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conflates a couple of things: the legacy tip itself and the fact that legacies tend to have stronger academic profiles to begin with (they come from advantaged households). A skeptic can fairly say "of course legacy admits do well, they're better applicants"
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So with some searching…

In the UK you can apply to upto five colleges.

In the US the recommendation seems to be between 5-8

The price portion of this hits hard. My oldest starts college in 2 year and then his younger brother follows 2 years later. We make enough to not qualify for need based aid but not enough to just write a check, merit based aid + a meager 529 and our savings is their only hope besides debt.

Further, both are male, hetero, only 1/4 hispanic, and my wife and I are not drug addicts or alcoholics so they'll get nothing from the "whole student" review. There's a huge swath of the population in this boat. The middle/upper-middle class pays for everyone else as always.

> only 1/4 hispanic

If you mean only one grandparent is born in a Latin American country, then according to the U.S. Census Bureau, you are Hispanic.

Exactly.

All this stuff is self identifying too, so there are far more dishonest applicants than someone with a single LatAm grandparent marking themselves hispanic.

Thats why its called price discrimination: you are trying to get as much money as possible from each buyer without regard to fairness. Heroin dealers at least set a fixed $/oz because they know that word getting around that someone gets it cheaper would get them shot.
"The published cost of attendance is a fiction almost no one pays."

"Net effect: a $175k household with a house and a 401(k) is judged "full pay," pays near-sticker from already-taxed income, and receives essentially nothing."

I never know how to resolve these two statements. In our case, my daughter happened to choose a good public university. Maybe that is what they mean.

Pretty much the whole thing in a nutshell is the one chart showing the same student as Asian, 25%, White, 36%, Hispanic 77%, and Black 95%.

This is institutionalized racism. Perhaps Affirmative Action was needed in the past to kickstart the disproportionate enrollment demographics, but it was past due to get rid of it.

The most interesting part following SCOTUS' ruling is that Harvard said it wouldn't change their ways, and nobody enforced the ruling.

How likely is it to be a certain demographic given certain stats? Pretty much says it all.

The race factor is irrelevant in practice. Even more so when you look at literature indicating that your success is actually more predictive from high school success than college attendance.

In other words, if you get into Stanford you will likely succeed even if you don’t go.