Legacy and Athlete Preferences at Harvard (2020) [pdf]
public.econ.duke.edu
public.econ.duke.edu
Harvard is primarily a brand for wealthy people, and they need the non-wealthy cohort to justify the legitimacy of their degree. Harvard does have world class institutions, but that’s primarily to reinforce the brand they’re selling to wealthy alumni and donors who wants their kids to enter the exclusive club.
A world class institution likely deserves to be a good brand
That is, even if it is invested for returns, the money and the returns on the money must be used for the intended purpose of the donor.
No one in my cohort had to study, we wanted to.
I imagine it's of some quality, if for no other reason than the brand attracts talent and the money buys everything the talent needs. That said, what even is educational talent? Is that where the incentives are aligned for the institution, to get the best teaching talent?
As the saying goes: it's not What you know, it's Who you know.
She ended up at Kellogg so still got a strong network, but Harvard is kind of unbeatable.
FWIW I don't think the content changes much between institutions. Certainly I don't see what an Oxford grad learned that some other engineering student at say Imperial or MIT didn't do.
So yeah, you can have much worse education...
In the end the core of a degree is not going to change a whole lot, of course options will be slightly titled towards demand. Everyone who studied engineering did a bunch of math courses and a bunch of physics courses, just like everybody anywhere.
If you take Albert Einstein and put him in University of Michigan or Harvard, he's still going to be Albert Einstein, and some rich kid from Hingham is still going to be just another rich kid from Hingham - not Albert Einstein.
On some objective level, Harvard is awesome. But it really doesn't matter that much.
Geniuses are going to be geniuses. And no matter how much resources you pour on some mediocre person, they're still going to be mediocre.
Where it does matter is that a person of equal skills from Harvard is going to get more/better jobs than the person from Michigan.
This is why I think it's fair to say it's "mostly a brand".
The value is not in the education you're getting. Harvard isn't going to make the same person meaningfully more skilled or educated than Michigan.
The value is in the rubber stamp, mainly.
That’s ridiculous. Surely it depends on when and where you send Albert Eisenstein. it doesn’t matter how smart you are if the facilities around are up to the task to fulfill it.
> Geniuses are going to be geniuses. And no matter how much resources you pour on some mediocre person, they're still going to be mediocre.
Genius are only as much geniuses as the information they can retain, understand , and synthesize. It doesn’t really matter how much of a genius a 12 year old could be if you never teach him or give him the means to learn what an atom is.
are we seriously going to act as if certain institutions don’t allow better flourishment than others ? I’m not saying Harvard is the holy grail here but come on.
The impact of these schools on the education and social outcomes of disadvantaged groups in this country is miniscule. I'm speaking as someone who went to an Ivy. If the US really wants to change outcomes for minorities, it needs to start at childcare and K-12. If the Supreme Court REALLY wanted to change shit up, it would limit public school districts to state level funding sources only and give vouchers to everyone.
Harvard is obviously a world-class research institute, but it seems to be funded by the wealthy essentially treating it like a social networking experience, and knowing that the label "Harvard" opens a lot of doors due to the research reputation. The education given to the "poor" and the stringent selection criteria imposed on them primarily serves as set dressing.
All the talk about affirmative action is about undergrad/law school/medical school/business schools. Not so much about m.s/ph.d admissions. Because this exclusiveness is perpetuated; otherwise, Harvard ceases being Harvard. What happens if MBB recruit many UC Davis undergraduates; what if Louisiana state university law graduates become Supreme Court justices/interns at elite govt institutions.
HYP/S, uber wealthy, and their elite servant class(media, admission committees, c-level execs) don’t want to lose their power by distributing power across many schools, states, geographical centers.
I think allowing legacy while also promoting lower class students is OK. The lower class students benefit from the money of legacy student parents as well as the contact with the well connected legacy students themselves.
I could imagine that next there would be a supreme court case against this. A conservative court might then ban consideration of class. But then we are left with a Harvard that really is a just a club for rich kids. Smart kids who are not rich could try to fight against legacy promotion, but I doubt a conservative court would do anything about it.
The Supreme Court can I guess try to go case-by-case banning metrics. This stupid whack-a-mole game will look pathetic on their part and burn up whatever tiny bit of institutional legitimacy they have left, but at least they’ll probably fail.
Conservatives aren't stupid enough to think they can and should solve all problems via judicial fiat, which is about as divisive, autocratic, and undemocratic as it gets. But, conservatives also know that there's been decades of terrible jurisprudence to undo, many of it done by activist judges. In particular, yesterday's ruling on affirmative action undid California Board of Regents Versus Bakki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regents_of_the_University_of_C...).
While the ruling actually declared that racial quotas violated the equal protection clause of the constitution, it simultaneously opened a massive back door to enable effective racial quotas in the name of "diversity". All universities had to do was prove a "compelling interest" in having diversity and they could continue factoring race into the admissions process. This ruling, among other things, inspired the "critical mass" argument, stating that to get the diversity benefit you have to have enough of each racial group: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/151579503.pdf
What's the difference between requiring a critical mass and having racial quotes? Well, not much in practice! In another bit of terrible jurisprudence, the court upheld the critical mass argument as late as 2015: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/cert/14-981
Unfortunately, our courts have made a lot of bad rulings in the past, and it's far past time they got undone or reworked.
The diversity Harvard wants is the golden calf of American liberals: black Americans. Diversity is almost always code for black people. No other race seems to deserve any attention. See how campaigns like #OscarsSoWhite were propagandized as discrimination against blacks even though the percentage of black actors winning Oscars was nearly identical to their percentage of the population, i.e. Oscars were perfect representational of black people, meanwhile every other race was greatly under-represented.
A race-blind policy that factors in class/income will result in more poor asian students dominating placement, likely at the expense of black students. We already know from the discrimination lawsuits how much contempt Harvard has for asian Americans, I assure you Harvard don't want this kind of diversity.
Why are you thinking in terms of class? Class-based conflict was the center of original Marxism. Then the 20th century Marxists, realizing that it wasn't working because capitalism was actually good for people, moved on to identity politics (neo-Marxism), with which they've had far greater success in disrupting and tearing down our society. And, now that there is finally some institutional pushback against neo-Marxism, you want to go back to classic Marxism?
I think your worldview needs to be updated to not be centered around group-based dynamics and politics. Individual meritocracy is the least corrupt system we've come up with to determine access to opportunity. How about we gate access to Harvard based on things like ability, and focus instead on making more high quality schools? This would increase the supply of quality education, which would actually make the world a more equitable place! It's amazing how many "equity"-based policies exist that actually make the world a less fair, less equitable place!
Part of the reason the above is so difficult is specifically because the institutional elite of our day want a class-based society. They want to be part of an emerging new nobility class, and they like having certain filters and gates like ivy league schools. This is what Marxism has always devolved into, really. Harvard loses it's power when we stop treating it as so special, and that goes hand in hand with fighting against those in power today who want to build a an ever-wider moat around their power.
I understand what you are saying about meritocracy, and for sure Marxists went too far: it's fascinating looking at the what the early Soviet Union attempted: watch the Asianometry episode where they tried to ban money: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWWqhsh848E
So I think the answer is of course a balance. College admissions should mostly be a straight meritocracy based on grades and high school achievement. But some help for disadvantaged classes, plus some random chance, plus some legacy for the money and contacts it brings.
Pure meritocracy has problems: an example of this is police departments. Do you really want an all-white police force patrolling all black neighborhoods, even if all of the white applicants have better scores than all of the black applicants?
Also you ignore discrimination. Decades of redlining and other similar policies have created many of today's problems.
If Harvard wants to preference legacy students, that's their right. But they (and their endowment) shouldn't get a tax break for it.
While legacy admissions might not be a judicial issue, what about legislation that says no federal funding will be provided to institutions who use special standards for legacy applicants?
If you are a private institution and want these programs, that is your legal right (since it likely does not cross legal lines around protected classes), but the taxpayer shouldn’t subsidize it.
A dozen or so years back there was an effort by many universities, including Harvard, to keep military recruiters off campus. When the courts ruled that this would endanger federal funding Harvard, like all the others, folded like a cheap suit.
I’m surprised to hear that. I know objection to it went back to the Vietnam war, but didn’t realize there might have been a recent episode.
Walt Rostow notoriously set troop levels from his office at MIT when he was “on leave” to work in the White House. That ended up causing the complete banishment of military research from MIT. Absolutely no exceptions, I mean, except that overtly military work can be done by MITRE and Lincoln labs (cough completely owned by MIT), ICBM navigation at Draper, the AI Lab and LCS sharing a building with the CIA for a long time, DARPA funding all over the place, whole departments essentially entirely funded by the Navy and the Air Force, and a continual revolving door between the pentagon and some departments.
Harvard still has ROTC students…but they have to get up even earlier and drag themselves over to MIT for early morning drills. I didn’t feel sorry for them; Harvard students don’t have to pull all nighters every week.
How small? Well last time I looked (2018) tuition was 14% of revenue. TBF spending on education (i.e. everything spent on students except for expenses of undergraduate and graduate students working on faculty research projects) was 16% of expenses. With their grant overhead (north of 70% iirc) they could cut tuition, but why bother? Break even is apparently fine. At least they don’t do legacies.
BTW I first looked at these numbers when I was an undergrad in the early 80s and that 14%/16% level has been fairly consistent for the last 40 years.
Nearly all of that endowment is tied up in long-term investments and funds. It's not liquid.
Their cash flows and run rate are made up of a HUGE percentage of federal funds. Government grants and loans, research grants, and special programs. A large percentage of professors spend a large percentage of their time applying for federal money. That's where their operating budgets come from.
Why would legislatures pass a law that has the potential to be both unpopular AND bite the hand that feeds them?
Who wants that? Normal people? Whose paycheck do they sign again?
Affirmative action may not have been an elegant way to counterbalance legacy admissions or compensate people who had been wronged, but it was the only thing that came out when we shook the vending machine, and now people have thrown it in the trash and are acting like something better is going to happen.
* or deregulatory, I’m not trying to make a partisan point
You also want diversity because you want the best people for a given situation, and the odds it's actually a bunch of rich white kids that are the best at being doctors and lawyers and whatnot is basically zero.
But I agree with my sibling commenter; ChatGPT will give you the best form of this argument, better than anything I can write.
I won't really be able to explain all of this here, but I do need you to understand that what you're arguing for is to allow more people to be oppressed because of their skin tone. I know that's not what you want, that's not what anyone wants.
Republicans like to think that affirmative action is about collective guilt. It’s not. As a white person, I don’t feel guilty about slavery. But, I do recognize a monumental theft which the victims were never compensated for, and which continues to shape our society.
Edit: changed “in contrast” to “furthermore”
As someone who got into an "elite" university despite not coming from an "elite" background - the Legacy admissions are the reason people like me got the opportunity to integrate with people who otherwise wouldn't have given me a second glance. Being in a study group with a prince, going to a club with an heiress, or sculling with a billionaires' kid is not an opportunity most parents can give their children outside of sending them to a place like Harvard.
It's horrible that the world is so fixated on status, but you don't get to choose what game you play always - just how you play it. Ingratiating yourself with a Fortune 100 CEO's son can reap many orders of magnitude more benefit than being surrounded by randos who are better than him at calculus.
The value prop of a place like Harvard isn't that they're particularly good at teaching, it's the idea that, as a sufficiently smart and lucky regular person, you might have a shot at getting into an otherwise exclusive circle. No guarantees, and may people can't crack it (or choose not to, because it feels so slimy) even when given the opportunity - but Legacies are part of Harvard's value proposition.
Events where students can meet alumni seem far more productive, if slightly harder to organize. I'm sure Harvard can incentivize their alums well enough to attend, considering their sizeable endowment.
Harvard wouldn't be Harvard without its legacy admits. It's how universities perpetuate their status.
Graduate becomes wealthy, their children become powerful, get into the school, make friends in their graduating class, help vault new graduates to the same circle. Rinse and repeat.
The real answer is taking some of their $$ and expanding seats. With how low acceptance rates are now, they could double their class size and still be very exclusive.
And I think you can take it further, as it goes both ways. The value proposition is specifically the mix and ambiguity between the legacy and smart students. You’re selling the legacy students a chance to associate with (and, most importantly, appear to be themselves) smart students. And you’re selling the smart students the chance to associate with the legacy students (as you said).
It would also encourage rich kids to focus more on their educations so they can have a better chance of getting into their preferred schools. A more educated elite benefits everyone. I see no downsides to society as a whole, just downsides for some value propositions.
They exist to recycle/refresh and to create elites. Any society (and organization for that matter) will have a minority group of elites. A healthy society has a function that can recycle and select for elites. An unhealthy society does not do a good job of this and the elites are inbred and only legacy. This is the purpose of an institution like Harvard and why legacy admissions exist.
Now the "best and brightest" are connected with the "rich and connected" and new elites are born. Existing elites with kids that can't make it in with legacy are recycled into the general pool in time and new elites are made from the best of the general pool.
This is the social function Harvard serves. It's a good thing if the elites are being recycled frequently enough by moving weak elites into the general pool and with deserving candidates from the general pool replacing those weak elites.
But I'm not making an opinion here (on if they should do this or just how much they should do), just explaining why Harvard exists. And it isn't just for the best and brightest to get together. It never has been and it never will be.
The cynical view is existing elites only steal from the best from the pool. I’m not sure empirical evidence supports this. The system probably over-selects existing elites. But it’s their system. I’d argue that AA was a tool to allow even more over-selection and preservation by consuming seats with unqualified and therefore uncompetitive quotas. Cultural cachet I guess and a moral justification for low quality elite preservation.
The problem is, Harvard's incentive is to make a university which is best for its students - not society as a whole. They'd rather scoop up the cream of the crop in terms of affluence+intelligence and then leave the dregs for everyone else. Legacy admits are one tool they use to do that.
I sort of suspect the abolition of SATs serves a similar goal, where a university class can be curated on more than intellectual merit without articles like OP's getting published calling them out for it and the equity arguments universities have made for doing so are either facetious or misguided.
I agree that it is beneficial to the lucky few "low-class" people who manage to get into Harvard, but that's at the cost of eroding the concept of meritocracy for all those who don't.
I would have rather gone somewhere like MIT or Caltech where there are fewer legacy admissions/admissions from uber wealthy feeder schools, as I feel the value of my connections would have improved. I don’t think those schools are particularly suffering for reputation either
For most people, outside of technical training, scarcity of "high quality" education is either artificial, or education is more about signaling competitive success by mere admission to these "elite" institutions rather than anything actually learned.
They all want to accept more students. There's simply no space to keep them.
Secondly, they have. It's now quite common for UK universities to have spin-off campuses a long way from their original sites:
https://www.lborolondon.ac.uk/
https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/currentstudents/study-abroad/in...
I barely even need to point out that Republicans didn't need to be scared into opposing legacy admissions, as they eagerly supported them, for people who might be taken in by their meritocratic facade from the decision yesterday.
This is all documented in The Price of Admission (https://www.amazon.com/Price-Admission-Americas-Colleges-Out...).
If the Supreme Court interpreted the statutory language banning racial discrimination in federally-fund education the same way it interpreted the same language in employment, it would already be banned as disparate impact discrimination.
Also, I disagree that it is clearly beyond the scope of the 14th Amendment: yes, I’d agree superficially, but then if you took the main opinion in the recent cases at its word when it claps back at the dissent suggestion that universities could move to other bases which are not, but correlate with, race about the ruling banning racially-discriminatory treatment regardless of how it is framed, the current court would absolutely strike down legacies if they were properly before it.
(I predict that if such a challenge comes, in a case where they’d have to hear it to preserve legacies, they will tie themselves in knots to do so rather than act consistently, but that's another issue.)
It's not really the education there that makes the name stand out: https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/harvard-university-2155... doesn't show any trends of it being particularly good at any subjects. Maybe CS theory, but that's not exactly a competitive area for universities.
Almost all of these elite private universities were started by random rich people and gained prestige over time. Modern rich people seem unambitious compared to people in the past. People forget that Harvard and Stanford are named after people, they weren't always these giant institutions
Actually building something for the future, not because it will make you even richer, seems to have fallen out of favor.
Besides SpaceX, not sure what other goods there have been from this social contract recently.
If one day we do end up with colonies on the Moon and/or Mars, historians will point to SpaceX's drastic lowering of the cost of making it to orbit as one of the critical stepping stones that made it happen. Not only does it directly make such things more possible, but it increases the amount of economic activity that can occur in space, which grows the entire industrial ecosystem and indirectly unlocks even more possibilities in the long run.
Endowment money is a really long term play and probably comes from old money rather than new money 99% of the time
Now, with transportation across the country taking mere hours rather than months, a new college would have to compete with every college in the country.
On top of that, you need to deal with accreditation and lots of other red tape to even get to the point where you could start attracting the talent that is being rejected, meaning you are competing with top state schools and next-tier private schools.
They don't have to use it except as collateral for loans.
I was disturbed back when Donald Trump was elected that one of the strains of opposition was "he can't function as president because he owns businesses. He should just own stock like a real politician."
The supposed concern is that, if you have an actual business going, you may experience conflicts of interest between your business and your political decisions. But (1) categorically excluding anyone who does productive work from holding office is a really terrible (if historically common) idea; and (2) it's not like we never hear complaints about politicians getting into conflicts of interest between their political decisions and their stockholdings.
And perhaps that's for the best, sometimes when well-meaning billionaires try new things we just end up with wacky dystopian shit at our expense, like Munger Hall : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXd7Y3HvUj4
I'd rather give billionaires the option to waste their money on yachts and meaningless trips to orbit, or give money to charity, than force that largely insecure, incompetent demographic into actual leadership positions. Would be like handing a machine gun to a pissed off chimp that just had its mate stolen.
Case in point, look at the account holders of Silicon Valley Bank who had essentially their entire corporate cash reserves, billions collectively, at that one institution. Frankly they all should have been wiped out down to the FDIC limit for such foolishness, but I'm sure as most rich people do they have a mountain of excuses. These people are largely not competent, they took stupid risks and got lucky, but the same stupidity that made them take the risks tends to stick around after they get lucky. Steve Jobs himself had the good fortune to get the rare CURABLE variety of pancreatic cancer, detected early no less, and he turned down standard treatment in favor of some new-age juice-diet bullshit. His stupidity cost him his life, and all the wealth in the world meant nothing. Thank God he never thought to open up a hospital based on his beliefs.
I think most people rich enough to pull this can afford to buy their kids into Harvard/Stanford so it would take someone with a real principled interest in this approach.
Starting a research university (which you need to attract top professors) from scratch seems really challenging though because you need to build up your grants and either poach existing professors or hire junior ones. You could start a teaching or liberal arts university but a lot of students who want to go on to PHDs or take advanced classes would skip based on that.
The conversation should instead be focused on admissions and funding for the hundreds of public universities in the country. It's the responsibility of your state's university system to educate you, not Harvard. If you have a problem, knock on the doors of your state legislature instead. Why exactly does a university fully funded by taxpayer dollars have a system of legacy admissions?
Nearly half of white students get (got) a VIP lane into Harvard.
But that doesn't necessarily tell the story for what it would be like to apply to Harvard as a white student. There is a subtle yet important distinction in this.
Sure, college is about academics, but someone who spends a lot of time mastering a sport (and is gifted at it) isn’t that different from someone gifted at math and working at it.
I feel like HN may disagree, but not all athletes are 2.0 GPA students who relied purely on height to get in somewhere and have never worked hard.
But you actually posted the counterargument by yourself:
> Sure, college is about academics
Exactly: college is about academics and not sports, so athlets should only get a "VIP lane" for academic achievement/potential and not for athletic achievement/potential.
The CEOs are the future are more people skills related than anything else. If Harvard was all purely academically driven people, it would just create professors. Not exactly the college goal.
I am rather used to the German academic culture, but from this perspective I rather say: this is by the self-understanding of universities exactly the central purpose of colleges/universities (the rest is considered to be side gigs).
Except in the stuff that actually matters in the context of going to school -- your schoolwork.
> I feel like HN may disagree, but not all athletes are 2.0 GPA students
Yeah it's not all of them but you might want to take a gander at football/basketball players at the P5 level. There are a huge number of them that are, shall we say, not exactly college material. The schools shove them in basket weaving majors and assign an army of tutors to keep them academically eligible.
It's not like you can choose to be in a group that benefits from those legacy admissions when you're white. That's why the race based rhetoric is so dangerous to fairness - just because it's easier to some people who share some physical characteristics with you doesn't mean it's in any way easier for you. Part of the political spectrum wants to even turn it against you.
If you think this is about skin color, they have already won.
The problem is elsewhere: degree should matter less. It's better to focus on attacking this one. It's just can't be good that decisions you or your parents made before you're even 18 shape your whole professional life in such radical way.
It already does. Large companies no longer require degrees. I think it started with EY
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/15/pwc-says-gr...
Believe it or not, but American universities have never been about simply taking the highest scorers. They want their graduates to be among the elite in all areas, which inherently requires representation from all relevant backgrounds.
If you want elite artists it doesn’t serve that interest necessarily to pick a mediocre artist with a perfect SAT vs award winning high school artist with mediocre grades.
Ascribing intentions to everyone who takes your opposite point isn't an honest way to discuss things. There are many, many people who care about fairness, not about special interest groups getting what they want.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universities_and_antisemitis...
Legacy admissions are indefensible, but athletic admissions are even less so. (Less than 0, I guess?)
No one outside of Harvard cares how their fencing team does and (I presume) 99% of current Harvard students don’t either.
If you want to find the group that is most unjustly benefitted by a dumb feature of the admissions process it’s in my view athletes.
Yeah, not so much. They're just back to the old (or old boy) kind.
- Johnny got in b/c he was all-state lacrosse. Probably would not have got in if just all-county.
- Sally got in because she was an underreprestent minority--probably would not have gotten in if she were Asian.
- Jean-Luc got in b/c something thinks he's the next Jonathan Safran Foer. His math scores indicate he'd be a good candiate for Lehigh, though.
The admissions formula is so non-scientific that I don't think you can measure whether they would have gotten in or not.
Can you explain a scenario where this might be the case? The only one I can imagine is assuming that legacy students are rich and so they can just toss around more money on private tutors. Perhaps. But then the right statement is to say that rich students have better access.
... are now, without irony or introspection, arguing that, no, Elite Universities are Cloistered Hives of In-Group Kleptocracy.
Which is it?
This is why they do bullshit like reject Chelsea Manning for a fellowship and accept Sean Spicer instead. They are laser focused on being a hub of establishment influence, not about being "right".
This is why Brown just appointed Ashish Jha as their Dean of Public Health when he has demonstrably contributed to the deaths of many many people without resolving the pandemic. Why would you appoint a loser? Because he has an in with establishment power and did what they wanted.
Part of the reason Harvard is appealing is that you can rub shoulders with the establishment. For that to work, the children of the establishment have to be admitted.
I don't like it, but it does make sense and add value that many are looking for.
Considering he was one of the early voices calling for the lockdown, which probably did save millions of lives (remember, flattening the curve helped prevent our medical system from being even more overwhelmed than it was), and the pandemic is functionally down to the same threat level as seasonal viruses, this is a pretty bad take.
This is propaganda produced by the white house including Jha. The fatality rate when vaccinated is the same as the flu unvaccinated, assuming reasonable vaccine match (people aren't updating their vaccinations, so that will drift) or constant infections (long COVID). This view also omits the wild transmissibility of COVID vs flu, making is much worse even with the same IFR. Severity * number of people infected = impact. COVID reinfections can happen multiple times a year and have little relation to seasonality. Worse than flu.
Most people expected to catch the flu once every few years (maybe once a decade). People are getting COVID at increasingly rapid rates. New data from Japan said reinfections are possible within 3 months.
https://twitter.com/fitterhappierAJ/status/16723497564361277...
This view also omits long COVID which the WHO said may affect 1 in 10 infections and could lead to hundreds of millions requiring long term care.
https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1651227079684358151
Yes people are tired of the pandemic, but the messaging you have been given is designed to protect the economy. Obviously. Other people, rich people, making money off your deliberately constructed ignorance of the basic facts of our situation are making stacks. Jha helped do this and that's why he is celebrated by elites.
Took me a while to read it "Harvard Legacy" and not "Hogwarts Legacy".
Seems like it's just part of the cost of accepting the money from donors.
Everyone wants the brand of Harvard without donating a couple million. There is your avenue to compete for admission. It's their place, why do people feel entitled to make their own rules to get in?
Seriously, just go somewhere else. Harvard is status without necessarily having substance. Clamoring to get in only lends to the status.
If you want a meritocratic institution that is actually reasonably priced and provide great educations, then that's what a state school is for. Or like the few private institutions that are actually meritocratic (MIT, caltech)
Elite schools are for the children of elites who will inherit some amount of that power (political, wealth, ect) and for a small cream of normal people who have the iq, eq and luck to be chosen. The goal is to let these people mix. That way in 20 years after graduation when a brilliant mathematician has discovers a powerful algorithm that he has an inkling that it could apply to the stock market, he can phone up a college roommate that had an extremely wealthy dad in finance. The rich heir roommate can join and fund the venture that might billions on the stock market. Or the fact that an official in the state department went to college with the then daughter of South Africa's president, chances are that daughter still is influential. They can talk and maybe broker some aspect of foreign policy. They are finishing schools for the elite. Whether we like it or not, society's next generation of elite includes the most capable children of the current elite. Evn if those children are less capable than the most capable of the general populace, they stand to inherit quite a bit and they will have an outsized impact on the country and world. Their parent's and ancestors influence is important in their acceptance process because it's important in real life.
There is no real solution to this. There's a reason that despite America growing in pop insanely, foreign applications increasing exponentially, billions being donated to them and everyone going to college, these elite institutions have barely changed class sizes.
The exclusivity and mixing of the different types of people is a feature of these places. If you somehow get these top institutions to be more meritocraric like MIT or Caltech or increase overall student body size like ASU all that will happen is that individuals with power, wealth and influence will simply slowly coordinate to send their kids to different schools and soon enough those schools will face this scrutiny again.
Now I can understand that it is extremely unfair that when all our Supreme Court justices, significant numbers of national politicians, power brokers and many individuals with outsized influence come from a few institutions. If you are one of the many intelligent, hardworking and capable individuals who don't get in when others who are probably just as good as you might, it is extremely annoying. Their entire trajectory of life is changed because of luck that you didn't get. But sometime life is like that. College does not exist in a vacuum and just like most things in life, influence and wealth are powerful.
Those with power tend to want their descendants to have some of that at least and they will do what they can to perpetute that.
I want to say I'm not saying that this is perfect or even great. I'm just saying the way humans work and the way incentive structures are setup, this is how it is. To not mention this is to be ignorant. If you want to improve the status quo you need to acknowledge the reality of the situation and plan around this.
I did not attend one of these institutions for the record.
- ~75% Asians
- ~20 White
- ~2% Hispanic
- ~1% Black
- ~2% Unknown/other
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuyvesant_High_School#Demogra...