We Don’t Do Legacy (2012)
mitadmissions.org
mitadmissions.org
The Admiralty version of this British method (old pattern) was different only in its more restricted scope. The Board of Admirals were unimpressed by titled relatives as such. What they sought to establish was a service connection. The ideal candidate would reply to the second question, “Yes, Admiral Parker is my uncle. My father is Captain Foley, my grandfather Commodore Foley. My mother’s father was Admiral Hardy. Commander Hardy is my uncle. My eldest brother is a Lieutenant in the Royal Marines, my next brother is a cadet at Dartmouth and my younger brother wears a sailor suit.”
“Ah!” the senior Admiral would say. “And what made you think of joining the Navy?” The answer to this question, however, would scarcely matter, the clerk present having already noted the candidate as acceptable. Given a choice between two candidates, both equally acceptable by birth, a member of the Board would ask suddenly, “What was the number of the taxi you came in?”
The candidate who said “I came by bus” was then thrown out. The candidate who said, truthfully, “I don’t know,” was rejected, and the candidate who said “Number 2351” (lying) was promptly admitted to the service as a boy with initiative. This method often produced excellent results.But even with all of that said: not having legacy admissions is better than having legacy admissions.
I liken it to Jim Crow: systemic racism didn't end the day that Jim Crow laws were struck down, but a world without those statutes is undeniably a step in the right direction. So too here: it's not perfect, it doesn't solve the issue once and for all, but it's unquestionably better than the alternative.
Bur it makes me wonder 1) Why must the brand MIT be such a ticket to supposedly meritocratic job market? And 2) why must college attainment be seen as the only way of passage into the middle class?
Jim Crow effects persist today because of the dearth of social capital for many black Americans that both prevents entry into a highly selective launchpad into gainful careers and only has such power for the outsized role social capital plays in job prospects.
The rigor of coursework varies greatly. College degrees in the USA are not interchangeable.
None of this is meant to contradict the fact that elite institutions have lost their way and are artificially scarce. Obviously, there are far more students capable of excelling at MIT than are admitted. And there are tons of faculty who could teach to MIT standards in pretty much every subject. So in that sense MIT seats are definitely artificially scarce.
I just think the fact that there ARE real differences in the quality and rigor of education within US higher ed is often lost in these discussions.
Anyways, to your questions:
> 1) Why must the brand MIT be such a ticket to supposedly meritocratic job market?
Because meritocracy is a lie. Alumni networks are just one example of corruption in the job market. Church networks function the same way. Even high school networks matter. Nepotism is rampant. The world isn't fair.
> why must college attainment be seen as the only way of passage into the middle class?
The only people who see it like that are members of the upper class and upper middle class who fetishize these institutions.
There are many paths to the middle class. Almost all of them start not with "college", but with "don't live in one of the ten most expensive cities in the country". You can get a house in the midwest for very little, and accessible healthcare and trades jobs that don't require a college degre pay quite well in that part of the country.
Irrelevant for me, apparently though, because my kid has said there's no way he's going to go to the school I went to <shrug>.
I have a half dozen 1st generation friends who worked their asses off in inner city schools to get full ride scholarships to get into top schools, and are now part of the professional class in a single generation.
For example, admission to most top grad schools in biomedical sciences is only possible without quota if you have publications. Guess who gets published in their undergrad more often than others? Children of professors.
In the end the reality is pretty much everyone of socio-economic privilege gets one boost or another that's not available to other groups of people. That's why I don't get mad if some underprivileged classes get "unfair" quotas as alleged by the US supreme court. I didn't get mad that rich kids can get into Harvard without too much work, why would I get mad that an underprivileged kids can do that now?
This is like people claiming that because a higher percentage of children of high earning parents become high earners, that they got an unfair advantage because their parents could pay for them to go to good schools, etc. That might be part of it, but having parents who are intelligent enough and have the attitudes and habits to get a high earning job means that you will most likely be more intelligent than average and have absorbed those attitudes and habits as well.
I don't doubt that those scenarios you describe happen, but I strongly doubt it happens at top research schools in any capacity that would be noticeable or affect anything. In fact, professors running the labs that I've encountered couldn't care any less about who you are, and way more about what you can bring to the table in terms of getting things done and published.
They have all been professors kids or friends of professors kids
Quick edit: I’ll also add that PIs project one face to prospective students and “outreach” students, like a high schooler is. Additionally, adding a high schooler to your lab gets you points for scientific outreach, which can help with certain grant submissions.
Sure, but the original comment was about the difficulty of getting published without being a child of an academic or an influentional person. Getting published as a 16-18 years old kid is insanely rare and unachievable for most, and I would agree that for that you might want to rely on hookups from parents. Mostly because it is so uncommon and rare, heavy majority of labs won't even be able to provide the necessary support for a high schooler to be productive in their research (exceptions apply ofc). However, getting published as an undergrad is very doable for most academically-minded students, and there are plenty of opportunities to do so at most research-centric colleges.
As for grad school, guess what's the most helpful item on the CV that professors and grad admission committees look at when deciding whether give an acceptance offer to a prospective grad student? It is their previous undergrad research and publication experience.
My (and that of everyone I know) experience with undergrad research was more like just taking a class with a professor, checking out their research papers, finding their research topics interesting enough, having a chat with the professor after the class or sending an email asking if their lab is looking for research assistants, meeting up with the professor to have an informal conversation to decide whether this is a good fit and whether it is a potential publication opportunity, and that was pretty much it.
Caveat to this: only talking about STEM fields, as I have zero idea how sociology/psychology/etc. labs hire researchers or even operate at all.
Or you get into MIT because of your zip code, which is basically true of all elite schools:
https://www.admissionsmadness.com/blog/your-zip-code-is-the-...
your half dozen friends are anecdotes.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that good schools have better admission rates to good universities.
The actual answer is probably "it's complicated." MIT also doesn't want to filled with Stuyvesant and Bronx School of Science grads. (Though last time I saw the numbers they did admit a fair number anyway.) 5% of my small high school graduating class ended up at MIT but that was a long time ago and I assume that wouldn't happen today.
Genetics don't determine that much as some would like to believe, seriously.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid...
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/genes-dont-just-infl...
I think people strongly want (need?) to believe that good things have happened to them mostly as a result of their own virtues which are of course entirely self-determined.
In fact if free will even exists (evidence is against) the scope for its operation to affect one's future is very narrow. We are who we are, and where we are, because of our parents plus a little bit of chance.
As societies we can decide (to some extent, if democratic) to redistribute wealth and strive for equal opportunities for all. This is a good thing for civilisation, by giving the best minds access to the best training and resources we can make more scientific discoveries and technological breakthroughs.
But is it "fair" in the sense that we all have equal opportunities to achieve greatness? Of course not, we are not all born into (genetic) wealth.
Do we even want less able people to be given the best education? If we would give everybody the same (perfect) education what benefit do people on the lower three-quarters of that spectrum get? You'd need a degree to get even the most menial jobs? That doesn't seem to benefit anybody.
A better idea seems to be "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs". We should stop judging the value of a person by their wealth or their ability or their achievements. We're a very long way from that though.
If we want a meritocracy we have to be comfortable with genetics playing a role in outcomes.
Personally I've realised that a meritocracy would not be "fair" in the way that a lot of people assume.
But still, we have nature (genes, 60-70%) and nurture (hey, parents again). What else is there?
Professors and Teachers, the variability of them is huge.
Friends can have a huge impact as well. Is the norm to skip classes to go work on a startup or focusing on getting good grades?
Resources such as the Numberblocks which make math more visual and accessible. My pre-K kid was doing multiplication because of that show.
But I also feel that sports achievement is given far too much weight as well, in general.
If you're trying to be the Ivy League...maybe not. I recently heard an explanation saying that legacies/"special admissions" are not the customer in this situation. They are part of the product. At Harvard, some percentage of your undergrad class were literally born into more money than you will ever make in your hypersuccessful career. The chance for making connections with such people is why many hypersuccessful/hypermotivated people choose the Ivy League over more meritocratic institutions.
I'm not 100% sure I buy it, but it's an interesting perspective.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universit...
However, this sounds a little like a post hoc rationalization from a legacy person, tbh.
It's why there's such a skewed financial aid. And it's why there's no prestigious rich-kid-only school, because it's obvious the academics aren't very good and that's not what is desired to be seen like.
Some smaller liberal arts schools in New England probably come closest to qualify. But if you've heard of the school that probably means it's large and diverse enough that isn't really an accurate description.
I knew a varsity crew and varsity sailing athlete and despite both being nationally notable in their sports my understanding was the coaches could do nothing to "recruit" them. It of course helps in admission as much as playing a music instrument at a high level or being a published author might. If you have that plus elite academic achievements then you probably have a decent chance at admission to a school of your choosing.
Probably because if you have good athletes, it can bring in a lot of money to your institution via football/basketball ticket sales (a lot more than tuition). It's a question of funding in most cases.
I think in general, we'd all agree that those are good - they show that those people are driven and able to achieve something significant. So does being an elite football player. You have to be up at the crack of dawn for practice. You need to work well with other people. You need to memorize playbooks. It's a lot of work and commitment. Why shouldn't a university look upon that favorably?
And it's a known way to game admissions. How many people do you know who row or fence? Because top schools are looking for a set number of people who are good at those sports each year and wealthy parents can get their kids top coaching for such boutique sports, knowing that.
And I played club rugby undergrad without having done it before. Lots of people play various non-intramural club sports without prior experience.
Yeah, out of a freshman class size of about 4,000 students. It’s negligible.
What kind of argument is that? "Yes my client hit that person but look at it in terms of percentages."
MIT and Ivy League+ schools do not have such deep sports cultures.
You said you were speaking in general, right?
Then, it doesn’t make sense for you to keep harping about MIT or other Ivy League+ schools because your argument falls flat when schools with sports-heavy cultures are brought up. Admitting athletes at the average school really is negligible.
(Unless you edited your original comment to specifically mention these schools? I only read your reply to me that said you weren’t talking about MIT and that you were speaking in general)
Also, I only used a single sport (i.e football) as an example because you used a single sport (i.e football) as an example. I quoted you. I know you were speaking in general. But so was I.
If you have specific concerns with MIT or Ivy League+ admissions as it relates to sports, then just say that! Don’t try to generalize your argument because it’s not helping your point.
(Also, if percentages don’t matter as much as you think, then why were they brought up in the recent Supreme Court case?)
I do think SOLELY athletics may be a bit much, but its impossible to ignore that athletics and education have been intertwined ever since the idea of a liberal arts education existed.
[0]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/analysis-who-is-winning...
[1]: https://gceps.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/162ro...
[2]: https://digital.sandiego.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=191...
Moreover, a classmate of mine from a wealthier family and who was on the football team was admitted to MIT, despite having worse grades and a lower SAT score (he was smart and deserving, I'm just pointing out that my numbers were better).
So while it is nice that MIT claims to not use legacy now, the process I experienced 20 years ago suggests that alumni still had influence then and even athletics mattered too.
To be clear, I'm not necessarily against legacy admissions or athletic preferences. I just wish schools were upfront about it and things were explained clearly to applicants.
Not to discount your experience, but I don't believe what you experienced would fall under "legacy" or "alumni relations." For those, you would either need to have had parents/family that attended MIT, or a close relation to an alumni. It doesn't appear either of those applied to your situation.
Who is better prepared to discuss MIT with alumni? A student with no idea about college or admissions, or someone who grew up with experience and knowledge of the institution.
The push back against legacy is that is gives an advantage and thus less meritocratic. In this interview situation, a legacy is still at an advantage, and from my experience, a significant one.
Again, I'm not sure this practice is still a part of the admissions process. My point is that non legacy were at a disadvantage when they had alumni interviews.
I don't see why. I was interviewed by an MIT alum during my MIT application process back in the early 1980s, and he never asked me anything about my parents or other relatives. (I did not have any parents or relatives who went to MIT, and would have told him so if he had asked, but he didn't ask.) He only asked me about things I had done.
> Who is better prepared to discuss MIT with alumni?
The alum who interviewed me didn't ask me anything about MIT. He told me things about MIT. (One particular piece of advice he gave me was extremely helpful: he advised me to visit the MIT campus before I made a final decision about going there if I was accepted. I did that, and it made a huge difference.) He wasn't quizzing me about my MIT knowledge.
My understanding of MIT's rationale for using alumni to interview applicants is that the alum can provide input on how well they think the applicant would acclimate to the MIT environment. MIT can seem very harsh to a student coming from high school, where they were used to being at the top of everything academically, and finding out that at MIT, they're just somewhere in the middle of the pack. MIT, at least in my understanding, believes that alumni who went through that experience themselves can provide useful input on how an applicant might deal with it.
Honestly, I think you're overstating things. That a parent attended a possibly distant school 25 years ago is a pretty indirect path to wowing an alumni interviewer.
Now, maybe it's different, if the school was a part of your life growing up. A good friend of mine's father has a doctorate from MIT and worked next door at a lab that used to be part of MIT and my friend tells me of sometimes being dropped off in Doc Edgerton's lab to be looked after. But that's hardly typical.
You're making a point here that doesn't support your argument. "Alumni having influence" and "legacy status is considered" are not the same thing.
And there is a lot more to admissions than numbers. Athletics do and should matter - robust health is positively correlated with future success. And essays, recommendations, etc. also matter. And I would think that MIT is not ashamed to say so.
That doesn't seem entirely farfetched, nor does the idea of appealing to interviewer bias in general.
From what I could remember, the alumni interviewer was kind, I just couldn't articulate answers to his questions as I was unprepared and didn't know what to expect. With some insight on the process, I probably could have done better, but it doesn't really matter.
I ended up on a different path and am content with where it lead.
My larger point is that there are many little ways where legacy advantages can leak through even if you have an explicit policy of not considering it.
I think alumni interviews are such a possible mechanism of still factoring in legacy status or making this advantages stand out without it being on the application.
I mean, if we are going down this rabbithole, your "legacy advantage" definition can be shoehorned into literally anything.
I moved to the US midway through high school, with very barebones english and zero understanding of how college admissions process works. I didn't know what SAT was until about a year before I had to take it. Is it a legacy advantage if someone grew up in the US and was familiar with the process ahead of time and was able to optimize for it?
Is having plenty of time to dedicate to studying, instead of spending your time helping parents [who lack any english] translate documents and help with tons of basic life things, like opening a bank account, a legacy advantage?
What about some wealthy first gen international students who have great tutors and know all ins and outs of the american college admissions processes? Is this a legacy advantage, despite their parents never having attended a college in the US (or, very often, not having attended a college at all)?
There is a clear definition of what legacy admissions is when people talk about it, and what you are describing ain't it.
"For those of you not familiar with the practice, “legacy admissions” means preferring the children of alumni in the admissions process. Why would schools do this? For the money, mostly, because if you make your alumni happy by admitting their kids, they might be more likely to give you money."
I agree that colleges should state simply and clearly how they evaluate student applicants.
But if they all did, students would probably need to start preparing in their sophomore year, if not sooner, to get the nice extra-curricular achievements to make their application stand out. I wasn't even thinking about what college I wanted to go to when I was a sophomore.
But I didn’t meet many students whose parents were also MIT grads there, which suggests that they don’t give it a benefit.
Maybe that’s a combination of intellectuals and engineers and scientists and rich people and connected people and business people.
“Legacy” is a good proxy for “connected”. Donors are rich. Test scores find the engineers and scientists. Essays try to identify intellectuals. Etc.
But that’s not fair, because you can’t make yourself rich or connected before you turn 18.
Athletics doesn’t fit into that formula, and quite frankly a lot of academic departments don’t, either. But it’s a form of excellence so I don’t see why it shouldn’t count. A lot of intellectuals seem to think it’s unfair to treat sports excellence on the same plane as intellectual excellence, but that’s a self-serving position to take.
Universities don't vie for the top 100 bassoonists each year and are willing to look past poorer tests results for top bassoon achievers.
To me being the best quarterback at your school and playing varsity football for four years should basically be considered the same way, as you point out, being the top bassoonist would. And my guess is that for the vast vast majority of cases extracurricular activities are pretty much all created equal unless you do it to a degree that makes it notable (like being an all-state athlete, or playing with you regional symphony or something)
But that being said... this isn't a strongly-held opinion, and I'm in awe of anyone going to these schools and what it takes to get there. Being a top talent in one or more sports, and also academically, is amazing, and I don't want to diminish that.
Money in sports distorts things, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean that everyone must treat football and bassoon talents equally.
"The word [meritocracy] was adopted into the English language with none of the negative connotations that Young intended it to have and was embraced by supporters of the philosophy."
blog.
Links to https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/just-to-be-clear-we-do...
which reads:
> anatomy of a WTF in the WSJ
WTF
> Mollie blogged about it back in 2006.
blogged.
> Our institutional research website says, quite specifically, that “alumni relations” are “not considered.”
Nope, it's a dead link.
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MIT, the original source of authority, trying to dispel a harmful myth, can't even be bothered to publish a legitimate, maintained document to use as a reliable, authoritative source for admissions policies. All they offer is gossip from random employees.
Why would they expect random journos to do what they themselves can't do?
[1] https://mitadmissions.org/apply/firstyear/biographical-infor...
Just kidding. MIT, until quite recently, was remarkably backwards in their own administrative systems. Class registration was done by filling out a triplicate form, getting the appropriate signatures, and taking it to the gym to be stamped, with two copies going in a shoebox and one copy being kept by the student to use as evidence for when whoever entered the data into a computer eventually got it wrong.
And this is the same MIT that sold half of its /8 without successfully notifying all the users of said addresses. And also the same MIT that created and still actively maintains Kerberos but, for some reason, outsourced authentication for its own systems to Duo.
So I would believe any level of competence in the quality of MIT’s development, registration and admissions databases.
We Don’t Do Legacy (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14016231 - April 2017 (78 comments)
At the extreme, if it’s a private club, I imagine they could use any criteria (fair or not, including race) but I suppose private universities aren’t the same as private clubs?
So in that case within reason the output is independent of input, and the decision of who to admit to limited places is a matter of larger societal policy. Admittance on "merit" in this case would actually be bullshit in effect.
My employer is also the institution where I got my degree many years ago (I like this city and after coming here I never left) when they taught me, the requirement for Computer Science was 24 points, with Maths. Today the requirement is at least 3 As, one in Maths (which is approximately 30 points by the old system). Do they need better students? No. They need fewer students, they are over-subscribed, and higher requirements deter applicants and some will miss the higher requirement, meaning they teach maybe 500 students (in my day it'd be maybe 80). They still can't find big enough lecture theatres, next year's course will require overflow video relays. As I said, there's no correlation, but the goal isn't to find "the best" it's to reduce the sheer numbers without expensive in-person interviews of every candidate.
The result isn't better graduates, it's about the same, because you could teach (within reason) anyone. Some populations might lead to more pastoral problems†, but the degree to which excellent pastoral care is delivered is independent of actual teaching.
† Somebody's dog dies, they're distraught, don't go to class for a few weeks because they're so upset, next thing they know it's exams and they don't know anything. It doesn't have to be their dog dying, it can be mum got cancer, the family home burned down, their home country has a civil war, or even just the guy next door plays loud music 24/7 and they can't sleep properly. Non-academic stuff happens, you can wipe out somebody's potential by not addressing it.