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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

What is interesting is how Harvard's reputation remains lofty despite these admission practices. If everyone knows that a large proportion of each class is either legacy or racially selected, why do people still think it's a top institution?

> 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).

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Harvard continues to have a great reputation because they continually produce so many notable alumni.

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.

It is however a vicious cycle and as the article points out exclusivity is key.

Why vicious and not virtuous?

Because, like another person said, a large proportion of each class is either legacy or racially selected. There’s no virtue in following that method.

Is virtue based on the input or the output? Are people from lower incomes leaving and becoming senators, presidents, ceos, etc, at a higher rate than elsewhere or does that remain the domain of the legacy students who were already politically equipped at birth?

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.

I’m talking about virtue from Harvard, and so it should be the input. If you have virtuous input, then your output should also be virtuous, unless the school is doing something that scrubs virtuous habits. Of course, I’m treating this as a black box that will admit anyone over a certain criteria, but that’s not reflective of the real world. So I don’t know if it’s based on input or output - so probably both?

Because giving the "Harvard stamp of approval" to people who were admitted mainly because they are legacy applicants is hardly virtuous.

> Harvard continues to have a great reputation because they continually produce so many notable alumni.

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?

I do think they have less of a monopoly on prestigious education than they used to. Not that they are not considered prestigious, but compared to 100 years ago, the Ivy League isn’t the only place that produces prestigious grads, especially in STEM (they do retain more importance in traditional “elite” occupations like politics and law). Some of that is just population growth, but I think some is genuinely filling niches that the Ivy League didn’t serve well, like engineering education.

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.

Exactly - public institutions are now the top institutions for many STEM fields. It's simply where they've put their focus over the past 30-40 years and it's paying off.

Harvard's reputation is absolutely diminished, you can ask around millenials/zoomers to get a sense of true harvard rep.

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

This is absolute nonsense. Young people are overwhelmingly pro affirmative action, and none of this has damaged Harvard’s rep at all.

For STEM students it was just never as good a choice as schools with more developed eng schools.

> Young people are overwhelmingly pro affirmative action

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

Local valedictorian of this year's class, in suburban DFW, is going to Harvard to be an engineer. She's Hispanic for what that's worth and was sold on trying to change Harvard's engineering reputation.

> To me it would be more exclusive and prestigious if they gave everyone a free ride but it was entirely on merit.

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.

Seems like it would be a waste of money as many students can afford it, Stanford's model of generous, guaranteed scholarships makes more sense to me.

Harvard is prestigious not from the education but the research, and alumnus network. Tuition is them selling access to both, and the endowment is to fund research projects.

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