Hacker News Reader

Comment by chaostheory | Hacker News Reader

If you ban legacy, then you lose needed donations. If you lose donations, then costs go up for everyone else. There is a net benefit for everyone when there are academically challenged wealthy children. Just keep standardized testing to prevent mass arbitrary admissions that will inevitably become racist.

https://priceonomics.com/do-elite-colleges-discriminate-agai...

It’s happened in the past to Jewish people and it’s now happening with Asians. It’s routine to hear admissions officers say that Asians are boring.

If the end goal is to eliminate any sign of a meritocracy, they are well on their way to achieving it.

View on HN

> If you ban legacy, then you lose needed donations. If you lose donations, then costs go up for everyone else.

Or the universities could spend a bit less money. Most donations go to things that aren't exactly central to the supposed mission of a university, like football fields or $90 million dining halls [1]. The explosion of administrative staff over the last couple decades also doesn't help.

[1] https://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/blog/real-estate/2016/0...

Sports programs, just like legacy entries, earn a lot of money for universities.

Do they? The WSJ disagrees:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/march-madness-is-a-moneymaker-m...

> If you lose donations, then costs go up for everyone else.

Aren't costs going up for everyone else anyway? Hot take: instead of hoping that rich alumni would donate to universities, the nation could tax these folks properly instead, and use that money make public education free/cheap.

There are quite a few countries in the world doing this, not all of them rich.

That would help public universities, but many universities are private

In many countries with a single-payer health system all or some of the hospitals providing care are private. One could imagine a similar single-payer education system where some of institutions providing education are private too.

Elite institutions like MIT, Yale, Stanford, Princeton and Harvard do not need more donations.

Look at the worth of theirs endowment funds at the end of 2021 :

  Harvard   53G$
  Yale      42G$
  Stanford  37.8G$
  Princeton 37G$
  MIT       27.4G$

Can you honestly tell me that they need more donations ?

What is G$?

1000 megabucks

1024

I think that’d be gibidollars (Gi$ or something like that?).

All these unusual units are kinda fun, could spice up a presentation or conversation to throw in without context.

It gives me that hacker having fun, tarsnap picodollar/byte-month pricing vibe.

It is the SI prefix for giga, and commonly used instead of B for "Billions" outside of the US when writing "Harvard's endowment fund is currently worth fifty-three billion US dollars".

53G$ == $53B USD

1G$ = 1 000 000 000$

G$ == Giga dollars?

None of these (and other) schools view endowments as something to spend. It must always be growing to show how amazing and great the school is.

I remember how during the pandemic there was a number of articles about how these schools might have to take out some small pittance of the endowment to fund certain things and the schools were all doom and gloom about it.

Many endowments pay the salary of the fundraisers at major universities, in fact. And legacy gifts are usually set up for "forever" scholarship, where, say 5000 bucks is available for a certain type of student each semester forever, because the gift to the school was large enough that they know investing it will make at least enough to cover the cost.

So no, endowments aren't spent, but the returns fund a lot of stuff.

You don't spend the endowment, you spend the interest.

Not all universities are elite

University of Texas system was around $42B in 2022 : https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-harvard-university-o...

This is not the reason ivy's have legacy. They have legacy students because that's what makes them the most prestigious universities in the world. Legacy students will succeed no matter what due to their connections. They will become rich and powerful, and networking with the rich and powerful is the main value add that ivy's are providing. Without legacy admits ivy's would be no different from Berkeley or ucla.

We don't need rich people to all piling in to donate to the top schools. Have them donated to the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th tier schools.

Encouraging donation to top schools via legacy admission creates a perverse incentive to concentrate resources at a few top schools, creating the cycle of everyone fighting to get into them. Money and resources should be spread out.

I like a alternate version of this: tax 25% of all donations to schools (all of them, top or not), and redirect the money to fund and improve quality of public universities.

You still have a strong incentive for folks who want to show gratitude to their alma mater, and at the same time help improve access and equity to everyone else.

I agree, and for the record I wasn’t referring to just elite schools.

But for the beneficence of the aristocracy...

I think that's a joke of an argument. The people whose kids would no longer get in would go somewhere and the distribution of their bribery would surely be more democratizing.

Did you not read the part where the ‘aristocracy’ pays way more tuition money for their one child? If you weren’t so focused on class warfare, you’d realize all of that extra money can be used for other things such as scholarships for families who wouldn’t be able to afford a university education for their children. The people you’re referring to wouldn’t be able to afford tuition before the rate hikes, and they sure would be in a worse position post tuition hike

That money could just as easily pay for scholarships at public colleges. Why is it important that they donate to generational private schools instead of public?

Private schools aren’t the only ones with legacy, even though they deny it; and I wasn’t only referring to private schools.

> If you ban legacy, then you lose needed donations. If you lose donations, then costs go up for everyone else.

LOL they don't need any more donations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com