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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

> Institutions like Harvard say they consider an applicant's race as one of several factors - including economic status and religious belief - in order to build classes that accurately represent the racial and ethnic diversity of the country.

I mean, this is all kind of window dressing for elite institutions to be elite, right? There are millions of people qualified to attend these university, Harvard gets to hand select from all of them who gets to join their walled garden based on whatever Harvard Admissions is into right now. Notice that they don't care about diversity of viewpoints or politics.

If these universities actually cared about minority enrollment, they could always expand the size of their enrollment. But none of them want to admit that the only real cache of their education is the exclusivity.

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Everything makes sense when you think of Harvard and similar universities as selfish private institutions that want to maximize their reputation. They want the children of world leaders, billionaires, and actual super-geniuses. They don't want to dilute their brand with thousands of extra students with mundane backgrounds that end up being moderately successful professionals who make mid-six-figures. Affirmative action students give the school more credibility among URMs, so they offer more to Harvard than a somewhat more qualified Asian who isn't quite IMO medalist level.

My friend who was in a doctoral program put it best:

"The point of academia is to make more academics. Bachelor and Master degrees are their funding source."

It's more than this. It's way better to think of Harvard et al as large hedge funds abusing the school tax loophole. They do want the children who will be world leaders, billionaires etc. but it is because those are the most likely to donate to the hedge fund. They don't want to grow admission because it might hurt hedge fund donations but also because educating people is secondary to their actual purpose and should only be engaged in to the point that their primary purpose is maximized (middle management doesn't make the kind of donations worth worrying about for a hedge fund, they want a higher minimum efficient scale).

> they could always expand the size of their enrollment

There are reasons beyond manufactured exclusivity for why this doesn’t work. College education isn’t just about students soaking up material. We need more online vocational schools where that’s the sole purpose. But let’s not throw out the baby with the bath water.

Compare say, Berkeley to Stanford, and you'll see why this could work.

> Compare say, Berkeley to Stanford

Berkeley is highly exclusive [1], albeit 3x less so than Stanford [2]. The class-size difference, about 12,000, is noise against the millions of degrees conferred to Americans every year.

Meanwhile, Stanford produces different graduate as a result of its process. Forcing homogenisation to one model for ideological purity is misled.

[1] https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/campuses-majors...

[2] https://stanforddaily.com/2021/10/14/stanford-admit-rate-dro...

tl;dr Berkeley is still exclusive even after you're admitted

Berkeley has its own way of filtering students once they're admitted. This is most obvious with the computer science majors, of which there are two that involve almost the same coursework. EECS is super hard to get into to begin with. Whereas anyone in the school can intend L&S CS, but there's a rather high GPA cutoff (at like 30th %tile but don't quote me) for declaring, and you're effectively barred from most upper-div CS classes until you've declared, usually second year IIRC.

If you miss the cutoff for L&S or one of the other exclusive majors, you end up in an alternative. CS usually becomes the other CS: cognitive science. Yes it's a real field, but at Berkeley that just means you couldn't make comp sci. Cog sci has very few classes within its own major; instead everything is cross-listed with other majors, and you have a very hard time getting a spot in the class. The other common duo is Haas vs economics.

And many of the required lower divs are "weeders," huge classes with low average grades that students perceive mainly as obstacles to the upper divs.

I'm not saying this is a bad strategy, though.

I also want to highlight that this dynamic messes up those adjacent programs. I was a cognitive science student because I thought it was fascinating, and it's unfortunate that the program gets a bit diluted by being branded "the other CS" and some share of students that don't actually care about the other components.

Yeah, it kinda stinks. I want to edit my comment saying that cog sci is just mostly the alt bucket for comp sci, but it's too late. My roommate was cog sci because he actually cared about it, then he switched majors.

I largely agree, except: When I look back on my own college experience, the actual academic content might only account for, like, a quarter of the value I got out of it.

And data seems to back this out - entirely online degrees don't nearly drive as much success as the in-person experience.

So universities are certainly not going to admit that the content and learning portion of their experience are not important. But moreover I suspect what Harvard and others don't want to admit is that they don't fully understand what makes alumni successful, and are terrified of changing the recipe too much.

Don't underestimate how much they can push the cognitive dissonance :-)

"Do Unto Other Harvard Students" - https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/do-unto...

“...but we also recognize principles such as inclusiveness and equality, which many members of the Harvard community consider of paramount importance to our mission..."

It also seems straight up incorrect. There are way too many international students at Harvard for it to represent the makeup of the country.

Expanding the size of enrollment isn't just something that can flipped like a switch. One cannot simply build a high-rise dormitory without increasing the capacity of all other facilities in lockstep - and a university designed to be fully walkable can only accommodate so much simultaneous construction.

And more generally, you have the use of applicants' race backwards - the entire point of affirmative action is to take into account an applicant's merit-based performance relative to the opportunities they received growing up - and it is difficult to evaluate this fairly without taking into account the opportunities that might have been denied to the applicant as a result of their race.

To put it another way, two hypothetical applicants from two families with different races but equivalent wealth etc. in the same community may have been treated incredibly differently based on their race. An admissions office forced to be "blind" to an applicant describing this discrepancy in opportunity would be less effective at evaluating applicants based on merit.

Ivy schools have some of the largest endowments, rivaling the GDP of some small countries. If Harvard, and Yale were serious about diversity, they would let people attend for free.

Ummm, they largely do.

If they admit you in the first place, they pretty much do, which was indeed a pretty salient perk of the top-tier colleges among the Asian immigrant parent crowd, at least a decade or two back.

For a particular cohort of second-gens, you were going to an "elite" institution or you were going to state—the family finances weren't going to support sticker price without a near-full scholarship.

> A university designed to be fully walkable can only accommodate so much simultaneous construction.

Well, your implication here is that accessible, affordable colleges are clearly a second-rate experience. I'm not necessarily disagreeing here, but it's something academia themselves have not admitted.

Your example forgets that they are still allowed to look at financial/hardship data to determine merit. So presuming that someone with identical upbringing must have had a harder life because of the color of their skin only exists to perpetuate bias.

Financial and legal hardship data are often insufficient. For instance, see the various examples listed in https://twitter.com/samspital/status/1587084634193596419 (citations in footnotes around PDF page 23 of https://www.naacpldf.org/wp-content/uploads/2022-07-22-FINAL...).

I'd certainly like to live in a world where students of the same age, with the same family income/savings etc., with the same teachers and classrooms, with equally supportive parents, would have equivalent opportunities throughout their K-12 careers. In such a world, I would indeed be the one "perpetuating bias" with my comment. But we live in a world where the race of those students, controlling for everything else, is statistically shown to have an impact on things we'd generally agree are an important part of a child's learning experience.

Now, we might reasonably disagree on whether admissions departments are overreaching in trying to ensure that their merit-based decisions take these factors into account. And we might reasonably disagree as to whether the government should have the ability to intervene if such overreach were found to exist. But the idea that any of this is only being done to perpetuate bias, ignores the fact that bias already exists.

> relative to the opportunities they received growing up

There are so many better ways to do this than race, and they have zero interest in looking at any them. Measures that are both more accurate and more objective like.

Do your parents have a college degree? What's you family income?

What opportunities that affect GPA/SAT are going to be denied to anyone because of their race?

> Notice that they don't care about diversity of viewpoints or politics

Ever talked to someone from Harvard? (they'll usually tell you in the first 4 minutes you meet them telling you they went to school in Boston). They admit quite a number of conservative people if that's what you're worried about, and even their more left people are pretty center-right, as in they really don't want to pay more taxes.

> they could always expand the size of their enrollment

Really the feds could (and imo should) force them to do so, given a ton of their money come from federal grants. It's always been insane to me that private schools can receive 50k+ per grad student from my taxes, knowing that most people will never get in. Also insane how the elite UCs for example educates more people than the entire ivy league combined.

> They admit quite a number of conservative people...

Nope. Fewer than 10% of students are conservative.[0]

> and even their more left people are pretty center-right...

Nope. ~65% self-identify as "Very Progressive" or "Progressive"! [0]

There is no pretending that this is an accident, given that conservatives outnumber liberals by ~40% in the general population! [1]

[0] https://features.thecrimson.com/2022/senior-survey/national-... [1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/328367/americans-political-ideo...

>conservatives outnumber liberals by ~40% in the general population! [1]

You seem to have misunderstood the article you cited, from the article:

>The percentage calling themselves conservative has been steadier over time and, at 36%, is the same today as in 1992.

No, he hasn't. Conservatives are 0.36 of the general population, which is ~40% higher than the 0.25 that are liberals.

> There is no pretending that this is an accident, given that conservatives outnumber liberals by ~40% in the general population!

Age and conservatism are largely linked, so I would take this with a grain of salt as your average college class is going to be very young.

You are entirely correct.

I found a Pew study[0] that breaks down the political leanings of Millennials, and it tracks very closely to the Harvard numbers:

57% fall into either "Consistently Liberal" or "Mostly Liberal", while only ~12% fall into "Consistently Conservative" or "Mostly Conservative".

[0]https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/03/01/the-generati...

Reread my previous message, what those people identify as and their actual politics and views on policies are very very different.

> Really the feds could (and imo should) force them to do so, given a ton of their money come from federal grants.

People frequently tell me I don't understand what endowments are for. Harvard has $51 billion. If we take an average of 5% per year and this assuming they make a $2.5bn return on that investment each year (and raise zero money in addition to it), that would allow them to pay for 25k students (at $100k each. I'm rounding up by like $20k btw). That's more than Harvard has at any given time, by a few thousand.

I get that endowments are supposed to be safety mechanisms and allow funds for things like new buildings, tuition assistance, and gaining more investments. But at what point do we recognize that these are just money making schemes. Many public universities have multi-billion dollar endowments. Money held away and not being used is not adding value to our economy. I'd argue that education adds a lot of value. But that's an argument for cheaper education, not allowing it to become a highly profitable system. Clearly what is happening right now isn't sustainable.

Harvard already effectively pays for the entire tuition if you can't afford it. They have decided that preserving the endowment for future crises as well as funding other aspects of a college (running a research university actually costs a ton of money, around if not more than $100k per student) is a more important goal than ensuring that students who have families making $300k+ a year go free.

Also 5% is not a safe spending rate.

I went to Harvard and your comment about the leaning of the school is incorrect. Certainly, "even their more left people are pretty center-right" is just... wrong.

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