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.