Harvard Discriminates Against Middle-Class Kids
wsj.com
wsj.com
Personally, I don’t really care that there’s a magical club for rich kids. If it wasn’t Harvard, it would be something else. I do think it would be better to just have different admissions slots and just have an auditable lottery. That way as a society we can move in from tiger moms forcing their kids into Cello, squash, or whatever the hot credential is this year.
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At least poor people actually have some chance when it comes to standardized testing.
What’s expensive is the kind of extracurriculars that Ivy League schools look at when test scores are deemphasized. The kids in Chinatown don’t live next door to anyone who can get them an internship at an impressive non-profit or NGO, or near college professors who can help them get published. The parents working at a Chinese restaurant can’t invest the time it takes to get a kid to be world class in some instrument or sport.
Plus those are explicitly peacocking, in the sense of being a burden on the rest of your life while having very little chance of being useful to you, other than as a flex to get into an elite college. Very very few people make a living of any kind in sports or in music.
Having been that Chinese restaurant kid myself I can promise you it would have been an extraordinarily expensive way to get an education, in comparison to just studying the same old academic books.
Every time SAT is mentioned it sounds like it's completely separated from US schooling.
The norm in school is a grade based on number correct. SAT is a composite score with different weights and treatment of answers. When I took it, an incorrect answer deducted points while a blank answer was neutral.
When I was in school, the good students got 1280-1450, and the prep classes would yield 40-100 points in most cases. It’s an optimization exercise. If Johnny can’t read, Kaplan isn’t gonna save him.
The SAT is also incredibly easy. I got a 1200/1600 when I was in the 6th grade while going to a inner city school. I wasn't exactly doing SAT prep then.
it is not the lack of money that is holding the kids, it is lack of willpower to push yourself to top 10%/1%/0.1%.
It is hard work and not every kid can do it, considering all the leisure alternatives they got
Money==High SAT is silly meme that only lazy parents perpetuate. If money could give high SAT then there would be no need in Legacy Admissions in the first place! (Why need legacy backdoor, if you can hire tutor to get top 0.1% score?)
Not every rich kid is like Don Trump Jr!!!! A lot of them are quite capable (esp the ones who make it to ivies)
Some dogs are highly intelligent and readily trained and some dogs aren't. You can guess by looking at their phenotype, i.e. breed, although not every dog of a preferred phenotype is capable.
Someone may be gifted at dancing. Someone may be gifted at singing. Someone may be gifted at hunting.
Why do we insist academic pursuits are equally available to everyone if we only throw enough resources at them?
Any selective program, music, athletics, military has a minimum entry level they're willing to accept. They know you can't turn a random person into an elite musician, athlete, or soldier.
Why does academia have to pretend that academic talent is evenly and randomly dispersed?
That being said, slavery and colonialism are clearly dysgenic. Slavery kills the brave, the strong, the honest, the compassionate, those who can see the bigger picture, those with self-respect, those who love their parents, those who love their children, those who will not be raped, those who will not be enslaved. It selects for the apple-polisher, the scammer, those who are best at concealment, the selfish, the ruthless, the wily, the drone, those who can bear endless misfortunes, those who can lift heavy weights.
"Readily trained" isn't synonymous with "highly intelligent," although readily trained is the goal of breeding. To be "readily trained" is to be obedient; ready to take the master's priorities as your own.
Even with full reparations and the lack of further obligation that would mean for the US, black people will be in the position of trying to silence that part of our brains that has been bred to prioritize the problems and the presence of white people. Luckily it was only 400 years of damage.
When you follow the narrative of white slavery, you’re taking a road that leads to some racists spewing whataboutism to somehow establish that slavery in America was acceptable.
Grouping all light skinned people into one made up ethnic group is completely disregarding their unique and special heritages, and the oppressions that happened between them.
The problem is that peoples assessments of whom is best suited to what doesn’t work with sentient humans as it does with pack animals or dogs. The conversation tends to degrade towards whatever social biases are held vs any meaningful assessment.
When those great minds of the 19th century were opining on this, they weren’t thinking about the stupid white/black/indigenous (with or without Hispanic) categories used in the United States. They wanted to make sure that Irish and Italian bumpkins stayed away from polite society - because they were poor and presumably unsuitable.
Anyone doing working/sport dog stuff 100% chooses the dog.
For instance, a friend of ours (has a pup from us) went through 4-5 litters where she was told “I have the perfect pup for you!” Only to have it not be anywhere even close. She eventually came to us, and we did have the right pup. And now he gets to sniff out dead bodies, ride I’m helos, and find lost people in the nm woods.
My cousins got in to Harvard and Yale. They had a portfolio of extracurriculars, service, etc.
The issue with SAT is that it correlates to IQ, and its been rules in courts that there are racial differences in performance that are problematic. Civil service exams have been similarly impacted - if there are exams, they are trivia and grammar questions.
> Harvard could afford to provide nearly full scholarships for every student with 1% of the annual return on its $50.9 billion endowment. Many other elite colleges could easily afford it too. They don’t, because they want to maintain an aura of exclusivity.
To me it would be more exclusive and prestigious if they gave everyone a free ride but it was entirely on merit. Like much of Europe, and how the UK used to be (tuition in the UK is still more reasonable than Harvard though).
You ought not to think of it as a rigerous academic forging fire for the meritocratically selected brightest minds, but rather as a finishing school for America's elite.
So long as they keep producing presidents, diplomats, CEOs, senators, and so forth, they will continue to have a great reputation.
Having a brilliant son who would have previously been discriminated against by Harvard’s admission process, I’m happy to see explicit race components removed. However, should he choose to apply and go (mostly to be connected to opportunities he otherwise wouldn’t have), if he leaves with a degree and nothing more, what good is it? The one Harvard professional peer I had came from the middle class, ended up at the same FAANG as me (who is just about as unconnected as one could be), and burned out in the process. Sample size of one, but it wasn’t an inspiring story.
You don’t need to be a good school to have notable alumni. They aren’t “producing” anything. Ive league schools use the same curriculums as the unknown university I went to, and from the lectures I’ve seen, the teaching isn’t any better either.
They just reject anybody who isn’t a well-connected, hard-working high performer, so it makes it look like they are producing notable alumni. Good material in -> good material out.
And, yeah, you can discriminate pretty heavily and still be selective within the remaining groups you aren’t discriminating against. It’s not strictly either-or.
And, who knows, maybe they knowingly discriminate against lower/middle class people and against asians because they perceive those groups will struggle more after graduation due to their disadvantages (targets of racism / lack of connections / lack of money) and will not make the school look as good?
It's not up to you. It's far easier to be admitted into Harvard than to have your opinion on Harvard admissions be something that Harvard should be concerned about. Part of the definition of "exclusive and prestigious" is that elites get to decide what it is.
The reason Harvard is a top institution is because it is an elite institution. It is not because of its quality of instruction or thought, which are just fancy decorations.
Places I think of as “new generation” prestigious universities include: Berkeley, UT-Austin, Georgia Tech, MIT, CMU, UIUC, Caltech, U. Michigan, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, UW-Madison, UCSD, etc. (Most of those places existed 100 years ago, but weren’t considered top-tier like they are now.) One thing that’s notable is that a number of these are public flagship institutions.
STEM types absolutely dont wanna go to harvard for example - why try to push there and deal with bs of racial discrimination? if you can get better engineering education at CMU/MIT/Caltech, heck even Ohio State has pretty decent engineering progam
For STEM students it was just never as good a choice as schools with more developed eng schools.
False, because Students for Fair Admissions (the org who sued Harvard for racial discrimination) - are young people and they have millions of supporters around the world
Giving a tiny subset of able and hard working people a magic cookie that opens doors for them is inherently unfair to all the equally able people who don’t get that cookie. It doesn’t matter how you pick the lucky few. It’s not fair and can never be fair.
The only fair thing to do is to get rid of this system and stop treating these degrees as somehow superior to those of other good schools because of Ivy League branding.
Of course the elite social networks around these schools are the other reason they are special, and as we have seen in other contexts network effects are remarkably hard to disrupt.
Is it the responsibility of elite educational institutions to break up elite social networks? If it is, why wasn't it the responsibility of educational institutions to fix racism or to "celebrate diversity"?
How is it "only fair" to force (or convince?) people to think more of degrees they think less of? Should I be forced to buy tickets to movies in genres I don't like because people worked just as hard on them as the movies in genres I do like? Does the state have any interest in the children of PMCs being able to attend the colleges of royalty?
Another approach would be to expand the size of the elite institutions to serve all who belong.
This is the system working as intended. If you lift up masses of people, how will the class structure be preserved?
It’d be a lot easier to stop pretending people from other schools can’t be just as good, or even autodidacts from no school.
Of course that undermines the price premium these places charge.
It also did not mention that people identifying as white are the only ethnic group that is underrepresented relative to the population in the US. It's odd that there is not a clear definition of what an optimal percentage of different ethnic backgrounds should be.
I think Harvard discriminates against talented people who do not have parents who aggressively push them from a young age to get into an elite school like Harvard. White students are the least likely of any ethnic group to take test prep https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/03/th... Test prep has been shown to boost SAT scores so if there are disparate rates of taking test prep, the test would bias in favor of people who have parents that put their children into it. I think that's unfortunate for talented people who don't have parents that prioritize that for them. Harvard may well have attempted to compensate for this.
Harvard should obviously conform to fully uniform visibly non-discriminatory if it wants tax privilege and funding through the state.
Perhaps the thing is that student loans make price competition impossible.
If you had $10B+ wouldn't it be somewhat tempting to instead of donating to an existing university, just make your own? Buy some site, hire some profs, make it clear you are after the top kids, give a free ride to all of them, you're guaranteed to get plenty of applicants. You'll have your own Stanford in a few years.
I went to school with a guy who had all the top credentials (absolute top math guy), got into the top schools, ended up taking a free ride scholarship instead. You're simply bound to win some of those if you pay for it.
Like Trump University?
Not an accredited university. Also named after perhaps the least intellectual person possible, I think it might be hard to establish an elite academic reputation.
Admits on merit, provides brand name & money & networking.
Produces great results overall
I don't know if it's actually good for the US to have a secondary education system that is so cutthroat. It's just very polarizing and gives too much power to a handful of schools.
With a 100% scholarship the new university would be sure to get a lot of interest.
This is a market with a high barrier to entry and those customer base is shrinking. Not really a good environment for new entrants.
The middle class is governments tax cash cow.
Expanding it by bringing up the poorest is great, but once you see it's just to make that cash cow juicier it can leave you very cynical.
Am I supposed to be bothered that the government gets more money when they succeed at doing this? No, I will not be bothered by that. I only wish they could have 10 times the success that they have had. If that gives them 10 times the extra money, that's fine. I'll take that state of affairs, gladly.
People keep trying to All Lives Matter Jim Crow.
I think the goal isn’t to fill Harvard with a particular class, but to fill it with amazing students.
To who? Nobody deserves to go to Harvard any more than somebody deserves to come to my board game night. Harvard isn't a natural right, it's an organization.
> Harvard’s admissions process is not a good way to attract the best students.
Harvard's admissions process isn't intended to attract whatever your measure of "the best students" is. Harvard thinks the best students are a mix of children from alums, extremely high achieving normies, and a particular racial mix that makes them seem visibly cosmopolitan. They were told the the third class was illegal because it was racist. Other than that Harvard hasn't been restricted; who Harvard admits is who Harvard intended to admit.
> I think the goal isn’t to fill Harvard with a particular class, but to fill it with amazing students.
Who's goal? Harvard's goal is clear. What's not clear is why it should change its standards to ones that "middle-class" kids have better access to.
imo, it's the same energy as the fight against Affirmative Action; middle-class white people demanding that the standards exclude things that they can't be good at (like being black, or having fancy parents), and include things that they can do, like doing well at their mediocre high school and taking tests.
This is cloaked in pseudo left-wing rhetoric of fairness and inclusiveness, but a kind of fairness that doesn't consider the difficulty of black lives in a country that enslaved them, and is deeply worried about the access of children who never missed a meal to Harvard.
The only real case against legacies is that it is also racist, but it is a difficult case. Even to make that case would rest on Jim Crow, because your angle would be that their legacy admissions have been tainted by past racist policy, and are carrying that policy into the present. It still wouldn't be about middle-class wish fulfillment.
wrong. 75% of blacks who make it to harvard are rich kids, like kids of obama for example, or kids of businessmen from Nigeria/Ghana/etc.
harvard does not admit black kids from inner cities, this meme has to stop. This has never been true
It may miss some of the extraordinary ones, though.
I think you'll find that the factions of people running the university (which by the way is a many, many-headed beast) would rather keep the money than act according to the principles they profess. I think you find that's true for a lot of liberal principles. (and conservative ones equally)
Harvard is free to experiment with social tinkering. Just not with my tax money.
some ivy's post their lectures for free online. There's a reason that doesn't produce greats either.
Anything not based on random number generators is discrimination. Do you want kids that can read? Write code? Volunteered in Mexico? Perfect SAT?
Each decision is discrimination along some vector.
Maybe Harvard plays a role in political stability of the US (oldest democracy in the world) and helping the poor, and they are fine leaving the middle class to tread water.
If you don't want them to discriminate on A, then explain why discriminating against B is better.
Schools filled with the top test takers would be quite dull.
Just like sports teams with the best players?
In Europe there's a bunch of universities with the top test takers, and there's no reason to call them dull places.
I know it's comedy, but it's typical: Louis in suits referring to anything non-Harvard as "worse than sludge".
Poor Louis doesn’t realize that some people get offered admission to Harvard and turn it down. He’s optimizing for the wrong thing (of course his character is a parody).