Ending Legacy Admissions at Johns Hopkins
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
This change happened in five years. Such a policy change would be extremely popular. For proponents of race-based affirmative action, this would serve as somewhat of a proxy due to the correlation between race and class. For opponents, removing legacy preferences makes admissions more meritocratic.
The only groups with something to lose are (i) mediocre children of alumni, and (ii) the university's endowments if alumni decrease their donations. I don't believe (i) is a strong factor in a university's calculations, which leaves (ii). I believe universities are happy to see the public fighting about race-based affirmative action: indeed, dividing and pitting the low- and middle-income groups against each other over their limited subset of the pie, means they will not be working together to increase their overall share of the pie.
(I think this issue could and should be considered orthogonal to race-based affirmative action. Race-based AA was never put on a stable enough legal footing and will continue to bounce back and forth in the courts until it's resolved, while this could be resolved quickly and uncontroversially.)
I would venture the following: if we agree on the norm that "power should stop being transferred dynastically or through nepotism in a modern civilized society", and abolishing legacy preferences bring us closer to this norm, then the negative effects will be transient, and worth it.
There's a significant difference between not having nepotism and eliminating family bonds.
> We are tribal and protect our families.
Many of virtuous_signal's arguments boiled down to the observation that protecting your family via nepotism or dynastic preference isn't even necessarily good for the effected family member in the long run. I think that poster makes a good argument that dynastic preference in university admissions is a net negative for its beneficiaries.
The negatives of nepotism also show up in business, where, with rare exception, nepotism tends to genereate a huge drain on both productivity and external respect.
You could even replace “rich” with “rich and well-connected” though it may be hard to determine the second part.
This seems like a more honest system and it doesn’t strike me as obviously unfair or unreasonable to have. Someone paying double fees isn’t taking someone else’s place so much as providing for someone else’s place.
Connections are traditionally determined through the very old method of asking for letters of recommendation. US military academies still work this way; you can't be admitted without a recommendation from one of the three (3) legislators representing you in the federal government, or the vice president. The method is cheap and accurate; you test someone's connections by having them exercise those connections.
For some reason universities still ask for letters of recommendation, but they've shifted to asking for letters from random teachers. This completely defeats the purpose; a recommendation from someone who is unknown to you [where "you" are the admissions officer] and who holds no power of any kind is obviously worthless.
Your way is just that in terms of outcome, except it's more antagonizing to the rich.
if the dean's claim is true, they are basically admitting that their admissions criteria sucks.
The issue is that they have a limited set of things to go on. And high school performance, test scores and extracurriculars just aren't a great predictor of success, but they certainly better than just picking students randomly.
[1] https://paw.princeton.edu/article/no-loan-pledge-decade-late... [2] https://blog.collegevine.com/does-the-ivy-league-offer-schol...
The tax law says you aren't supposed to be able to deduct contributions to charitable organizations if you get something in return.
Edit: Point being that this system is illegitimate in the first place, not that it doesn't happen.
That is, the only thing that donations get you is the vague hope that your university will never make the decision Johns Hopkins just made, and it's a vague prisoner's dilemma - as long as enough alumni donate, legacy admissions stay around for all alumni.
Harvard creates a special "Dean's Interest List" (https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/10/18/day-three-harv...) which includes celebrities, "top donors", and certain athletes. The admissions rate restricted to this list was 42.2% in 6 recent years.
so basically it correlates with a lot of things that the institution wants, but doesn't want to state as an explicit policy.
Most universities where legacy admissions are a thing have self-perpetuating endowments by now. Harvard could easily fund itself forever without any donations or even tuition fees at this point, just off the interest and trading profits.
And any natural experiment that could have been done due to JHU's change was probably messed up by the largest donation to a university, ever: www.nytimes.com/2018/11/18/us/michael-bloomberg-johns-hopkins-donation.html
If someone has to decide openly between allowing or denying an instance nepotism, based on a secretly-held belief that it’s acceptable because it could benefit them, then they are able to take the stance that “nepotism is bad, but anti-nepotism has gone too far” in order to extend the life of the benefit (and their chances of benefiting from it).
And if the impact is large - equivalent to 1 point of GPA - then there are legacy admissions a full GPA point worse than the least capable of their non-legacy peers, which is even worse.
I agree mediocre is inaccurate, because mediocre means half way to the top, and students who need legacy admissions are at the very bottom of the class.
1. It would coddle the child at a time in their life when it's essential to learn independence. This can't be good for the values they are developing.
2. It has no correlation to their success at the school. Getting admitted to a tough school like Hopkins if they are not prepared would be incredibly stressful and would probably be negatively correlated to their future success. I saw a few students who got special admissions crash and burn their freshman year and transfer out.
3. The article goes into this a lot, but it's not good for equality and encourages stratification. This isn't good for society. And it decreases diversity which is probably bad for the university.
Your #2 is basically a restatement of mismatch theory[1] which has generated tremendous controversy when applied to the affirmative action debate.
[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/12/the-nee...
It baffles me that such racist policies are so prominent at some of the best universities in the world. "Personality scores" too. What an inane cover-up for rejecting people and races you don't like. While we're at it, lets get rid of legacy admissions too.
In college admissions, a student's name, race, and background should be obfuscated. Test scores and rhetorical skills should be the sole measure of a student. Maybe a boolean telling us if a student was below the poverty line or not. It's not perfect, but this would be far better than what we have today.
At least California law prohibits affirmative action, and I was able to go to a fantastic university without having to worry about institutional racism.
My friend was a teacher at a private technical school (for manufacturing, electrician work etc) that started having revenue problems. The attempted fix was to lower the bar of candidates they took in and pushed them through more and more remedial classes, including basic maths. Their graduation rate plummeted, enrollment kept shrinking, and they went under.
I also saw a less extreme version of this in college and university while I was a student. Kids were being accepted well below standard, then pushed through remedial (aka developmental) courses to get them up to par on reading / writing / maths. The graduation rate for these students was far lower than those who didn't take the courses.
Mind you, this isn't (or at least, just because of) affirmative action. The state in question had a massive gap between what high school students graduated knowing, and what colleges required, and so was a systemic issue that affected all races.
Since then, common core was supposedly attempted, and colleges were banned from testing students into remedial courses if they met certain conditions. The end result is fewer students spending money without earning credit (remedial courses didn't count towards a degree) but it has been too recent to know whether it has had a positive impact on graduation rates or if the students who would have been forced to take them but now aren't are floundering.
1. I wouldn’t call it coddling - going from say 5% chance to a 15% chance
2. I would hazard that the vast majority of legacy admissions are perfectly capable students - just as would have trouble telling the difference between the performance of the ~5% of applicants that got in, with the next 5% that didn’t
3. Equality of what?
this is actually pretty rare at very selective institutions. Harvard has a graduation rate of about 96%. most elite schools tend to be in the mid to high nineties.
If a university wants to keep legacy admissions, fine, that’s their right. But no more tax exemption for their revenues, property or endowments. (And no more, I’d argue, publicly-subsidised loans for its coffers.)
Same for “institutional advancement,” i.e. granting the progeny of the rich seats in exchange for patronage.
Also, the Pell Grant averages just over $4K, going up to about $6K. The tuition for JHU is about $52K, but with room and board, books, and other misc living expenses this goes up to $69K.
Most of my aid was straight-up need-based, on top of $2k/yr National Merit and federal Work-Study, the latter of which had me running around doing desk-side support and learning a TON about end-user behavior.
Graduating into the post-DotCom bubble was a little rough, but unlike some of my CS classmates from more prosperous backgrounds, I felt absolutely no shame taking a boring government contracting job that covered my loans and what I thought was a nice lifestyle.
Which 900 get turned away and how do you decide which?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_college_admissions_briber...
There are also other ways of getting easier admission to selective schools in the US by saying you are for example Native American.
Here's how I envision it. I write in my essay that "I'm proud that I'm part Native American. My grandmother told me that her great-grandmother was Cherokee. My ancestors were forced off their land, and I think that's a tragedy.", etc.
Admissions officer reads it, rolls eyes, then plops it into the rejection pile.
Do you have something more substantial in mind than just "saying" to get easier admission?
The whole “Comanche/Cherokee princess” thing is not an uncommon family myth in Texas and Oklahoma, and I had a high school classmate whose mother thoroughly believed she was 1/8 Native and therefore eligible for all sorts of scholarships.
I now realize that it is probably unlikely that said great-great-great grandmother of mine was Comanche.
Hopefully this move by Johns Hopkins gets the ball rolling and other schools will soon follow suit.
Removing legacy preference in favor of merit is not penalization.
The article does not advocate admission based on racial preference. It does point out that a level playing field allows more applications of merit from races that would traditionally be displaced.
Take away legacy admissions and you just get people who want to go there for the reputation and endowment. The endowment quickly fades because people are less likely to donate, and when your reputation slips suddenly your students dry up and there is no loyal customer base of families who are committed.
Legacy admissions are a great way to generate loyal customer base. Top schools would be crazy to give this up.
Why link first two to the last?
Pride in one’s alma mater, and encouragement towards one’s children to attend, can remain without a codified edge in admissions.
There are numerous advantages a parent familiar with the process and people at an institution can give their kids. Adding to that edge is superfluous.
This is great! I hope more elite universities follow suit (or preferably are forced to) if that’s the case.
As opposed to people who only want to go there because Dad or Mom went there? Or, how about this -- people who want a world-class education without having to compete against other applicants with an unfair advantage.
I would not have found a well-paying job without my univerity's resources and name recognition, and I would not have been able to pay for tuition (for any college out-of-state) without my university's very generous need-based financial aid. So you can call it reputation and endowment, but I prefer to call it social mobility.
> generate loyal customer base
Given these are non-profit institutions, I certainly hope not.
Surely there is some new thing we can invent for them to take pictures of themselves with?
Edit: the author is using the Atlantic to take a victory lap after having infiltrated, destroyed and dismantled something. Their cant deserves scorn.
>Commenting to register disappointment at this outcome, but no point in arguing a forgone conclusion.
Understood. It reads like you really want people to know you own a thesaurus, but register your forgones to your heart's content.
>The opportunities this creates will be in how
Huh?
>to satiate the need for validatiom this new class of burghers.
A new class of mid-level paramedieval bureaucracy will be created from the fact that rich kids who don't meet school admissions requirements don't get rich people admissions slots?
>Imposter syndrome is a trillion dollar opportunity.
Elaborate?
>Surely there is some new thing we can invent for them to take pictures of themselves with?
Why are you sure?
>The author is using the Atlantic to take a victory lap after having infiltrated, destroyed and dsmantled something.
How can you dismantle something that has been destroyed?
>Their cant deserves scorn.
Hypocritical and sanctimonious speech is fine with me. What do you have against cants?