbers.)
It says that in 2021 amongst 18-24 year olds, 52.8% were white. Thus the ALDC group is even more disproportionately white than the whole-population number would make you think.
I don't feel like that's too surprising. There is that saying "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree." It reminds me of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kqi_6v2RGB0
Essentially a high school student (now a college student @ MIT) solved a conjecture on distribution of Carmichael numbers. The parents of the high school student also happens to be first rate mathematicians.
I went to a southern ivy and many of the legacy students that I've met were children of doctors, lawyers, business executives, etc and grew up in a very fostering environment where they were exposed to how to behave in such an environment. I don't think it's too surprising that children would also excel like their parents.
There's not what's happening. What's happening is (made up numbers, relative proportion a true)
1000 ALDC students qualify. 200 admit.
1000 non-ALDC students qualify, with equivalent resumes. 50 admit.
Thus it's easier to get in at ALDC, all else equal, and les qualified ALDC displace "overqualified" non-ALDC, or if you believe their qualifications are truly equal and those 2000 students can't be compared to each other, ALDC get loaded dice for the random selection.
"On average, LDC applicants (that is, excluding athletes) are stronger than typical applicants. However, the average LDC admit is weaker than the average typical admit, suggesting an admissions advantage for LDC applicants." (p.3 of http://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/legacyathlete.pdf )
If you break down non-legacy cohorts where Asian applicants have to score 50-100 points higher, then academic performance of both legacy and non-legacy (average dragged down by AA) is artificially low.
Whats the distribution look like though? I can generate you two datasets that have the same average but different distributions to the point that a small minority of one dataset would qualify for admission if they were combined.
Let's further break-up the white student category, if any interesting correlations come up. For undergraduates specifically:
Ivy League US Ratio Mean nationwide SAT score [1]
Jewish 17.2% 2.4% 7.16 n/a
Asian 19.6% 5.3% 3.71 1216
White (incl. Jewish) 50.3% 61.5% 0.82 1148
Hispanic 11.4% 17.6% 0.65 1043
Black 7.8% 12.7% 0.61 966
White (non-Jewish) 33.1% 59.1% 0.56 ~1141 (lower bound estimate assuming a generous 1284 mean Jewish SAT)
SAT score seems to offer no benefit, up until the magic cutoff somewhere between 1142 and 1216.
The numbers don't sum to 100% because multi-ethnic students, a few minor ethnicities (American-Indian, Pacific Islander..), and students categorized as "unknown" or "other" by the universities were excluded from analysis. Data on university undergraduate demographics was taken from the universities own diversity reports. Jewish representation was gathered from http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/, https://forward.com/jewish-college-guide/, and https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduat..., taking the lowest estimate when sources conflicted. ejewishphilanthropy.com (eJP) points out flaws in Hillel's data gathering (e.g. showing Harvard as 30% Jewish, when eJP found it only 16%) Hillel seems to have since fixed these flaws, as the estimates they now give are in-line with those of eJP.
No correction has been made to look at only the college-age population of the US, or only at the Northeastern US where all the Ivy League universities are located, so that may be a source of some bias. It's also hard to get consistent demographics from the universities, as they all report them in slightly different ways. Corrections welcome.
It seems to have the highest predictive power regarding chance of admittance (a randomly chosen White is 11.2x more likely to be admitted if they're Jewish vs. if they're not).
Though for the record, those polls considered anyone that identifies as Jewish as.. Jewish, regardless of religion. You can read more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_atheism
In any case, if you can find the data, you're welcome to do the analysis for other religions/ethno-religious groups too.
They are useful for comparing the ratio of Ivy League vs. nationwide populations. E.g. if a group had SAT scores 300 points higher than the national average, we would expect to see them overrepresented in prestigious academic positions.
Legacy status is different from race. I propose the following thought experiment as comparison.
"I need to see a cardiologist, but there's a long waiting list. Fortunately, my dad is a cardiologist so he saw me immediately."
Few people would think that this action should be illegal.
Compared with:
"I need to see a cardiologist, but there's a long waiting list. Fortunately, I'm White, so he saw me immediately."
(notice how it's still distasteful even if we replace White with Black, Asian, or whatever).
Notice as well how the situation is different if we're talking about a public hospital--in that case we wouldn't accept the nepotism case.
So there's real reasons why we would allow a private institution to have legacy admissions but not race-based admissions (and...come on. Only in the USA would that sentence be controversial!).
The rub is that in the USA many (most? all?) private institutions--yes, even Harvard--receive government support, participate in government programs, and so constitute a sort of shadow arm of the government.
The real answer, unpalatable though it may be to most, is that if private universities have legacy admissions, they should receive no govt support
> "I need to see a cardiologist, but there's a long waiting list. Fortunately, my dad is a cardiologist so he saw me immediately."
> Few people would think that this action should be illegal.
> Compared with:
> "I need to see a cardiologist, but there's a long waiting list. Fortunately, I'm White, so he saw me immediately."
> (notice how it's still distasteful even if we replace White with Black, Asian, or whatever).
> So there's real reasons why we would allow a private institution to have legacy admissions but not race-based admissions (and...come on. Only in the USA would that sentence be controversial!).
The relationship between a cardiologist and their child is fundamentally different than that between an educational institution, their alumnus, and the alumnus's child.
The former is a nuclear familial relationship and the treatment is comparable to feeding one's own child.
The latter is an institutional relationship that gives preferred access to a rarified privilege (attending an Ivy league university), not a basic need like medical treatment.
Therefore you can't use the example of the parent/child doctor/patient relationship to justify legacy admissions.
Why tunnel vision on particularities of one private institution when the presumed reason for caring in the first place is fairness in access to higher education? Harvard enrolls 1,200 pupils/year. That's a rounding error.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, obviously they shouldn't fly completely under the radar on egregious shit (e.g. racial discrimination), but too much public attention on it reinforces the lie that admission to Harvard has any importance to society.
They want to be a 43% legacy/athlete/family school? Cool. When I hire applicants fresh out of school, I already operate with the understanding that most applicants managed to skate by in their studies. And after 5 years of experience, I couldn't give less of a shit about formal education.
I don't know the term but you can also basically varyingly-indirectly pay to get in to most Ivys & other schools. I wonder what those admissions numbers look like.
I don't have a ton of info, but I've been at two different parties with people for whom this was semi-directly their job, to help facilitate extremly wealthy foreign students buying their way into top tier American schools.
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 242 ms ] threadThis is how they market themselves to the general public, but everyone knows that Harvard and its admission policies were designed by and for the ruling class to educate their children and build connections. A Harvard degree would have no value if it selected based on merit alone.
A meritocracy would turn a school like Harvard into a factory for upper middle class people like doctors and lawyers and defeat its purpose. Harvard wants to educate presidents and CEOs.
Edit: I’m willing to assume that Harvard’s admissions and development offices know what they’re doing, considering that they’ve been wildly successful for centuries.
When I was applying to schools, I remember reading that the policy UPenn used for legacies was that only those who applied early decision got any sort of statistical advantage over other candidates. If you weren’t ready to commit via early decision, your odds were the same as the general population.
Perhaps their marketing sucks because as an external observer, I've never associated Ivy League schools with meritocracy.
I'm struggling to come up with an ALCD I know who is outstanding in their field. The best I can do is an athlete who is now a successful politician, though I wouldn't describe her as an intellectual giant
The smartest Harvard grad I know is now a professor at a different Ivy, but he was more like the Good Will Hunting kid (but writing rather than math)
Expecting Harvard to forego legacy and faculty admissions and scholarships to students that maybe wouldn't get in otherwise is expecting Harvard to not be Harvard, which may be expecting too much.
Harvard also doesn’t want to become a school exclusively for the children of successful Chinese immigrants which is what it would be if it went strictly by test scores and GPA. And for what it’s worth, those Chinese parents don’t want it to be either. As others have noted one of if not the main advantage of attending an ivy is networking with the kind of people whose families can ensure them a spot at Harvard and beyond.
Which one is it? Maybe it's not so heritable.
One possible source of confusion is mistaking “heritable” for genetic. But a heritable trait can be cultural too. For example a child with Spanish speaking parents is considerably more likely to have the speaks Spanish trait. Similarly, Asian immigrants to the USA have an admirable cultural bias toward studying hard and their average test scores have skyrocketed over the past couple decades, far too quickly for it to be a genetic effect.
Now you're lumping Asians, who the admissions system has systematically and openly disadvantaged, with legacy admits by both calling their ability to attend a school as a heritable trait. Yet in one case it's actively discriminated against, and the other it's given preferential treatment. If the goal were to control against the 'heritability' of educational obtainment, wouldn't the primary factor in admissions be weighting parental educational obtainment negatively?
they're funnels for the political and judicial elite. Eight out of nine of the current supreme court judges graduated from Harvard or Yale. A country being run by nepo babies rather than the most capable is kind of concerning
If Harvard stopped accepting legacy admissions and donors and elites as much, would that mean that the other people would get those political and judicial appointments, or would Harvard just lose status as an important institution?
Another way to look at it is whether those Harvard attendees are being appointed because of Harvard, or because of the connections they made with sufficiently powerful people also destined for similar positions at that time? Of you reduce those people, eventually you may reduce the effectiveness of going there, not increase the ability of non rich people that go there getting those positions, as Harvard itself maybe isn't the most important factor.
Personally, I think it's mostly just nepotism, whether Harvard or Yale or whatever, and reducing the effectiveness of nepotism from going to Harvard will just cause people that would benefit from it to shift to a different institution that does the same. If you want to combat nepotism, stopping g people from meeting at one specific place may be the hardest and least effective way of doing so.
If your goal is to promote non legacy people to positions of power, maybe just encourage more of those people at Harvard while also keeping the legacy people, and make nepotism work in your favor.
Do I understand you correctly?
Rather than make ineffective one of the many pipelines that elites use to meet each other and form connections which they use in their nepotism to enhance themselves and their friends, perhaps we can use it to promote a more representative set of elites through that nepotism.
They are. The numbers are of the students that they chose to admit.
Aside from being egregiously hypocritical and unfair -- the practice promotes foundational rot and moral cretinism among the nation's most powerful and influential, at the expense of society at large. By providing fake credentials to boost the careers of e.g. this person:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Kushner
See in particular:
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-story-behind-jared-ku...
Is Harvard not allowed to admit the students they want?
Not if they want tax-exempt status and federal subsidy.
As of last week's US Supreme Court ruling, no.
No, they are not allowed to use racial preferences to make up for historical (and experiential) racism, even through they would prefer to.
Clarence Thomas seemed to be making the argument that the reason they are not allowed is because a racial categorization is just racism, but also seemed to indicate that considering the actual harms of slavery and Jim Crow wouldn't be racism. That would indicate that he would uphold legacy admissions if they had to decide it, because they're specific, instead of racist. But that would be about the descendants of slaves, not "minorities" or "people of color."
It shouldn’t be a surprise both factions seek their material interests.
Citation? That'll be interesting, asking 10 Americans to define "liberal" will probably result in 12 definitions...
If you want to have a meaningful discussion, what do academic staff say about this selection criteria specifically, and/or affirmative action?
Want to git rid of legacy preference? Great.
Let’s be honest, though — this is just whataboutism.
Non-legacy applicants were extremely disadvantaged if they were white.
This is classism. Shockingly, institutions can have both classist and racist discrimination - let's be honest, they're both bad and need to go.
I think people are trying to make the case that legacy admissions are another form of affirmative action that largely benefits white americans.
They’d be wrong, of course. Legacy admissions are classist, not racist. Being white inferred no advantage under their legacy admissions policy — in fact, the opposite, because combined with race-based affirmative action, it left even fewer slots available for non-legacy white applicants.
No way to justify legacy admissions which are racist at their core (blame the historically racist US population) with a thick coating of 'classism' used as cover.
So the comparison is between e.g. black Harvard students and white Harvard students - would more than 69% of black Harvard students have gotten in even without racial preferences? Maybe, maybe not, but I guarantee you don't know. You're just using Affirmative Action as a euphemism for black, like a racist would. And in addition, racial preferences have been struck down by the Supreme Court, I hope you know, so that means that 31% advantage now stands out there alone, rewarded because one fell out of status quo genitals.
Anyway though what performance? We're talking about college students they don't do anything yet. But how about for example the fact that black people are more likely to be misdiagnosed and undertreated unless the doctor is black. If you care primarily about harm, with that in mind, getting the percentage of black doctors higher than 5% is something you'd be concerned with, I would think.
Yes it is, because the entire point of showing these statistics about white legacy students is to “shut up” people arguing against affirmative action by going “see, white people get their own form of preferential treatment too!”
Let's be honest, they're kicking ass at the schools they got into, and to paraphrase an old expression, they already started life on second base, they'll be fine regardless
I just wish we didn't live in world that sees which college you attend as some innate measure of your quality as a student or your potential, because they is demonstrably untrue, yet the myth persists
But I Googled how much of Harvard's funding comes from donations by alumni, and it's 26%.[1] So maybe the real problem is the admissions office is almost certainly, at some point, making a calculation about how likely a prospective student is to graduate and then gratefully make donations.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/02/11/harvar...
AA was the only reason why the legacy entry system was still allowed to continue.
How so? Legacy admissions will continue.
recipe for nearly all prestigious universities I feel, not sure how the recent AA court decision will impact these combinations.
"Among the admitted legacies, grades and test scores were indistinguishable from non-legacy students. Both groups had an average SAT score that surpassed 1430. Once on campus, legacy students tended to have slightly higher college grades, but their involvement in campus activities, merit awards, academic recognition and on-time graduation rates were indistinguishable from non-legacy students. In sum, legacy students, on average, were about as academically strong as non-legacy students, neither superior nor inferior."
https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-why-elite-colleges-...
As for grades, check out https://www.thecrimson.com/flyby/article/2013/12/5/the-harva... but in summary, the most common grade in Harvard is A, so don't think the data point says much.
Removing that would be easy.
I was not personally a legacy admit to my college (so no skin in the game really), but fwiw I don't think it's an entirely illegitimate thing to select for. most schools have their own distinct culture and consider that an important thing to preserve. I imagine families that try to send their children to a specific school over multiple generations probably feel a stronger connection to that school than the typical graduate, so putting a thumb on the scale to help them seems like an approach that could work.
if anything, I'm more upset about how recruiting for college sports works.
Do you have data supporting your claim that "plenty of legacy admits are diverse"? By definition the legacy admissions are very similar to previous attendees. You need to explain how that would increase diversity.
Just test scores and GPA have never been the only factor and never will be. For example universities aren't looking for robots who are just good test takers. I'm surprised you're speaking on this subject but seemingly haven't done the homework and aren't aware of what existing practice is and what the ruling still allows.
Going forward almost nothing will change in outcomes. The ruling said universities are allowed to use a student's life experience of racism as a factor. Harvard already highlighted this in their public response to the ruling. That's not race but it is a very strong proxy for race isn't it?
Legacy admissions can only maintain the status quo so there will be no increase in diversity if legacy admissions continue. To increase current diversity levels you would have to put some effort into it. The status quo rarely changes organically when it comes to gaining or losing power.
This isn't about test scores, it's about the opportunity for lower class advancement rather than perpetuating existing wealth
> Overall, our results show that only one-quarter of white ALDC admits would have been admitted if they had been treated as a typical applicant.
And on athletes -
> Being a recruited athlete essentially guarantees admission even for the least-qualified applicants. An athlete who has an 86% probability of admission—the average rate among athletes—would have only a 0.1% chance of admission absent the athlete tip
> For example, recruited athletes, legacies, and dean’s interest list applicants are all over 68% white, yet the share of non-ALDC applicants who are white is less than 41%. All other racial groups see higher representation among non-ALDC applicants and admits than in any of the corresponding ALDC applicant and admit categories.
- https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26316/w263... page 16
My anecdotal understanding is that "recruited athlete" often functions as a way for rich people to get their kids in. Get your kid on an expensive-and-niche sports team in high school -- lacrosse, water polo, etc -- and that puts them into a much-smaller pool of students that can be "recruited" by the college team.
75% of the US population is white, so it sounds like that group is underrepresented in athletic admissions.
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045222
First, note that the 75.5% figure in that table includes Hispanic/Latino people, which not all sources will -- importantly the study I was quoting doesn't include these under "white", so we can't compare those numbers. There's a different row in your table that excludes those to get 58.9% white. This alone gets us back to the ALDC group being disproportionately white.
Second, it doesn't matter if 75% of the US population is white, but rather what percentage of the college-admission aged US population is white. (Not that people outside of the 17-23ish bracket don't apply to Harvard's undergraduate program, but I suspect that they do so in insignificant numbers.)
Here's a source that breaks out US racial demographics by age: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_101.20.a...
It says that in 2021 amongst 18-24 year olds, 52.8% were white. Thus the ALDC group is even more disproportionately white than the whole-population number would make you think.
Essentially a high school student (now a college student @ MIT) solved a conjecture on distribution of Carmichael numbers. The parents of the high school student also happens to be first rate mathematicians.
I went to a southern ivy and many of the legacy students that I've met were children of doctors, lawyers, business executives, etc and grew up in a very fostering environment where they were exposed to how to behave in such an environment. I don't think it's too surprising that children would also excel like their parents.
1000 ALDC students qualify. 200 admit.
1000 non-ALDC students qualify, with equivalent resumes. 50 admit.
Thus it's easier to get in at ALDC, all else equal, and les qualified ALDC displace "overqualified" non-ALDC, or if you believe their qualifications are truly equal and those 2000 students can't be compared to each other, ALDC get loaded dice for the random selection.
If you break down non-legacy cohorts where Asian applicants have to score 50-100 points higher, then academic performance of both legacy and non-legacy (average dragged down by AA) is artificially low.
The numbers don't sum to 100% because multi-ethnic students, a few minor ethnicities (American-Indian, Pacific Islander..), and students categorized as "unknown" or "other" by the universities were excluded from analysis. Data on university undergraduate demographics was taken from the universities own diversity reports. Jewish representation was gathered from http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/, https://forward.com/jewish-college-guide/, and https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduat..., taking the lowest estimate when sources conflicted. ejewishphilanthropy.com (eJP) points out flaws in Hillel's data gathering (e.g. showing Harvard as 30% Jewish, when eJP found it only 16%) Hillel seems to have since fixed these flaws, as the estimates they now give are in-line with those of eJP.
No correction has been made to look at only the college-age population of the US, or only at the Northeastern US where all the Ivy League universities are located, so that may be a source of some bias. It's also hard to get consistent demographics from the universities, as they all report them in slightly different ways. Corrections welcome.
[1] https://www.ednc.org/eraceing-inequities-the-influence-of-ra...
Though for the record, those polls considered anyone that identifies as Jewish as.. Jewish, regardless of religion. You can read more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_atheism
In any case, if you can find the data, you're welcome to do the analysis for other religions/ethno-religious groups too.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"I need to see a cardiologist, but there's a long waiting list. Fortunately, my dad is a cardiologist so he saw me immediately."
Few people would think that this action should be illegal.
Compared with:
"I need to see a cardiologist, but there's a long waiting list. Fortunately, I'm White, so he saw me immediately."
(notice how it's still distasteful even if we replace White with Black, Asian, or whatever).
Notice as well how the situation is different if we're talking about a public hospital--in that case we wouldn't accept the nepotism case.
So there's real reasons why we would allow a private institution to have legacy admissions but not race-based admissions (and...come on. Only in the USA would that sentence be controversial!).
The rub is that in the USA many (most? all?) private institutions--yes, even Harvard--receive government support, participate in government programs, and so constitute a sort of shadow arm of the government.
The real answer, unpalatable though it may be to most, is that if private universities have legacy admissions, they should receive no govt support
> Few people would think that this action should be illegal.
> Compared with:
> "I need to see a cardiologist, but there's a long waiting list. Fortunately, I'm White, so he saw me immediately."
> (notice how it's still distasteful even if we replace White with Black, Asian, or whatever).
> So there's real reasons why we would allow a private institution to have legacy admissions but not race-based admissions (and...come on. Only in the USA would that sentence be controversial!).
The relationship between a cardiologist and their child is fundamentally different than that between an educational institution, their alumnus, and the alumnus's child.
The former is a nuclear familial relationship and the treatment is comparable to feeding one's own child.
The latter is an institutional relationship that gives preferred access to a rarified privilege (attending an Ivy league university), not a basic need like medical treatment.
Therefore you can't use the example of the parent/child doctor/patient relationship to justify legacy admissions.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, obviously they shouldn't fly completely under the radar on egregious shit (e.g. racial discrimination), but too much public attention on it reinforces the lie that admission to Harvard has any importance to society.
They want to be a 43% legacy/athlete/family school? Cool. When I hire applicants fresh out of school, I already operate with the understanding that most applicants managed to skate by in their studies. And after 5 years of experience, I couldn't give less of a shit about formal education.
I don't have a ton of info, but I've been at two different parties with people for whom this was semi-directly their job, to help facilitate extremly wealthy foreign students buying their way into top tier American schools.