43% of white Harvard students are legacy, athlete, or donor/staff related (2019)
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
"Among the admitted legacies, grades and test scores were indistinguishable from non-legacy students. Both groups had an average SAT score that surpassed 1430. Once on campus, legacy students tended to have slightly higher college grades, but their involvement in campus activities, merit awards, academic recognition and on-time graduation rates were indistinguishable from non-legacy students. In sum, legacy students, on average, were about as academically strong as non-legacy students, neither superior nor inferior."
https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-why-elite-colleges-...
As for grades, check out https://www.thecrimson.com/flyby/article/2013/12/5/the-harva... but in summary, the most common grade in Harvard is A, so don't think the data point says much.
> Overall, our results show that only one-quarter of white ALDC admits would have been admitted if they had been treated as a typical applicant.
And on athletes -
> Being a recruited athlete essentially guarantees admission even for the least-qualified applicants. An athlete who has an 86% probability of admission—the average rate among athletes—would have only a 0.1% chance of admission absent the athlete tip
> For example, recruited athletes, legacies, and dean’s interest list applicants are all over 68% white, yet the share of non-ALDC applicants who are white is less than 41%. All other racial groups see higher representation among non-ALDC applicants and admits than in any of the corresponding ALDC applicant and admit categories.
- https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26316/w263... page 16
My anecdotal understanding is that "recruited athlete" often functions as a way for rich people to get their kids in. Get your kid on an expensive-and-niche sports team in high school -- lacrosse, water polo, etc -- and that puts them into a much-smaller pool of students that can be "recruited" by the college team.
75% of the US population is white, so it sounds like that group is underrepresented in athletic admissions.
First, note that the 75.5% figure in that table includes Hispanic/Latino people, which not all sources will -- importantly the study I was quoting doesn't include these under "white", so we can't compare those numbers. There's a different row in your table that excludes those to get 58.9% white. This alone gets us back to the ALDC group being disproportionately white.
Second, it doesn't matter if 75% of the US population is white, but rather what percentage of the college-admission aged US population is white. (Not that people outside of the 17-23ish bracket don't apply to Harvard's undergraduate program, but I suspect that they do so in insignificant numbers.)
Here's a source that breaks out US racial demographics by age: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_101.20.a...
It says that in 2021 amongst 18-24 year olds, 52.8% were white. Thus the ALDC group is even more disproportionately white than the whole-population number would make you think.
Essentially a high school student (now a college student @ MIT) solved a conjecture on distribution of Carmichael numbers. The parents of the high school student also happens to be first rate mathematicians.
I went to a southern ivy and many of the legacy students that I've met were children of doctors, lawyers, business executives, etc and grew up in a very fostering environment where they were exposed to how to behave in such an environment. I don't think it's too surprising that children would also excel like their parents.
1000 ALDC students qualify. 200 admit.
1000 non-ALDC students qualify, with equivalent resumes. 50 admit.
Thus it's easier to get in at ALDC, all else equal, and les qualified ALDC displace "overqualified" non-ALDC, or if you believe their qualifications are truly equal and those 2000 students can't be compared to each other, ALDC get loaded dice for the random selection.
I was not personally a legacy admit to my college (so no skin in the game really), but fwiw I don't think it's an entirely illegitimate thing to select for. most schools have their own distinct culture and consider that an important thing to preserve. I imagine families that try to send their children to a specific school over multiple generations probably feel a stronger connection to that school than the typical graduate, so putting a thumb on the scale to help them seems like an approach that could work.
if anything, I'm more upset about how recruiting for college sports works.
Do you have data supporting your claim that "plenty of legacy admits are diverse"? By definition the legacy admissions are very similar to previous attendees. You need to explain how that would increase diversity.
Just test scores and GPA have never been the only factor and never will be. For example universities aren't looking for robots who are just good test takers. I'm surprised you're speaking on this subject but seemingly haven't done the homework and aren't aware of what existing practice is and what the ruling still allows.
Going forward almost nothing will change in outcomes. The ruling said universities are allowed to use a student's life experience of racism as a factor. Harvard already highlighted this in their public response to the ruling. That's not race but it is a very strong proxy for race isn't it?
Legacy admissions can only maintain the status quo so there will be no increase in diversity if legacy admissions continue. To increase current diversity levels you would have to put some effort into it. The status quo rarely changes organically when it comes to gaining or losing power.
Removing that would be easy.
If you break down non-legacy cohorts where Asian applicants have to score 50-100 points higher, then academic performance of both legacy and non-legacy (average dragged down by AA) is artificially low.
This isn't about test scores, it's about the opportunity for lower class advancement rather than perpetuating existing wealth
But I Googled how much of Harvard's funding comes from donations by alumni, and it's 26%.[1] So maybe the real problem is the admissions office is almost certainly, at some point, making a calculation about how likely a prospective student is to graduate and then gratefully make donations.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/02/11/harvar...
Let's be honest, they're kicking ass at the schools they got into, and to paraphrase an old expression, they already started life on second base, they'll be fine regardless
I just wish we didn't live in world that sees which college you attend as some innate measure of your quality as a student or your potential, because they is demonstrably untrue, yet the myth persists
So the comparison is between e.g. black Harvard students and white Harvard students - would more than 69% of black Harvard students have gotten in even without racial preferences? Maybe, maybe not, but I guarantee you don't know. You're just using Affirmative Action as a euphemism for black, like a racist would. And in addition, racial preferences have been struck down by the Supreme Court, I hope you know, so that means that 31% advantage now stands out there alone, rewarded because one fell out of status quo genitals.
Anyway though what performance? We're talking about college students they don't do anything yet. But how about for example the fact that black people are more likely to be misdiagnosed and undertreated unless the doctor is black. If you care primarily about harm, with that in mind, getting the percentage of black doctors higher than 5% is something you'd be concerned with, I would think.
Yes it is, because the entire point of showing these statistics about white legacy students is to “shut up” people arguing against affirmative action by going “see, white people get their own form of preferential treatment too!”
Yeah, yeah, yeah, obviously they shouldn't fly completely under the radar on egregious shit (e.g. racial discrimination), but too much public attention on it reinforces the lie that admission to Harvard has any importance to society.
They want to be a 43% legacy/athlete/family school? Cool. When I hire applicants fresh out of school, I already operate with the understanding that most applicants managed to skate by in their studies. And after 5 years of experience, I couldn't give less of a shit about formal education.
This is how they market themselves to the general public, but everyone knows that Harvard and its admission policies were designed by and for the ruling class to educate their children and build connections. A Harvard degree would have no value if it selected based on merit alone.
A meritocracy would turn a school like Harvard into a factory for upper middle class people like doctors and lawyers and defeat its purpose. Harvard wants to educate presidents and CEOs.
Edit: I’m willing to assume that Harvard’s admissions and development offices know what they’re doing, considering that they’ve been wildly successful for centuries.
When I was applying to schools, I remember reading that the policy UPenn used for legacies was that only those who applied early decision got any sort of statistical advantage over other candidates. If you weren’t ready to commit via early decision, your odds were the same as the general population.
Perhaps their marketing sucks because as an external observer, I've never associated Ivy League schools with meritocracy.
I'm struggling to come up with an ALCD I know who is outstanding in their field. The best I can do is an athlete who is now a successful politician, though I wouldn't describe her as an intellectual giant
The smartest Harvard grad I know is now a professor at a different Ivy, but he was more like the Good Will Hunting kid (but writing rather than math)
No, they are not allowed to use racial preferences to make up for historical (and experiential) racism, even through they would prefer to.
Clarence Thomas seemed to be making the argument that the reason they are not allowed is because a racial categorization is just racism, but also seemed to indicate that considering the actual harms of slavery and Jim Crow wouldn't be racism. That would indicate that he would uphold legacy admissions if they had to decide it, because they're specific, instead of racist. But that would be about the descendants of slaves, not "minorities" or "people of color."
Expecting Harvard to forego legacy and faculty admissions and scholarships to students that maybe wouldn't get in otherwise is expecting Harvard to not be Harvard, which may be expecting too much.
they're funnels for the political and judicial elite. Eight out of nine of the current supreme court judges graduated from Harvard or Yale. A country being run by nepo babies rather than the most capable is kind of concerning
If Harvard stopped accepting legacy admissions and donors and elites as much, would that mean that the other people would get those political and judicial appointments, or would Harvard just lose status as an important institution?
Another way to look at it is whether those Harvard attendees are being appointed because of Harvard, or because of the connections they made with sufficiently powerful people also destined for similar positions at that time? Of you reduce those people, eventually you may reduce the effectiveness of going there, not increase the ability of non rich people that go there getting those positions, as Harvard itself maybe isn't the most important factor.
Personally, I think it's mostly just nepotism, whether Harvard or Yale or whatever, and reducing the effectiveness of nepotism from going to Harvard will just cause people that would benefit from it to shift to a different institution that does the same. If you want to combat nepotism, stopping g people from meeting at one specific place may be the hardest and least effective way of doing so.
If your goal is to promote non legacy people to positions of power, maybe just encourage more of those people at Harvard while also keeping the legacy people, and make nepotism work in your favor.
Do I understand you correctly?
Rather than make ineffective one of the many pipelines that elites use to meet each other and form connections which they use in their nepotism to enhance themselves and their friends, perhaps we can use it to promote a more representative set of elites through that nepotism.
Aside from being egregiously hypocritical and unfair -- the practice promotes foundational rot and moral cretinism among the nation's most powerful and influential, at the expense of society at large. By providing fake credentials to boost the careers of e.g. this person:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Kushner
See in particular:
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-story-behind-jared-ku...
Is Harvard not allowed to admit the students they want?
Not if they want tax-exempt status and federal subsidy.
Harvard also doesn’t want to become a school exclusively for the children of successful Chinese immigrants which is what it would be if it went strictly by test scores and GPA. And for what it’s worth, those Chinese parents don’t want it to be either. As others have noted one of if not the main advantage of attending an ivy is networking with the kind of people whose families can ensure them a spot at Harvard and beyond.
Which one is it? Maybe it's not so heritable.
One possible source of confusion is mistaking “heritable” for genetic. But a heritable trait can be cultural too. For example a child with Spanish speaking parents is considerably more likely to have the speaks Spanish trait. Similarly, Asian immigrants to the USA have an admirable cultural bias toward studying hard and their average test scores have skyrocketed over the past couple decades, far too quickly for it to be a genetic effect.
Now you're lumping Asians, who the admissions system has systematically and openly disadvantaged, with legacy admits by both calling their ability to attend a school as a heritable trait. Yet in one case it's actively discriminated against, and the other it's given preferential treatment. If the goal were to control against the 'heritability' of educational obtainment, wouldn't the primary factor in admissions be weighting parental educational obtainment negatively?
They are. The numbers are of the students that they chose to admit.
As of last week's US Supreme Court ruling, no.
"I need to see a cardiologist, but there's a long waiting list. Fortunately, my dad is a cardiologist so he saw me immediately."
Few people would think that this action should be illegal.
Compared with:
"I need to see a cardiologist, but there's a long waiting list. Fortunately, I'm White, so he saw me immediately."
(notice how it's still distasteful even if we replace White with Black, Asian, or whatever).
Notice as well how the situation is different if we're talking about a public hospital--in that case we wouldn't accept the nepotism case.
So there's real reasons why we would allow a private institution to have legacy admissions but not race-based admissions (and...come on. Only in the USA would that sentence be controversial!).
The rub is that in the USA many (most? all?) private institutions--yes, even Harvard--receive government support, participate in government programs, and so constitute a sort of shadow arm of the government.
The real answer, unpalatable though it may be to most, is that if private universities have legacy admissions, they should receive no govt support
> Few people would think that this action should be illegal.
> Compared with:
> "I need to see a cardiologist, but there's a long waiting list. Fortunately, I'm White, so he saw me immediately."
> (notice how it's still distasteful even if we replace White with Black, Asian, or whatever).
> So there's real reasons why we would allow a private institution to have legacy admissions but not race-based admissions (and...come on. Only in the USA would that sentence be controversial!).
The relationship between a cardiologist and their child is fundamentally different than that between an educational institution, their alumnus, and the alumnus's child.
The former is a nuclear familial relationship and the treatment is comparable to feeding one's own child.
The latter is an institutional relationship that gives preferred access to a rarified privilege (attending an Ivy league university), not a basic need like medical treatment.
Therefore you can't use the example of the parent/child doctor/patient relationship to justify legacy admissions.
recipe for nearly all prestigious universities I feel, not sure how the recent AA court decision will impact these combinations.
I don't have a ton of info, but I've been at two different parties with people for whom this was semi-directly their job, to help facilitate extremly wealthy foreign students buying their way into top tier American schools.
Ivy League US Ratio Mean nationwide SAT score [1]
Jewish 17.2% 2.4% 7.16 n/a
Asian 19.6% 5.3% 3.71 1216
White (incl. Jewish) 50.3% 61.5% 0.82 1148
Hispanic 11.4% 17.6% 0.65 1043
Black 7.8% 12.7% 0.61 966
White (non-Jewish) 33.1% 59.1% 0.56 ~1141 (lower bound estimate assuming a generous 1284 mean Jewish SAT)
The numbers don't sum to 100% because multi-ethnic students, a few minor ethnicities (American-Indian, Pacific Islander..), and students categorized as "unknown" or "other" by the universities were excluded from analysis. Data on university undergraduate demographics was taken from the universities own diversity reports. Jewish representation was gathered from http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/, https://forward.com/jewish-college-guide/, and https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduat..., taking the lowest estimate when sources conflicted. ejewishphilanthropy.com (eJP) points out flaws in Hillel's data gathering (e.g. showing Harvard as 30% Jewish, when eJP found it only 16%) Hillel seems to have since fixed these flaws, as the estimates they now give are in-line with those of eJP.
No correction has been made to look at only the college-age population of the US, or only at the Northeastern US where all the Ivy League universities are located, so that may be a source of some bias. It's also hard to get consistent demographics from the universities, as they all report them in slightly different ways. Corrections welcome.
[1] https://www.ednc.org/eraceing-inequities-the-influence-of-ra...
Though for the record, those polls considered anyone that identifies as Jewish as.. Jewish, regardless of religion. You can read more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_atheism
In any case, if you can find the data, you're welcome to do the analysis for other religions/ethno-religious groups too.
Want to git rid of legacy preference? Great.
Let’s be honest, though — this is just whataboutism.
This is classism. Shockingly, institutions can have both classist and racist discrimination - let's be honest, they're both bad and need to go.
I think people are trying to make the case that legacy admissions are another form of affirmative action that largely benefits white americans.
They’d be wrong, of course. Legacy admissions are classist, not racist. Being white inferred no advantage under their legacy admissions policy — in fact, the opposite, because combined with race-based affirmative action, it left even fewer slots available for non-legacy white applicants.
No way to justify legacy admissions which are racist at their core (blame the historically racist US population) with a thick coating of 'classism' used as cover.
Non-legacy applicants were extremely disadvantaged if they were white.
AA was the only reason why the legacy entry system was still allowed to continue.
How so? Legacy admissions will continue.