Harvard Legacy Admissions Targeted After Supreme Court Ruling

Personally I'd love to see no more legacy admissions, but realistically there's no legal basis to change that. There's nothing the Supreme Court can do, Congress would have to pass an explicit law against legacy admissions.

The reason affirmative action was struck down is because the are certain federally protected classes of people protected from discrimination -- race, religion, sex, etc. And affirmative action is discriminatory along the race dimension.

But a private university is allowed to discriminate along anything else they want as long as it's a not a protected class. They can discriminate on grades (as they do), SAT score, essays, extracurriculars, athletics, geography, and yes -- legacy.

It's true that legacies are usually whiter relative to the general population, but a lot of factors skew towards racial proportions that are different from the general population (e.g. good grades skew Asian). But as long as the purpose of the discrimination doesn't have racial intent (or intent along another protected class), then no law is being broken. And if the intent of legacies is raising money, then there's no winnable case here. Alas.

Good.

I am affirmative action-curious, in that I do not necessarily have the knee-jerk "this shouldn't have ever been allowed" reaction that many on HN do. I think the case for affirmative action is stronger than many would allow. That said, I am willing to take the SCOTUS decision for what it is, because AA was an extremely unpopular policy with admittedly terrible echoes of past injustices built into it.

Legacy admissions, on the other hand, are pure trash, and I think absolutely everyone except the beneficiaries of those policies ought to agree on that. I truly can't think of a good argument in favor of them other than "universities like money."

I kind of enjoy the irony of this policy being supported by virtually everyone, other than the ostensibly-progressive Harvard admissions committee.

Someone here has already made the argument that the entire affirmative action set up at Harvard was just a way to hide the rich and well-connected from any meritocratic scrutiny.

If Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford remove quotas for ALDC (Athletes, Legacies, wealthy Donors, Children of staff and faculty), these universities cease being elite. That's good for America. However, it is bad for the administrators of these schools, uber wealthy, the elite servant class of this uber wealthy. What happens, if McKinsey, Bain, and BCG recruits more from UC Berkeley, Rutgers University, Vanderbilt? What happens if more of future judges and justices are graduates of LSU Law, UTAustin Law, McGeorge School of Law? Basically, the elites can't congregate around three or four schools. The power gets distributed, as the kids of the elite attend many schools across the country.

Legacy admissions are the point of going to private school. If you want fair, there's plenty of public universities in the country, where meritocracy rules and all that. Private universities, on the other hand, have a different value proposition: If you are rich and well connected, you can go to an extremely good school, where you can meet other rich and well-connected people and the high achieving lower class people. Likewise, for the lower class people, if you can meet their high achievement bar, you can network with other high achieving people and the well-connected, and have your education subsidized by the high costs the school is extracting from the rich students.

This is a win-win for everyone involved. Hell, it's a win for everyone else, too, because these conditions are breeding grounds for extremely high-impact individuals.

A question and point on resolving racism without giving up on meritocracy:

- I tend to think scotus believes racism is/was real but the best way to fix it is for congress to vote into law an actual remedy. Instead congress whines then fund raises off it. That control vacuum does not mean scotus has to fill the void. I'm pretty sure this what Roberts thinks anyway.

- on remedy: based on a young adult's background mainly by looking at parent's income and their educational attainment, and school quality k-12, under served kids that appear to have potential could be subsized to take a kind of finishing school with the idea of getting them backfilled education wise so they could take and pass MIT like AP exams in math, science, English. It'd be like a really high end HS to get them current. Kids who don't follow through are evicted, and are required to payback costs. This way they can compete reasonably well for open seats and colleges of their choice. We might call this the National High School Program perhaps mainly online. Congress can create and fund this. Seats are filled in time order of approved applicant only.

- remedy includes reducing or eliminating grants to private universities sitting on tons of money or have too many administrative costs. US education is too damn expensive. There has to be a way for the system to penalize stupid cost. If you've done hiring, ivy league credentials doesn't guarantee much. There are some darn good kids from state schools too

- a federal run super high school gives parents and kids a choice: state education or fed. Or state then fed later to fix shortcomings. This would also eliminate the fed/state/local control quagmire since US education is locally controlled. The fed could instead focus solely on its own school system letting parents/kids choose.

- in summary: congress has to get off their butts. Scotus would have to uphold congress' law. And if the national HS was demanding, nobody would be focused on race, which is the way we want it. It puts the focus on good kids who did good work which is also the way we want it.

If rich kids can't socialize at school where will things move to? Is there a rich people tinder or something?

This is way overdue