Comment by academia_hack | Hacker News Reader

Comment by academia_hack | Hacker News Reader

Something of a hot take, but I'd contend the Legacy admissions are there to the benefit of the people who earned their place!

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.

Let's say they get rid of legacy admissions. Kids of rich and powerful people will still ostensibly need college educations. Not all of them will get into the elite schools, so they'll be spread out among more schools. That'd increase the overall exposure between wealthy and other classes, which would benefit both the wealthy and the other classes because exposure to other groups helps for better understanding humanity.

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.

I think you first have to ask yourself why does an institution like Harvard, or Yale, or any other elite institution exist? The formal answer of course is that they exist to give the best and brightest an opportunity to learn from the best and brightest. But this isn't why these types of institutions exist.

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.

Ok, and? Remove legacy admissions from that equation and you accelerate the part of the churn where weak elites go back into the general pool. The best and brightest get to rub shoulders with each other and the strong elites. Seems like by your argument, legacy admissions are not helping society.

I mean, they sort of do already. Not everyone gets in that is legacy. They also contribute to the endowment, etc. And it's sort of their (the elite establishment) place in the first place.

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.

I think you have that backwards. They exist to preserve privilege for legacy kids. They let in some of the best and brightest so that some of the prestige from their accomplishments rubs off on the legacies.

If only that then it’s a dysfunctional system. Ideally it’s a mechanism to recycle elites. Preserve elites that are of a certain quality, dispose of the low quality, and acquire new elites from the pool ensuring a high quality of elites that is not only tied to ancestry.

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.

Really good point. I think at a macro level it makes a lot of sense to do that and if Harvard were a state run institution the government should definitely try to share the benefit. To some extent this is what the use of national entrance exams in many countries (e.g. China, India, Kenya) do, with varying degrees of success.

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 also went to an elite university from a non-elite background, and in technology, it has not benefitted me - few of the Uber rich people I met went into technology-proper, those that did are largely mediocre and not valuable connections, and as far as I know none are VCs either.

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

Yeah, it's how the rich kids get to connect with the smart kids. If it was all just smart kids then where is the value? The entire point of an institution like Harvard is to manage and cycle elites. Existing elites get to group their kids with the the types of up-and-coming kids from non-elite backgrounds but with elite level skills. New elites are made and the elites that weren't even good enough to get in on legacy will have their future lineage recycled back into the pool of non-elites.

This was in incredibly insightful comment for me, thanks!

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).

Interesting angle, but feels like post-hoc rationalization more than anything.

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's alumni are so powerful exactly because of legacy admissions. Politicians and executives and supreme court justices generally aren't coming from MIT.

The issue is that this leads to the Harvard label being misused as an indication of skill or capability. You see, suddenly those princes aren't being hired because they are a prince - no, it is because they went to Harvard so obviously they must be very smart and capable. It'd be a lot harder to justify that hiring when they went to Random Mediocre State University instead.

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.

Without legacy admissions these people would distribute themselves over more schools, meaning more people would have access to them. The more they are bunched up, the fewer people have access.

You're not wrong.

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.

Oxford doesn't have legacy admissions, and there are still plenty of that sort of people around.

I disagree with your conclusion (imo we should make the country more meritocratic so that meeting a rich personal kid isn’t a huge perk) but must commend the spiciness of this take.

Right, legacies are obviously the biggest value add of ivy's for the non legacy students, and it's not particularly close.

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