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> Family and community support for a college education, much less an expensive elite one far away. Sure, some super-teen can overcome this, but it's a major reason kids don't apply or drop out at high rates. My two friends were constantly asked, why would you want to go to college? Kids in these situations are in alien environments at college (that it seems perfectly normal to white middle-class kids should tell you exactly what environment it is) where they have few people who can relate to them, then they go home and are asked why they are wasting their time and family's money. And as they absorb university life, they also become alienated from people at home who don't have those life experiences or opportunities.

This feels strangely familiar to me as a guy who moved from a tiny poor-ish European country to Silicon Valley in his late 20's. I know it's not the same, but holy shit, I never thought a random comment on a message board would peg me so well.

At least in my case most of my back-home environment understands the why, even if they do question the rationality of it.

But try to explain to the average Silicon Valley dweller that just ~6 years ago, a $5 purchase was a significant expense, and they have very little to relate to.

There's also an explicit racial component to college admissions that I think plenty of us suspect does actually exist in the form of quotas, higher average scores/academic performance. That part can go pretty easily.

Do you mean the preference for white upper middle-class kids, or the affirmative action-like preferences?

Honest question. Have you read the article?

> But they have tied the notion to another equally provocative question: Does Harvard shortchange Asian-American applicants in admissions?

I mean the preference for other races besides Asian when academic performance is held equal. Which I guess would fall under 'affirmative action.' The typical argument is that colleges want kids who are more 'well-rounded' and Asian kids are stereotyped to be less so.

> The typical argument is that colleges want kids who are more 'well-rounded' and Asian kids are stereotyped to be less so.

I didn't know any college used that argument. Certainly those kids should be judged on their own merits and not on stereotypes.

> I mean the preference for other races besides Asian when academic performance is held equal.

My point above, which I might not have explained well, is that racial preferences are unavoidable. Academic performance can't be held equal because the various applicants are competing on playing fields that can differ radically. (Also, as I point out at the end, Harvard admits students on many factors that aren't due to performance but due to the applicants' families' social networks and wealth.)

The best Harvard can do is manage the situation to make it as fair as possible, which may include balancing the discrimination against some races with preferences in their favor. I can understand arguments either way but I don't think it's realistic to eliminate that component withhout looking at its affect on the whole system.

"well-roundedness" includes all sorts of stuff, like sports (especially WASP-y sports, like things involving boats) as well as volunteering and voluntourism.

If they really wanted to make it as fair as possible, they'd set some minimum admissions standards, and then just select randomly from the set of students who meet those.

>Academic performance can't be held equal because the various applicants are competing on playing fields that can differ radically

Caltech manages to do this just fine. So does UC Berkeley. Harvard could stop racism if it wanted to.

Interesting. Googling led me to a post[1] which claimed that Caltech uses a "pure meritocracy" and avoids consideration of race in admissions.

hackuser's original post noted that there are race-based sorting effects outside of the admissions department. To that point, Caltech's admission policy, flaws or merits of it aside, is not a counterexample to hackuser's claim[2]. That's exactly the sort of system hackuser was talking about.

[1] http://jadeluckclub.com/caltech-meritocracy-from-the-america...

[2] Which I took to be, essentially, "racial discrimination in admissions is inevitable due to selection factors beyond the control of admissions policies."

EDIT: readability.

Are you saying none of these problems could be solved by putting a team of professionals on it? For example, maybe six PR and marketing people working full time for four years couldn't make a dent in #1?

A team of six and four years and a pile of money is unlikely to stack up favorably against an entire life saying that Local U is as high as they can dream of.

#2 empirically cannot be readily addressed by professionals. A number of schools have already adopted the approach you favor - a team of full-time professionals - and the problem persists.

> Are you saying none of these problems could be solved by putting a team of professionals on it? For example, maybe six PR and marketing people working full time for four years couldn't make a dent in #1?

The elite colleges say anyone who gets in will be given affordable tuition, but they must have long known that their applicants come from specific socio-economic groups and therefore they are missing top applicants outside those groups. Why haven't they done much about it? (I can only guess.) Note that it must weaken their student body to miss so many top students.

Issue #1 has received a bunch of broader public attention recently (NY Times articles, etc.), so perhaps that has energized a response; I don't follow it closely enough to know.

I also know that solving #1 without solving #2 results only in a lot of dropouts. I happen to know someone at a good university that mentors a group of students from other backgrounds; the university has developed a detailed program to try to keep them in school.

Finally, I have read that Amherst, many years ago, decided that they would actually make an effort to admit a socio-economically (or maybe just economically; I don't know the details) diverse student body, with great success. That is true public service by an institution.