Students suing elite U.S. colleges seek 'wealth favoritism' information
reuters.com
reuters.com
Expect colleges to fight this much, much harder than they ever did for anything related to affirmative action, because this is actually hitting them where it hurts.
More money gets you a voice in hiring committees where you can set the tone of the department and shape political discourse. The Koch brothers (those people again) did that very successfully with George Mason University when they transformed what was a commuter college into a megaphone for libertarian ideas.
There is also a flip side to this coin, which is why universities usually call this the “development” office.
If you are going to give money away, you are very likely to give it to an organization to which you have some sort of affinity to. Universities are actively trying to cultivate that affinity so they can capture some or all of your charitable spending. And they really, really don’t want any donor to know how much they’ve been manipulated. Many people really believe that their child earned their admission letter based on merit.
A lesson that generalizes well. Remember Occupy Wall Street, Piketty's tome, the Bernie primaries? It all feels like distant history now.
Occupy Wall Street had participants that counted at most 30,000 cumulatively across demonstrations in NY and surrounding areas. Impressive number? Not in my opinion.
Admittedly, I have no idea what the hell 'Piketty's tome' is, so I won't talk about it, seems like its related to a few books that sold 1.5m copies, pretty successful, that's it from me for now though.
Bernie in 2016 received ~43% of the vote in democratic primaries, in 2020 he slipped down to ~26%, neither times was he close. Hillary received ~55% in 2016, Joe received ~51% in 2020. Opinion polls consistently put Hillary far above Bernie throughout the entire election season. In 2020, Joe also had the highest approval rating amongst candidates in DNC, only dropping for a few weeks where admittedly Bernie had higher approval, but then dropped it when it really mattered.
So you'll have to point to me where exactly these people are popular, maybe within their own world? Maybe by spending? That only works for Bernie, not for Occupy Wall Street which was a very minor event by all measures. Can't speak to Picketty, so I will leave that undecided on my end, and let you define it's success.
Note, I am far from a Democrat or a Socialist, in fact I'm Republican through and through.
And Bernie is a great example because identity politics was specifically used against him; his supporters were derided as mostly white male "Bernie Bros".
Sounds like exactly what GP was talking about: steering conversations to race and sex to avoid talking about economic inequality.
And the abiding irony of that was that most of the people who did that supported Elizabeth Warren, who had vanishingly little support from actual minorities. She finished behind Tom Steyer in South Carolina and behind Mayor Pete in Nevada (states where the democratic base is heavily black and hispanic, respectively).
Even the New York Times acknowledged that Warren's campaign was a "demographic cul-de-sac" dominated by "college-educated white people." And those people had the gall to paint Bernie--who has invested enormous time and energy in reaching out to Hispanics and did well among that group--as racist.
I would argue, however, that he faced tremendous opposition from the wealthy, and that translated into most corporate media either attacking him or ignoring him, so his supporters could only be heard on social media.
Corporate opposition is a just-so story. Until his campaign fell apart, Sanders stomped Biden in earned media coverage.
What isn't popular among voters, by contrast, is the woke managerialism lane Warren has come to represent. That's significant both because it points to how the party should recalibrate its message, and also because of its implications for the party's management structure (where the woke managerialists have outsize power). I suspect Democrats' reshuffling of the primaries will significantly ameliorate both problems.
I'm not a Warren fan either. I'm the weirdo in this conversation who was actually rooting for Biden.
That being said he was probably the only person who could’ve stopped the union workers in Ohio from flipping to Trump.
> And Bernie is a great example because identity politics was specifically used against him; his supporters were derided as mostly white male "Bernie Bros".
Really? I thought "Bernie Bros" were deemed the 'working class' as proclaimed by Bernie style 'Socialists' that model their economic ideals based on a fictional EU. This seems like it's rewriting history.
> Sounds like exactly what GP was talking about: steering conversations to race and sex to avoid talking about economic inequality.
Sure, which is what you did, on your own, through your own comment, I talked about popularity, you're in some weird area where you are vaguely on the same topic as I am but pretending like it is towards the point.
Bernie had no shot. Both times. If he runs again in 2024, which will be hilarious if he does, it will simply be to raise money for the DNC, just like he did the last 2 times. No refunds. Look at that, did not mention a single demographic other than 'he' in these short 2 sentences, maybe you're onto something with 'Bernie Bros'.
"Robinson Meyer, a writer for The Atlantic, coined the term Bernie bro in an October 17, 2015 article to describe young, white, progressive men who, in his view, support unrealistic progressive policies"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Bro
And if you think this is all off topic, you must have missed this quote from the root of this thread:
> U.S. colleges have been carefully steering conversations about admissions in the direction of racial quotas, to avoid talking about how by far the largest driver of unfairness in the admissions process is legacy admissions and donation quid pro quo arrangements.
IOW, steering conversations to race to avoid talking about class and economic inequality.
Piketty is an economist who wrote Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which is a book on economics and wealth inequality (essentially arguing that the rich are inevitably going to get richer absent government intervention).
I mean, I do think that students getting in because daddy gives a couple million isn't the end of the world.
The college I went to 20 years ago went away from need-blind admissions, which basically meant if you can pay you get some preference. Now THAT was bad, because it affected the general student population. If instead you have a reserved number of "bribe" students and that means pure-merit admissions can be done with the rest of the students, well, ok.
I love how admissions of athletes to play sports gets a total pass. Probably because it putatively is a good means for minorities to get into schools, even if they are separated off into purely sports training tracks and joke academics.
The real issue is the MBAs running the colleges as a profit industry. Except there's no profits, so they pay... themselves.
And sadly, even if they succeed on this track into the world of professional sports, the joke academics and lack of financial training (if you had a financial education you would never play college sports anyway...) mean that they're set up to go broke and fail in life as soon as the injuries add up or their athletic ability is no longer exceptional to their peer group.
Let’s not pretend all those legacies are showing up to class and working hard.
From my personal experiences, I suspect the restriction of financial aid based on arbitrary cutoffs affects more people. I know several people who got into ivys, but didn't go because they didn't qualify for financial aid and chose not to take on large amounts of debt, coming from frugal lower/middle class families.
(As an aside: as an advisor of PhD students in computer science, I sometimes have to train students out of these habits. Research doesn’t happen if you’re used to getting the shallow answer more quickly, or if you’re afraid to be wrong.)
You seem to be coming from the perspective that testing must be the best metric, and then trying to develop a methodology based on that assumption. Purely as a thought exercise: it might be helpful to start from the assumption that testing isn’t an option, and think about what you might do instead.
At that time, the SAT was good at predicting the likely performance of a prospective college student … for one term. That’s it. I got an excellent score on my SAT (not a perfect score, but I thought that it was a bullshit measure — which, like all standardized testing, it is — so I didn’t care). I did well in my first term, and then not so well after that (I ended up doing fine in the end, but it took longer to get through a degree program because I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up; I think that Americans, by and large, put too much focus on going to university too early and we would be better served by an extra year of high school and/or a gap year).
One other thing I remember from that time period is that a better predictor of overall success in school was NOBITH, the Number Of Bathrooms In The House. That is, socioeconomic indicators were a better predictor than anything else, including nonsense standardized tests like the SAT. And given that socioeconomic indicators are a better indicator, that is a strong indication that there’s seriously wasted potential at all levels of eduction because we mistakenly equate family socioeconomics with success in general.
Weighted GPA * 1000 + SAT Score + SAT II English + SAT II Math + max(remaining SAT II scores)
They would then just keep admitting people until they hit 5000 offers.
Then they got accused of racism because that process ended up overweighting Whites and Asians compared to the applicant pool for all the top schools.
There is/was a lot of debate on why Whites and Asians did better, but when you dug in it turned out they tended to almost all be upper-middle class or wealthy. So basically it was wealth and systemic racism, masked by "standardized testing".
Also it should be noted that wealthy people had a better chance at a higher weighted GPA because their schools offered more AP courses.
Is admitting the most capable students unfair? It is inherently discriminatory based on their knowledge and ability, which seems is what people want, but it also means that having more resources to be better equipped aka better nurture, which tends to positively influence individual's prospects, is suddenly something many are not okay with?
Obviously, the SAT tests are flawed one way or another. But then again, they don't care for students' superficial characteristics.
If not that, then implied statement is very reminiscent to slogans used in USSR or during cultural revolution in China.
Are they actually the most capable students, or did they just have a better chance of getting higher scores on the arbitrary metrics chosen? And if so, why did they have a higher chance?
There is a difference between better nurture and lack of opportunity. It's true, we shouldn't be correcting for lack of opportunity at the college admissions level, we should be doing it at the elementary level and younger.
But it's a lot easier to correct it at the college admissions level, which is a good choke point in one's life path, so for now, that is where the focus is.
Further, why should colleges try to correct for lack of opportunity? Their job is to educate people, and not everyone is apt for higher education. Admitting a student with poor mathematical abilities into a rigorous engineering program is just setting that student up for failure, not recompensing him for opportunities lost or squandered earlier.
Public schools should do it because they are part of the education system that needs correction.
Private schools arguably are still part of the public education system since they all get Federal dollars, and thus the same argument applies.
If they're getting tax dollars, that makes them a public good, and therefore they should be doing things that help all people, not just some people.
A student who goes to a poor school who offers zero AP classes will always achieve lower weighted GPAs than students who go to wealthy schools that offer many AP classes. No amount of individual achievement will overcome that mathematical disadvatnage.
Racism comes into when, because of racism, it just so happens that schools who are well funded and can give that advantage are overwhelmingly white, and schools who are are poorly funded and cannot give that advantage are overwhelmingly non-white.
Suggesting that a student who is "placed above his or her station" into an elite program is setup for failure is a favorite of a few SCOTUS Justices, but in fact is not supported by evidence. Graduation and other metrics of success are not strongly correlated to past attainment, primarily because most programs have already had to deal with achievement inequities, and the most successful programs already have mechanisms to even out unequal prior achievement. Virtually all programs that have elite programs already have a substantial apparatus dedicated to filling achievement gaps between incoming students.
The larger question of "what is the purpose of college" and "is it to educate people" is bigger than this thread, but shouldn't be overlooked. For schools that are publicly funded in whole or part, there should be a larger mission than sending young adults through an educational meat grinder. The public mission of public universities should absolutely have a social justice component.
There is absolutely no doubt that we could design an education system which, at an early age, divides and tracks students towards a successful and high level of attainment. By ruthlessly focusing resources on those children with the best chances of success, and minimizing resources expended on those with lower changes of success, the system could produce many multiples of positive outcomes than we do now, but at the cost of many more left with almost no attainment. Our present distribution of resources, in the US, is haphazardly assembled and produces a balance of outcomes, but is by no means optimized for any particular set of outcomes.
However, the downside to "solving" this is significantly worse. By giving a headstart to students based on their superficial or socioeconomical characteristics creates perverse incentives in the system and disconnects it from a selection process.
Usually, countries that are not US solve this by providing free tutorships or lectures to aspiring students, scholarships and a fixed quota of free placements in the admission for top performing students (each country may have their own flavour of the policy, but the main thing they !fortunately! did not use to be based on race or gender).
It is usually much better, in my personal opinion, to provide the "help" to those who seek it rather than trying to equalize for outcome. Poor upbringing can and usually does damage and incapacitates individuals to an extent. But any movement among the lines of "not having issues or being better prepared means you have to do more work" explicitly discourages the optimal behaviour, incentivizing victim-hood and demoralizes individuals which did use the opportunities available to them or managed to create ones.
Again, and I cannot stress this enough, communism is bad.
> Again, and I cannot stress this enough, communism is bad.
Again I agree with you. But I'm not sure how that's relevant. Changing the way we do college admissions isn't communism.
In fact, admitting students purely based on test scores is something that happens in communist countries.
They are the most capable. You call them abitrary, without stating what makes them arbitrary. Until you prove they're arbitrary, your opinion isn't worth addressing.
Standardized testing isn’t perfectly meritocratic, but everything else is worse.
As a side note, I haven’t found any more detailed breakdown of the personality scoring results. Asia is a very diverse place and Asian ethnic groups in the US range from the very richest to some of the poorest.
For example, Harvard could simply auction off their seats. That’s transparent at least, if not exactly fair.
Or maybe alternative is truly random or negative wealth scoring. That is only the poorest students get entry and everyone else will have to figure out something else.
Grades and standardized test scores might be one of the least interesting and almost definitely one of the less effective ways to classify the “most capable” students.
If I’m optimizing for students who do cool stuff, force marching them into relatively banal optimization tasks is counterproductive.
With that said, I think modern education system can no longer scale and has outlived its usefulness. The future is with LLM-driven tutors which can somewhat alleviate the scaling issues inherent to "apprenticeship". Personally, as an ADHD individual it was always drastically easier to study under a person who gives you dedicated attention that for any of my peers. By a wide margin. And yet, studying for local SAT equivalent was an insurmountable task involving acquiring a lot of knowledge and skills that were useless outside of passing the test.
It would be more constructive to improve teacher education, wages, and standards to create a more productive and better resourced education system.
You could look to countries such as Finland et al for a model rather than drawing upon satirical dystopian ankle deep in thought Harrison Bergeron scenarios.
My understanding is that Brown basically does that. This would sort of back that up:
It would also put a ton of pressure on high school students to get perfect scores, creating a ton more stress than they already have. And at the expense of much more valuable things they could be doing with their time.
The current system has issues, but there are worse ways to do things.
The number of high school or undergrads who wrote groundbreaking biology papers is vanishingly small, but you do raise a good point. There’s a chicken and egg problem. Because schools aren’t just weighting test scores (because the score is flawed) there is incentive to work on other, more subjective things.
That’s tricky. In a massive country with many incredible students, it seems to me that it’s going to be possible for the top .1% of students to do as well as is possible on any reasonable exam.
Do you disagree?
If wealth is the ultimate playground for everything (capitalism?), then obviously the elite institutions are playing the right game.
There might be natural reasons for that but there were also clearly some perverse effects: because those exams became effectively competitive exams (fixed number of seats available), they require intense preparation in preparatory schools which became the educational equivalent of a 2-3y navy seal bootcamp (it's not enough to have good grades, you need the best grades). Teachers in poor area high schools were often unfamiliar and intimidated by this system (they didn't go through it themselves), and were actively discouraging good students from taking that path. Students not having educated parents who knew the system were not pushed to work really hard to get into, and survive that system either. And you ended up with 80%-90% of the kids in those colleges coming from families from similar colleges. Money wouldn't be a major factor, the top colleges and preparatory schools are free.
Now the natural ratio shouldn't be 3-5% (elite college educated parent as % of general population), probably around 50-60%, certainly not 80-90%.
For the past 15y, France has opted to break the thermometer instead, ie to bypass those exams for the majority of the recruitment, and to select students on file which grants them full latitude for subjectivity. I suspect they also nationalised the selection process of those preparatory schools (not super familiar with the latest developments). I think the main consequence is that those elite colleges will quickly lose their prestige, and it might actually be the unstated intention, i.e. converge to a german like education system where the name and prestige of the university matters little vs the profile of the student.
It might be a good thing or perhaps it will just ruin the french educational system, it's hard to tell.
And for anyone who thinks it's unfair: not anymore so than the parent lottery. And I think institutional acknowledgment of the role pure dumb luck plays in our lives would go a long way towards dispelling our inclination to actively punish people for acts of the cosmos and/or dysfunctional policy.
This reminded me of something back when I was in high school in my Latin American country. There used to be this locally known international university-application-consultant and one of the things he mentioned for the "satisfaction guaranteed" of his services was being familiar on which Universities needed to increase their Latin American demographics and how to use that in the applicant's favor to increase the chances of a successful college and scholarship application. This was mostly targeted to students at bilingual or international schools whose families were already wealthier than average.
> shared the same life experiences regardless of their race
Where I grew up bilingual/international school students live in an isolated bubble separate from the rest of students. So they grow up with the study plans, standardized tests, music, tv shows and pop culture from their international school's country.
So probably that's why their life experience might have been more similar to those in the U.S. This is only a small fraction of the students though.
For example a high school student from American School of my country might know about the SAT test prep, Ivy applications, college application essay writing, and be familiar with US issues. All of those which would be mostly unknown by students outside that circle. Making others less likely to successfully apply.
It's possible that race simply has more charge than class does, regardless of the axiomatic arguments people have for why it should be the other way around.
Clearly there is a large constituency for class-oriented progressivism. Sanders wouldn't have been able to win California, Nevada, and Colorado, and hold his own in Texas, otherwise. What Warren proves is that adding identity politics to the mix is a losing proposition, even in the Democratic Party.
> The defense lawyers also called the demand for admissions and development records "intrusive and burdensome."
Prediction: the schools lose, and have to turn over the data.
Maybe if their argument was on privacy of the donors, they'd have a chance. Saying "it's intrusive and burdensome" to ask us for this is utter BS that any judge should see through.
It also works both ways. The defendant can dump all sorts of papers on the plaintiff and say, “be careful what you ask for, good luck wading through this!”
If they dumped all the donors over $50,000 for the last 10 years, even on paper, I can't believe it would be that much to go through.
What if such a data set doesn’t exist? What if it’s all in the email and word docs for these collegiate development and admissions departments over a decade? How do you tell it apart?
I don't even disagree with this, but I'm not sympathetic towards the schools, either.
Some facts to consider:
At Harvard, over 40% of non-minority students received special treatment for admissions (which includes factors such as being a legacy, athlete, or the 'dean's list' which was a list of high donating parents). 75% of those would not have been admitted w/o that help. I think this lawsuit is trying to pierce this veil. [1]
For those that argue "meritocracy" and that standardized testing is the answer: the SAT has a correlation of about r=0.3 to 0.5 with first year college GPA. Thus, the explained variance (r*2) is about 9% to 25%, meaning as much as 81% of college success is not statstically predicted by the SAT. [2]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/17/harvar...
[2] https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/national-sat-val...
this not making a claim anywhere near as interesting as it pretends. Since you're using a %, what is the % difference in quality that admitting these 75% makes (assuming it's even true, considering I don't believe much from the Guardian) and how does that (what the author calls "affirmative action") compare with other affirmative actions taken to achieve a balanced class? were they otherwise 99% good enough, or only 10% good enough?
My money is on above 90% because I went to an elite school (that has no legacy) and lots of people there were extremely highly qualified, and the ones who weren't did not fall in a pattern of being wealthy or whatever, probably better explained by something like your evidence of how ineffective IQ (what SAT does correlate to) or high school grades are in predicting college GPA and how effective GPA is or isn't in predicting future contributions. I find grades have much more to do with psychological makeup, like do you rebel against authority, or knuckle under. Good grades are valuable, but don't tell the whole story of your value as a contributor, sometimes screwed up and crazy genius works better. But either way, shouldn't that be up to the school what combinations they wish to place their bets on?
(people here who bitch about grading on a curve should take a course in statistics graded on a curve, then listen to their fellow students who got A's to explain how it works.)
The administration contended this policy had nothing to do with the $8M athletics facility built with donor funds, nor the influx of scholarships awarded to students who all happened to join the football team that year.
I disagreed. Vocally.
When I went from a 98% student to a 24% student at the start of a new semester just by refusing to write my name on any homework, I was pulled from all activities, isolated in endless detentions, and put on a "remedial track" away from my class (like ISS). It took a few more weeks of talking with the teachers and priests and protesting, but the headmaster eventually stepped down and was replaced by one of the nuns.
Grades aren't hard to cheat if the institution is complicit, especially if what's being measured is compliance and obedience.
The point here is that 75% of 40% (= 30%) of the majority/white students received special help and would not have been admitted otherwise. Furthermore, much of that special help was directed because of wealth and donation power, not due to "need".
You raise a good statistical question ("ok, it's 30% of majority but what is the % for minority").
I do not have the data for that, and in a world where average income of various ethnicities was the same, that would be a compelling point.
Maybe other standardized tests are or could be better predictors. Some countries rely exclusively on them for admission (and if I'm not wrong, also the US is some specialized fields such as law or medicine).
Well sir/madam, good luck with your arguments and evidence. At the very least, as it's doubtful such biases or prejudices that protects systematic advantages and socioeconomic position will be altered, it will make for a good popcorn read.
You are saying in 81% of the cases the SAT score is useless. They are saying this:
When HSGPA (high school GPA) and SAT are combined, the correlation with FYGPA jumps to .61, an increase of .08 and a 15% boost in predictive utility over using HSGPA alone.It's true, when you combine SAT with GPA, it's better, but that was not the point I was rebutting.
Even so, with GPA+SAT, if r = .61 then r^^2 = .37, meaning 63% of variation in college grades are not explained.
And I believe this is first year college GPA only - "getting a good GPA in freshman year" is probably a weaker argument than "succeding in college, or afterwards"
Well, it's not redundant. And this study shows that.
Now you are saying that the SAT does not explain much of the freshmen year GPA. But that could be (and it probably is) a consequence of the fact that colleges have different standards. The SAT could have 100% prediction power, like the Oracle of Delphi, if the colleges have different standards the correlation between SAT and GPA will be low.
A second effect is at play here, the binning effect. If you have two variables X and Y that are highly correlated (let's say rho = 99%),and then you split the observations in bins based on X, then the correlation of X and Y for each can be very low. They could be arbitrarily close to zero. Just give it a try.
Finally, prediction power beyond the first year. Why would colleges need that? They need quantitative metrics to determine who would perform well once they come in. After that, it's their duty to educate and nurture those students. If they can't do that, and the final outcome is some form of lottery ticket, that's on them, not on the SAT.
You point out that many Univ's have stopped using the SAT.
Some universities argue that they need the SAT to find those "diamonds in the rough" [1] (genius students who get crappy GPAs). I don't disagree with this idea.
As I said, it's complicated.
[1] https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our...
I was naive and initially shocked by "the list" when I was told about it. A list of applicants who were the children of faculty, staff, very large benefactors, and politicians. They could NOT be denied by any admissions councilor without a very serious reason (eg. convicted of a violent crime).
I raised an eyebrow.
Then I discovered that that list accounted for a full 25% of EVERY incoming class. Literally hundreds of students per year.
I raised the other eyebrow.
Then I realized that the constant and extreme push for diversity recruiting was to obfuscate the obvious nepotism and secrecy in admissions. The remaining part of the incoming class had to vastly overachieve diversity metrics so anyone questioning admissions or seeking transparency could be easily demonized for being <insert insult>.
They will never ever EVER allow transparency in admissions.
This is open knowledge. From the WSJ, https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-get-into-the-ivy-league-extr...:
```
Nearly half of white students admitted to Harvard between 2009 and 2014 were recruited athletes, legacy students, children of faculty and staff, or on the dean’s interest list—applicants whose parents or relatives have donated to Harvard, according to a 2019 study published in the National Bureau of Economic Research.
At Harvard, low-income students with top academic scores had an admit rate of 24% compared to 15% for all other applicants, according to a 2013 study by the school. Harvard has said it believes enrolling a diverse student body is important because the school wants students to learn to work with people from different backgrounds.
“The middle class tends to get a little bit neglected,” said Hafeez Lakhani, a private college counselor in New York who charges $1,200 an hour. “Twenty years ago, Ms. Younger would have had a good shot at an Ivy League school.”
```
Using just "white" is extremely misleading. Harvard undergraduates are already only 40% white [1], but 10% are Jewish [2] (despite being only 2% of the US population). Meaning non-Jewish whites, which are 56% of the US, are only 30% of Harvard undergraduates. For graduate students it's even more ridiculous - 53% Jewish, 28% non-Jewish white.
"White privilege" in action.
[1] https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/harvard-university/s...
Hold up, is this saying that literally over half of the graduate students are Jewish?? Am I reading this right?
Perhaps we should ask for the diversity statistics to count Jewish numbers separately so we could have official numbers, but I suspect that might encounter some resistance :)
*For 2015, the Jerusalem Post actually estimates Jews at 25% of undergraduates, but that may be relying on some since-corrected overestimation by Hillel. See https://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/The-most-heavily-Jewish-US-co... and https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduat...
What does this mean? They didn't qualify for student aid, they qualifed and were denied, or they went to a school, saw they could have paid less and were upset?
Without some kind of intervention that prevents employers using college degrees for employment decisions we’re gonna be here a while.
Not going to one of the "elite" schools is, though, and it's not like financial aid disappeared at all the state schools.
The reputational difference between the state schools and the ivy league has been narrowing a lot in recent years in response to numerous scandals like this and a lot of improvement from the state schools. Is there any reason for the government to step in here, rather than just letting the ivy league continue to destroy its reputation?
And having all these schools’ names be dragged through the mud during the court proceedings will further your goal.
The elite schools are considered "elite" not because they offer a better education, but because they ensure that your classmates will be valuable network contacts after you graduate.
From the perspective of the school, admitting people who are already wealthy/successful is preferable to admitting people who may become successful in the future. The school's status depends on having a disproportionately large population from the former group.
They act this way because the business world works similarly: you are more valuable if you are already on a first-name basis with high-level executives and politicals, because you can listen to the wind and bring your contacts in on the businesses that you are involved in.
All of that is a long-winded rephrasing of the old truism: it's not about what you know, but who you know.
This is how organizations die, political, corporate, non-profit, or any other type. People who are good at knowing other people frequently aren’t the best person for the job, and selecting for newcomers who are good at knowing other people over work leads to aristocrats and manipulative sociopaths taking over, and then you have GE, a company that lost its ability to innovate, could only copy hot trends popular among Wall Street poorly, moved into finance and oil despite having no expertise in these fields to the tune of billion dollar losses, and is now a mess in the process of being broken up and dissolved.
On a much greater scale, Putin’s Russia works a lot like this, which has led it to become an incompetent brutal dictatorship that terrorizes its citizens and also can’t even take over Ukraine, one of the poorest country in Europe and its direct neighbor, because everyone who was competent got pushed out or killed.
Anyway the claim in the lawsuit about lost money is really just theoretical - most of the top schools collaborate in developing methods to determine how much aid a student should receive. The lawsuit is claiming that if the top schools could not "collude" on aid, students would have gotten more of it.
However I think that is a massive assumption that is not going to play out the way they would like. These schools reject 100s of qualified people every year that would gladly take a spot with current aid packages. There might be an occasional superstar that schools do compete over, but your average small town middle class 1600 SAT kid is super fucking replaceable.
Hell I could see aid being lower if schools didn't "collude", because being part of this need blind consortium is good PR. The lesser schools that give lesser aid are the ones that supposedly don't collude.
Legally it will be an interesting case though - the reason these schools are allowed to work together on aid package formulas is because they practice need blind admissions, which really only the top unis do. The lawsuit argues that admissions is not actually need blind, because of preferential admission for wealthy donors and some other admissions dynamics that are more common and inadvertently factor in wealth.
That makes this discovery highly relevant to the case, and while I think need blind status will be ultimately upheld, I'm sure the schools don't want the info getting out.
Interestingly, the initial lawsuit is based purely on public info and a handful of salty (unclear why) students. There isn't private info about people's aid packages or anything like that supporting it as far as I can find. I suspect the people suing realized they had an argument the schools weren't actually need blind, and that is what they actually wanted to challenge, so they dug up an argument about supposed low ball aid packages because the need blind schools form an aid consortium.
A lot of the articles about the lawsuit have left out critical details about what is actually being claimed, the claims make no sense until you realize this is actually about challenging need blind status. Here is an article that does touch on the key issues: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/10/us/financial-aid-lawsuit-...
Instead they will be forced to go to another private school which will receive their endowments, and soon grow to the point they can compete with elite schools. Harvard, et all will still be good schools but not the "best" schools that people die to get into.
https://www.naicu.edu/docLib/20150803_Antitrust_legislation....
- POC
- child of alum
- athlete
- famous person or child of famous person
The list goes on.
and who are also completely lacking empathy for the financially challenged at best, disregard and look down upon the less privileged at worst. Both may lead to social isolation of persons with different socioeconomic background attending said schools.
If you even want to get into such games, having the money isn't enough. You need the aura that it's small stakes to you. Multiple cash game hustlers have written about this phenomenon.
source?
source please
My experience:
- people from less privileged background didn't need empathy. By being there, they were bound to have a successful career
- students tend to get along better with people from similar background/interest but there were enough diversity so that nobody felt they didn't belong, and nobody was looked down.
That being said, we don't have as much inequalities as in the US and also no quota/positive discrimination. Everybody who was there passed the same selective anonymous exams, which I think is very important. I can see why US students who benefited from favorable admissions criteria are looked down or suffer from imposter syndrome.
> Everybody who was there passed the same selective anonymous exams
My comment was targeted to the US university system where getting born in the “right”family is all you need to have access to elite education.
> It’s a lazy, unintelligent critique
I think this is what a subset of people belonging to lower socioeconomic classes tell themselves, and sometimes have heard it from their “superiors”, to better cope with their financial struggle. The poor people are just lazy is the motto of the privileged and is also a safe assumption to make for a rich person to have.
What percentage of millionaires inherited their wealth? Go Google it. Now tell me if it’s ok to judge any group of people based on that percentage.
It may be incomplete but your next sentence about inheritance is actually what's poor judgement on your part.
I didn't mention direct inheritance in my previous comment, however it's really hard to make any distinction between this and the fact that being born in the 'right' family means access to professional/educational opportunities due to specific connections almost never easily attainable by the ordinary mortals. And yes, this often means, especially in professional settings, getting away with doing the bare minimum and staying on the job just because the boss was in high school with your shipowner dad.
> What percentage of millionaires inherited their wealth?
This is a really problematic way to address the effect of inheritance has on one's wealth since such percentages are relied on self-reports, which means that effectively all will identify as self-made. I find it entertaining, but also telling about the brainwashing the financially desperate have suffered, people like Elon Musk being cited as self-made when they always happen to come from financially privileged families.
Not hating, just observing.
In the end it’s the non wealthy students that make or break a schools reputation which is why schools give out scholarships etc. It’s a pure transaction your future achievements aid us and our reputation and resources aid you.
Schools also specialize so Harvard doesn’t have nearly the reputation in say animation as CalArts etc.
Part of it is logistics: wealthy had money for weekend ski trips, cars, didn’t have to work student jobs so had more free time.
Maybe it’s changed? I was there over a decade ago.
Should Catholic seminaries be forced to admit islamic students? Jeff Bezos has a $150 million house in Los Angeles, should he be forced to allow the homeless to live there?
There are a lot of other universities.
But if we are going to be strict about it, then it should be strict. We have to look at the exact makeup of every single group of people in the USA and make everything is exact. So that means Jewish students should make up only 2% of elite schools, Catholics should make up 22% of the student body, 1.1% should be muslims, 14% of students must be black, hispanics must be 18.7%, 58% must be white, 7.2% of students Asian and of course must divide it more and more. We have to figure out how many left handed students must be allowed to be in elite universities, how many with crooked vs straight teeth. This is all wonderful stuff.
Of course at universities, 50% should be men and 50% should be women. Right now, 60% of students are women and 40% are men, universities must stop admitting so many women, that is very clear. Universities should only allow 50/50.
At the premier public university of UC Berkeley, 36% are Asian and so that must be adjusted downwards to 7.2%. 23.8% of Cal Berkeley students are white, so of course, the white student population must be increased to 58%. A lot less Asians should be admitted.
At UCLA, 58.6% are women, so that has to come down so it is 50%. 28% of the student body are Asian, so that has to come down to 7.2%. White are 26.3% so that has to be adjusted up to 58%. Hispanics are 22.6%, that has to come down to 18.7%.
Of course, this must happen at every single university.
I am starting to see how this game should be played now.
It's not because something is private that suddenly no regulations apply. Regarding universities, I don't think the issue is that some category is over-represented, but the fairness of the admission process. That being said, with affirmative action, the admission process is already biased and isn't on academical merit alone.
So you're saying that Catholic seminaries are required to admit muslims that want to become imams, and therefore the Catholic seminaries will be required to start a islamic department to train muslims to become imams? (rhetorical question).
So as far as the fairness of the admission process goes, all applicants should apply with no name, race, creed, or any type of way to identify who and where someone comes from? Do away with essays as they are super easy way to identify the background of an applicant? Pure test scores only?
I totally disagree with your saying that the issue isn't with some categories are over-represented. That's just not the case at all.
As a business owner, I value this trait highly.
It’s very rare that “be highly competent” alone is enough to optimize for (ethical) success.
People, including one’s customers, often have drivers other than competence (e.g., significance or likability). Knowing how to cater to those drivers while also being competent is a fairly common and consistent recipe for success.
If you run a consultancy, you're right, this is exactly who you want.
Is this not well known?
I have heard a couple of arguments in favor of the practice:
1) It brings more money into the university (most important reason for the university)
2) It enables the university to admit and educate a larger number of students than it could otherwise afford to (potentially pro-social reason)
I think they'll do it again. If this movement finds legs and makes itself hard to ignore, then the corporate media will once again use their editorial powers to shift the conversation away from the class narrative, probably again in the direction of divisive race politics.
Sadly, the weak left in the US falls for it every time, shrinking at each step, becoming incapable of providing a vision for a better future for all—because they all start fighting over who’s doing the identity politics thing better. The right uselessly plays into the new narrative by fighting over how much they should have to even care about the new identity politics, arguing for a return to the time before the identity politics became the dominant theme.
With both sides playing a pointless game, the damage is done—the fight that united people rarely returns with the same force it had before (as people exhaust themselves over divisive identity politics), and neoliberal dominance secures another decade or so of relative ease and impunity.
Edit: I stand corrected, and I rescind my assertion.
https://www.openthebooks.com/assets/1/7/Oversight_IvyLeagueI...
All the others take federal money in some way, shape, or form.
I drive on federally funded roads, should they get recording devices to see and hear my every move?
If the claims of the suit are true, then it's presumably trying to use proxies for wealth rather than explicitly saying "give us $$$s and we'll let you in"/
I can think of a few notable examples from arguably the highest ranked university, Oxford.
> Postgraduate students at Magdalen College have voted to remove a portrait of the monarch based on a photograph by Dorothy Wilding, taken in 1952, at the time she was crowned.
> The portrait, purchased in 2013 by students to decorate the Middle Common Room (MCR), the room that houses them, has been removed because it was an unwelcoming symbol of the UK's "recent colonial history".
Something about slavery, idk
> An Oxford University college has decided to keep its statue of a Barbados-born slave owner.
> All Souls College has dropped the name Christopher Codrington from its library
The concept of audible clapping
> Representatives from the Student Union (SU) passed a motion last week to replace clapping with “jazz hands” in hopes that this will make events “more inclusive” and “accessible” for those with the mental health condition.
> This comes after the University of Manchester made international headlines for passing a similar motion in September 2018.
In general it seems we import a lot of cultural nonsense from other Anglo countries even if its not quite relevant.
Granted, there are certainly tankie students in US colleges - but they don't usually run official Twitter accounts of student societies endorsed by the college. It reminded me more of the kind of stuff Orwell was writing about the UK intelligentsia in 1945:
"The ordinary people in the street – partly, perhaps, because they are not sufficiently interested in ideas to be intolerant about them – still vaguely hold that ‘I suppose everyone’s got a right to their own opinion.’ It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice. One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist claim that ‘bourgeois liberty’ is an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought."
So I think there's plenty of blame to go around on both sides of the Atlantic. ~
Let's not kid ourselfs that is not a wild conspiracy or some socialist agenda. Ending corruption is in everybodies interest, except you are planing to yourself profit from that system by making strategic donations in your offsprings interest.
Alternatively, if you subscribe to your police / sheriff department FB or Twitter feed or whatever they have, they will often post news about training their staff at such-and-such academy or training center. Looking those places up and reading about what they teach, exactly, can be very illuminating - "killology", for example.
And then there's the Fraternal Order of Police...
I know several people who have succeeded in tech in staff+/leadership roles without any college degree at all!
In law, and medicine, and academia in general? Sure, your pedigree matters. But in tech, and in many engineering fields, a state school degree is all you need.
Just look at the numbers. If it was so easy, again, everyone would do it. It's not.
I saw this with my own school. I have a hard time finding any graduates from my program who aren't gainfully employed right now.
CS degrees aren't like business degrees. It's much harder. Hence, many don't do it, despite the huge financial advantages of doing it.
Unfortunately the courts have a history of disallowing the use of IQ, viewing it as a violation of the civil rights act (see Griggs v. Duke Power Co. for more info). The colleges may be found liable of favoritism towards wealthy students, despite it most likely being the opposite.
Lastly here's the article if you're also paywalled https://archive.is/PX63H
Presumably need blind admissions skew high income to begin with just because some parts of America verge on third world and illiterate without even taking other factors into account, but I also have to assume their financial aid practices are carefully designed, perhaps with full US government support (FAFSA is a hilarious thing in many respects), to further distill out an appropriately wealthy distribution of admits.
The fact that government money and aid can go to these schools that are so instrumental in the creation and sustenance of elites has always been a farcical betrayal of the democratic ideal.
Very curious how far they've gone to prevent documentation of the kinds of things plaintiffs would know doubt like to know from ever existing to begin with.