Nearly half of white Harvard students are athletes/children of alumni/donors

> The feds own like ~90% of Nevada, let's put a top tier research university smack dab in the middle of it.

The feds own 85% of Nevada because it's mostly desert and it's not practical to live there; nobody claimed it during the homesteading era, so it was left to the BLM. There's a whole lot of wide-open sagebrush country striped with the occasional mountain range, and very little water. It would be an expensive place to run a college town, since you'd have to truck in literally everything you needed to live on from somewhere else.

I hear you, but lobbyists will get wind of the money and find a way to divert it into their coffers.

"Why should the fed open a school in Nevada when you can just give that money to us (University of Nevada). We promise we'll give x% of the money out in scholarships!"

The con continues.....

What about the bright kids that can't afford to move away?

What about the crumbling infrastructure in those rural areas which falls apart if you made any attempt to move people out there?

Or what do you do about the poor rural folk you displace through what is essentially extremely sudden government gentrification?

Honestly we have plenty of universities, many of which are not Harvard but still have incredible professors and bright students. Instead of building universities in the middle of nowhere, we should take that money to make higher education (whether it's trade or not) free and help fund people move to those universities. This is a far quicker solution than hoping to fix the problem 20-30 years from now when we need a solution today.

UT Austin, Notre Dame, and U of Chicago, while not all public, are fantastic universities in the deep interior of the country.

It’s a great point, although I think it’s already been done. There’s a lot of attention on Harvard in particular but there’s plenty of good education in the country. It’s just become very expensive and too focused on the perceived top 2.

Because the first thing that would happen is that people from rural areas would be squeezed out of said university.

We've seen it happen in Wisconsin. Which is why we just have a top x% of any high school in Wisconsin gets admitted rule. There are just too many poor people in, say, Milwaukee's suburbs, or Appleton, or LaCrosse. If you have to get in based on strict merit, I would not underestimate the number of, let's call them, "poor urban/suburban whites" who would outperform people in the rural areas.

Unless, of course, this school would be only for poor rural people. In which case they wouldn't do it because they'd get sued.

If you had such a place, I think admission would have to be like the Iowa/Wisconsin system. Sort of, automatic admission if you're in the top whatever percent of a high school class anywhere in US and pass a trivial test. That way, rural people could never be crowded out.

ITs a great idea but if you want people to populate a new town or city you've first got to move some companies and jobs there. Once jobs are there, the people will always follow. How to get companies to move there? Provide tax incentives: companies will do almost anything to get a tax incentive.

This is a fantastic idea. Economists love it too [1]

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-11-16/rural-...

Education won't fix America.

Nick Hanauer, of Second Ave. Partners, goes into some depth as to why [0], but his thesis is along Piketty's:

r>g [1].

Sure, education is a part of the solution, but as biologists say: it is necessary but not sufficient.

[0] https://www.realclearpolicy.com/2019/06/12/better_schools_wo...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...

This is desperately needed. We have:

1. An oversupply of newly minted PhD's literally waiting for tenured profs to die so that there is an opening

2. A skyrocketing demand from people looking to go to university, with acceptance rates everywhere dropping.

Connect these with building more universities. It might only be possible at the state level, look at how California opened UC Merced in 2005.

Sorry, you want the government to spend money? No, no, that simply won't do.

So... everyone's right. The strata being argued about isn't primarily about race, its economic and social class. We are super good at avoiding this in the US.

Even if you ignore the legacy admissions issue, if you count Jews as a separate group, gentile whites are the most underrepresented group at Harvard.

IMHO, degrees from any school should by default be devalued. Certain departments/majors within certain schools sometimes maybe have some value.

1. Elite schools are motivated to have high graduation rates in order to be competitive in various rankings.

2. Most programs at elite schools are not incentivized to take a tough love approach since it reduces enrollment numbers and ultimately funding. Popular programs get a pass on this.

3. For most elite school grads, if you’re hiring them for their education, then your usually hiring for the wrong thing. The best elite school grads, regardless of major, will get you access to better networks. The median elite school grad will get you someone who is aggressively willing to jump through hoops for rewards. If you don’t know how to capitalize on that, don’t hire these people.

FWIW, some majors at Harvard are definitely not easy — they just cull the weaker students early.

And that's the overall number. Berkeley's College of Engineering programs have lower graduation numbers.

P.S. It shouldn't be a good thing to brutally weed out students. Facts are facts though.

A Malcolm Gladwell noted in his recent podcast, the entire Ivy league undergrad cohort (17k) would fit into the incoming class at the University of Toronto (ranked ~20 worldwide in most rankings). If Harvard admission is so rigged, and the best and brightest are not making it in, maybe these numbers will do more to lessen it's social and academic cache than anything the courts could do.

I doubt these legacy admissions are going for a tech job, especially the ones that aren't that smart. They are going to go to jobs where connections and what Harvard brings can help them - politics, lobbying, the media, executive roles in nonprofits and in investment firms.

> That seriously devalues a Harvard diploma in hiring decisions.

Not even close. It's a brand and it's a good brand ... a very good brand and one of the best and it opens doors. Nobody honestly really cares about what happens behind the scenes the halo is typically that strong.

Look at it this way. If someone gets an Academy Award it's a branding that says 'you are chosen and special for some reason'. Doesn't matter if the film is good or sells the most ticket. Someone has decided it's special (or a production person/director/producer is special) and that's that.

When someone buys a luxury product sure it's most likely a more quality product but that is not what they are paying for or they care about. Not only do they not want to hear it's made in the same factor that makes things for Target but if they did hear they'd probably not care that much either.

> Especially since Harvard is easy once you get in. Did it occur to you that perhaps people rise to what is expected of them and are perhaps more fearful of failing or take advantage of all sorts of help so they do graduate? Or that they work really hard because they are there and are afraid to flunk more so than at a lesser university? It's also obvious that there are probably 10 people that could 'do the work' for those that are admitted. It has never been about the best and smartest at any upper tier college. And there isn't even a way to measure that anyone who thinks top grades and testing is what matters hasn't dealt with enough people in the world who are productive, have achieved but do not test well.

Full disclosure, I’m an undergrad at Yale.

I think that the high graduation rates at Ivy schools are fundamentally misleading in a couple of ways, if your takeaway is that getting a degree there must be easy. First of all, for academic and demographic reasons, most people at these schools would still have overwhelming odds of graduating elsewhere. Broadly speaking, it’s not the “dumbest” kids who flunk out, but those who are least likely to be in college in the first place.

The comparison of Berkeley/MIT/Caltech is interesting in that their attrition rate is much higher than HYP etc. IMO that reflects well on academic standards for the “alt ivies”, but I think the crucial point here is to recognize that academic programs have substantial influence in this regard.

Most obviously, there’s the difference in grading across fields, with STEM being the least forgiving across the board at top institutions. Thus it’s natural that the STEM dominant institutions have higher burnout.

The second, less obvious piece has to do with rules around changing programs, and opportunity cost. Notably most of the Ivy schools (and many alt schools) allow students to switch majors without significant hassle. Since many “soft” majors at Ivy schools are still on the FIRE/Consulting pipeline, the natural course of action for someone who’s underperforming in a more difficult program is to remain in the institution and change their major. This isn’t necessarily true for the STEM-first schools, whose humanities undergrads are less successful winding up in a lucrative east coast industry.

So I’m inclined to think it’s more about incentives than any conscious effort by the schools.

Hope I don't come off as a conspiracy nut, but:

I think it's important to remember that in the big picture of things, very, very few employers care about whether a hire went to Harvard or not.

But as it happens, the ones that do, also wield a lot of power.

I think a lot of these places only care partially about the intellectual prowess of their candidates, but also about a lot of other factors. Socioeconomic background, networks, pedigree, and what not.

Hiring the right kid from Harvard / Yale / Princeton / whatever means that he/she can be a good future resource not just because they're smart, but because they have many other attributes with considerable upsides 20-30 years down the road.

Hell, I'll put it in plain text: I think a lot of elite universities are valued in the job market because they're breeding grounds for rich elites, where the new generation of rulers can mingle and network, which is very useful for future operations. It's about grooming people for succession .

Obviously doesn't hold true for everyone there, but the ones that know how the system is rigged, will follow the rules.

I don't know man?

Just Devil's Advocate.

But what if these legacy admits are not as dumb as people think they are?

Just kind of, throwing that possibility out there.

Because it really doesn't. The total incoming undergrad class is ~1650. Across the entire Ivy League it's around 17000. If 20% of admissiosn are affected by legacy/faculty/donors, then that's like 3400 people who wanted to go to the Ivy League who couldn't (I suspect this is a high number, but ignore that). To include all the other higher tier schools ehre this might matter, let's just call it 10,000 people affected. There are 4.3M 18 year olds in the US. This means that roughly 0.2% of people in an academic cohort will have to accept going to a slightly lower tier school then they would have otherwise due to legacy admissions.

BTW- There are a fair number of studies out there suggesting that students who are admitted to top-tier schools but don't go have no effect on longer term outcomes than those who do, so other than short term disappointment it might be a null effect.

Meanwhile, universal pre-k enables families (ane espicially mothers) the ability to return to their own work/careers faster and has been shown to improve long term academic success (although their is some question to scalability).

So between the two, universial pre-k seems like a far more important issue...

As a non-American, I'm unsure about some of the terminology being used here - what are "legacy admissions"?

It's not about allowing it – we should allow institutions to choose their own members. The problem is that we are giving them money just so they can educate rich kids.

We should eliminate government support for Harvard like tax breaks, subsidized loans and grants.

What we, as a society, are willing to accept isn't really relevant to Harvard, which is a private institution.

Legacy admissions make sense to me even if it's unfair. Half of the experience of a university is the student body. I think it's completely acceptable for a university to allocate a certain percentage of the student body to legacies or children of wealthy donors because they can provide networking opportunities to other students.

I think this is no different from what Harvard has been accused of with their race-conscious admissions where it seems harder for Asian students to get in than White, Black and Latino students. While practices of admittance that include anything other than merit are unfair for the individual student, this makes sense for the university to build its own image for prospective students, and its image for employers looking to recruit college grads. Students don't want to go to schools that don't have diversity and employers are looking for diversity.

University is not just about the academic lessons taught inside the classroom, or building a qualification for a career. Some of the most important lessons are taught between and outside the classroom like the social skills required to build study groups or the management skills to be in the leadership of a club. There are also meta-social learning in the abilities to socialize with people from different backgrounds in various levels of formality.

Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul's School by Shamus Rahman Khan talks about how in prestigious college prep schools, students learn similar social traits from an environment that shapes them into what is received as a successful elite student.

As far as the educational system goes, I could care less about how the most elite schools go about admissions because it effects such a small amount of the population, and degrees only affect the first job of your career except if you are trying to get into med school or law school. What's more important to me is the failure of the public educational system to provide literacy when teachers are taught to use methods that harm the ability to learn phonics. https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/02/12/582465905/the-gap... What is also important to me is the impact of one bad teacher to ruin a child's belief that they can learn math or a learn a new language or music or just their own self esteem. One of the biggest problems in American schooling is that when a teacher fails accreditation to teach high school or middle school, they generally are able to teach elementary school. Teachers that do not know how to teach a given subject should not be put in front of students at more formative years where damage to an academic self-image can be more significant and impactful.

Ideally a college education would not be required for most of the workforce. Sadly our standards for a k-12 education have fallen due to a lack of care to find how to best teach students and a working environment for teachers that does not attract teaching talent or understanding of how to teach, and allows for mediocrity. There are great teachers in the system, but many of them are burning out due to long hours of teaching, grading, and re-accreditation and low pay.

There's really no such thing as a true private university in the US, at least not with respect to any of the schools in the of the rankings. All top schools receive a ton of government money in the form of research grants and other investments and partnerships. Then you add in all the federal money that comes in via the students from federally subsidized student loans, grants, etc and what you have is effectively a school where the funding is public and the management and accountability is private. Much like with banks in the US, the upside is privatized and the downside is socialized.

Note - this is not a defense or critique of their policy with regard to race and admissions. I don't believe that it's just or reasonable to use race to lower or raise the bar for anyone. In an ideal world, admissions would be merit based and you'd let the chips fall where they may. The fact is that certain groups place higher or lower levels of value on a specific type of educational achievement. There's nothing wrong with that. In some subcultures in the US, the best thing a young person can do in the eyes of their parents and community is join the military. There are other cultures where that is seen as a bad path. We shouldn't be in the business of telling others what is or is not in their best interests. That should be left to individual families and communities.

There is a large group of obsessed upper-middle class parents that believe you must go to Harvard (or another Ivy League school) to succeed in life.

Sadly, the jobs that are most dominated by nepotism and politics (law, government, academic professors of softer subjects) it really does help to go to Harvard or similar and have the brand name. Value-producing industries in the private sector are not exclusively merit-based, but it's much more likely you can go from the bottom to the top by starting a competitive business. And starting a business does not require going to Harvard.

Many private universities in the US, including Harvard, have a reputation that is built not only (or even primarily) on the quality of their undergraduate education but on the quality of their research output. The funding for this research, which includes compensation for professors, grad students, and operational overhead, forms a significant component of the revenue of the institution overall. It frequently dwarfs undergraduate tuition revenue and often constitutes the largest single component of institutional revenue.

A substantial portion of this funding is federal. It's in the public interest for the positive effects of being educated at a well-funded research institution to be allocated "fairly" and since that funding comes from public sources it is well within the purview of the government to regulate that allocation.

In the US it is illegal in many cases for private business to discriminate based on race, despite them being private businesses. This case is about whether that extends to universities.

With regards to public policy: there's not much of a problem (except to the extend that public policy props up private schools).

But should it not cause us to re-evaluate how much we respect the university and it's degrees?

Harvard receives federal funding through student tuition assistance and research funding.

Because in many respects it's the #1 University in the world where there is intense global competition amongst students to get it and they believe Harvard admission would be determined in a merit based fair manner.

Harvard is essentially funded by public money since it has a special tax status. Tax exempt groups have stricter guidelines for behavior relative to purely private, for-profit groups.

These kinds of stats are basically impossible to produce while children of alumni get to skip the queue and get in much more easily.

If what you say is true, the problem seems easily fixable -- makes children of alumni enter through the normal channels, and not mention their parents, and if they will get in if they deserve to.

The Duke paper addresses this point directly:

"Our model of admissions shows that roughly three quarters of white ALDC admits would have been rejected if they had been treated as white non-ALDCs."

As this article states, there are a lot of non-hyper intelligent people at Harvard. My personal experience with the many people I know from that school back up the assertion that many are there for purely non-intelligence or ability related reasons.

I'd argue genes are negligible here anyway. Just exposure to such elite high-performing family and friends goes a long way to making high-performing people.

The barrier to entry for a lot of people isn't even being good/smart enough -- it's being familiar with or having the resources to navigate the bureaucracy that obfuscates the opportunities which are ostensibly open to "everyone".

I don't know why you're referring to the kids as "dipshit" This article is not about them, it's simply about the admission process not being based solely on intellectual merit. Leave the kids/students out of it.

intelligence is estimated to only be ~50% inherited. the rest is environmental. Based on that... half the legacy admits would be there based on intelligence, the other half would be there based on parental choice of university and might not be qualified.

>Of course, legacy might be a determinative factor in life success, but I'd prefer the doctor who got in on academic merit alone.

I agree with you, but to play devil's advocate: I think it's very possible that the legacy child of two doctors becomes a better doctor than a more academically-talented student.

Although that would be admitting that the initial (possibly biased) selection is more important that the actual education.

By the surprising number of bad doctors I would hope academic merit wasn't the only factor. A good doctor needs more and the smartest are more suited to research and curing cancer rather than seeing 100 people a day in a walkin environment with runny noses.

yeah, unless you're a fake athlete. how many professional athletes have come out of Harvard?

That's probably where we're headed. If this isn't already required by law (I'm genuinely unsure), I suspect this would be a rare case where Congress could easily muster bipartisan support to make it so.

Lawsuits are not the way to solve this. That would require the judiciary to basically create a new law, which is the job of congress.

Sure, its possible that they place "greater emphasis on academic education" etc., but then you have to ask yourself what is the reason behind this.

As an Asian American who has had good academic success, my best guess is its socioeconomic. Asians who came to the US in the 70s - 80s often were highly educated, upper middle class, and they had resources to raise their kids towards academic success. They certainly faced some struggles, but were not socially disadvantaged in the way that other minority groups in the US have been.

You may not have meant it this way, but your post reads like a racist dog whistle.

According to UC Berkeley (https://internationaloffice.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files...), in 2018, they had 6569 international students enrolled out of a total of 42,519 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California,_Berk...).

This means that 15% of the UC population was international.

On the contrary, Harvard admits about 21% international students: https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/harvard-university/s....

By that metric, UC berkeley is way more pro-America than Harvard, because UC berkeley educates more Americans as a percentage of its class.

You should probably attempt to cite facts when making statements.

>Time for unpopular facts: Harvard is more proximate to Europe. Conversely, the UC system favors Asian international students over all others. One could argue Harvard is at least pro-US by comparison.

How does favoring Europeans over Asians make it "pro-US"? Neither of those populations are American.

Right. By admitting mainly legacies and the old-rich, Harvard is just doing its patriotic duty.

Imagine having a mental model of US demographics so bad that you think all Asian-Americans live on the West coast.