Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt | Hacker News Reader

Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt

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603 pointsGeekette771 comments

Good. With the end of affirmative action, legacy status in admissions becomes much harder to justify. [0] The number of kids entering elite universities via non-meritocratic avenues is incredible.

> "[The researchers] examined four kinds of nonracial preferences—for recruited athletes, and for children of Harvard graduates, financial donors and members of faculty and staff. The researchers found that more than 43% of white applicants admitted to Harvard between 2014-19 fell into one or more of these categories. Nearly three quarters of them would have been rejected if they had been subjected to the same standards as other white applicants."

[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/end-college-legacy-preferences-...

Opens a ton of slots for race-neutral preferences that can, say, pull in the top performing students from otherwise underperforming urban and rural districts.

It's kind of begging the question to assume multigenerational family ties to a university are "not merit" when a big part of a university's value proposition is social networking: One doesn't go to Harvard just to take courses; one goes to Harvard to bump shoulders with the scions of dictators / diplomats / "captains of industry" etc. Personally I didn't understand that at the time, would have rejected the notion on principle, and still don't really like it, but is definitely worth consideration

Then we might as well admit that "merit" is heavily influenced by starting conditions instead of pretending that everyone has "equal opportunity". How many times have I heard from people that the USA is about "equality of opportunity" and not "equality of outcome"? Legacy admissions is directly contrary to equality of opportunity, and undermines the idea of meritocracy in university admissions that people have been crowing about in anti-affirmative-action rhetoric.

Why does legacy admissions being bad justify racial preferences? Two wrongs don’t make a right.

> Two wrongs don’t make a right.

This is nonsense, in any moral framework worth its salt.

Consider a simple situation:

1. Lying is wrong.

2. Someone's running from a mob that wants to kill them. They went right.

3. The mob stops, and asks you if the person in question went right.

4. Two wrongs don't make a right, so you tell the truth. Or don't say anything, and let the mob go off in the correct direction and chase that person down.

Your example is backwards. Lying is the right, and truth is the wrong in your example.

So in arguing for two wrongs are OK, you are suggesting you'd direct the mob to the person running away (maybe they were a person you didn't like, or were of privilege you resent).

> Lying is the right, and truth is the wrong in your example.

Lying is wrong! Except, according to you, when it leads to good outcomes!

It sounds like outcome-driven morality is what you're pushing for..? Then what's the problem with AA? Not using it to compensate for structural disadvantages is being in the wrong in its case...

"Lying is wrong" is a non-sequitur - like West is to the left. It is morality for 5 year olds or Sam Harris.

>Then what's the problem with AA? Not using it to compensate for structural disadvantages is being in the wrong in its case...

AA fails on that criteria as well. It isn't compensating the people who were wronged and the burden falls on people didn't do the wrong. Poor asian immigrant gets kicked out so Harvard can virtue signal and put a black face on their web page and course catalog. Never mind that kid is a wealthy immigrant from Kenya.

And to make it even worse, the AA admits do worse, drop out at higher rates, and drop down to lesser majors because many aren't academically competitive. They would have done better if they were matched on merit to schools.

Do you have data to back up the implicit claim you're making that dropping affirmative action will, all else equal, result in a larger number of lower-income people attending schools, and that affirmative action policies weren't aiding non-immigrant Blacks?

On the contrary, when California enacted a ban on AA in university admissions in 1996, enrollment of minorities plummeted. Sure, maybe some of them would have dropped out, and some may have changed majors, but at least they would have had the opportunity, and certainly some would have been able to take advantage of it.

It seems that the only demographics that plummeted were whites and Native Americans per https://edsource.org/2020/freshmen-enrollment-csu-and-uc-by-...

It varies by school. https://www.npr.org/2023/06/27/1184461214/examining-the-impa...

> Berkeley and UCLA, the most selective public universities in the state, saw a declines in Black and Hispanic enrollment of about 40% immediately the year after the Proposition was implemented. There was no net change in black and Hispanic enrollment at less selective California universities because while some black and Hispanic students lost access to those schools because affirmative action ended, they also gained Black and Hispanic students from more selective schools like Berkeley and UCLA that those students could no longer get into.

> seems like these very selective public universities in California just provided greater value to relatively disadvantaged Black and Hispanic students who came from lower-income neighborhoods, had poorer job networks, relatively less access to otherwise successful peers, and who were thus able to better take advantage of the resources provided by these super selective universities than the white and Asian students who took their places.

Certainly, specific demographics can vary by school. But the OP said that enrollment of MINORITIES plummeted in the California university SYSTEM. Asians are minorities. There are more schools than UCLA and Cal.

Moreover, we can examine the data directly at Berkeley and realize that the only demographic that has “plummeted” long term is whites. Immediate enrollment percentages may have dropped for black and Latino students but it has recovered and it seems like Berkeley has been able to somehow return to their previous highly consistent proportion of Latino and black students. UCLA is the same.

It’s almost uncanny how the racial percentages at top schools stay so consistent over the years.

https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/about-us/information-...

Fine. You think lying isn't always wrong. I don't care, it's not important, it's just an example.

Pick literally any other action that you think is always wrong. I'll give you a counterexample where failing to do it is wrong.

"Two wrongs don't make a right" is the 5-year old-level morality platitude that you should be turning your ire against. Because, as you're demonstrating, "Wrong" is entirely contextual. A 'wrong' that mitigates another wrong can make a right.

Here's an interesting defense of racial preferences a mutual acquaintance wrote on HN some years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4758529

> It has to do with correcting specific and massive historical wrongs in which our government was complicit, not lifting up disadvantaged people generally.

And I tuned out. I’m not paying for the sins of our fathers.

You’re definitely happily collecting the proceeds of those sins, though, I’m sure.

being a veteran who swore they’re life, lol no. not a chance.

We can say that for just about everyone though.

Most Americans came here after slavery ended, so no they’re not. If you can trace the “proceeds” of slavery anywhere, it’s not the pocket of some Polish guy whose parents got here in 1920, or some German American from the Midwest or some Appalachian. It’s to places like Harvard and the banks, insurance companies, etc., that Harvard graduates end up working at.

The Chicago suburb that I live in right now was debating a quota system to prevent Black families from moving here within my own lifetime, and was until the late 1990s spending tax dollars to subsidize apartments being held vacant for white families. The harm these programs attempt to correct wasn't in the distant past.

But what benefit are you deriving from that?

I can answer this, but first I want to understand better why it matters. It's deliberate, de jure harm inflicted on Black families regardless of the purported and actual benefits to white homeowners.

Because the original statement was that white people are gaining advantage because of the sins of our fathers. Most of us remember our lives and know this is not true, unless you think growing up poor with parents that couldn’t even afford school for their kids is an advantage.

Aside from my thoughts on discrimination in general, which I'm willing to concede isn't a strong argument here, I think describing affirmative action as necessary is naive. Ensuring that disadvantaged groups grow up with quality schooling, healthcare, and whatnot should be the top priority. Creating/improving colleges (because Ivy Leagues aren't the end all be all, even if the social networking is better), reducing tuitions, perhaps providing money on the basis of poverty (which is, I daresay, objective more correct than the basis of race) in the communities and for college are secondary measures. Affirmative action is comparatively simple, convenient, and utterly propagandized policy. If money is the bottleneck, I daresay it's more due to the lack of political will to distribute money cough massive wealth disparity cough.

If only we could track down the author of this take and ask what they think about it.

How would the current thoughts of someone commenting about the same topic a few years ago be particularly relevant to our conversation today?

As far as I see, the argumentation isn't particularly novel or unusual either. It's a pragmatist take, discounting methodological concerns in favour of expected outcomes.

I think that take probably summarizes a quarter of the current debate.

The take is relevant because it's being quoted in answer to its own author.

Oooh, I see. Thanks for highlighting that!

I guess this is an example of how little personal brand visibility HN provides next to the comments itself.

I do wonder to what extent Bangladeshis were impacted by these policies.

A decade sure does change a person, especially when their kids start to demand college money in lieu of merit scholarships.

Remember, graduates of these institutions go on to run everything else, and take these ideas with them. Including bizarre conventions such as the people of color hierarchy, where Kenyans and Ghanaians are higher on the totem poll than equally poor Bangladeshis or Indians. All of us “people of color” have to live within this paradigm.

What pushed me over the edge was facing these policies from the receiving end. I now routinely have to explain my “diversity” to white decision makers in a business context. And my kids—I’ve had three since I wrote that post—are being encouraged to identify as “people of color.” So they can spend the rest of their lives writing diversity essays and trying to persuade white people to pick them.

College racial preferences aren’t the only problem here, but I’m convinced that—given how influential higher education is in American society—they’re the root of the problem.

A decade later, turns out I was wrong. Ironically, it’s because the racial identity politics of the last decade made me realize I’m not white, and that race is such a pernicious concept that even the good white people can’t be trusted with it.

That's fine , but you can't reasonably adopt a tone that there are obvious answers to this, or feign surprise that people disagree with you, when you yourself argued the exact opposite --- and when your reason for changing your mind is so idiosyncratic. I assure you that most people do not arrive at their opinion on racial preferences based on a realization that they aren't white. If that's the reason racial preferences are wrong, it's incumbent on you to disclose that up front.

You can think it's idiosyncratic, but I can assure you (both as an Asian and as someone who knows quite a few Asians) that many (maybe the majority of) Asians whose views on race-based treatment/preferences have changed were driven by the eventual recognition that they exist in the racial in-between. They get almost none of the "privilege" that white people do while getting none of the "protections" that other minorities do. And, at the same time, they are often penalized for being Asian.

It's not surprising or idiosyncratic that an Asian's viewpoint on race has evolved as they've spent more time being exposed to America's racial hypocrisy and experienced more and more of this in-betweenness.

I think we’re making a similar point, but I’d frame it slightly differently. For Asians, racialization is situational. Growing up, I rarely thought about race. Outside of dating and sports, physical differences never came up.

And now, Asians are racialized from both sides. And on the left, it’s this pernicious sort of racialization where we’re “people of color” when they’re trying to show how big their coalition is, but expected to “check our privilege” like white people and defer to the interests of black people and Latinos.

I agree we are making a similar point. My original post had a long rant about Asians only being minorities when it benefits someone's argument (on the left or right) but I deleted it before posting. Suffice to say that there is a long history of marginalizing racism against Asians in America (recall that the Chinese Exclusion Act or some form of it was in effect until the World War 2) and the fight that the left has put up to try to excuse or hide the clear facts that affirmative action policies have (had?) an adverse impact on Asians is the latest example of that.

My reason isn’t idiosyncratic at all: any system of racial preferences necessarily racializes people. Being racialized is unpleasant. I don’t like it for the same reason I imagine the majority of non-white people oppose racial preferences. They don’t want to be treated like that, don’t think it’s fair, etc.

Growing up as someone who wasn’t racialized and then becoming racialized as an adult is something most people don’t experience. That is idiosyncratic, sure, but that’s the reason my view on racial preferences changed, not the reason I oppose them now.

I'm not saying that you're making a risible argument, though I disagree with it. I'm simply saying that you're making a non-obvious argument, and the evidence that I offer for my claim is that you yourself didn't believe it just a few years ago, despite being one of the "token conservatives" in your law school class. It couldn't have too much to do with how you grew up, because you came by it lately.

Make whichever argument you like. I'll only object to your use of the rhetorical frame that implies surprise that someone else would disagree with you. You disagreed with you until recently, as I do now.

You’re mixing up two separate issues.

The argument I’m making about why a system of racial preferences is bad is the standard conservative argument against racial preferences. It reinforces the racialization society and perpetuates it to the next generation. “The only way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

But the question you asked me above was different: why my view changed. The reason for that may be idiosyncratic and non-obvious—I didn’t appreciate color blindness as a social norm until it wasn’t my reality anymore—but that’s a different issue than the first point.

It’s like if someone is a pro-taxes and regulation Democrat and then changes his view because he inherits his dad’s small business when he passes unexpectedly. The reason for the change in view might be idiosyncratic, but the reason for opposing taxes and regulation is standard.

Yes. Once again: I'm not saying that your argument is invalid because you've changed your mind. I'm saying that because you've deeply held both positions on the issue, it is disingenuous to pretend that one of those positions is obviously false. Perhaps you know something new, as the metaphorical inheritor of the family business. It's incumbent on you to share that, rather than posturing as if you knew it all along.

(Again, I agree with Rayiner Classic on this point, and not with New Rayiner, but that's neither here nor there.)

>turns out I was wrong

>race is such a pernicious concept

>even the good white people

...

I think the debate regarding affirmative action is very simple and not unexpected at all. Here's how I view it.

To start, in America I believe that most of us believe that the "default" behavior should be to avoid unfair discrimination, especially for protected classes. I think most people would agree to at least this, it's a pretty generic and obvious statement.

Therefore, when we deviate from this for some reason, generally, it REQUIRES a healthy amount of thought: the baseline should be at least a strong hypothesis to begin the conversation. The world is very complicated, so simply assuming something does what you expect it to because it intuitively sounds like it does is generally not a reasonable position.

And of course, the idea behind affirmative action, hopefully put into words that people feel is fair, is a sort of discrimination, but the intention is of course to try to adjust for past disgressions and injustice to try to "re-balance" opportunity. So unlike the four-letter-word that was discrimination in historical contexts, it is not based on racism[1], for example.

So does affirmative action work? It seems to do roughly what it is supposed to do, although honestly a huge problem is that it's sort of tautological. Of course it works, at doing what it's meant to do. Some have argued that it could potentially harm students by leading to a "mismatch", but the evidence is mixed and in any case it probably causes more good than harm in terms of outcomes. I am not an expert on this though, and I have not been into the studies for a while.

The real question that I think causes so much strife and pain is the one that hurts to try to answer: is it worth it? And that is not easy to answer, nor does it have an obvious objective answer. I truly believe that most of this argument boils down to proxies for this particular question. Some people who have a particular egalitarian bend to their views on life and society might blanket oppose such a policy on an ideological basis, whereas someone who is strongly anti-racist is highly likely to prefer such policies even at high cost.

Cost? By that, in this case I mean in terms of going against the basic belief of not discriminating. Ideology is important to people even when there isn't a discrete cost, but in this case the micro and macro views are very different. On the micro level, someone who is less qualified will be preferred over someone who is more qualified, on the basis of factors outside of their control. On the macro level, population demographics change, generally reducing biases.

There's a lot of finer points. Like clearly, on the micro level, when someone "less qualified" according to some criteria passes due to affirmative action, the idea is that it was beyond their control in the first place that they were less qualified, which may very well be true. And on the macro level, statistics may not tell the full story: demographics are a measurement of people, and people are not fungible. The numbers surely look better on paper, but one must wonder sometimes if it's actually doing what it looks like it's doing.

You might think that I am staunchly opposed to affirmative action based on my framing of this, and the truth is, I simply don't know. I think that it's potentially very powerful, but it also is damn scary to wield institutional discrimination even if it's supposed to be a force for good. This isn't exactly a slippery slope situation, of course, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I've personally flip-flopped probably a lot of times. All I can say is that I sort of hope people don't just assume this is the right way to solve all of the problem of injustices, or maybe even more importantly, that merely instituting policies like this doesn't "solve" America's history with racism and sexism; and I don't think most people believe that it does. For some of those things, I think only a lot of time will truly be able to heal most of that, and it's going to leave a pretty nasty scar.

Of course, beyond the fairly straightforward debate is the culture war bullshit surrounding it, but to me it's mostly noise. I look forward to a future with less influence from Twitter and news organizations so that people can go back to discussing things at least slightly more like human beings.

[1]: Using racism in this context to refer to the fairly strict definition of being related to beliefs about races rather than about discrimination.

What baffles me is that so many people argue solely about affirmative action, as if it's the only possible maybe-solution. I wrote more details here[0], but I think affirmative action can't be effective because it's so narrow, and the alternative should be lifting up poorer communities to an acceptable baseline. A strong foundation provides an opportunity for a strong house, after all. This would have an outsized impact on disadvantaged minorities but is more generally just correct: it doesn't violate equality of opportunity and it actually helps out minorities.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36796543

To go on a bit of a rant unrelated to your comment, but I think what I'm proposing will be very effective, assuming that the focus on education is held in poorer communities. Culture is a touchy subject. Anyways, education has been shown to be an empowering force, and what better way to eradicate racism to the fringes of society than to bring everyone to the same level? Intentional or not, the feasibility of racism would become less as the prevalence of undeniably qualified minorities grows. Affirmative action gets the goal right but not the method. Even if what I'm proposing is somewhat incomplete, it would be a lot better as a starting point of discussion. Surely there must be other people who have thought similarly.

>Using racism in this context to refer to the fairly strict definition of being related to beliefs about races rather than about discrimination.

A fairly meaningless distinction when beliefs about races drives the discrimination.

Affirmative action is just racist, it just is, it’s grounded on the idea that a racial group which outperforming another is in of itself proof of that group advantaging itself via racism and justifying racial discrimination to countervail this. People bought that for Whites, the same logic being applied to Asians broke the system because people find it appallingly racist and divorced from reality.

> How many times have I heard from people that the USA is about "equality of opportunity" and not "equality of outcome"? Legacy admissions is directly contrary to equality of opportunity, and undermines the idea of meritocracy in university admissions...

Understanding "equality of opportunity" to be literal and absolute is nonsense, because to do so would require hobbling people with natural talent (for instance), since not all people have the opportunities created by those talents (there's a famous sci-fi short story about that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron).

IIRC, rejecting "equality of outcome" in favor of "equality of opportunity", means rejecting explicit policies to pick winners and losers.

I don't think you do remember correctly, and equating the ideal of equality of opportunity to Harrison Bergeron is silly. Feel free to peruse any one of this to get an idea of the common usage the term.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_opportunity

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/equal-opportunity/

https://www.britannica.com/topic/equal-opportunity

I think you have it backwards: targeting "equality of outcome" necessitates policies to pick winners and losers. Specifically, it requires policies that aim to minimize both.

Equality of opportunity doesn't mean hobbling talented people or enforcing that everyone be given identical opportunities. It simply means that people regardless of talent (in a given ability) ought not be restricted from an attempting to take an advantage of an opportunity should they happen to have it.

All admissions policies pick winners and losers, that’s the point. A collage which sifts the relative importance of SAT scores vs GPA is picking winners and losers, it’s hardly an argument in favor of any specific policy.

AA increases how much innate talent matters vs some peoples social position. It’s the same outcome as removing legacy admissions, just with a slightly different set of beneficiaries.

Collages have many leavers to get these kinds of outcomes. Favor elite prep schools and suddenly you have a surplus of high income families etc.

Legacy admission preference is obviously contrary to equality of opportunity but I guess people will argue about everything.

I say this as a legacy admit

Yeah, I think part of the problem is that people don't really understand this. I have taken classes at a community college, a directional state school, an R1 and my master's degree is from a highly selective school. My n=1 experience is that the coursework from any accredited program is largely the same. The professors at the state school were actually better than at any of the other schools from a pure teaching perspective. The biggest difference between them was the profile of my classmates. The entire value that Harvard et al. provide is the name brand and the alumni network. The education itself you can get anywhere.

So be sure to network when you get there. Socialize! Attend the parties! It's not just for fun's sake.

Not necessarily true. The more prestigious schools have more budget to hire better professors, but more importantly, can fund top class research that costs ALOT of money.

Your random college probably can't afford a research nuclear reactor, but MIT sure as hell can if they want.

Getting a position as a undergrad on those research projects is incredibly competitive.

MIT is different though as they don't have legacy or athletic admissions.

False. They do have slots for athletes.

"Unlike many other schools, MIT does not send “likely letters” or do “signings,” nor do our coaches have discretionary “slots” which they may fill."

https://mitadmissions.org/help/faq/does-mit-recruit-athletes...

Yeah right. From same doc.

"If you’re a prospective student interested in playing varsity sports at MIT, you should contact the coach of your sport by completing a recruitment form. Depending on your potential contribution to MIT’s varsity athletics, they may choose to advocate for you in the admissions process..."

Heavy thumb on the scale with 90% accept rate.

> The more prestigious schools have more budget to hire better professors

Better by what metric? It has not been my experience that instructional quality is in any way correlated with budget or prestige.

> Your random college probably can't afford a research nuclear reactor, but MIT sure as hell can if they want.

Idaho State has a research reactor. As does Kansas State, Missouri S&T, NC State, Ohio State, Oregon State, Penn State, Purdue, Reed College, Texas A&M, Cal-Davis and Cal-Irvine, Florida, Maryland, UMass, Missouri, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, Wisconsin and Washington State.

You don't have to go to MIT to get onto good research projects in that field. And that's true of every field.

MIT is also a bad example because as the sister comment points out they don't have legacy or athletic admissions.

Have to agree about the professors. They aren't there to teach, they're there to do research.

I found that despite being in regular 2 v 1 tutorials, a large number of professors are simply not that interested in teaching.

The best tutors ended up being PhD students. They knew how stuff actually worked, and had been through the material recently enough to understand how undergrads might not get it.

> Better by what metric?

Sometimes, by material.

If the class can be taught from a textbook, the instructor may be irrelevant. The best classes at my alma mater were being taught by professors who handed out paperback copies of their as-yet-unpublished textbook, or had us work from the first-print editions they authored, or who's "textbook" was the aggregation of notes they'd collected over the years.

Your experience is wildly different than mine then. The worst professors I had were the ones teaching out of their own book.

Definitely one of the worst classes I experienced was Thermodynamics where I had to tip-toe around calling out gibberish in the 1st edition book authored by my professor. He was a real hard ass that would make you feel like the idiot for asking why the book and the whiteboard don't match.

I had this same experience. The professor would say just read the book. We would say but we did read it and we are confused. And he would say I don’t understand the issue it’s very clearly stated in the material.

In fairness I actually did have one good experience with this. I had a history professor assign some material he’d written about the civil war and both he and the material were fantastic. Ironically that was at the junior college. Professors become professors by publishing. I’m not sure why someone would think “wrote the course material” would be a feature unique to elite universities.

MIT doesn't have athletic scholarships. But I'm pretty sure they weight athletics like they do many other non-academic activities (e.g. music).

ADDED: If you're national class in a sport, they'll probably try to figure out a way to admit you so long as you meet some set of qualifications which mean you probably won't flunk out. (MIT tries pretty hard to keep people from flunking out.)

They have slots. Coaches have a certain number of slots, but yes there is a minimum academic performance that they have to adhere to. If you're recruited you know it.

> Better by what metric? It has not been my experience that instructional quality is in any way correlated with budget or prestige.

I can't explain why you haven't seen it, but it's quite prevalent due to the economy of educational resources.

Let's dispense with qualitative arguments and just talk about availability. For example, try to find a class for learning Farsi/Persian in Fullerton, CA. Community colleges don't offer them and the 2 professors that do have curriculum are either at a UC or part time (specific semester + year) at various State schools while they also teach, the more popular, Arabic. How many of each resource are allocated to how many of each school? There are limits and those limits are influenced by tangibles like salary, accomodations, etc.

Cal State Fullerton literally offers Persian. They have 9 different course offerings for Persian. My grad school alma mater has 5 and it looks like the availability is pretty sketchy. From a quick look at it you'd actually be better off going to Cal State Fullerton than that particular elite institution if you want to learn Persian. I'm not sure why you think elite institutions aren't also subject to resource constraints for those kinds of classes. Remember schools like that devote most of their massive resources to things other than classroom instruction. They generally have much smaller pools of faculty who are actually teaching undergrads than a big state school will have.

When I was in grad school I missed out on taking a course I really wanted to take because it was offered by 1 professor 1 semester every other year, and I'm fairly confident he taught no other courses. Which is really common at elite universities. If you want to learn a specific subject like that with a truly limited number of professors the best thing to do is target a specific program. But you very rarely need to go to an elite school to get it. If you want to maximize your chances to be able to take whatever course you want you're actually much better going to a massive state school with 10k faculty than an elite school with 1-2k faculty many of whom rarely if ever teach undergrads.

> more importantly, can fund top class research that costs ALOT of money.

That's important if you're at the college to do research; but many people attend college to get instruction. Top class research says nothing about top class instruction.

but some people try to find top class instruction of research. what's can better than hiring best researchers, give them foundation for research and require they teaching students how to research in same time?

The University of Kansas is an AAU school and has an acceptance rate of 92%. Most R1s are big state schools who admit almost everyone who applies. You do not need to go to an Ivy League schools to get top notch research instruction.

You're incorrect about better professors, but the extra money does allow for ease of research.

The only reason research is perceived to be better at certain institutions is due to the extra money, which allows ease of research.

Most researchers at any university can have the same ideas, and be equally intellectually qualified (if not more intellectually qualified at non-ivy league universities, explained in a bit) to do the research.

The difference comes in the availability of specific labs, with extremely expensive equipment, to perform tasks for collaborators. At ivy league universities, the graduate students effectively get to treat their work as if they were a manager who contracts out every price of work needed. Need cryo TEM of some samples? Send it down the hall, don't worry about it for a week, and then get nicely formatted results done for you by staff scientists that perform this service for the university daily. Need statistics to be done? Send it by email to the team, they'll let you know when it's done, etc.

Other universities don't have this luxury, but I would say it improves their capabilities as a scientist; hence my argument that non ivy league universities have more intellectually capable scientists. For example, instead of sending that sample for TEM, they learn how to do TEM, but not on a fancy new system; rather, the one that uses a car battery and a circuit board that you have to understand well enough to add some extra solder when needed.

I've worked in several different universities, and it's definitely still surprising to me, but the level of incompetence from grads coming out of ivy league institutions is astounding sometimes.

> The more prestigious schools have more budget to hire better professors

The prestigious schools are interested in hiring the best researchers. They don't much care how good they are as teachers.

Some are great, many are terrible teachers. And you don't get to see them much since all appointments are with TA kids anyway.

At the unknown schools the professors are there to teach and do little or no meaningful research so the are judged based on teaching ability, not grant-pulling fame. So they are on average much better teachers.

If you want an academic career, you need to hook with advisors who are famous in the field to get your early papers connected to their fame. But if you just want to learn and go into industry, you're better off with good teacher professors at the no-name school.

I did both, having a degree from a school you've never heard of (but is very good) and a degree from a top-1 (or top-3 depending on your biases) university. At the top university I had an advisor who was well-known in our field, which was fun. But I didn't go into research or academics so that advisor connection didn't do anything for my career. And he was so busy with grant and research work I only got to talk to him once a month.

In terms of learning I learned more from the unknown-name school where the professors were dedicated to teaching and were happy to chat about projects every day.

I did both community college and Harvard undergrad. My experience is that while some intro classes were similarly structured, Harvard offered far more accelerated options for people who are prepared for it. You're right that the student body is a huge difference though.

Absolutely, but it's hard to convince people of this. Elite schools (generally) provide better facilities and peer support, but the quality of teaching is usually better at non-elite (but not bottom-of-the-barrel) schools. Also, grade inflation is, or was, not such an issue. You don't get a "Gentleman's C" at a public college.

The public makes a huge investment in Harvard, both directly through grants and indirectly through waived taxes. Is subsidizing social networking with and among the privileged a good use of public dollars?

Well, you get smart kids who actually earned their spot connected to the rich kids with money. The first group isn't as privileged as the second group. This certainly isn't the best system, but if it was removed, would something better naturally emerge, or would we just further reduce social mobility without any benefit?

/realpolitik

It seems like your model here is that we eliminate alumni preferences at Harvard, rich kids stop getting in but that has no impact on their future elite status. The smart kids miss out on connecting with them and end up the only real losers in the change.

I think you should consider another possibility—-that things like getting into Harvard is how rich kids end up being elite. Take those things away from them and many will still be wealthy but they won’t be elite. They’ll be the guy working a mid level job (or none at all) that just happens to have a really sweet house and vacations in Aspen.

> wealthy but they won’t be elite. They’ll be the guy working a mid level job (or none at all)

I think a super rich kid who can't quite get into say, Harvard, but instead goes to some other school, is not going to be unemployed or pushing paper in middle management, they're still going to work for the family firm, start a business with family money, or cross-pollinate among the other elite families.

Furthermore, if the would-be legacies can't get into Harvard and Yale, the most likely outcome I foresee is that they start to cluster at other schools (say Amherst, Tufts, BU[1]), gradually shifting the character and reputations of those schools and getting us right back where we came from.

I don't really think that is a bad thing, and think it's probably best to stop doing legacy admissions. But I think there's no way this will result in reshaping of class in our society to where the elites are usurped by a bunch of smart, diverse (merit-admitted) kids from the wrong side of the tracks. Best case it gives a boost to the best non-Ivy schools at attracting the descendants of the Harvard and Yale set, potentially to the point of altering society's definition of which schools are the most elite.

[1] forgive any errors in my choice of schools – I just googled top universities in New England and skipped over ones I know are Ivies.

But I think there's no way this will result in reshaping of class in our society to where the elites are usurped by a bunch of smart, diverse (merit-admitted) kids from the wrong side of the tracks.

I don’t see why not. America has a long track record of up from nothing elites.

> Lloyd Craig Blankfein was born in The Bronx borough of New York City to a low-income, Jewish family on September 20, 1954. His father, Seymour Blankfein, was a clerk with the U.S. Postal Service branch in Manhattan and his mother was a receptionist. He was raised in the Linden Houses, a housing project in the East New York section of Brooklyn.

> Sotomayor was born in the Bronx, New York City, to Puerto Rican-born parents. Her father died when she was nine, and she was subsequently raised by her mother, who worked long hours as a nurse to support the family.

> Andrew Carnegie was born to Margaret Morrison Carnegie and William Carnegie in Dunfermline, Scotland, in a typical weaver's cottage with only one main room, consisting of half the ground floor, which was shared with the neighboring weaver's family. The main room served as a living room, dining room and bedroom.

> Lincoln was born into poverty in a log cabin in Kentucky and was raised on the frontier, primarily in Indiana.

> Feynman was born on May 11, 1918, in Queens, New York City, to Lucille (née Phillips; 1895–1981), a homemaker, and Melville Arthur Feynman (1890–1946), a sales manager.

> [Tom] Cruise was born on July 3, 1962, in Syracuse, New York, to electrical engineer Thomas Cruise Mapother III (1934–1984) and special education teacher Mary Lee (née Pfeiffer; 1936–2017). His parents were both from Louisville, Kentucky, and had English, German, and Irish ancestry. Cruise grew up in near poverty and had a Catholic upbringing.

On the other side of the coin there are plenty of second and third generation people running medium or occasionally large companies, Hollywood famously has a nepobaby problem, and there are other bastions of inherited privilege. But we are by no means dominated by certain families the way some other countries are. We have a chance to become even less dominated by breaking the remaining pipelines, including legacy admissions (inheritable dual class stock is another one to look at.)

Yes, I agree that in individual instances it's possible to rise up (and already has been as you point out), it's just that I think that if you are talking about who mostly ends up as Presidents, Senators, CEOs and boards of major companies, etc. I don't see the percentage of that set derived from rich, elite families dipping dramatically just because of things like ending legacy admissions, nor by affirmative action.

Being able to sit down for dinner with a college professor is already a huge advantage. Those kids don’t need an additional boost.

Looking back, my dad was a mechanical engineer and it definitely helped me. Especially in math and science. He showed me the math he was doing and as a kid seeing math done at a professional level helped me appreciate what actually mattered. As a result I really cared about those subjects and I did well.

It would be interesting to see if there is a reason to go to Harvard without legacy admissions. There certainly is a reason to go to MIT for example where they don't have it.

If Harvard wants to be a networking club for the rich, that's fine, but then it should be cut off from public funding.

Cutting off public funds would obliterate Harvard's research output overnight. NSF, NIH, NASA, DOE and other government agencies fund virtually all fundamental scientific research in the United States. Without government funding, most professors (at least in science and engineering) would immediately leave for places where they could access public funding.

Harvard should decide what's more important to it: networking or world-class research?

on the other hand, people go to MIT to interact with brilliant classmates and faculty. MIT's value proposition is that the smartest people are there, and funding will find those people (and vice versa) on the merits of their intellectual abilities.

On the other hand,

> One doesn't go to Harvard just to take courses; one goes to Harvard to bump shoulders with the scions of dictators / diplomats / "captains of industry" etc

is correct about Harvard. Harvard is much more about elitism-qua-elitism. Sure it's academically selective (if you're not from a political dynasty), but that's just because the intellectual elite is only one of many kinds of elite they carry about.

I think this is a true insight about Harvard, and the other ivies that give a "Gentleman's C" to plutocrats' children, but I think it deserves to be destroyed. I'd prefer Lincoln Lab to the Skull and Bones.

The word "merit" is flexible, but not so flexible that it encompasses the mediocre children of well connected people. That's the entire point of "merit" based admission.

You are right that much of the value in Harvard is the network, but that's not the branding.

What that sounds like to me is that we give (/continued to give) national accreditation to elite clubs that care more about status than genuine merits.

Obviously organizations that want to do this should be free to in some form, but does it really have a place anywhere in the education system?

Not all universities seem to be this way. While any measure of merit will definitely be flawed in some way, there are certainly universities that live and die not on elite status but on elite results. In some ways, it's going to be a proxy, because people who are better off will naturally perform better. But on the other hand, at least selecting people literally based on how well they perform academically is more meaningful to the function of education than selecting people because they're related to someone of high status.

I never felt like university was for people like me anyways, but there are DEFINITELY some kinds of organizations that get a sort of special status, e.g. churches, universities, etc. where it feels like we should be scrutinizing them more.

Maybe I just don't understand, though. But, that's what it feels like to me.

That could change, if there's no credible reason for society to support it. Democratizing education quality and access is inseparable from diminishing, or at least changing, the appeal of "elite" colleges.

We're still creating a meritocratic elite, based on capacity limit and price of admission. Not everybody get to have an elite education, or afford such an opportunity.

Ideally, high quality education would be democratized and made accessible to anyone who want it regardless of their means to pay.

> Ideally, high quality education would be democratized and made accessible to anyone who want it

It pretty much is. Hardvard undergraduate classes aren’t substantially higher quality than at many other state schools.

People say this, not sure what it is based on, unless by “many other”s you just mean Michigan, UC, and UNC.

And University of Nebraska, and University of Wisconsin Maddison, and Texas A&M, and Ohio State, and many others.

It seems like you based what you said on some vague notion of prestige, but if you look at the courses offered/required, the topics covered, and the books used of any of the schools I listed, you’ll see it’s effectively the same education as Harvard and the rest.

Unless you think there’s something magical about the professors at Harvard that enables them to teach undergraduate classes far better than professors at state schools, there’s no reason to assume the classes are any higher quality.

> Ideally, high quality education would be democratized and made accessible to anyone who want it regardless of their means to pay.

We already have that for the most part, I can find courses from half a dozen of the worlds best universities online for free right now.

Bingo. At this point, you can acquire a better education on most topics through self-directed free routes like that as long as you're motivated. Or for some areas there are things like bootcamps, the best of which teach the actually marketable skills much better than colleges.

I'd argue that college ceased being primarily about education a long time ago. College in my humble opinion is:

• Place to rub shoulders with elites (mostly only applies at Ivies, or at prominent schools within certain niches probably)

• Proving you have sufficient grit and responsibility to endure adversity and get things done - or more accurately, some in society are willing to use it as a decent filter to exclude those who are lazy and unmotivated. Notably, this has a high false-negative rate, meaning lots of hardworking, motivated people don't attend or graduate from college due to money, time, cultural expectations of their social group, etc.

• Least important: A filter to exclude people who apparently can't be taught. Has the same false negative problem, some fall through here because their schooling sucked and they didn't learn how to learn.

Only that first aspect is really related to whether minorities need a boost or legacies need to be brought to an even playing field. Education itself is easy to get at many schools, and is often better than these fancy 'research schools.'

That's fine and all, but self directed education is a skill in itself in that you need to be able to figure out how to teach oneself and troubleshoot when you're stuck in addition to cultivating a mindset and habits. This is a thing not taught broadly to people, or otherwise well known. It is an entire topic in itself that people write entire books about it.

For sure, there are ton of folks who self taught themselves programming and other skills, which seems to occur mostly be an accident.

There's also the time component. You can learn a lot really fast if you can spend a year without needing to be paid, which is really not possible to achieve unless you're already wealthy.

Totally agree with everything you are saying here. I just don't have a great deal of faith that college actually moves the needle that much on what gets learned, for at least a significant portion of the people who attend.

The word merit doesn't stretch so far as to include mediocre children of wealthy parents. You are welcome to call it an elite education. But the whole point of the word "merit" is to distinguish it from mere parental wealth and connections.

“for recruited athletes, and for children of Harvard graduates, financial donors and members of faculty and staff“

Athletes have merit. Arguably more than some academic departments.

Why should a top high school baseball prospect take up a spot at a college instead of a spot on a local A league team?

Why should a Political Science major take a spot at a college instead of joining a political group discussion on reddit? It’s not like it’s a real science and I don’t see any merit in it, nor what it contributes to college.

I’d much rather have athletes on campus even though I am not one. At least it provides nice facilities for healthy recreation (a lot healthier than just drinking a lot).

Yeah I sure got to use the 75,000 seat football stadium a lot for pickup games when I was in school. It's not like you need 'athletes' on campus to build student rec facilities.

Not what you meant, but the answer is because they are a profit center for the college.

Because money.

Sorry. That's the reality that everyone fails to talk openly about when discussing athletics. It brings in a lot of money for the top schools like Stanford, Michigan, Texas, Alabama and so on. You find a way to replace that revenue, a lot of schools would be happy to get rid of it. But until then?

I mean the B1G has a tv split of almost 100 million a year "per". Once all the former PAC12 schools unite with the B1G, that amount will be even larger.

All that to say this, no one is throwing away 100 million a year. Maybe the elite schools you can get to stop athletic admissions? But that 2nd tier of state flagships that are taking all that in? I'm not sure they would go down without an epic fight.

Now of course, we can question whether or not you need a men's baseball team to bring that money in? You probably don't. But they will all probably fight tooth and nail to keep football and basketball.

But they're already filthy rich. Maybe I'm being too much of an idealist, but universities should be about education, not sport centers.

Too late now. Profits are more important. Maybe the people who benefit don't even understand where you're coming from because they're so greedy. Doesn't excuse them for it, though.

At some schools I'm quite sure that graduating athletes also end up making more money than their non-athletic counterparts, which - even ignoring the "big sports" aspect of it - makes them more likely to become future donors to the university.

Maybe they should open up a casino instead. That would bring in a lot more money without needing to the through hoops of using sports teams to finance higher education.

Too expensive.

For Villanova, a basketball team costs next to nothing. And requires very little admin. A casino costs millions. And requires literally orders of magnitude more admin.

Because they want to become a CEO and not a baseball player? Competing at athletics at the highest level is a good preparer for the executive world. Certainly having a high standardized test score doesn't make you a better CEO candidate.

I'd rather have an engineer or an economist than someone who can hit a ball really well.

Also we don't do this in the rest of the world, the athletic scholarships thing is almost uniquely American.

That's fine, but you're not the one running harvard admissions. And they figure top high school baseball players bring something to the table that engineers and economists don't.

The Ivy Leagues famously don't give athletic scholarships. It's always news when they have a team that doesn't suck in sports people care about. Someone getting into a school on merit that has a serious hobby isn't the point of this discussion.

They don’t give scholarships but that isn’t quite the full story. The below link discusses ways a good sports background can make entrance considerably easier and costs far lower.

https://www.quora.com/Can-a-sports-scholarship-get-you-into-...

Beware. On the next iteration, education will simply lose it's importance in providing any sort of edge in life. Just because well, elites are hereditary, it's only about particular methods of maintaining their hereditary status. Education seems to about to cease to be that method. Which means, we will see all the same people on the same commanding positions in the society - except they will be uneducated/much less educated. Because why bother.

A step like this increases the necessary level of violence applied to the society to keep the elites in their places and the masses in check. Because maintaining elites through educational attainment was the nicest avenue i can think of, all other methods will be uglier.

A good society should know how to let the elites stay in power without getting everyone else too angry.

> With the end of affirmative action, legacy status in admissions becomes much harder to justify.

I've heard this repeated nearly verbatim in a couple of places, and it's such a puzzling framing. Why was this practice any less ethically challenged prior to the SCOTUS decision?

Not sure why this wasn't mentioned more often but it's because of donor money. Donor money that funds things like new cafeterias and other facilities ultimately benefits everyone at school and helps keep tuition prices in check, also complicates the ethics ie if they didn't have enough donors, then tuition will go up and it'll be even less affordable

Yeah, it would be sad for Harvard to get unaffordable.

Noted your sarcasm, but it would be sad for Harvard and its ilk to get EVEN MORE unaffordable for anyone not upperclass.

I think the argument rings hollow to me mostly because it's not that Harvard has to charge this much. I'm sure they could be providing the same quality of education for 1/5th the price. In fact, with the endowments many of these schools have, they could probably go tuition-free for a couple of decades and still be fine.

They charge this much essentially because they can (govt-subsidized loans), and because it helps them maintain a certain reputation.

Harvard has been around for centuries, long-time-horizon planning is rare in the current corporate landscape but less so at such large institutions.

Harvard effectively is close-to-free if you are not rich, but why would they subsidize people from rich families?

Govt subsidized loans thing is wrong also, very few Harvard students have any sort of loan.

Harvard is very affordable post -financial aid and I am not sure where the rumors otherwise came from.

But there's no actual evidence that ending legacy admissions will dry up donor funding that I've seen.

The idea is that affirmative action gave a non-merit advantage to minority students, while legacy admissions gave a non-merit advantage to white kids. (Left out of course, are the white kids from non-elite backgrounds.) People want it to be "fair" by removing more non-merit policies since one has fallen. But I think this thread brings up a good point, as to what it is that places like Harvard are actually selling.

> With the end of affirmative action, legacy status in admissions becomes much harder to justify.

I just don't see this. In our society we believe it to be illegitimate to discriminate on the basis of race. We believe that to be a special kind of uniquely harmful prejudice, one that fractures the deepest structures of society, and that it therefore clears the very high bar required for limiting freedom of association. That is what is at issue in the case of affirmative action, the elimination of which was not a broad referendum on the right to form elite social clubs.

We do not live in a perfect world.

Instead, we live in a world where a collection of individuals has had the fruits of their labor stolen from them for most of the past 400 years, served in wars where promises were made and not kept upon their return, and are still being discriminated against in representative democracy.

And when someone enumerates all the reasons that these people have been harmed, financially, spiritually, democratically, and physically... the people who are against attempts to rectify the situation given the tools available also have nothing but "fairness" to fall back on when attempting to justify their positions, because they'd rather sweep it under the rug and pretend like it's something that we should never address.

You might not agree with the spirit of this an endeavor, but I have a yes/no question for you:

If you were to wear your most clever, most creative writing cap, could you make a convincing case entirely contrary to your beliefs? I'm not asking whether you could write a convincing case against racial affirmative action, because I know you could handle that just fine.

Instead, could write a convincing case that the group you're talking about owes some collective debt to the rest of society, rather than the other way around?

I used to be a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. Their entire case is "it's not fair" in the absolute sense. That because some white folks descend from people who didn't have anything to do with slavery that all should be absolved from participating and benefitting from systemic racism.

It's not an intellectual argument. It's an argument from performative and wanton ignorance.

For sure. My ancestors mostly came to the US well after slavery. The only one that I know didn't fought on the Union side in the civil war. But that doesn't matter, because in my life I've received the benefits of being white in America. And I think a lot of that performative and wanton ignorance is basically refusal to admit that sort of privilege born of luck.

It's quite revealing when you say that "fairness" (scare quotes) is not important.

But that's not the only/main reason. The proponents of affirmative action are guilty of the very thing they say they're against: racism.

When individuals are victims there's a system to deal with that. But you can't have "justice" for people based on birth, skin color, &c. You would have to have the same baseless criteria for discriminating against people. But instead of separating into "inferior" and "superior" you want to separate into "victims" and "culprits".

The solution is to treat the shortcomings, not the people. If black people are doing less well in school, then it might be that the real reason is that poor people are doing less well in school, and the solution would be to deal with that, not based on race.

You say 400 years, but the United States didn't exist 400 years ago. Are the descendants of Greeks (in the US) enslaved by Greeks owed compensation? Are the descendants of Europeans enslaved by Africans owed compensation?

I think it's clear that you don't want to treat the "shortcomings" with any solution that requires something tangible. The only time governments ever treat people on a per-person basis are during the census, during voting, and during the outcomes of trials. That's it. All other solutions are class based in nature.

I never said "black people." That's a you thing. And I'm an American citizen who knows that we've ALREADY had reparations for Japanese-Americans who were held for a few years during WWII but won't do the same for people whose ownership we can directly trace because we've still got the records of ownership and sale.

So if you're going to be flippant, go do it with someone who doesn't understand history, because your argument is silly.

> You say 400 years, but the United States didn't exist 400 years ago.

As a historical fact, West Germany and East Germany both paid reparations to Holocaust survivors, despite neither being legally identical to the German Reich.

If for various reasons you find that unconvincing, it’s also the case that the Funding Act of 1790 has the federal government assume the debts of the colonies.

> It's quite revealing when you say that "fairness" (scare quotes) is not important.

They put it in scare quotes because there is a big difference between "fairness" and fairness. You're not asking for actual fairness.

If there were two children, each who had a cookie, and one child steals the other child's cookie - nobody would say that a fair way to distribute the next cookie is to split it evenly between both children. But that's the kind of "fairness" you're asking for. It's fair in the most basic and childish sense. Once you stop ignoring what came before it's no longer fair.

Sins of the father isn't a popular position in this country. It's also a very hard way to get elected.

The popularity of the sentiment seems to depend crucially on who precisely the father is, and what the sins were.

While we don't engage in mass slavery anymore (well, except for those who are incarcerated), there's still plenty of racial discrimination going on today. Even if we decide that we're not going to talk about reparations for slavery anymore, and things like that, there's still plenty that needs to be fixed that's going on right this minute.

Legacy admissions discriminate by class (if you are well off to be part of a donor family, you get a leg up) or by birth right (if you were a lucky enough sperm to be part of the family of a prior attendee, you get a leg up).

How is the principles of giving preference to a particular class or birth right any different than giving preference to race? All three fly in the face of meritocracy. Yet to not allow this means that one has to invoke government interference of private criteria.

So it seems logical that there are two reasonably argued sides. It seems that if you want to follow a more libertarian model and allow a private learning institution "the right to form elite social clubs" as you put it (surely there is more function to a university than networking!), you would likewise allow it to set other policies as they may, such as allowing preferences for race. Conversely, if meritocracy is the goal, enough to force a private university to change their criteria for admissions, then all three admission practices would be problematic.

The cherry-picked groupings don't make sense to me. Class and birth right favoritism is okay but race based favoritism is not? Why? On the surface, this smacks of protection of elitism and a class based society, which pretty much nulls all commentary from various peanut galleries arguing that ending affirmative action is about meritocracy.

Whatever you think in theory, in practice we have an actual legacy of the extraction, relocation, and enslavement of a particular group of people on the basis of race. We fought a civil war about it and it remains the most enduringly contentious and difficult conflict -- the defining conflict, in many ways -- in our nation's history (right up through today).

It will always be a topic deserving of special dispensation.

The question, therefore, is really quite simple: 1) does that legacy justify a similarly targeted set of rules designed primarily (and maybe exclusively) for the group most harmed by that racial legacy; or 2) does our Constitution in fact demand that no such racial preferences ever again be practiced on this soil?

That's really the debate.

>The question, therefore, is really quite simple: 1) does that legacy justify a similarly special set of rules designed primarily (and maybe exclusively) for the group most harmed by that racial legacy; or 2) does our Constitution in fact demand that no such racial preferences ever again be practiced on this soil?

Yes to both conflicting ideas, how about that. AA was under consideration in the mid aughts and the SCOTUS essentially said it was a special exception, and not to be permanent, but they would allow it at the time.

https://gspp.berkeley.edu/research-and-impact/publications/w...

In her opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor concluded that affirmative action in college admissions is justifiable, but not in perpetuity: “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest [in student body diversity] approved today.”

We conclude that under reasonable assumptions, African American students will continue to be substantially underrepresented among the most qualified college applicants for the foreseeable future. The magnitude of the underrepresentation is likely to shrink—in our most optimistic simulation, somewhat over half of the gap that would be opened by the elimination of race preferences will be closed by the projected improvement in black achievement.

> It will always be a topic deserving of special dispensation.

I completely disagree. Still after another 50 years? Another 150 years? Still 1000 years from now? 10,000? At some point, it has to be eliminated as a special dispensation topic. When exactly that is, and whether that is in the past or the future can reasonably be debated, but to conclude that it should be permanent is well beyond reason, IMO.

> At some point, it has to be eliminated as a special dispensation topic

If white supremacy would stop being perpetuated, we could stop worrying about the effects of white supremacy. But the discussion doesn't have to end after a specific timeframe just because you feel uncomfortable with it.

When someone in the future inevitably asks "what was the United States of America?", it will be long past time...

How interesting that you think it's easier to destroy the USA than it is to end white supremacy in the USA.

I'm not advancing that argument at all, but rather arguing "even people who do believe that will surely agree that the USA will someday cease to exist and, later, will fall out of history to an extent that someone will have to ask who/what the USA even was and, therefore, the notion that we will forever need affirmative action because '[the USA had] an actual legacy of the extraction, relocation, and enslavement of a particular group of people on the basis of race' is highly questionable".

I see. We're misunderstanding each other.

A society with severe imbalances in wealth, health, and power should examine how those imbalances came about. If it turns out that they're directly caused by racism, that society should consider race-conscious remedies. This is true regardless of how long the racist policies have been perpetuated, and it's true regardless of whether or not the federal government of the USA still exists.

I agree with that 100%!

My only disagreement was with the conclusion that such remedies should be ordained at this moment to be "always be a topic deserving of special dispensation" since always is a very/infinitely long time.

I never said it should be ordained for all time. I said it should be ordained until the issue is solved. If that takes another hundred years, we shouldn't just stop because too much time has passed - in fact we should probably double down and accelerate our efforts in that case.

You didn't (nor did I suggest you did); someone else did; that's what started this sub-thread.

I mean, sure, but we’re not even close to there so I’m not sure why it’s relevant right now.

Because a policy that is intended to last over 10K years, regardless of changes in situation is likely to be different than a policy that is designed to last until some level of change in situation has been acheived.

You design one for its ever-lasting nature.

You design the other to achieve a specific outcome.

No policy is designed to last 10k years. Period.

Reminder that even the oldest of official policies in the US are just over 300 years old. Two magnitudes less. Most policies currently in use are less than a hundred years old and are a result of changes and amendments to those that proceeded them.

Even common law is only a thousand years old and has been revised over time.

None of that has anything to do with the issue still being relevant now and for the foreseeable future, ie the colloquial definition of “always”. When that eventually changes, then it can be re-evaluated, but that’s not likely to happen within our lifetimes, so it should very much be remembered when policies are made.

I am not so differently inclined. What I mean to say is that as long as we exist this will always have been a part of our history and as a result addressed in Amendments to our foundational documents. Those Amendments are an indelible form of special dispensation.

You can't say that about anything related to organizations playing favorites with the kids of former members. It's by comparison comically irrelevant.

We get to stop talking about it once racial discrimination stops happening, and we've managed to right the scales when it comes to past discrimination.

If we can do that in 50 years (doubtful) then we can stop talking about it. Ditto for the other time frames you mention.

Even then, we shouldn't really stop talking about it. Forgetting our history increases the likelihood that we'll slip back into old patterns and do it again.

It's possible, but based on current progress, I don't think it has to be eliminated. Certainly, 150 years after Reconstruction we are still struggling with many of the same issues. Or reading MLK 50 years later, his writing still seems very fresh: https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....

Further, humans are social primates. As books like DeWaal's Chimpanzee Politics demonstrate, power hierarchies that seem very familiar predate humanity itself. It's perfectly possible that violently enforced group hierarchies are a natural outcome that can be based on any sort of visible difference. Since race is such a visible and obvious difference, it's plausible that for the rest of our history, we'll have to educate people out of racial bias and put everybody on guard against the emergence of the sort of racial animosity and racial dominance that persists to this day.

>Legacy admissions discriminate by class (if you are well off to be part of a donor family, you get a leg up)

"Nearly three quarters of them would have been rejected if they had been subjected to the same standards as other white applicants."

It looks like simply having alumni or professors or donors for parents is not translating to the academic records one would need to get in on merit alone. But we would expect that having more money to throw at education would lead to somewhat better academic records. So while the argument seems a bit flawed, it also seems like one would never get rid of all economic factors. If it's possible to throw money at education to positively impact outcomes we'll always see a higher percentage of wealthy people making it by "merit".

> On the surface, this smacks of protection of elitism and a class based society, which pretty much nulls all commentary from various peanut galleries arguing that ending affirmative action is about meritocracy.

All this makes a lot more sense when we recognize that the push to end AA came from a political movement that is all about protection of elite privilege. It is fine with the deck being stacked in its favour, which is why it opposes any efforts to counterstack, and why it is very quiet on the subject of legacy admits.

"Class" is often a way to discriminate by race without explicitly doing so. You can't enslave a people for generations then let them go and say "Our bad, I guess we're equal now, you're on your own now".

Like, they were exploited and nearly every free-person in the United States either directly or indirectly benefited from that exploitation. And after the practice was ended those who benefited, including a lot of those who benefited greatly, got to keep the spoils of that exploitation.

And you're right, ending affirmative action wasn't about meritocracy. Protecting legacy admissions serves the same purpose as ending affirmative action.

Personally, I believe that there's a way to do affirmative action without violating meritocracy. Just, all other things being roughly equal, make sure you're not picking all white dudes. Stop inventing excuses to exclude people who don't look exactly like you.

But favoring legacy status in admissions is a form of racial discrimination because non-white people are much, much less likely to have legacy at elite institutions.

Harvard posted that 70% of their legacy admits were white and 30% non-white. That's higher than the population of 18 year olds but maybe not as extreme as some would think.

If a 'fair' coin came up 70% you lose, you'd be ready to fight the person trying to scam you. At the very least ready to call the cops on them.

I don't think racial discrimination is the right term for discriminating based on things that happen to correlate with race.

Everything correlates with race. Height, disease, money, eye color, divorce, number of pokemon cards, you name it.

You may as well call it eye-color discrimination, height discrimination, pokemon card discrimination, etc, as well. It just makes no sense at that point.

So what exactly is the point of calling it racial discrimination then? Isn't every single policy racist then?

> I don't think racial discrimination is the right term for discriminating based on things that happen to correlate with race.

I agree, but we shouldn't be blind to discrimination that correlates with race, because enough of it can be equivalent to racial discrimination at a population level.

> I don't think racial discrimination is the right term for discriminating based on things that happen to correlate with race.

Fortunately for people of color, it is. You don't have to say you're discriminating based on race in order to be doing so, and the law acknowledges this. That is how gerrymandered district maps can get struck down on the basis of racial discrimination. We do actually get to look at reality when we are deciding if an act is racist.

Well, depends on the day. See the Trump v. Hawaii (the Muslim ban case). In this case Trump did say he wanted to ban muslims, but it didn't even matter.

I mean why would it? The law explicitly stated he's allowed to ban immigration and travel of non USA persons based on whatever he feels like. Non USA persons don't get the same rights especially around entering the USA.

That’s funny because Trump v. Hawaii proves the opposite. Obama was the one who identified those specific countries. They just happened to all be Muslim. Trump said he wanted to ban Muslims, but did so by using a list of countries that Obama had generated based on presumably non-racist reasons.

gerrymandered district maps can get struck down on the basis of intention of racial discrimination. Correlation and intent are two very different concepts, and it is very dangerous to assume that everything that correlates do so by intent.

> it is very dangerous to assume that everything that correlates do so by intent.

Yes but it is much more dangerous to assume that correlation can't imply intent. Because sometimes it does.

Indeed. Once a situation is suspected to be done by criminal intent, investigators can interview personal, go through search histories, looking for text conversations and so on. Once collected a judge can look at it and determine if there is or isn't intent.

It is a costly, time consuming and cumbersome process, but the legal system is quite used to it since almost every single criminal case involve some aspects of establishing intent.

>> gerrymandered district maps can get struck down on the basis of racial discrimination

Under current interpretation of civil rights laws, district maps can get struck down on the basis of racial discrimination if they are not sufficiently gerrymandered.

I assume you’re referring to section 2 of the voting rights act? If so, I find that a pretty disingenuous framing. Can you point to an example of what you would consider to be a fair map getting struck down because of a VRA violation?

Since it’s the most recent high visibility VRA districting case, let me just say from the outset, the SCOTUS case involving the AL congressional map is most definitely not such an example.

Legacy doesn't just correlate with race - the fact that legacy admissions are so heavily skewed towards white people is because of past racial discrimination. It's a grandfather clause of sorts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfather_clause#Origin).

Actions can have racist outcomes whether or not they have racist intent.

(obviously one can argue about the intent until the cows come home if you wish, but the outcomes are more a matter of fairly straightforward facts about the world).

So what exactly is the point of calling it racial discrimination then?

We should point it out when it happens. Most of us know what sorts of stunts were pulled with Jim Crow era laws. None of these were explicably racist on paper, but we all know they intended racism and exclusion. And these sorts of policies continue that tradition, even if it wasn't meant to.

If a policy winds up being discriminatory like this, we should call it out and change it. Not doing so means silently agreeing with the discrimination. The justification matters little.

Isn't every single policy racist then?

Obviously not.

The point is that legacy admissions have always been an egregious injustice. One effect of affirmative action was to (partially and imperfectly) ameliorate the admissions situation. Now that's gone.

As far as the freedom of association goes, that's not an argument in favor of legacy admissions but it is possibly an argument that the government should stay out of it. Given the central role that universities play in our society, and the fact that they depend on government support, I think it's a complicated question. Ultimately I think it's also an uninteresting question - the important thing is building a societal consensus legacy admissions are wrong and should end.

Depends. Often well to do alumni donate significantly to their alma maters which grow their endowments and allow the institutions to offer more in terms of scholarships.

That said, I agree with removing this priv.

I never really understood the complaint. Rich people spend massive amounts of money to send their kid to a school. That massive, completely unnecessary investment is then reinvested across the students attending the school, who come from all different backgrounds.

This is, in effect, one of the most common ways wealth is redistributed in the US. Why is it so bad? Maybe we should limit it, but the actual practice itself is probably more good than bad.

You can do one without the other. The biggest problem in my oppinion is the lack of the mentioned redistribution for the first 18 years of the poor sob's life who lucks out since that's way more important than the extra money for the already extremely wealthy institutions.

> This is, in effect, one of the most common ways wealth is redistributed in the US. Why is it so bad?

Because the government could simply tax those with wealth more and use taxation as a means of redistribution. Like most western countries do.

Anand Giridharadas dissects this topic rather convincingly in his "Winners Take All", see also his infamous google talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_zt3kGW1NM

> Because the government could simply tax those with wealth more and use taxation as a means of redistribution.

I don't think the word "simply" applies when you are suggesting the government take money from billionaires with their armies of lobbyists and redistribute the money to the masses.

So because billionares will try to fight legislation to keep them from trying to make things more equal, instead we should have them just voluntarily give their money to universities, as if that somehow isn't even more susceptible to being spent the way they want rather than to make things more equal? I admit I'm biased in favor of using taxes instead of university donations to redistribute wealth, but even for a position I disagree with, this seems like a fairly weak argument.

Using taxes would be (IMO) ideal, but that just isn't politically feasible in the US. I'm not sure I'm convinced that university donations from the wealthy is anywhere near as good when it comes to wealth distribution, but it's pointless to say "doing this with taxes is better" if we don't have those taxes and can't have those taxes.

> So because billionares will try to fight legislation

They don't "try". They succeed. Time and time again. Maybe at some point they'll stop succeeding, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

I just don't see a reason to pick a fight if the status quo is "everybody wins".

Billionaires get to send their kids to good schools and everyone else at the school gets their education subsidized by those billionaires voluntarily.

The only difference I can see with using taxes is that the billionaires' kids don't get to pick their school, and the government now has to waste time and effort collecting and auditing those tax dollars.

I don't see a gain that's worth the effort. They can still donate money to the school or its employees if they want to influence the school's policy, or maybe just make some phone calls to accomplish the same.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that billionaires have a lot of advantages that we should try to even out, but this feels like picking a fight for the sake of it. There are better things to try to fix in the world.

> I just don't see a reason to pick a fight if the status quo is "everybody wins".

> Billionaires get to send their kids to good schools and everyone else at the school gets their education subsidized by those billionaires voluntarily.

That's not "everybody though"; most people _don't_ attend elite institutions like that, and every spot that goes to a billionaires' kid means one less spot for a kid without wealthy parents able to work the system like that. The argument being made is that having taxes instead and using them for public goods that are accessible to a much wider swath of the population would be worth doing instead; I tend to think that the answer to this question is yes, it's worth the effort, but even I'm skeptical that "it's all going to suck anyways" or "anyone who doesn't go to an elite school is irrelevant to the question of how individual wealth can improve society as a whole" are the best counter-arguments to my point of view.

Enlighten me. Which G20 nation has better economic conditions than the United States?

According to this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average...

The PPP adjusted median income is highest in the US (not counting Iceland/Luxembourg for obvious reasons).

And as a follow up, how stable is the government in your example countries? The US has the worlds oldest document-based government. The rest of the “western countries” have constantly collapsing systems/borders with the exception of France who has historically done exceptionally well in this regard.

TL;DR - Why should we take notes on wealth redistribution from other societies which are less successful?

I think it's worth pointing out that income inequality is much worse in the US; the Wikipedia page you referenced reflects this somewhat: "2020 average wage in the United States was $53,383, while the 2020 median wage was $34,612."

If you define 'better economic conditions' as meaning more wealth in total, sure, the US is at or near the top. But however, if you're interested in knowing how most people are doing, the reality is that many of our European friends are better off than we are.

The one example I'm personally aware of is Switzerland, which has a wealth tax and relatively low overall taxation. People they tend to live longer lives than we do, they have more disposable income, great infrastructure, a pristine natural environment, local manufacturing, and they have hundreds of years of political stability.

Median (not average) PPP income is highest in the US. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income

While it’s true our income inequality is larger, the fact still remains that the median American makes more money than the median European (or any other comparable region).

Ask yourself: Is it better for everyone to be richer and have high inequality? Or is it better for everyone to be poorer but more equal?

EDIT: Switzerland is a good point. They are a prosperous and highly educated society! It’s just tough to compare in my mind because the US or EU is hundreds of times larger.

Comparing absolute numbers for income is a bit of a fool's errands, even when you use PPP.

The philosopher John Rawls has a famous thought experiment of choosing a form of social and economic organization without knowing where you personally might end up on whatever heirarchy it generates or contains. Rawls' point was that in such circumstances, most even semi-rational people will choose the one that makes it the most likely that they will not end up in a non-disadvantaged position, which is the fundamental concept behind an egalitarian to oppurtunity and inequality.

Given that, faced with a choice between:

1) a society that carries out substantive income/wealth redistribution so that few people (if anyone) has issues with a broad set of "basic" needs

2) a society that offers limited substantive income/wealth redistribution in the name of "high rewards for high achievement" or something similar

most people in Rawls thought experiment will choose the former.

You only choose (2) when you have reason to believe you will be a high achiever, which in a truly meritocratic society, you cannot know in advance.

So, the US is a society in which median (PPP) income is highest, but low income redistribution ensures that large numbers of people struggle to enjoy the things that US society considers "normal". By contrast, social democratic societies in Europe have lower median (PPP) income, but higher income redistribution means that far fewer people face such struggles.

Rawls would maintain that a rational person with a belief in justice would always pick (1), and that only irrationality or some (unfounded) conviction of one's own certainty of outsize success would lead someone to pick (2).

I appreciate the response!

> By contrast, social democratic societies in Europe have lower median (PPP) income, but higher income redistribution means that far fewer people face such struggles.

The idea that EU citizens do not face poverty is simply false. The EU sheltered homelessness rate is very close to the US, both under 0.2% which is phenomenal honestly…

Poverty rate statistics are quite tricky to decipher. But all the data I can find says that there isn’t an outsized difference between the regions. Rates in US states vary as much as EU member countries with plenty of states from both regions exceeding or below US/EU averages.

I’m not trying to be a blind patriot stereotype or even claim that the US is “better” than other portions of the world.

My only point is that objectively speaking, living standards in America are PHENOMENAL. We should not “redistribute wealth like other western nations” because I can’t think of any G20 nations that have a clearly preferable economic system.

Also to your point about Rawls, if you go too far with redistribution you remove the incentive for people to do difficult or unpleasant work. We’ve witnessed this countless times over the past century in all the failed socialist/communist societies. In a less extreme example we just witnessed France default on its pension obligations!

Nobody is going to work for free. The US spends more money than any other nation on social welfare programs. It’s inefficient and unsustainable. How can we honestly consider expanding wealth distribution programs when we can’t even afford what we have now?

If you can think of a particular nation’s system we should emulate I’d love to hear the argument with an open mind. I honest to god cannot think of any.

How about Denmark? Seems like a smooth running country. Hardly any national debt. Free healthcare and education for all. Consistently rated as one of the happiest countries on earth.

I don’t know much about Denmark but it sounds like a great place!

I’d be concerned that policy in Denmark wouldn’t work in the US due to the enormous differences in size, culture, geography, etc.

That’s why I think it really only makes sense to compare G20 countries or entire regions like US:EU

Do you think that Delaware or Wyoming's economic systems are substantively different from those of the USA as a whole? Obviously, the specific industries/service sectors of these states are quite different from one another, and from other states, but they represent applications of "the American way" to very small populations (1M and 600k respectively, massively smaller than Denmark).

The Danish way of things is clearly an entirely adequate model for populations of up to 5M or so. Claims about culture, geography are red herrings (they are almost always overstated, and sometimes just outright lied about).

Whether it can scale to, say, 40M larger (as in our biggest states) is a valid question, but given the much greatest similarity between Denmark and Germany than Denmark and anywhere in the USA, despite Germany's 84M population, I'd suggest the burden of proof there is on those who say it can't scale.

Of course, the Nordic social democracies do have their own problems, and there's no shortage of people from those nations who will fill your ear with complaints. Some of them deserve to be listened to, but if you think that society is better when modelled around collective self-improvement, broad social interdependence, and a general sense of shared responsibility for everyone's welfare, they are mostly noise.

"sheltered homelessness" is an important metric, but it's not the one I would to differentiate between levels of income/wealth redistribution, precisely because it affects such a small part of the population.

the metric(s) I would use need to be ones that are meaningful (and meaningfully different) for more substantial parts of the population.

So, some suggestions could be:

* medical care induced bankruptcy

* personal bankruptcy in general

* percentage of income spent on housing costs

* disposable income after housing, health care, education and transportation costs

* some measure of "timely" access to medical care

* inter-generational economic mobility

There are certainly issues within the EU with any and all of these (worse in some places than in others), but overall my understanding is that the US generally does worse on all of them.

I am originally from the UK, and I would argue that while there are aspects of quality of life here in the USA that are vastly better than the UK or the EU, most of those things are primarily the domain of those who make median or above median income. I certainly don't think that the economic system in the USA is better than those found in the EU, even though there are some metrics where you might make that case. But mostly what the USA has a lot of that the EU has much less of is economic churn - businesses constantly starting and almost all of them failing, followed by more businesses starting etc. This gives the impression of very prosperous, active economy, but I would question whether we really do much better out of this model than the EU does with their much less entrepeneurial systems.

> if you go too far with redistribution you remove the incentive for people to do difficult or unpleasant work

The people who earn the most in our system are not the people who do difficult or unpleasant work, and it just seems preposterous to me to suggest that there is a link here.

> In a less extreme example we just witnessed France default on its pension obligations!

This is not an example of what I think you're claiming it is an example of. Defaulting on pension obligations is about a failure to honor past labor contracts, not income/wealth redistribution.

> How can we honestly consider expanding wealth distribution programs when we can’t even afford what we have now?

Same way we can afford a war whenever "we decide" to fight one. Same way we can "choose" to spend more than the next 10 top military spenders combined. We are a rich country, and we could choose to place substantially more emphasis on the quality of life of all our people. But we "choose" to do otherwise.

That's a typo its supposed to be "Unsheltered Homeless".

I don't think you're understanding the broader point. Look at the economic data. The PPP median household income and PPP net wealth is much higher in the US. Yes, the income/wealth distribution curve is skewed to the right here...

But the majority of Americans are wealthier than the majority of Europeans! A random sample of both populations would yield wealthier individuals on the US side.

Equal distribution by itself is a silly goal. The goal should be increase the net income/wealth as much as possible for as many people as possible.

> I certainly don't think that the economic system in the USA is better than those found in the EU, even though there are some metrics where you might make that case. But mostly what the USA has a lot of that the EU has much less of is economic churn - businesses constantly starting and almost all of them failing, followed by more businesses starting etc. This gives the impression of very prosperous, active economy, but I would question whether we really do much better out of this model than the EU does with their much less entrepeneurial systems.

This is an insane take. The technological innovation that comes out of the US blows Europe out of the water. Where is all the European competition? Just look at the financial statements of the largest EU and US corporations. The data is plain as day!

> The people who earn the most in our system are not the people who do difficult or unpleasant work, and it just seems preposterous to me to suggest that there is a link here.

You're wrong. Any meaningful tax revenue for wealth distribution would have to come from people in the upper quintiles. These are lawyers, doctors, engineers, oil rig workers, underwater welders, etc.

You still haven't suggested any actual policy change. I'm guessing you have a nebulous idea of "take it from the billionaires". There is no way in hell we can create a wealth tax that generates a $1T+ in annual tax revenue. There aren't enough billionaires to sustain such a tax and they absolutely have the means to legally evade taxes or jet off to anywhere in the world. Also, we already have the estate tax!

> This is not an example of what I think you're claiming it is an example of. Defaulting on pension obligations is about a failure to honor past labor contracts, not income/wealth redistribution.

Dude. Its literally a government run wealth distribution scheme. It's the basis for most citizen's retirement. The government isn't paying out what they had promised.

> Same way we can afford a war whenever "we decide" to fight one. Same way we can "choose" to spend more than the next 10 top military spenders combined. We are a rich country, and we could choose to place substantially more emphasis on the quality of life of all our people. But we "choose" to do otherwise.

We cannot afford infinite wars. Our military spending is dwarfed by our spending on social programs. Go read the federal budget for fucks sake. The majority of our budget is social security, medicare/medicaid.

Go read history and international news. How can you hear about the current events in Europe and claim that economic conditions are good? The region is unstable and full of young governments. The region cannot create its own energy, which kneecaps its own heavily industrial economy. The region is entirely dependent on the US/China and is just now decoupling from Russia. Macron is ranting about the lack of European Sovereignty. Inflation is much worse in the EU. The continent will definitely stabilize, and its not the end of Europe...but they've sustained significant economic damage.

I don't give a fuck about nationality. I don't think America or Americans are superior. Europe is our most powerful ally and I wish prosperity for the entire region. I just hate this constant populist rhetoric that the US needs to adopt undefined mythical tax/spending systems to achieve some fantasy utopia.

Please name the policy changes required to solve poverty in America. You'll be a hero.

Policy changes:

return to a much higher upper marginal tax rate (there's no evidence that the reductions which started with Reagan have benefitted most Americans in any way).

reduce military spending (American's socialism) by at least 50%.

take the money from these two actions and use it on infrastructure and social support.

> These are lawyers, doctors, engineers, oil rig workers, underwater welders,

These are not the people who earn the most in our society. They might be the top 10%, but they are not the top 5% let alone the top 1%. The way you make the most money in our society is overwhelmingly by playing games with money. And before you cite someone like Bezos ... well, I worked with him. Bezos is an exception that proves the rule (and is surrounded by people who played games with money in order to make money).

> Dude. Its literally a government run wealth distribution scheme. It's the basis for most citizen's retirement.

If I am hired for a job, and the job pays $X/year and contributes $Y/yr to a pension, with the promise that in retirement I will be paid $Z/yr, there is no possible way to construe that as a government run wealth redistribution scheme, even if I am employed by the government. Wealth redistribution schemes consist of taking money in taxes from people with more money and (in some way) giving it to or spending it on people with less.

> The technological innovation that comes out of the US blows Europe out of the water.

Certainly there is a particular kind of technological innovation that the US is very good at. But ... I would first question the extent to which this innovation is necessarily a force for good, and secondly I would point out that this prowess does not extend to micro-electronics (where Asia dominates overwhelmingly) or mechanical engineering (where Europe is generally still ahead of anything in the USA. There's a reason German designed and built equipment is still so prized). Even with pharma, its not entirely who is doing the best work (rather than the most work).

> But the majority of Americans are wealthier than the majority of Europeans! A random sample of both populations would yield wealthier individuals on the US side.

In terms of income (even adjusted for PPP), sure. But as I tried to explain, that's a silly way to measure wealth, at least if it is the only way you use. As an American, I am forced to spend more of that increased wealth on things that would be free-at-point-of-service or just cheaper in Europe. Granted, there are Americans (mostly wealthy Americans) who like things that way; I understand that, but I think it's a sub-optimal approach to social organization if egalitarianism is the goal.

> return to a much higher upper marginal tax rate (there's no evidence that the reductions which started with Reagan have benefitted most Americans in any way). > reduce military spending (American's socialism) by at least 50%.

This is not even a remotely serious proposal. There is no scenario where both parties agree to cut the military budget in HALF! Have you looked at the actual budget numbers? We're going to have a 2023 budget deficit of $1.5T. Even if we could, in the midst of the the Ukrainian invasion and rising tension over Taiwain, cut military spending by 50%, that's only a ~$400B reduction of our annual deficit. Do you seriously expect to extract an additional >$1T from income tax in the top bracket? Basic napkin math should tell you this isn't possible.

Also lol at "America's socialism". How do you explain the fact that SS,medicare,medicaid absolutely dwarf military spending?

> take the money from these two actions and use it on infrastructure and social support.

Complete non-statement. What specifically are we going to do with you imaginary tax revenue?

> ...Wealth redistribution schemes consist of taking money in taxes from people with more money and (in some way) giving it to or spending it on people with less.

I don't know how to help you understand this. I suggest reading this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pensions_in_France. Here's some quotes:

"This minimum pension (Allocation de Solidarité aux Personnes Agées in French) is the first level of the first pillar of the French pension system. The ASPA is a monthly benefit paid to low-income seniors, whether or not they are former employees. It is not a retirement pension: it is financed by the State, not by social contributions."

"The mandatory state pension is an unfunded contributory pension based on the redistribution of contributions from those working to those in retirement."

"The mandatory occupational pension is a defined contribution scheme that is mainly based on redistribution"

The French pension system is a direct transfer of wealth from workers/citizens to beneficiaries. The US equivalent is social security.

> In terms of income (even adjusted for PPP), sure. But as I tried to explain, that's a silly way to measure wealth, at least if it is the only way you use. As an American, I am forced to spend more of that increased wealth on things that would be free-at-point-of-service or just cheaper in Europe.

Your understanding is incorrect and the cost of living (including government subsidies to healthcare) is included in the OECD statistics:

"This indicator [Household Disposable Income] also takes account of social transfers in kind 'such as health or education provided for free or at reduced prices by governments and not-for-profit organisations.'"

---

I do not believe you are arguing in good faith. Your argument basically boils down to "Ignore all the economic data because it doesn't tell the whole story". If you reject the OECD data, corporate financial reports, and national statistics, the least you can do is offer some other data to compare.

Go play with this neat little tool - https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-disposable-income.htm

The US beats the EU on almost every indicator including household income, net worth, debt, and savings.

Let's look at France then. They have lower numbers on paper when you look at things like per capita GDP, but they live longer lives, work about half the hours we do, take a full month of vacation, have access to free higher education and healthcare, etc. The estimates for their overall wellbeing are very similar to ours [0].

At to income distribution - in France the lowest quintile controls 8% of incomes [1], while in the US that number is less than 3% [2]. In fact, the second quintile in the US controls only 8%, which means that for the bottom 40% of income earners, one is very likely to be better off living in France.

Income inequality does indeed matter when you have many millions of people living in abject poverty, and it is a very relevant thing to consider when comparing economies.

[0] http://klenow.com/Jones_Klenow.pdf [1] https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/france/income-distribution [2] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-p...

There’s a lot of great things about the French economy. There’s also plenty of areas where they lag behind the US.

The French labor force participation rate is ~74% compared to ~62% in America.

The French homeless rate is 3x the US rate.

France just defaulted on its national pension obligations a few months ago.

What policy exactly should we copy from France? If we’re still arguing about wealth redistribution policies I want a clearly articulated example of a superior system. I don’t see where it is in France but please lmk if I’m missing something.

Sure, I’m not suggesting we copy any one policy, but the assumption that people in the US are better off than everyone else and that it is somehow because we don’t tax wealth is kind of silly.

By some measures many European nations are better off economically than we are. And many of these countries have wealth taxes.

We’d also be remiss to overlook that the US had a tremendous advantage in not having our infrastructure destroyed in the middle of the 20th century.

Glad we could find common ground! I’m not claiming that life in America is inherently better…just pointing out that things are pretty fucking good all considered.

I’m not in favor of a wealth tax though I frankly still don’t see any evidence that it improves society. Our edge as a nation comes from our insane technological and economic output. Squeezing the private sector too hard can drive away that innovation.

At some point in the future our economic machine eventually falters and we’ll loose reserve currency status. That’ll mean a massive drop in US living standards across the board…so I hope it happens way after we’re dead.

> just pointing out that things are pretty fucking good all considered.

That might be true, but we can do a lot better in terms of eliminating poverty.

> I’m not in favor of a wealth tax though I frankly still don’t see any evidence that it improves society.

Blindly throwing money at things probably doesn't help. I daresay there are plenty of great initiatives the government could support with better spending. If money becomes the bottleneck, that's where the wealth tax comes in.

> Our edge as a nation comes from our insane technological and economic output. Squeezing the private sector too hard can drive away that innovation.

I don't think we have been squeezing the private sector hard enough. I value the notion of innovation enough that I don't support widespread nationalization of companies, but there's plenty of waste going on. Government contractors are a great example. Our unbridled capitalism has resulted in massive corporations focusing on making obscene amounts of profit. Insurance companies, credit companies, data brokers, FAANG (although some of what Google does is quite innovative), etc.. I imagine there's a disproportionate amount of innovation considering all the profit.

Those numbers are not what you say they are.

> The following table represents data from OECD's "median disposable income per person" metric; disposable income deducts from gross income the value of taxes on income and wealth paid and of contributions paid by households to public social security schemes. The figures are equivalised by dividing income by the square root of household size.

According to that metric, public healthcare, public pensions, and subsidized education and childcare lower disposable income, while private versions of the same services don't. Additionally, cultures where adult children often live with their parents have higher incomes by that metric than those where they move out earlier.

The OECD definition says this:

"Information is also presented for gross household disposable income including social transfers in kind, such as health or education provided for free or at reduced prices by governments and not-for-profit organisations."

See: https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-disposable-income.htm

I'm not disagreeing with your wider point, and in particular I do agree there's a lot to admire about Swiss society—but want to mention they have had a few bouts of instability in the past several hundred years.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland_in_the_Napoleonic_...

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restoration_and_Regeneration_i...

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonderbund_War

> counting Iceland/Luxembourg for obvious reasons

Obviously you wouldn't want to count any cases that contradict your claims.

Lol. The US is hundreds of times larger than those countries. It does t even have to be about the US…

Do you really think it’s reasonable to compare Luxembourg with its 600k population to a country like Germany which has 84M citizens?

This sort of rationale would seem to suggest that you also cannot take examples of bits and pieces of the USA and compare them with the country as a whole.

Yes I agree with that! It makes no sense to compare Beverly Hills to the state of Oklahoma.

>> the government could simply tax those with wealth more...Like most western countries do

Not sure where you're getting your data, but, looking at Europe as a proxy for "western countries" not including the US, in 1990, 12 countries in Europe had a wealth tax, while, as of 2019, only 3 did. Weather taxes were generally considered a failure.

This is like shooting yourself in the foot. Billionaires will just move their wealth elsewhere. The only things this would accomplish are weaken the US economy and the dollar.

So, the wealthy ruling class will seize money from the wealthy merchant class and (checks notes) give it to the poor?

I'd suggest they would use the new windfall of (never to be seen) money to launch another useless war.

The fundamental question is: do we want admissions based on merit (or not)? Saying "Yes" and then carving out an exception for the wealthy is dishonest (IMO); if the answer is "No, admission is not on merit" then we need to talk about what other considerations would be fair game.

Also, implicit in your argument is that universities getting more money is always a good thing - I take umbrage at that prior as universities should not be driven by the desire for perpetual capital growth.

Upon further reflection, I can see how it is advantageous to the elite if "wealth" and "merit" are seen as interchangeable terms by the public.

This perspective seems naive. Rich people tend to not spend a lot of money on stuff that doesn't make them more money.

So if they do spend a lot, they think it's worth the expenses, including the "charity" part.

> reinvested across the students attending the school

I do not know this for a fact, but I WILDLY doubt what you said here, and I cannot imagine what could possess anyone to believe this. Especially at so-called "elite" schools.

> That massive, completely unnecessary investment is then reinvested across the students attending the school

You're confusing legacy and donor. My only issue with children of donors getting on the Dean's List is the donation's tax deductibility. Legacy, on the other hand, isn't linked to resource contribution.

Yes perhaps the unstated benefit of elite private schools is the long term relationships formed between children of legacy (i.e. generational wealth) and highly capable and hungry individuals who are getting in on merit alone.

The two problems I see with legacy admissions is that:

1.) It has never been explicitly stated as a policy. If it were an upfront "get one admission for every 10 full price admissions/tuitions you buy" that would seem fairer. That said - I can see why a private school might be hesitant to be so transparent...

2.) The schools need to grow in order to keep the percentage of new admits to legacy admits constant as every generation of graduates is likely to produce at least 2x increase in legacy admits.

> every generation of graduates is likely to produce at least 2x increase in legacy admits.

If you're implying that people are having kids at the 2 per couple replacement rate, US is below that.

Also it's forgetting that each couple likely took up 2 ivy league seats during their college years, so even if mom went to Yale and Dad went to Harvard, but their 2 kids both go to Harvard, that would be consuming 2 "legacy admit" seats which is 1x the number of seats from last generation.

My hypothesis is disproven though, if it is super common that ivy leaguers very frequently marry outside the ivy league, then 1 becoming 2+ with each generation would be a problem.

Speaking as a legacy Harvard admission, I wouldn’t say you get a lot of long term relationships beteeen legacy students and merit students. Some, for sure, but there are different social circles at Harvard. Check out the Harvard social clubs sometime.

That said this is a decades old anecdote rather than data.

They should be allowed to behave however they want, but whether we consider that behavior sufficient for non-profit status and tax-exempt endowments should be on the table. Donations for admission of your kids feels especially gross when talking about granting tax-advantaged status to institutions. It's a change in how we view them, to be sure, but questioning our expectations of tax-exempt non-profits seems like exactly what we want the government doing.

A lot of the costs in modern college programs over the last 20 to 30 years has been due to increase in administrative personnel, building up sports programs, etc.

Modern colleges appear more like resorts than educational institutions. The presidents of these colleges also make massive amounts of money, many of even public or state college, which is highly disingenuous.

I think "legacy kid" is different from "kid of rich donor." They'll just be fewer kids of middle class alums and more kids of Middle Eastern and Asian upper classes.

It’s bad because government is much more efficient at this using taxation than relying on the benevolence of rich people. Harvard educated far fewer students than U.C. Berkeley and Berkeley has 1/5 the endowment. The budgets are probably more or less in line with each other but that excess endowment amount speaks to a major inefficiency in terms of allocation of resources.

> The point is that legacy admissions have always been an egregious injustice.

To whom? Anyone who would have been accepted to CMU or Pitt but for the legacy apps will be accepted to another school and still be able to get a high quality education.

What harm is caused? They have a slightly worse starting hand in status posturing games during the short period of their lives where anyone gives a shit where anyone went to school?

I’m not saying it’s the ideal world or anything. But “egregious”? C’mon

Anyone who was rejected because they didn’t have the right parents because the spot went to someone else because they did have the right parents.

Look at the list of people appointed to run executive agencies, serve as judges, etc., and see the degree to which our society is run by elites from a handful of schools. The Supreme Court that issued this decision has one Justice who didn’t go to either Harvard or Yale.

This is a really thought-provoking reply. I appreciate it.

The thing it makes me wonder, though: Isn't this unmerited dominance of Ivy Leaguers in our society the real problem that both AA and the discussion about legacies, is purporting to "solve" or "improve"?

It seems like every society has elites, and we're trying to put a thumb on the scale (or remove other thumbs on the scale really) in hopes we can propel the brightest (poor/nonwhite/non-upper-class) kids into the elite category, but I worry that this is doomed to make little difference because no matter what, not everyone can graduate from Harvard or Yale. No matter what there will be people just as smart/virtuous/etc as the ones admitted to Harvard and Yale who were just unlucky.

I feel like it's more of a problem of humanity -- that we tend to be tribal and exalt some people based on things like what school you went to. Many of the most intelligent and thoughtful people I've worked with dropped out of college or didn't go at all.

Consider two extremes: positions in the next generation's "elite" are randomly selected vs auctioned off. In the latter case, you quickly develop the problem of a parasitic elite who uses that elite power to extract wealth to buy places for their kids in the next generation.

The essential reason America exists was we said "hell no" to a parasitic, hereditary elite, the British "nobility". So I think it's very in keeping with the American experiment to prevent the reemergence of that sort of elite. I'm not sure we should have an elite at all, but to the extent that we do, I think college admissions should absolutely not favor people based on wealth or family ties.

> The essential reason America exists was we said "hell no" to a parasitic, hereditary elite,

Is it avoidable having a hereditary elite? It seems like every society develops one. It even happened in the supposedly classless USSR and they had a name for it the nomenklatura https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomenklatura. Even in the US there has existed groups with hereditary and elite status but there has been a lot of social change over the past 100 years. The American problem is deciding who that elite should be now. I think a lot of the conflict and turmoil we are having is caused by different groups fighting to establish themselves as the hereditary elite.

Peter Turchin's theory about elite overproduction might have merit applied in our context. We have too many people vying for too few elite seats and the losers seek vengeance. Admissions into elite schools appears to have become a battleground.

It is avoidable, and the US has done a reasonably good job of avoiding it. It's notable how little current political and economic leaders are the grandchildren of previous major figures. We could do better, of course. And we should.

I have not seen this argument used when discussing the striking down of affirmative action.

That anyone who doesn't get accepted to a school "because of affirmative action" could still "be accepted to another school and still be able to get a high quality education".

Why protect an institution like legacy admissions that is about as far as meritocratic as possible?

From a purely legal standpoint, the affirmative action issue is really about government funding and has little to do with limiting freedom of association. Schools that take federal funding can't violate the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. Private schools that wish to continue their affirmative action admission programs are free to do so provided they forgo government funding.

I understand. But things are never “purely” legal though.

> we believe it to be illegitimate to discriminate on the basis of race.

If there is significant and lasting harm done on the basis of race, should there be significant and lasting action taken to correct that harm?

What if such harm continues today, as it does in our society?

It is both wild to me and totally predictable that a reasonable question like this would get downvoted on HN.

If people are interested in this particular phenomenon, I really recommend Mills's "The Racial Contract". [1] A contractarian philosopher, Mills wrote about how the literal centuries of social contract philosophy somehow never got around to mentioning race. His well-supported conclusion is that there was always a second implicit social contract, which he calls the racial contract. But it has an epistemological dimension where one of the rules is that we avoid discussing, avoid even seeing the racial contract.

This sort of downvoting of even basic questions, let alone answers, is exactly part of that epistemological erasure that he talked about.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Racial-Contract-Charles-W-Mills/dp/08...

I’m not in favor of affirmative action for a whole host of reasons.

However, if we consider discrimination against group A to be illegitimate and yet that discrimination and it’s negative effects to people of group A remain widespread, actions to remedy that discrimination, which in many cases will indeed require treating people of group A differently, is not automatically illegitimate.

Just like we consider violence to be illegitimate, but at the same time we draw a massive distinction between violence by an offender and violence done in self defense.

While that’s true in general, as far as affirmative action specifically is concerned, as the legacy removals in response to the ending of affirmative action indicates, affirmative action was essentially colleges paying lip service to reducing harm while using it to justify all sorts of inexcusable practices (like legacy).

“However, we will sabotage our own elite social clubs as part of compliance with the new ruling with the hope that they will associate the pain with the current Supreme Court and thus hate them as much as we do.”

This is a straining of the issue with discrimination, which cannot be divorced from its history. Corrected:

It is illegitimate to discriminate on the basis of race to the advantage of those previously, explicitly advantaged by their race. We believe that to be a special kind of uniquely harmful prejudice, one that fractures the deepest structures of society, because part of the country's attempt to uphold this prejudice lead to the single bloodiest war in the country's history.

Affirmative action was upheld for more than a half-century in recognition of these incontrovertible truths, and was only overturned with the rise of a Supreme Court whose partisanship would be unprecedented, if it had not been preceded by the courts that gave us Jim Crow. No one even voted this change in.

Affirmative action was voted down even in California when it came on the ballot, so an argument to democracy here goes against you.

California is not the country.

It's the most liberal state in the country so it would get voted down even harder everywhere else.

It's liberal on some matters. It's also the state that let Rodney King's assailants off. Political progressivism doesn't ensure a lack of anti-marginalized racism.

The argument against affirmative actions was largely rooted in the concept that admission should be based on purely meritocratic considerations.

Legacy admissions are the opposite of meritocratic considerations, unless you believe that genetic inheritance is such an excellent predictor of cross-generational merit. Such a belief suffers from the same basic flaws as more clearly racist ideas.

Now let's back up a moment. In US society we have said for the last 60 years max that it's usually illegitimate to discriminate on the basis of race, and before that it was legal and actually approved of to discriminate on the basis of race. Discrimination on basis of race is written into the founding documents of the land. That's what makes it the one of the deepest fractures in our society, the fact that it was legislated for the vast majority of the time the colonies and then country have existed.

It's also worth acknowledging that elite social clubs have always had the ability to pick who they want -- the pretty people, the rich people, the well-connected people. Given that racism is suddenly (last 60 years) less popular/legal than it used to be in the US, is it any wonder that the elite social club of Harvard wanted to pick the most attractive candidates coming from groups previously denied admission? Now the end of "affirmative action" says that Harvard can no longer curate the class it wants to have its favored racial mix. Since this end of affirmative action is a direct strike at Harvard's ability to pick its elite the way it wants to, how do we continue to justify legacy status, again? "You can't pick people with the experiences you want; you just have to pick rich kids/according to heredity, that's the only fair way to do things." Really? Why?

America hasn't always hated racism, but it has always hated a hereditary nobility.

Harder to justify?

In an absolute vacuum, they were always the hardest to justify. There's absolutely no reason that they should have ever existed. I do still like the idea of employees of universities getting the benefit of their children attending for free, though... but then I also had no problem with affirmative action for many of the same reasons.

Then they will put their money into another pay-to-win system.

Why did they lump athletes in with those other three groups. Athletics is the ultimate meritocracy. If athletes are a significant portion of that 43% it dilutes the whole argument.

If 10% were alumni/donors/faculty it would still be outrageous, no need to pump up the numbers.

> Athletics is the ultimate meritocracy

...but not in education.

The US system of making athletes waste time in university is quite unique and ridiculous.

I like that we still emphasize education even if you're going for a job that doesn't even require you to know how to read.

Don't they basically get a free pass for regular courses as long as they behave and provide results?

Yea.. These students also generate capital through ticket sales and rally alumni to donate. Unless a non-producing sport.

> Nearly three quarters of them would have been rejected if they had been subjected to the same standards as other white applicants.

That's kind of insane. Over 30% of white students at Harvard would have been rejected if not for those programs.

But also, why is meritocracy so above any criticism? Why is it considered so great?

It would be fairer to just pick at random. Or even better, make sure everyone who wants a good education can get one.

The rationale for meritocracy is that a limited resource should be allocated to the individual that will make most use of it. Demonstrating that you understand the prerequisites and are studious is a pretty good indicator that you’ll attend class and strive to learn more.

Randomly picking students with zero minimum qualification would be a massive waste of resources.

Randomly picking students above a given objective standard would be okay. Though arguably not as good as given the best of the best first dibs (depends on who you ask!).

This statement is a bit misleading, as the criteria get to be hair-splittingly narrow when you are talking about a school with a sub 5% acceptance rate -- you could fill the whole class with valedictorians. Nevertheless, my experience is that in terms of finding a 'better' candidate:

Legacy -- legacy preference is pitched as a tiebreaker. Most of the legacies are actually quite good, and many are exceptional, so perhaps 30-50% got in over some 'better' kid. But in many cases, those slots represent something like geographic diversity, or a legacy kid of a minority or a kid of some famous person, and they generally don't take dolts. So this is not a huge tip.

FacBrat -- The kids of professors tend to be extremely and sometimes extraordinarily good -- their parents are Harvard professors, and that tends to rub off. Staff members less so, but it is politically hard to reject them if you want to keep their parents. There are more in the second category than in the first. So perhaps 60% of the kids get in based on this tip.

Donor -- Not a lot of these that I know of. Even in the 1930s, the son of the President of IBM got rejected from Harvard and Princeton because he was a goof off. I seriously doubt that there are more than 10-20 kids/year who get in this way who wouldn't otherwise.

Athlete -- This is where very few of these kids would get in if they were in the general pool -- 10% max I'd guess. A lot of them are very good, but that level of dedication to sport tends to eat time that could have been used for academics or other worthwhile pursuits.

I've always been amazed that they recruit for Golf, Squash, Crew, Fencing, Diving, Tennis, Lax, and Water Polo... these sports are limited to prep schools and rich suburban districts ... not exactly equitable.

Your comment is pretty spot on about the admission dynamics.

> Legacy

I think it is more of a tip than you are making it out to be simply due to yield farming - the smart kid who has a Harvard parent is more likely to go to Harvard over Yale than a generic smart kid, so if you want to keep your admission rates as low as possible you tip legacy.

> 10-20 kids/year who get in this way who wouldn't otherwise.

They certainly exist, Harvard has the z-list.

Hah just heard that come up in another context. Confirmed. Heard the price tag was $3m and you have to take a gap year.

I don’t know what the price tag is but the gap year thing is true, the people I was familiar with had billionaires as parents.

why do you have to take a gap year?

they admit you off of the waitlist if your family donates a lot but i think they get to not count it in this years numbers or next years if they give you a deferred acceptance

One special gifts officer told me that the U had rejected a rather limited number of people whose families had 8 billion dollars.

3 million might get you into Brown, but it isn't going to get you into Harvard.

I think this is a "we call you" situation, so if the kid is on the bubble they ask for the bribe. It doesn't work the other way if the kid is unqualified. No more Kushners...

Headline in 5 years: “Endowments from alumni down 50% and no one knows why!”

Which is why many have stated it’s hardest to get into university if you are a non wealthy, legacy white or Asian male. I totally see that’s institutions all issuing apologies for the past discrimination.

I recently came across a somewhat provocative defense of legacy admissions. The argument is that the iveys are great because they bring together the children of the rich and powerful (legacy admissions with connections) with really smart and hungry students (children of the middle class, mostly).

It's arguably a good deal for both. Smart kids get access to wealth and power and they get to learn how the world works. This is the one thing they can't get anywhere else. And the legacy students get the prestige and credibility of having gone to a top school, as well as access to hungry students who are eager to take advantage of the opportunities that come their way.

When Harvard becomes an institution of merit will it still be worth the price of admission? I'm not so sure.

> will it still be worth the price of admission?

Definitely. Will it still be the same value you're getting? Perhaps not.

Notably, some schools like MIT already don't consider legacy, and are still worth the price.

Because MIT is more of a technically school, not a networking school. Networking schools are more likely to be business schools.

I doubt that the mixture of rich and smart kids actually happens that much. I didn’t go to an ivy, so I can only speculate. But I imagine the rich kids hang out with each other and the poor smart kids hang out with each other.

Not an Ivy, but at Stanford, they seem to mix.

I think the argument is worth considering. At the same time, it seems easier in the age of internet for kids of merit to attract sources of funding, and I expect funding will still find their way towards massive untapped concentrations of merit.

I agree with that assessment and have always considered the criticism of donor/legacy admissions as simple jealousy. Nothing wrong with taking some donors who are going to open up opportunity for regular students, even though I personally wouldn't want to be one of those kids with rich donor parents.

The bigger flaws with Ivies and Stanford (but imo not MIT or CMU) are in how they don't really pick the regular students based on merit either. I went to a top high school and saw many classmates go to those; most of them were about average but managed to pad their resumes or play some diversity card, while most of the real gems went elsewhere. I really thrived going to UC Berkeley and think that had to do with the genuinely good students around me. Still, it was obvious how the neighboring Stanford uni had way more money and connections floating around for the number of students, meaning less need to fight over resources (on the flip side, Cal taught me how to fight when needed, which was more important for me).

I don't have problem with private institutions like Harvard giving preferential treatments to its legacy. However, I think they should give up some portion of their tax advantaged status as the result.

There is at least one interesting study that tried to test this. They took students who were admitted to prestigious universities. They tracked those who attended as well as those who attended "lesser" schools instead. They found no real difference in success later in life, so it may be confusing cause and effect. People get into prestigious universities because they know how to be "successful" and are not necessarily successful because they went to the prestigious school. In other words, prestigious schools are good at selecting for people who would be 'successful' regardless.

The one caveat that did get a benefit were low socio-economic students, who did see a measurable difference in success. That's a class you didn't mention in your post. The thought is that it's precisely due to the network effects.

Can you link to the study?

I'd be curious about how success is defined here. Career is a pretty narrow lens to define it by so I'd hope for something more expansive.

Many of the benefits of having friends in high places are outside of traditional career ladder. The expedited (insert annoying process here), the vacation you're invited on, the unintentional influence you have on some big thing because you happen to be an ear to the decider, etc etc.

There's been a few studies. [1] is one framed in economics, so it measures earnings. You're right, though, that earnings is probably an overly blunt measure of success at best. I think the difficulty in measuring quality of life statistics is that much of it is difficult to quantify, so studies fall back to easily quantifiable metrics.

Edit: [2] expands the measures to include educational attainment and family outcomes. Reference [3] relates to socio-economic class, while [1] relates to race/ethnicity. [3] was the one I had in mind during my original comment.

[1] Krueger, A., 2012. Estimating the Effects of College Characteristics over the Career Using Administrative Earnings Data Stacy Dale Mathematica Policy Research.

[2] Ge, S., Isaac, E. and Miller, A., 2022. Elite schools and opting in: Effects of college selectivity on career and family outcomes. Journal of Labor Economics, 40(S1), pp.S383-S427.

[3] Dale, S.B. and Krueger, A.B., 2002. Estimating the payoff to attending a more selective college: An application of selection on observables and unobservables. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 117(4), pp.1491-1527

Earnings is probably a reasonable proxy for something like a business school. I'm not sure it's great for a liberal arts college. Way back when, I looked at some of this stuff and you're right that figuring out what outcome(s) to fit to is challenging. Undergrad GPA is pretty clearly not what you want either but generalized career or life success is pretty hard to quantify.

>People get into prestigious universities because they know how to be "successful" and are not necessarily successful because they went to the prestigious school.

It also depends on what the "lesser" schools are. I expect that if someone missed out on the significantly random admissions lottery to get into Harvard but were admitted to Dartmouth, Cornell, or Williams (or even UMass Amherst) instead, I expect that if they'd have done well at Harvard they'll do just fine.

I expect for the lower socio-economic students, the delta is probably related to being among fellow students who maybe set a bit higher bar than other schools would.

>I expect for the lower socio-economic students, the delta is probably related to being among fellow students who maybe set a bit higher bar than other schools would.

That's one explanation, but not the guess that the study's authors had:

>"One possible explanation for this pattern of results is that highly selective colleges provide access to networks for minority students and for students from disadvantaged family backgrounds that are otherwise not available to them."[1]

[1] Dale, S.B. and Krueger, A.B., 2014. Estimating the effects of college characteristics over the career using administrative earnings data. Journal of human resources, 49(2), pp.323-358.

I could see that from the list of the colleges. Certainly it would be a lot easier to fall through the cracks at Penn State than at more elite schools. It's probably also true that your experience at large state schools in general is probably more a function of what you make of it than smaller, more selective schools.

>It's arguably a good deal for both. Smart kids get access to wealth and power and they get to learn how the world works. This is the one thing they can't get anywhere else. And the legacy students get the prestige and credibility of having gone to a top school, as well as access to hungry students who are eager to take advantage of the opportunities that come their way.

I'm not 100% convinced by this argument, insofar as that kids with wealth and power will probably end up at Ivies anyways (and they tend to make up a large percentage of the students, legacy or not). They've had access to private tutors, went to private schools like Exeter or Andover (or usually at the very least a magnet), and grew up surrounded by other ambitious young people in major power centers like NYC, Boston, or DC.

The number of public school students you meet is just shocking low, even among non-legacies.

Just look at who runs the government at the highest levels—elected, and appointees, both. Heavy representation of Ivies and other elite schools... sure, OK, not surprising, but you look farther back and more often than not, yep, expensive prep school, rich-parish catholic private schools, or (less commonly) a well-into-the-top-1% public high school (usually with selective admission—basically by definition, since you can't realistically do that well, as a school, without it). Notably, the latter option is simply absent if you don't live in the right places, which tend to be rich, expensive ones, near or in a handful of major cities.

If you're in a normal-ass public school—even a good, but not exceptionally good selective-admission one—when you're 16 because your parents couldn't afford the straight-up costs, or relocation & other maneuvers (e.g. résumé padding), to get you into a top secondary school, let alone university—many doors of possibility in your life have already begun to swing shut, whether you realize it or not. It's not impossible you'll get into those kinds of positions despite that, but... your odds are even worse than one might suppose, had one not noticed this tendency.

(of course, it's worse still for certain other pursuits—for some sports and musical instruments, if you're not already damn serious about it and receiving excellent [$$$] coaching/instruction by age 8 or so, then that's already effectively cut off for you as a possible future career. Decide at 14 that's your passion and give it your all? Too bad, you're already too far behind, learn to enjoy participating as a hobby on weekends.)

> The number of public school students you meet is just shocking low, even among non-legacies.

at least at Harvard, a substantial majority are from public schools - generally bougie suburban ones, yes, but still public

This is definitely true, but we can go a step deeper. You have to think about what Harvard's goals are. Maximizing academic success is not very high on the list. The real goals are maximizing career success, donations, and cultural cachet/prestige. When legacies are considered with these goals in mind they make a lot of sense. Legacies are likely to have successful careers due to their parents resources and power, they're likely to donate too because of all the resources they have.

So yes, legacies are the main value add at Harvard type institutions for the non legacy students, but even if they weren't, admitting them aligns with the universities goals. If we're considering the "fairness" of admissions we have to look through the perspective of what admissions is trying to accomplish. We can get into equity vs equality, but at the end of the day accepting legacies does probably maximize Harvards chances of achieving its goals, and many would say that makes the process fair.

Ok, then why have classes at all? Why have any tests? If college is just a country club for young adults, just auction off seats to the highest bidder and be done with it. You’ll get an elite mix of those with the most “potential”. It also has the benefit of full transparency. A seat at Harvard costs $4 million cash. Don’t have it? Too bad you wanted an education but Harvard has to look out for their own interests.

Well, Harvard is going to look out for Harvard but Americans have to look out for our own country. And what is best for the country is not to have a snobby elite club, but to develop the minds of kids to solve the most pressing issues of the 21st century.

Because you need to maintain some pretense that Harvard grads aren’t incompetent. That’s also why they admit at least a few academically inclined students.

Yeah it is almost like the opposite situation described in this thread.

It is the super rich that are hoping their child will become friends with the next Bill Gates. Not the next Bill Gates hoping he can meet a spoiled rich kid

Bill gates was one of the spoiled rich kids. But ignoring that the relationship goes both ways. The legacies want to be surrounded by people who are legitimately smart, high achievers. The smart high achievers want to be able to network with the legacies as they are what gives the institution prestige and make the alumni network valuable. Having only legacies or only meritocratic acceptances would be worse for both groups.

> This is definitely true, but we can go a step deeper. You have to think about what Harvard's goals are. Maximizing academic success is not very high on the list. The real goals are maximizing career success, donations, and cultural cachet/prestige.

Exactly. Harvard is about being the source of the next generation of elites. IIRC, they're far more likely to admit the captain of the high school football team over an otherwise similar nerd with better grades/test scores, because the captain is demonstrating leadership potential and is more likely to be some next-gen big shot.

Is MIT still worth the price of admission? I would certainly say so and they don't do legacy, and I would trust the Princeton/Harvard line on a resume a lot more if it was guaranteed they didn't get in because of non-academic reasons (like parents, sports, etc.)

MIT and Harvard are almost completely different. The promise of MIT, as I understand it, is sort of a ruthless no-compromise academic excellence. The promise of Harvard or Yale is that you are going to be inducted into the American ruling class. These are different goals.

For students, sure, but when being hired (or funded) they all have similar “elite” tier intelligence/potential, nothing about ruling class

In tech, sure, but that’s because it’s tech. How many MIT alums are on the Supreme Court?

Lawyers are certainly an old profession stuck in old ways. I agree

MIT doesn't have a law school.

To be fair, Supreme Court justices didn’t always used to previously be judges. So, you know, there’s a chance…

That goes to my original point, I think.

Might not be crazy to prefer someone with that ruling-class cred/connections (even if not, themselves, of that background) in certain very-lucrative sales positions. Or investing. Or law (especially the varieties that tend to pay very well). Or lobbying. Or just about any halfway-important position in a non-profit. Or the C-suite of a corporation, and more-so the bigger it is.

And so on.

Lots of cases where "oh, I sailed with her nephew one Summer when we were both at Harvard" or just being able to credibly wear any of several "in-group" school colors ties and talk the talk is worth more than 10 extra IQ points or whatever.

>> MIT and Harvard are almost completely different. The promise of MIT, as I understand it, is sort of a ruthless no-compromise academic excellence. The promise of Harvard or Yale is that you are going to be inducted into the American ruling class. These are different goals.

> For students, sure, but when being hired (or funded) they all have similar “elite” tier intelligence/potential, nothing about ruling class

Being suited to "ruthless no-compromise academic excellence" may actually tend to make one unsuited to a whole host of "ruling class" jobs, so maybe they're not so similar after all.

IMHO, people who are personally focused on intelligence (especially when they're "intelligent" themselves) tend to overestimate its value in a lot of endeavors. Even in academic sphere, I understand a lot of extremely successful scientists are intelligent but not that intelligent. Their success comes from their attitude, personality, and other factors.

MIT still has standards and you need to be able to play at a very high level there. Most everyone is too dumb to go there. The others not so much.

Won't more of them just go to state schools and mix with the smart kids there?

The benefit of legacy admissions isn’t just that you can get into Harvard if your dad went to Harvard; it’s the promise that if you get into Harvard, your children will also have a better chance of getting into Harvard. If you’re not a legacy admit yourself, the practice of legacy admissions means that once your family has climbed high enough up the American class ladder to get you in, you’re going to be able to pass that down to your children. Which of course means that ending legacy admission sort of welches on the deal and takes us marginally closer to a low-trust society in which these sorts of implicit promises are worthless.

> will it still be worth the price of admission? I'm not so sure. As an alum of the harvard-for-working-people extension school at the Ivy, I can say it already sure isn't. The education is mediocre, and the administration is more interested in growing admin budgets than any real education whatsoever.

Ve Ri Tas indeed.

What you're paying for is essentially to signal to employer that you've been able to make it into a very select club which is in turn acting as a proxy for intelligence/conscientiousness. As long as the seats are be limited, it will be worth the cost.

True - but if some other place existed which said "We only let in 50% children of harvard students and 50% really smart people", would that place turn out to be more desirable to hire from?

I suspect so... Those connections are perhaps more valuable than great exam grades.

I read the same argument, but that sounds like a much better argument for donation-led places (which is also a thing), rather than hoping for the knock-on effect of legacies.

Legacy is a weak proxy for rich, though. There's a separate entrance for rich-rich kids: donors are evaluated based on the size of their gifts and their ability to continue giving, and their kids are given preferential admission.

This is an easy thing to quantify. MIT does not have legacy admissions, so you can do a comparison between Harvard and MIT to see the effects of legacy admissions on career growth.

There are a lot more Fortune 100 CEOs and Supreme Court justices from Harvard than MIT, so it's an interesting opportunity to look at a correlation / causation question ;)

(Am personally an MIT alum...)

People who are born at a level tend to stay at that level throughout their entire lives. This is just as true for the rich as it is for the poor. It doesn't mean that the rich are good and the poor are bad, it's that people tend to go through the lives they've had prepared before them.

Given that this is the case, legacy admissions should be relics of the past. People who are born with extraordinary access to capital don't need more help.

I think this may have been true in like, the 1920s, when it was very difficult to connect merit and capital but today it’s fairly easy and the justification doesn’t really make sense.

This is correct. I have three friends that went to HBS and got very high paying careers. Being friends with the CEO's son was not why they got the jobs.

They administrators at these schools really tipped their hands when the Full House admission bribery scandal broke.

They were not upset that someone paid to get into a school. They were upset that someone didn't pay them to get into a school.

I think that even without legacy admissions, you'll still get many/mostly wealthy kids there. You can see that in elite institutions which are purely meritocratic.

I'm sorry, but I don't think the argument holds water. Why is the US special here? The easiest counterexamples are Oxford and Cambridge in the UK. Neither have 'legacy' admissions.

*(ceteris paribas; and assuming that the argument is valid...)

the problem is that ALL the powerful kids are concentrated in select few universities, mostly in the Ivy League, NorthEast US.

If Legacy admissions are eliminated, then the powerful kids will be spread about, IMHO, and the network effects will be spread about.

right now the NorthEast US unduly benefits heavily with the concentration of powerful kids, and the network thereof.

____

BTW, right across Harvard is MIT, and I believe they do not factor legacy admissions. Harvard's loss is MIT's gain, so I doubt there is anything to be unduly concerned about. (not to mention the 7 or so other world class research universities a stone's throw from Harvard Yard.)

Harvard will have to just pull itself together by its bootstraps.

Don't legacy admissions often mean that their parents have donated significantly to the University?

In a sense wouldn't that just mean that those students are essentially paying a very high premium to attend there and subsidizing the education of all the other students?

I'm not against abolishing them but I do wonder if this will have any impact on alumni donations.

Honestly, relying on donations doesn't seem tenable without discrimination. The only way out is to treat it as a public good and fund it as one.

Carnegie Mellon is a private university, and obviously there's already a strong public commitment to college education through subsidizing the student directly.

It's a private university founded with the intent to be a public good. It exists ostensibly to be a counterweight to the ills brought about by the concentration of wealth and power under its founders, in recognition of their outsize influence on society.

So... get rid of private universities entirely?

I'm sympathetic to your position, but that doesn't quite seem like the wisest course of action to me.

I think the question is whether the donations create more resources than what is used up by a legacy admission.

For example, imagine I donate $1B to the university, with two stipulations. First, they admit my child to the CS program. Second, they use the money to perpetually expand the size of every incoming CS class by 10 students.

In that respect, the legacy admission is a net good. Yes, for four years there's a spot that's used up by my kid, but even during those four years there are 10 additional people got into the program who wouldn't have otherwise.

I realize it's not that easy, it doesn't work like that, and the size of classes at places like Harvard are not limited by the how much money Harvard has. But it seems like there could be ways to keep some kind of legacy admission program which also create a net good.

Maybe every legacy admission should be required to fund a perpetual scholarship for one financially disadvantaged student? That's both expensive enough to be rare and beneficial enough to be hard to argue with.

Why tie it to legacy though?

The university could just offer a secondary admissions pool with a higher tuiting cost.

Then your $1B is provably not a donation, and hence subject to taxes.

It’s already not a donation if it is tied to a benefit to a specific person in your family.

The “provably” in my comment is meant to indicate that people would actually be afraid of falsely claiming donations which are really payments to increase m chances of their kids’ admission, since they could be proven guilty of tax evasion.

They could, but they make more money by keeping the clearing price unknown.

They’re more contributing towards enormous endowments than subsidizing others education.

Princeton can and does do this because of their donors:

https://admission.princeton.edu/how-princetons-aid-program-w...

>I do wonder if this will have any impact on alumni donations.

Wonder not. "[T]here is no statistically significant evidence that legacy preferences impact total alumni giving."

https://production-tcf.imgix.net/app/uploads/2016/03/0820191...

Lack of evidence is hardly evidence of lacking.

You are confused; evidence of absence is not absence of evidence. Unless you can point to a problem with the methodology, failure to discover a relationship between A and B is indeed evidence that A and B are not related. You're suggesting they would have to prove a negative for there to be evidence.

"Using annual panel data covering 1998 to 2008 for the top one hundred universities, we show that, after controlling for year, institution size, public/private status, income, and a proxy for alumni wealth, more than 70 percent of the variation in alumni giving across institutions and time can be explained. The coefficients all have the expected signs and there is no statistically significant evidence that legacy preferences impact total alumni giving."

That doesn't answer the question though, does it?

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence...

The article clearly says there's no evidence of a "casual relationship between legacy preference policies and total alumni giving."

Can you explain your point further? Maybe you are aware of better data than what was used in the cited study?

Maybe the individual legacy preferences don’t influence it but the knowledge they exist does. For instance, there is no statistical likelihood of winning the jackpot from buying a lottery ticket and people keep buying tickets when they don’t win - but if the jackpot just got removed, do you think that would affect people’s choice to buy a ticket?

Wouldn't that still cause a correlation between schools that have legacy scholarships and alumni giving? In your lotto ticket example, there is a correlation between the jackpot and the number of tickets sold.

Yes, that was what I was saying.

The "no evidence" comment is not made by the paper itself - it was made about a much weaker 2008 study. The linked paper actually claims that legacy admissions do increase alumni giving by implicitly favoring wealthier families. I think both papers have flaws.

The linked study literally says “our primary finding…is that there is no statistical evidence of a casual relationship.” It also controls for wealth: “after inclusion of appropriate controls, including wealth…”

Maybe we’re referencing different studies. Which are you specifically referencing?

No, we're not. It controls for wealth, and then says that the policy itself affects the wealth of alumni, which makes it entirely inappropriate to remove that as a variable. In essence they are arguing that legacy preference systems are not what motivates higher donations, but they are a causal factor in the outcome of higher donations.

"the policy allows elite schools to over-select from their own wealthy alumni. In other words, the preference policy effectively allows elite schools essentially to discriminate based on socioeconomic status by accepting their own wealthy alumni families rather than basing admissions on merit alone."

" we show that prior to controlling for wealth, there is a strong correlation between alumni giving and legacy preferences. This suggests that greater alumni giving at elite schools with legacy preferences is driven by the school’s ability to over-select from their own wealthy alumni populations—not a result of the preference policies themselves inducing additional giving."

I think you are pointing out a related but slightly different problem. The question being asked is not "Does admitting wealthy students lead to higher alumni donations?" but rather "Does admitting legacy students lead to higher alumni donations?".

The latter one is what is being measured when they control for wealth and conclude that the practice of admitting based on legacy status does not result, in itself, with higher alumni donations. But like you said, when it becomes a means to admitting wealthier students, it can result in the former. But the two questions shouldn't be conflated and measuring them as distinct questions is why it's important to control for wealth in the methodology.

They cannot be measured distinctly when one is a proxy for the other.

It seems like they are correlated, but I don't know that one is necessarily a good proxy for the other.

Would you apply that to, say, wealth and SAT scores?

> better data

I am personally aware of a very large donation to MIT with the express purpose of admitting the high schooler, and I am less acquainted with a similar situation at Harvard. I have personally seen another alumni development quid pro quo, not a monetary donation, at MIT. Honestly it seems like common sense that the two are related. The mistake from a scientific point of view is how to define legacy preferences and how to measure such impacts. It is certainly there, it’s an interesting question as to how to measure it.

At the risk of sounding glib, I was asking for data and not anecdotes.

>The mistake from a scientific point of view is how to define legacy preferences and how to measure such impacts.

The paper looked to define legacy preferences using multiple datasets where the school measured the importance of alumni relations in admissions. The datasets had to agree for a legacy admission classification (e.g., both say that alumni relations are "very important" regarding admissions). The measure used in the studies that showed no evidence was the level of alumni donations. It's pretty easily quantifiable. Other studies cited show that when legacy admissions were abolished there was not a statistically significant change in alumni donations.

>I have personally seen another alumni development quid pro quo, not a monetary donation, at MIT. Honestly it seems like common sense that the two are related.

You're comparing apples to oranges. The question is whether consideration of legacy status in admissions is causally linked to greater alumni giving. What you're asking is whether wealthy parents are willing to pay bribes to get their dull children into particular institutions. The two aren't comparable, because rich parents don't need to be alumni to pay bribes.

    "Prior to controlling for wealth, however, the results indicate that schools with legacy preference policies indeed have much higher alumni giving. These combined results suggest that higher alumni giving at top institutions that employ legacy preferences is not a result of the preference policy exerting influence on alumni giving behavior, but rather that the policy allows elite schools to over-select from their own wealthy alumni. In other words, the preference policy effectively allows elite schools essentially to discriminate based on socioeconomic status by accepting their own wealthy alumni families rather than basing admissions on merit alone."

So it's likely that if fewer people from wealthy families become alumni then alumni giving will go down.

They actually investigate this starting on p. 115 and find no significant short-term decrease based on observations from institutions that ceased consideration of legacy status.

I think the more important point this comment misses is that the family's wealth isn't going anywhere and their kids will still go to college, so it stands to reason that the alumni will still give, they'll just be giving to e.g. Arizona State instead of Harvard, which seems like a net positive to me. If people are being honest about their concern that donations from wealthy alumni are good because they subsidize education, those fears are totally allayed.

"Moreover, any loss in alumni giving at the elite institutions would presumably be at least partially, if not fully, offset by additional giving to alternative institutions where parents of wealthy students might donate as an alternative, and the wealthy students themselves would become alumni. "

I think that paper over-indexes on exactly that argument - that having a relative attend the school is just a proxy for wealth, so they would give just as much anyway if they went to a different school. It doesn't stand to reason at all that the donations will be transferred to whatever other school their kid attends, donations like this are not fungible and do not scale linearly - if everyone in your family for five generations has gone to Harvard, and your kid goes to Arizona State, you aren't suddenly going to build a family tradition of loving Arizona State. You're more likely to simply dilute the strength of the family-college connection and not donate at all, or donate a perfunctory amount and put the rest into the opera you attend these days. I didn't look up the authors of this study, but they certainly didn't bother to mention any familiarity with the field of fundraising, which isn't as straightforward as they make it sound. Even if the strength of connection was the same, do public schools have the same skills and desire to request donations as Harvard does?

To test that hypothesis: they should check the Arizona State alumni to see if the number of relatives who attended Harvard is just as good a predictor of donations to Arizona State, because it's equally as strong a proxy for wealth when you attend Arizona State as when you attend Harvard. My bet is that it's a very weak predictor!

They do not have an outsized impact to admissions. What has an outsized impact is the connections a person has with the university. And those connections can come from significant contributions.

It doesn't even have to be large sums, but the existence of legacy admissions creates goodwill between the university and its alums that broadly motivates consistent, modest donations.

Legacy admissions are also a way to increase yield (percentage of students enrolled versus accepted) which is one of the many ranking-driven stat games.

In the article: > “The pros are certainly fundraising development. I think people like to think that if they give a lot of money to a university, their children will get special preference,” he said. “I can sort of understand the other side saying it’s unfair to other applicants.”

The quoted person doesn't deny it helps, but people like to think it helps.

Also, please don't donate to your university. You paid them for an education, food and housing. You don't owe them anything else. Compound interest on their takings is your contribution.

AFAIK, legacy admission and donations are two separate "tracks", if you will.

Donations are when the "donation office" giving a list to the admissions office.

Legacy admission is when the student ticks a box on the application.

The former is to recognize past contributions, where the latter is more for future contribution (if your whole family went to Harvard, presumably you will be more likely to give money to Harvard)

> The former is to recognize past contributions, where the latter is more for future contribution (if your whole family went to Harvard, presumably you will be more likely to give money to Harvard)

So it's just a checkbox to say you're already on the sect

Large alumni donations can and often do increase the cost of education of all the other students. They frequently lead to large capital investments that then have uncovered operational costs. I used to work for one of the wealthiest universities with 100s of millions in capital improvements annually that couldn't provide functional HVAC and a fresh coat of paint to the buildings it had.

What about smaller, recurring donations? Does that increase the cost?

Probably not, because they don’t come with the string attached that “you must build a new building and name it after me to receive this donation”.

"..and the building (a dorm) must not have any windows"[1]

1. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/22/nightmare-of-t...

Yeah. Even if a modest donation is earmarked to, say, the athletic department, the school has a lot of flexibility to move unrestricted money from one pocket to the other. For significant even if not huge donations though, schools really would like unrestricted gifts in general.

Seems simple enough to get someone that vain to cough up an annuity to pay for maintenance and some admins for that building, “we’d hate for your building to wind up like poor Jefferson Hall, we can’t even afford to pressure wash it every 5 years.”

Yeah. Stadiums and landmark buildings don't work this way, so why universities diverge is beyond me.

Whoever pays for upkeep should get the naming rights.

This is a little bit ridiculous. There is no connection between alumni donations and capital investments except decisions that university leadership chooses to make. The issue isn't the donations, its the university leadership thats choosing to make large capital expenditures. The donations could go to other things and do go to other things. Any blame you're putting on the donations actually belongs to the people running the university. Blaming unwise spending on donations without mentioning who is making those decisions as the root of the issue is ridiculous.

How often does anyone donate millions of dollars with no strings attached, especially to a university?

If someone offers you $5m and in return you have to spend $25m, you can choose not to go -$20m by just not accepting the $5m under the terms proposed. Thats fiscal leadership.

Another option in this case is to find other donors to make up the rest. Maybe one can have the largest lecture theatre named after them, or the street renamed, or choose the art, etc.

I think you're referring to small incremental donations while their person you're replying to is referring to the giant "you must name a building after me" ones.

Naming a building after someone doesn't have a financial aspect.

If a gift requires further spending later and the overall benefit is net negative, its up to the university to negotiate terms or turn it down.

It's all university leadership failing to steward their university.

It means a new building. And are you saying that if admitting a legacy kid or taking a restricted donation is net negative they shouldn’t do it? They just need to know in advance if the future donations from the family will be worth it? How simple!

Again if a gift will create a big long term financial obligation that will end up making it a net negative, it is obviously the role of leadership to choose whether to implement it or not.

Taking into account fictional future donations and communicating with donator and explaining the issue is called negotiation. Being convinced to make bad financial decisions in fear of losing a donator is again, a failure of leadership.

If someone offers you $10 if you spend $100 later you're better off not taking it, even if you could have bought something with that $10. That basic financial stewardship is the role of university leadership to deal with. They failed.

> There is no connection between alumni donations and capital investments except decisions that university leadership chooses to make.

Not (always) true. Direct example with Carnegie Mellon - David Tepper was upset the business school (his alma mater) was appearing to fall behind in recruiting, so he donated ~100m but tied it to the business school getting a new building/quad. Total cost to the university was well north of 200mil; and their hands were functionally tied in how it was spent.

Yes, I know this is an outlier and yes, university leadership could have said no - but you're risking pissing off a doner who's given 100m+ over the years and will likely continue giving (and you know Tepper will continue guiding further capital expenditures as he sees the need).

Those are all decisions the university leadership made. David Tepper (?) doesn't run the school - the university leadership decided to make those decisions to get the money. They could have said "this isn't sustainable", and their hands weren't tied.

"Your $100m gift will cost us $200m, we can't accept it as currently stipulated".

All university leadership decisions that they failed on.

yeah way easier to blame the donor for his pesky asks

What risk in there in pissing off the donor if the donor's gifts all cost you at least that much? If someone offers me $100 million but conditions it on me spending $101 million, it doesn't really matter how upset they get with me because I was never going to come out ahead in that deal anyway.

Now also called the Tepper School of Business!

> university leadership that's choosing to make large capital expenditures

SUNY Binghamton recently received a private donation of $60 million, with a rule from the person donating it had to be spent on a new baseball stadium. Do you think the university leadership should have declined the offer?

If it costs more than $60 million to build the stadium, sure.

What good is a $60 million donation if it costs you $100 million on something you weren't going to buy in the first place?

Because now you have a $100M stadium that you only paid $40M for. That stadium generates revenue. You just need to make sure the numbers work

This is lower tier D1 baseball in the Northeast, so revenue is going to be minimal.

> You just need to make sure the numbers work

The entire point of this thread is that universities aren't doing that, because they're accepting $100 million donations with quarter-billion dollar lifetime price tags tied with them.

That’s because the money goes to everything except education. The “admin” is a curse to everything it gets involved with. I went to a public university and I remember our CS classes over subscribed because the UnI wouldn’t fund two additional TAs, meanwhile our Chancellor got a 300k fence to prevent protesters from getting close to his university funded house protesting “his mismanagement of funds and corruption”.

Go bears!

> They frequently lead to large capital investments that then have uncovered operational costs

The problem is not the high amounts, but most donations can only be used for a specific purpose, so even though the endowments are high, the actual working capital will be a lot lower.

Plausible. OTOH, a institution can Just Say No to somebody who insists that their donation be used for something which is un-needed. Or will be an ongoing maintenance money pit. Or that sounds plausible...but the complexity of the strings attached to the cash is not worth having to keep track of in perpetuity.

Most universities have really messy financials. A lot of money gets spent on projects and programs that don't directly benefit the education students receive, or the research output of the university. Things like sports investments, ballooning administration staff, or flashy construction projects. At the same time, TAs, grad students, adjunct professors, and other staff are frequently underpaid and overworked.

There's a lot of room to debate on what colleges should spend their money on, and what they should be providing. But American universities are not strapped for cash, and should be spending more of it on things that directly benefit students and researchers.

I only know a little dirt about the one I worked in and it was pretty bad. The redirection of funds, the word games, and so on ... I would have a better chance of making improvements I desired by making little paper airplanes out of hundred dollar bills and trying to hit areas I though needed help.

> I would have a better chance of making improvements I desired by making little paper airplanes out of hundred dollar bills and trying to hit areas I though needed help.

It was certainly an amusing visualisation lmao

The US federal government should do the same thing to public universities (US definition) that they did to insurance companies via the ACA -- cap administrative overhead.

For every dollar in tuition, >Y% must be spent on qualifying direct educational expenses. E.g. teaching faculty salary, etc.

If a college fails to meet that threshold, and spends too much on non-qualifying costs, they are required to rebate the difference to students.

If a college refuses to do this, they're no longer eligible for federal educational money (Pell grants or loans, etc).

Then let colleges optimize themselves to get under the limit.

It caused a lot of scrambling and long-overdue efficiency improvements in another legacy, slow-to-change industry (health insurance).

The colleges will just respond in the same way that the insurance companies did, by jacking up prices. Raising the amount they're charging for premiums / tuition allows them to still maintain or grow their total overhead amount, even at a lower rate.

One would hope consumer choice would come into play and students would start shopping around for the best deal.

This didn't work in the same way it doesn't work with insurance: students are limited by more than just price alone. Location matters a lot (a student may be staying with their parents). And also if all univiersities raise their prices in this way, there's nothing the students can do.

Doubtful.

The only reason the cost of college is high is because 18 year olds that know nothing about finance don't have to pay for it now because they can get loans.

You take away the loans, and you take away the ability of the college to charge whatever it wants and kids keep paying.

Are 18 year olds today significantly less smart than 18 year olds 50 years ago? No. So why is tuition so much more expensive? In 1970 tuition at University of California schools was about $1000, inflation adjusted. You could easily make that at a summer job.

So what has changed? States have stopped funding for schools. A lot of tuition used to be covered by tax money, which spreads out the cost to everyone and over many years. Now, it is a very abrupt cost to a small group of people.

The prior funding model also had the benefit of a progressive tax system. Wealthier people paid into it more than poor people. Now, students have to rely on unpredictable financial assistance like grants and scholarships, and take on predatory loans to cover the difference.

> So what has changed? States have stopped funding for schools.

Yes - but more importantly, schools got more expensive, because people had more access to debt.

That's not an issue particular to university funding, though. Access to - and use of - debt has gone up across the board, for any and all big-ticket items, both for private and public purchases. There's a problem far larger than expansion of credit access, and it has to do with attitudes at the uppermost reaches of the planning of our economy as to how to distribute wealth - not just by geography or interest, but even by temporally. Decisions made 40-50 years ago to put the cost burden on future generations are literally paying interest today.

I'd question whether insurance companies jacking up prices for purposes of growing headcount was a major trend.

In the ACA aftermath, I believe you saw more insurance companies exit markets because they couldn't be competitive and profitable on prices with standardized plans.

Which is its own problem and led to a lot of limited-insurer markets, but a different one.

I stopped reading after the first sentence.

Our current health insurance laws should NOT be a model for anything, ever!

What would you have done differently, in an attempt to evolve a complex, layered, and ossified industry that absolutely cannot stop providing service for even a day?

I'd start by removing the subsidies and special rules around student loans. That makes colleges compete on price again which puts downward pressure on tuition.

Repealed the McCarran-Ferguson Act at the time instead of waiting until 2021 to do it?

You made it past "The US federal government should"?

> sports investments, ballooning administration staff, or flashy construction projects

Construction projects are typically the result of specific earmarked donations and sports investments often create lots of income. NCAA Division I programs should be thought of as a side business that generates revenue for the university.

Administrative staff is the major problem here. It’s also where most organizations tend to dump their excess revenue, and since the US has been aggressively subsidizing demand for universities for decades, they’ve had a ton of excess revenue to dump into administrative staff.

> TAs, grad students, adjunct professors

Most academic fields produce significantly more Ph.D.’s than there are tenure track positions or other full time professional careers. As a result, the grad student or Ph.D. exists in a competitive-verging-on-exploitative labor market. The typical grad student or adjunct is in the same position as the aspiring actor who has a day job in LA waiting tables. People always claim that this is because there aren’t enough tenure track positions, but I think that’s backwards. Why would you open up a tenure track position when you have a plethora of Ph.D’s who are apparently willing to work as adjuncts? If the universities didn’t produce as many Ph.D’s in the first place, the labor market would be more competitive and they would need to offer tenure track positions.

Universities shouldn't have side businesses, don't they have some non-profit status that's specific to education? They should be heavily restricted to education and research alone.

I’m not a huge fan of the NCAA system myself. A lot of universities don’t have major sports programs, and that’s a respectable choice on their part. But NCAA sports are tremendously profitable for the universities that invest in them. No Division I school would actually save money, in the long run, by defunding their football and basketball teams.

And when it comes to side businesses, sports pale in comparison to endowments.

Edit: Just to clarify, my only point here is that criticizing these Division I schools for how much they spend on their sports programs is fallacious. If you have a different criticism of college sports, that's fine but I'm not sure why you're addressing it to me.

Yea same I’m a big hoop nerd but the mainstream collegiate sports especially basketball make my eyes bleed. Literally infuriating to watch idk how people do.

But something like Duke Basketball has been tremendously beneficial to Duke–in terms of brand awareness. Same with UT Austin and their football brand ($7mm on new locker room is insanity tho).

>No Division I school would actually save money, in the long run, by defunding their football and basketball teams.

Tulane might be a counterexample to this especially since the 80s (although not lately)

Who cares about making money or not, plenty of ways to make money, but that's not the purpose of a non-profit organization dedicated to education.

Less revenue for the school means higher tuition costs for everyone and less scholarships.

No, more revenue means that revenue goes to paying for non educational stuff, admin bloat, etc.

The waste is unreal. When I was in Uni, I used to sit outside and work in a little side-of-a-building park area where, every spring, I'd watch the grounds crew pull up perfectly good looking flowers and plant slightly better looking ones in the days before a "parents weekend" or a big admissions event.

They would just toss the "old" flowers in the dumpster

Corporations do the exact same thing before shareholder’s meetings.

> or flashy construction projects

My experience discussing this with some Deans of (large, top 10ish) institutions is that space and (qualified, tenure track) faculty are basically the hardest things to find, and space is probably harder. Lots of things require space (including, for example: student services), but space is limited, and classrooms and research and administrative space often take priority. And creating space is difficult, it takes years to build a building.

People don't want to donate to fixing something old, they want to donate to making something new, even when fixing something old is way more effective.

Nothing like how private companies like Google operate. /s

Isn’t that more of an indictment of the administration than of alumni donors?

This might be partially true but I think the bigger implication is that the donations do lead to overall more investment overall which leads to better universities. This is true with literally donations to anything…

I battle our elected officials with similar arguments. We want some safety improvements to our neighborhood roads. We ask them to work on a fix. They say there isn’t money for them. We show them there are federal grants to pay for them. They say they need staff to “manage” the grant money. End of the day, now nothing happens and we still have unsafe roads.

You can’t argue no money is better than some money. It takes a little more to see change but you go much further

This is the way many public universities without legacy admissions actually function as well. They have a high published tuition, but if you are a half decent student, there are many discounts and scholarships that can reduce it significantly. Only less qualified students pay full price.

They love to tell this story. It's absolutely laughable how limited scholarships are for actual academic performance.

Just trying to gauge opinions. Is roughly half off tuition for 3.5+ GPA acceptable? That’s been the most generous I’ve seen

I think that depends on the school - Georgia Tech is free for high academic performers from Georgia, for example.

For non-Georgian's reference, the HOPE scholarship essentially funds Georgia public college tuition with lottery receipts, subject to merit only. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HOPE_Scholarship

It's changed a bit over the years (+/- qualifications and coverage), but generally does what it says on the tin -- keep a high GPA and graduate in a reasonable amount of time, and most of your tuition is paid for.

God forbid you come from a competitive high school, though. Some kids can't get into Georgia Tech simply because of the quota system. A kid with a 3.8GPA will surely get in from Tri-Cities HS, but not from Milton HS.

If that's the case, your options are somewhat limited for a comparable tech/engineering school.

Well they've gotten enough money now to appear virtuous onwards.

What's the point of the donations to maintain an institution, if the institution's effect is to further entrench the advantages held by the already well-off and well-connected legacy admissions?

Please do tell- which institutions effect is as you describe?

Yes, but as it’s a finite resource, it’s also taking a spot of someone deserving on merit. Schools will have learn to operate without free money.

I'd actually love to see more data on this. My cynical take is that now people donate to schools they didn't even go to - and are concentrated anyways in a few big donations a year. So banning legacies could still just allow wealthier people to buy their in, even if not their own former college.

Most of these universities are already rich as hell, with their small class sizes they can easily support the current structure just off the interest on their endowments. Really, i think the current structure actually benefits rich legacies more than it does their much more talented poorer counter parts since the poorer counter parts can get VC funding much easier in todays climate if they demonstrate they have a great idea but this won't happen because most of the systems in America are rigged to make money flow upward.

Its a valid point, but its one the government does not care about.

If you are a public funded institution, you charge the same for admission to all students.

The moment the university stop taking public funds, you can have your wealthy students subsidize the less well off classmates.

That's a separate category of admissions advantage - "dean's list" or "donor" is usually what it's called. "Legacy" is just children of alumni regardless of whether they've donated, and "staff" or "faculty" is relatives of workers.

Exactly, this will likely increase donations.

The end of both legacy admissions and race-based admissions makes me feel hopeful that we're finally pivoting to a productive, merit-based approach.

Only one of these is a good thing.

I don’t think discrimination against asians was a good thing!

There was an interesting piece in a NPR podcast on the effects on the more "elite" students:

https://www.npr.org/2023/06/16/1182630192/the-indicator-from...

Basically, when the top students couldn't enter the more selective schools, they'd go to private or a bit less competitive schools and compensate the difference in education/networking in other ways, making it a wash when looking at their income years later. In contract students who benefited affirmative action where getting a way better deal at the exit and saw more significant salary difference compared to those who couldn't attend the more selective schools.

and it's probably not the one you think

At the same time, we're getting rid of testing in admissions decisions.

So instead we're in an era of squishy, difficult-to-judge metrics... and of course, the places where one could stand out-- interesting stories on one's transcript or essay-- are increasingly being evaluated by AI.

The cynical(?) explanation is that it is precisely because of the dismantling of standardized testing that getting rid of legacy admissions tenable...because it means schools can still proxy for class in admissions decisions (except veiled as extracurriculars, or "oh, this student knows calculus" in boston/sf).

If Harvard or USC were on the list I'd wager this to be the case, but MIT, Mellon & Pitt are serious schools so I believe them when I say it's in favor of increased rigor.

Some schools probably have a higher academic floor. The other thing that happens is that a fair number of good but not spectacular students who nonetheless want to get into the best school they can will put somewhere like Harvard on their list even though they know it's a long shot. If they have so-so SATs (especially in math) they won't even try for MIT--and probably wouldn't like it anyway.

I'm not sure it's deliberate, but I broadly agree with you that getting rid of tests favors class (despite the reasons purportedly being for equity). While you can buy small improvements in test scores, most things that have replaced tests in admissions decisions are easier to buy.

> MIT, Mellon & Pitt

MIT still requires SAT scores, so it's a non-factor there.

It's because schools want to retain a measure of control over who they let in. A true merit based admissions system (say min SAT score + lottery after that) is uncheatable and therefore schools have _zero_ control on who they have to accept.

The only reason why Harvard has kept its mythos of being the incubator of the next ruling class is because, well, they accept the children of the current one. Those are most likely to become part of the next ruling class by virtue of having been born into it. It's an old boys club. There's no intrinsic property of Harvard that turns them into this incubator.

And from the other side you have the brain dead equity idiots who are also against true merit systems, for equally twisted, but different reasons.

Schools have the ultimate control.

We're merely discussing whether certain things are used as inputs to a very complicated decision process.

Test scores are no longer being used as inputs in many places, in the name of equity: but I think almost anything you'll weigh higher will favor class, instead.

They're also removing race. And legacy status. The net effect is an admissions landscape that will look very different.

You're assuming that everyone is on an equal starting point. Wealthy people will be able to favor their kids.

That is exactly my motivation to become wealthy. I don't need a nice number with lots of zeros. I need to secure my children's future, including their prospects for higher education.

I see no problem with those who have amassed significant resources, being afforded use of those resources to their childrens' advantage.

I'm not disagreeing with you and I'm actively doing the same; however, I wouldn't say that our children gaining advantages would be considered "Merit-Based"

pivoting to a productive, merit-based approach

For the right definitions of "merit", yes. I'm not confident we've figured that part out yet.

We can't even define the purpose of college. E.g., is it only graduating and Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs, ..., Mark Zuckerberg are all failures?

Meritocracy works best if you have something to measure against.

I hate to burst your bubble but unfortunately this just kicks the can down the road. How do you measure merit? Because [EDIT] many measures of "merit" (was: standardized testing) can be (and often are) biased by race, cultural background, and economic status. For example:

Student 1 has built a fully automated chip manufacturing line in his basement.

Student 2 has build a robot that solves a maze in fifteen minutes (against the current state of the art which is a few seconds).

Which one would you admit?

Student 1 is the child of billionaires, and it's not clear how much of the work was actually done by him/her and how much was done by employees hired by the kid's parents.

Student 2 lives in Sudan and built their robot out of locally available materials, in the process inventing a new kind of motor built out of coconut fronds.

Now which one would you admit?

How is that an example of standardized testing?

Good point. I've edited my comment.

Student 1. He has the resources needed to move ahead. And unless my university can provide self help to the motivated, student 2 may not work out well here.

It’s as if you’re trying to make perfect the enemy of good. Standardized tests aren’t perfect but they give less privileged kids the best choice at attending a good college.

The kids of the upper class and the rich will always have an upper hand compared to the poor. However, standardized tests limit how wide the upper hand is. An upper class kid still has to study and pass the test, and the poor kid can also do that.

If admissions become “holistic”, poor kids would have little chances. Good luck to that poor kid competing subjectively with kids whose parents send them on impressive charity trips and get them unpaid internships at the most prestigious companies.

I think you are underestimating the extent to which standardized tests can be (and have been) biased.

https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/racis...

That's soft bigotry of low expecations. All you have to do is look at data that includes Asian Americans, which is always conveniently omitted from these racist narratives. Even non-Americans routinely do better on American standardized tests.

It is not. GP is saying that the "expectations" in question aren't as applicable to potential as they're purported to be.

>Asian Americans, which is always conveniently omitted from these racist narratives.

Ironically, so is the diversity of the Asian American community.

I think you're underestimating how biased literally every other possible metric of admissions can be.

Everyone understands that standardized tests are biased. They are still the least bad way to identify students from underprivileged backgrounds who have high potential to succeed in college.

I am someone, and I don't understand why they are. Do you have a primer handy on this subject?

SAT scores are correlated with wealth. This CNBC article is a decent introduction to the issue, but be aware that anything you read on the subject is likely to be pushing a particular narrative so it's tough to find a neutral primer anywhere.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/03/rich-students-get-better-sat...

It’s funny how that article doesn’t mention the most obvious reason - it turns out intelligent people generally don’t get jobs as janitors, retail workers, or other minimum-ish wage jobs. Those intelligent people then have intelligent babies.

For some reason a large part of our society doesn’t want to acknowledge that genetics (highly) influence intelligence.

Anyone who has lived in the real world knows that the conditions in which you grow up have a massive effect on where you end up. There are entire communities of people who live in deep poverty. It's not because they're all - uniformly down to the last person - dumb. The parents are poor, don't have a high-quality education, work long hours, can't afford tutoring, can't help their children with their coursework, etc.

There are entire countries trapped in poverty. China was desperately poor until just a generation ago. Did Chinese people suddenly become smart for some reason? Which is the next country that will magically go from being filled with dumb people to being filled with smart people?

As I said, just a bit of experience with the real world and critical thought will show that your explanation is nonsense.

> Did Chinese people suddenly become smart for some reason?

Yes, they stopped following strict communism. They pivoted to authoritarian capitalism and got wealthier.

I wasn't talking about different countries. Obviously there are issues that can hold large geographic regions down.

(Basically) no intelligent teenager in America is held down by poverty. My parents were relatively poor, didn't go to college, worked long hours, and I went to a public school and certainly didn't have any tutoring and didn't receive much help with homework.

I did well enough on my ACT to go to a private college for pretty close to free. Even if that doesn't happen you can go to a state school that doesn't need great grades, take out loans for the entire amount, get a degree for a good paying job, and suddenly you're out of poverty.

thank you. I read that article and the linked NEA one. Lots of info on biased roots in history, not much information on the mechanisms that create the bias or unbiased standardized tests as an alternative.

I would think there would be a lot of demand for an unbiased standardized test. All I saw for suggestions was to use GPA instead, which clearly has a lot of bias potential... is there a recommended replacement for the SAT/ACT?

What is the evidence that the tests now are biased other than that different groups score differently?

When your history ensures that some groups are socioeconomically disadvantaged, every possible method will be biased. It's unavoidable.

So why don't we focus on socioeconomically disadvantaged individuals instead of focusing on racial metrics?

With affirmative action gone, that's pretty much exactly what's going to happen.

Yeah the SAT is the worst admissions metric, besides all the other ones.

What would you use in its place? You think grades don't have bias?

Interviews, transcripts, (optional) test scores, letter of recommendation, a set of common essays across all schools, and an optional supplemental section or portfolio to showcase any personal achievements not covered by the other standard categories.

Oh wait! That exists — it’s called the Common App, and it’s what most private colleges today use, from the Ivies to elite tiny liberal arts colleges with the largest share of students from the 0.1% that you’ve never heard of, like Pomona College.

They use it because it allows them to ignore standardized test scores and just do admissions based on their own preferences. They used less merit-based metrics because they don't WANT a meritocracy.

Question. Which tells you more about a student:

1. An essay that was probably written by chatGPT then edited by the students parents

2. A test taken in a supervised, controlled, timed environment

1. Would absolutely not get you in anywhere selective

2. Would absolutely not either

I believe the whole concept of “meritocracy” for purpose of admissions is a lie— choosing the criteria to measure against is itself a subjective act.

> I believe the whole concept of “meritocracy” for purpose of admissions is a lie— choosing the criteria to measure against is itself a subjective act.

Let me ask you. Do you also believe that requiring a display of proficiency in mathematics to get into the best schools is inherently discriminatory? What about requiring a demonstration of the capability to understand and complete basic subject matter material in the fields or reading, writing, or scientific literacy?

There’s no shortage of people who meet any of that criteria!

The whole point of a selective college is they have to select from a pool of already qualified applicants. There is no objective measure to measure against when you’re splitting hairs. Even were you to limit it to “objective” requirements like test score and GPA, how do you decide between two students for one spot when both have the exact same scores?

There is no shortage of perfect scores applying to Harvard. And yet a majority, or even a plurality, of any given class of admits didn’t have perfect scores.

There is no shortage of perfect scores applying to Harvard.

1,000 people typically receive a perfect SAT score yearly.

Essays are incredibly biased though! Do you really think that for some reason essays actually have to be written by the person applying, and can't be gamed with money? That an overworked public school teacher is going to write a better letter of recommendation than a private school teacher? That a rich kid is going to have worse extracurriculars, portfolio or achievements?

The Common App is great, but it's not magically less open to bias than standardized test scores.

Not only that, but the person reading the essay is also biased and will select for students who align with their bias. It is a terrible admission metric.

It’s naive to think schools don’t have a system in place for this: separating piles into buckets of test score, ordering by grade, marking a certain number from each bucket as worth another look, then ordering by essay, marking a certain from each group, and repeat on any other metric.

Many schools, selective or not, actually do this whole process — multiple times, with each admissions agent doing a separate order of criteria, to ensure everyone’s application gets read at least twice. The idea being that those with the most “let’s give them another look” across the board are the most notable. Then from that shortlist the debates comparing each applicant, usually sorted by geographic proximity to each other, begin (at Harvard, if you’re from Texas you’re not really competing against New Yorkers for a spot, you’re competing against other Texans for the XX number of Texan spots they usually admit a year).

I did a short stint as a student worker in the admissions office of a very selective college in California (<5% admission rate, but not one many could name off the top of their head), and this is more or less how it worked

> That an overworked public school teacher is going to write a better letter of recommendation than a private school teacher?

LOL. My understanding is the really good prep school college counsellors golf with one or more high-up folks in elite university admissions offices, and get the inside scoop on exactly what they and their peers in other universities are looking for in any given year, such that they can even tune an essay or letter of reference for a given school based on that non-public information and advise students which schools to focus their application efforts on, based on their background & activities.

> letter of recommendation

We've gone full circle.

Transcripts aren't useful across different high schools. Rich kids have more connections for rec letters. Rich kids get professional essay help, and lying kids make up a good story. Kids and parents with lots of time/money/connections on their hands get a portfolio of community service etc built up. I knew these kids in high school with resumes like veteran philanthropists, and it worked.

I think the only good one out of those is the interview.

Is there literally any test in which:

"Students of Color" receive scores in the same distribution as white/asian/hispanic students (same fraction of 1s, 2s ... 35s, 36s on the ACTs for example)

AND

Top scores are meaningfully distinct from the population average? (because the first condition can be trivially fulfilled by having everyone score the same)

"Since their inception a century ago, standardized tests have been instruments of racism and a biased system."

Standardized tests were invented in Sui dynasty China, in the early 600s AD, as a way of selecting officials for the imperial bureaucracy. They were invented precisely because they were more objective than the prevailing method of selecting officials - recommendations from the aristocracy.

There is a long history of standardized testing being a means for rewarding merit, instead of more easily corruptible methods of selecting officials/students/etc., such as recommendations. Just to illustrate my point: Do you know why Harvard abandoned standardized testing in 1926 as the sole means of determining admissions? Because "too many" Jews were passing the admissions test. Harvard's "holistic" admissions policy was invented for the sole purpose of restricting Jewish admissions.

To the contrary, the NEA wildly overestimates it and employs junk question-begging "disparate impact" [0] reasoning throughout. The article is full of stuff like this: "There is a clear correlation, for example, between test scores and property values."

To the extent that society is meritocratic at all and intelligence is heritable (and it is), we should expect test scores to correlate with all manner of measures of success, including property values. Articles like this don't even take that question seriously. They just ignore it. It's proof by repeated assertion. It may be fashionable to insist that this is prima facie evidence of bias, but that is a question of logic and not a difficult one, whatever exceedingly average minds like Ibram X. Kendi think of it.

[0] As a legal concept "disparate impact" is what it is. The law means whatever its authors intend it to mean. But as a matter of logic, it's embarrassing, and beneath this forum.

They're not biased at all. People don't like them because they're accurate.

The entire concept of an “admissions” department was based on the historical fact that too many Jews were being admitted and too few WASPs were. So they included a “character” criteria and fixed the problem.

Now, too many Asians are being admitted based on test scores. Oh no! To fix this problem, Harvard consulted their history department and included a “personality traits” section. Is it any wonder that Asian students scored low on this?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollme...

Oh my. This obsession over race is so bewildering to foreigners like me.

That’s an awfully big article with no actual examples of how the tests are currently, in any way, biased.

This is so naive. Poor kids do worse in school because their lives lack the material and parental support necessary for quality education.

S1 definitely.

depends on their race

> Now which one would you admit?

Why not both? I think a lot of the debate over college admissions misses the fact that so much of this is artificial scarcity. Some of the big schools like Harvard/Yale/Princeton etc. could easily increase the size of their incoming classes many times, and still have them only be filled with highly qualified candidates.

Top schools exist not just to educate, but to ensure that the social hierarchy is maintained. If it were purely to educate or to ensure diverse learning environments, the top Ivies could solve this easily by quadrupling the size of their classes, but then this would of course dilute the exclusivity that is the primary reason for these institutions in the first place.

Magic that happens in top universities in US is combining money (kids of billionaires) with smarts (kids with 1600 SAT) in one place. Both bring different skills to the table and result is disproportionate share of top scientist, business and political leaders produced by those universities (from both classes of people). Removing either group from university will just lead to university stopping being elite. Considering that number of billionaires is measured in hundreds (so only a dozen or so kids of billionaires enter universities every year), university may just admit that one kid.

On Student 2 who build something in Sudan from stick and rocks. Unless he is from elite family he most likely did not get proper school education and won't be able to keep up with rigors of studying in top university even if he is very smart. Harvard is not really in a business of providing remedial education. With that if he is really smart and resourceful, he had a very good chance of doing very well for himself in Sudan (becoming entrepreneour, building soemthing local, become warlord, etc) and then his kids will be fully equipped to go to top university.

Yeah I see this take all the time. Admissions offices are allowed to take a student's means into account! So in deciding between two students with equal SAT scores, one from a Greenwich private school and one from South Tucson, the one from Tucson is the more impressive student.

Affirmative action was misguided because it assumed that because one student was Korean and the other Mexican, the Mexican kid must be disadvantaged. Besides the fact that there's an inherently racist worldview baked into that, Newsflash! There are tons of poor Korean kids and rich Mexicans!

Spot on. I don't see why this is so hard for people to comprehend and why they are fighting the obvious. That very basic level of nuance tends to be missing from these conversations.

> I don't see why this is so hard for people to comprehend and why they are fighting the obvious.

It's because these people only see the world through the one-dimensional lens of skin color.

Further, it's an attractive way to view the world when you're a complete idiot with nothing of substance to offer society. It leads these people to infecting society with parasitic and fallacious ideas that you see manifested in the extremes of both political parties.

Why is SAT score a good way to decide which student is more deserving of a spot?

There should be some SAT score floor. But beyond that other factors should take over. If the floor is at n and two applicants appear - one with a score of 1.1n and the other 1.2n, I don’t think that’s enough information to decide who should get the spot.

> Why is SAT score a good way to decide which student is more deserving of a spot?

Name a better way.

SAT score floor + lottery?

What makes you think that is better?

Vox had an article about college lotteries earlier this year you might find interesting:

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/4/19/23689402/colleg...

Lottery is a metric that can't be gamed, if implemented correctly. It may not ever be the best system, but it also can't end up being what was a better system that was gamed into a worst system. It provides a certain level of consistent mediocracy between various other systems which rise and fall as they are gamed.

what are the other factors?

There is an incredible about of SAT prep that is free.

It's a good way of figuring out who is intellectually capable. SAT scores have a very good prediction rate of success in college.

High SAT scores are only a good predictor against low SAT scores. Can you say that extremely high SAT scores are a better indicator of college success than very high SAT scores?

I’m not saying SAT scores are useless, just that they should only be used as a filter and not for ranking.

We'll never have a perfect way to measure merit, but that doesn't justify the status quo. It would likely reject both students for a third student that checks the right intersectional boxes, even if coming from a more privileged upbringing than the other two students.

We should be constantly improving our ways of measuring merit, not throwing up our hands and pretending it's meaningless to try.

I'm confused here. Both facts are salient (what was built and under which circumstances was it built) to any discussion of merit. The main complaint I see here is that admissions committees should use as much information as possible, which I doubt anyone disagrees with. What is racist is someone saying 'Oh, student 2 is black, thus without any further information, I'm going to assume he's poor and from Sudan'.

Case in point, we had a very wealthy black student in my college. This woman was not disadvantaged in any way, yet she played the race card all the time in order to claim a disadvantaged background. I'm talking about a family that would take their kids to France and England to summer. That level of wealth, yet framing all her accomplishments as if she came from the inner city. That's disingenuous, yet the (now-gone) affirmative action camp would have gladly taken her checking the 'African-American/Black' checkbox as a sign that all her accomplishments should be judged on a poor disadvantaged upbringing. How is that not racist?

I believe that GP would admit the child of billionaires. People who promote the meritocracy myth have an agenda and are sticking to it. Do you really think you can change GP’s mind with logic?

Is this a need-blind or need-aware institution?

If need-aware, does the admitting class have enough full pay to cover the costs of those needing scholarships (wouldn't want to actually tap into that tax-free endowment)? If they need more full pay, then S1, if there are already enough full pay, then S2.

standardized tests are not biased.

Well, I'm getting down-voted even though I'm correct. This is one of the problems in our society generally -- people have decided that what they think is just must be correct because they assume that life is fair.

I hate these types of arguments that create an extremely contrived example. If we’re making a choice between these two students, then you can’t really go wrong. But that’s not the choice being made.

What kind of child, even that of billionaires, wants to build an automated chip manufacturing line? Maybe in Minecraft. Or in Roblox.

I fundamentally do not understand why merit is something you should focus on when it comes to admission into a university. The entire point of an education is to learn, may be you need the bare minimum to enroll but universities shouldn't be chasing the brightest students, they need an education the least.

Just because thats how it should work in some people's heads as the ideal doesn't mean it makes any actual sense if you really interrogate the idea. Meritocracy makes sense after you have an education, it doesn't make sense before it.

Resources are finite. If college courses were recorded lessons or they just gave you a theory book and an exercises book, then of course we could automate everything. Just sign up, pay your fee and take the exams and once you're done you get the degree, even full remote. Your taxes will go towards professors and a fuck ton of TAs for questions and exercises and to keep the infrastructure running.

But we're not there yet

Perhaps it’s politically incorrect to say, but students learn best when they’re around students that are of similar intelligence and motivation to succeed.

Taking a brilliant kid and putting them around underachievers doesn’t do anyone any good.

Students learn best when they have a quiet home to study in, 3 quality meals a day, parents who aren't working 3 jobs they can ask questions to, parents who aren't fighting about paying the bills that month, good school supplies, etc.

Agreed. So let's go solve those problems directly and stop pretending the solution is to put underachieving kids into top schools to make ourselves feel better.

I will only feel better when the working class controls the society it built.

Once they do that, they become the ruling class and the elites. Then their children are no longer working class, and are now the enemies.

In such a case, I won't feel better yet will I? So we'll try again...

Just like we've tried in the past again and again and again... and a few thousand years later here we are and we will keep trying :)

Exactly. A lot of progress was made in that time, so I have little patience for defeatism.

You're missing the point: If the working class becomes the ruling one finally the majority rules, not a rich elite.

Conversely, putting someone who isn't well suited to that environment is setting them up for failure.

> Taking a brilliant kid and putting them around underachievers doesn’t do anyone any good.

In a meritocracy, those that do not achieve do not advance, so this is not a problem after a time. I was in the US Navy's Nuclear Propulsion program. It was the closest thing to a pure meritocracy. You didn't pass a test, do the work, or behave in line with expectations you were sent to the fleet. After a few months, only the capable and motivated were left. It was completely colorblind, completely free of social agenda. You could either do the job well enough or not.

I watched a lot of wash outs where there someone would find a way to tip the scales in college to keep them passing along. I watched the following wash out: the son of a Navy Captain, a congressman's kid, a couple of sons of really rich parents.

> Meritocracy makes sense after you have an education, it doesn't make sense before it.

This is really a truth. There really is no meritocracy if you gate who is allowed to have merit before you measure it. Regulating opportunity to control outcomes is the exact opposite of what should be done to have a true meritocracy.

> universities shouldn't be chasing the brightest students, they need an education the least.

Or it can be seen as give education to the students that will make the best use of it maximizing value to society.

I doubt merit based approach is the only way of conducting admissions. Merits don’t count for as much as people think they do. A narrow pool of candidates come because of merit.

A more reasonable selection system wouldn’t just rely on the individual but also the support network. For example, I often hear “it takes a village to raise a _____ doctor”. And that truth speaks volumes.

We're not, we're heading towards tribalism. The concern about legacy admissions is more that the legacies may be disproportionately white more so than anything else. With limited data on other schools, Harvard recently reported that legacies actually had higher SAT scores than non-legacy admits.[1] That didn't stop people who wanted an alleged merit based admissions policy from continuing to call it a racist backdoor. Carnegie Mellon did not publish any stats on their legacy admits however.

Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, universities have promised to continue to look at race as a factor that still complies with the SC ruling which means a backdoor for race. FWIW white students are the most underrepresented on elite campuses so it would be hard to argue that there are admissions policies favoring them.

[1]: https://features.thecrimson.com/2021/freshman-survey/academi...

[2]: https://stanforddaily.com/2023/06/30/stanford-to-expand-outr...

actually had higher SAT scores than non-legacy admits

Is the SAT score the only measure of merit?

The non-legacies are going to miss on the chance to make social connections with legacy admits who have a lot of connections...and access to a lot of resources..

Yeah how often does that actually happen. Did Tommy Lee Jones’ acting career really benefit from him being roommates with the son of Albert Gore, Sr.?

The legacy admits will just go to some other college where some other suckerfish can hop on to get access to a lot of resources..so what's the big difference socially.

> The concern about legacy admissions is more that the legacies may be disproportionately white

Disproportionally rich is my problem with legacy admissions.

Harvard recently reported that legacies actually had higher SAT scores than non-legacy admits…

So you agree that Harvard shouldn’t need to factor in legacy status and instead use fairer metrics like SAT scores?

Not necessarily. I am neutral on it. I see both sides of the argument.

I do think legacy admissions should not be a strike against which seems inevitable now to prevent lawsuits and bad press. I also think legacy admits shouldn't be tarred as less qualified (a polite way to say dumber), affirmative action beneficiaries for white people, and spoiled.

Now I feel like you’re making up strawmen. Literally no one is saying anything about legacy status counting against applicants.

Even if that was a concern, applicants could simply… not mention their legacy status? Or better yet, the application itself could just not collect that data?

I'd hope it's not a strawman.

I do think legacy admission status counts against now. The SFFA lawsuit accused Harvard of using legacy admissions of being a backdoor affirmative action for white people because the legacy admits were so disproportionately white. I think my point is that in a highly racial context, the facts are thrown out.

To your point, in California, there was a law that was passed in 2019 that requires reporting on legacy admissions now[1] so I think the school is obligated to collect this data (so idk what happens if an applicant omits it). And again, legacy admission status is accused of broadly being affirmative action for white people[2] without evidence.

The reason it counts against now is that if a qualified legacy student is accepted, the data on students must be made public, by law or by public interest. The higher the percent of legacy admits, the more the school is accused of letting unqualified people in, facts be damned. I think that is because of a highly tribal view of school admissions.

[1]: https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/california-lega...

[2]: https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/affirmative-action-white...

You claim “the facts are thrown out” but then don’t cite a single hard fact which remotely suggest anyone wants legacy status to count against. Instead you are extrapolating that removal of legacy from positive consideration will eventually lead to re-adding legacy for negative consideration, but no one is actually suggesting this. You are completely making it up.

The California law you cite only applies to universities that collect and consider legacy data in the first place. Thus, your claim that “if a qualified legacy student is accepted, the data on students must be made public...” does not hold if the universities simply drop legacy status from consideration altogether, which is the goal here. If they don’t collect the data, they can’t be accused of anything.

Honestly, this manipulation of facts and narrative leads me to believe that you are pushing an agenda and not arguing in good faith.

but then don’t cite a single hard fact which remotely suggest anyone wants legacy status to count against.

Accusing it of being affirmative action for white people or for "the rich" pretty clearly means people want it to count against. I think you are deliberately ignoring that the SFFA lawsuit said this, politicians said this, and even people ITT said this and clearly these things reflect poorly on the university. There isn't any evidence that legacy admissions is affirmative action for white people or rich people though.

simply drop legacy status from consideration altogether

There isn't any evidence that legacy status counts for. You have never established that it does. Not one of the California schools in that article I cited says that legacy admits have an advantage. Here is Stanford's policy https://provost.stanford.edu/2020/06/26/admissions-considera.... CMU from the OP article said legacy status had no bearing on admissions for years. Harvard likewise. Their reasons for tracking legacy status are probably complicated. I concede at one point they were used to allow in less qualified students but that hasn't been the case for years. But tracking legacy status does not mean it is used to give favorable admissions. I do not believe it does and the legacy admits are probably qualified. That is clearly the case for Harvard. If you did not believe this, you are saying universities are lying about their policies.

So since the accusation that legacy admissions is affirmative action for white people is disingenuous, I believe the people who continue to say that it is are actually the ones not arguing in good faith.

edit: dropping legacy status from applications may not even change the percentage of 'legacy' admits and yet I am sure that universities know who they are. Including it on applications may harm the legacy applications because the universities are now under politically charged pressure which is what I am arguing would be wrong.

Harvard likewise

To be clear, you are claiming that Harvard explicitly does not consider legacy status when deciding on admissions?

So, when a student is considered being cut in the final stage of the admissions process, i.e. on the “lop list”, and decision makers are provided with only four pieces of information: legacy status, athlete status, financial aid eligibility, and race; you are claiming that legacy status is included for… what, to satisfy the curiosity of admissions committee members? Give me a break. Also, you’re moving the goalposts from “legacy-based admissions are okay” to “actually, legacy-based admissions don’t exist.”

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf

For the record, I don’t believe that legacy admissions are intended to be “affirmative action for white people”, but I do think the outcome is similar.

To be clear, you are claiming that Harvard explicitly does not consider legacy status when deciding on admissions?

ya. Well... I think it's unlikely. There might be cases, I went through some math on this once and concluded that maybe 2% of the incoming class at Harvard could be unqualified legacy admits based on the total pool and the SAT std dev, etc. but even that I doubt. I think legacies probably are qualified based on what I have seen but the main reason I think this is more because admissions are hyper scrutinized now (for the past 10-20 years and they've been publishing student body stats) so if there is a way for Harvard to let in unqualified people it will be noticed and the public would not accept legacy admissions(SFFA lawsuit began almost a decade now). The athletic one is a different beast.

you are claiming that legacy status is included for… what

Possibly a tactic to raise more money because alumni are somewhat tricked into thinking making donations increases the odds their children are accepted. I don't know for sure and they probably should not include it on the application.

Also, you’re moving the goalposts from “legacy-based admissions are okay” to “actually, legacy-based admissions don’t exist.”

haha. Well if a school came out and said we allow some legacy admissions because it raises more money from donors and we need the money (and that wasn't a lie) I think that raises an interesting question about admissions I don't have an answer to. Most schools probably don't need the money now, I don't know where the money goes though. But I don't know what to think about admissions; not convinced there is a perfect formula. I'm not in favor of one group monopolizing schools though.

> Harvard recently reported that legacies actually had higher SAT scores than non-legacy admits.

This likely indicates wealthy people can afford SAT preparation tutors.

It could also mean: smarter people make more money -- and they pass down intelligence -- both genetically and through teaching.

>reported that legacies actually had higher SAT scores than non-legacy admits

About 30 points higher than non-legacy students whose average is brought down by affirmative action. VS Asian Americans who need to score 50-100+ points higher for comparable consideration, they're underperforming based on SAT merit.

I'm not sure I buy this because the only metric I have seen on racial categories at Harvard is using the old score where the average Asian SAT score was 767 out of 800[1]. Apparently roughly doubling this is equal to the score format reported in the link above for legacies so rounding up and using this chart I found which may or may not be reliable https://www.sparkadmissions.com/blog/comparing-your-new-sat-... that gives us a 1500. The legacy score was 1523. Also, affirmative action may lower the legacy score.

[1]: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/10/22/asian-american...

The 50-100 (really 140-450 points) is from Princeton study on Asian SAT stats for admission in private colleges vs other races. Apologies for wall of text.

Alternate explanation is that particularly sneaky elite admissions boards have learned to coordinate to devalue SAT scores for Asians, they'd rather engineer their mean Asian SAT score around something not embarrassingly high as cover for other cohorts, especially legacy which AFAIK doesn't need AA skew, since they're... legacy. AA primarily brings down average scores of non-legacy, and in this case make legacy look better, like average at Harvard for non asian & non white is 1450 according to your link, which is low considering 1500+ scores is 9th percentile for 223k Asian takers [0&1]. This is slightly conspiratorial, but also essentially what started the anti-AA case was when an Asian applicant with 1590 got rejected from multiple elite colleges, and the case essentially revealed high scores make Asians seem like bland test takers with bad personality even though personality assessment showed otherwise. Asian scores are high enough to break Harvard's argument not just for AA but IMO legacy as well.

Some other considerations, with respect to Harvard, according to latest admission data, @28% asian enrollment out of 2000 for class of 26, that's about 550 asians (previously this was ~20%). The real question the Harvard admissions stats don't show is how many Asians with 1550+ scores are being rejected due to "personality". If you look SAT score distribution [0], Asians are the only group where perfect math score is NOT 99+ percentile rank but "only" 95, and on ERW Asians 750+ score is 95 percentile vs other groups where it's 99+ except whites / multi racial at 98. Meaning Asians have disproportionate candidates with most perfect math and close to perfect ERW scores of all groups. Asians also total score outlier in that 1500+ is "only'' 91 percentile vs 98 to 99+ for everyone else. Collegeboard also has info that about 223k Asians (out of 2.2M takers) took SATs (2020 data [1]), so there's ~20k Asians with 1500+ scores (9th percentile). If extrapolated from 98th percentile of over 1500+ scores from 2.2M takers, that's ~44k total pool over 1500+ candidates of which 45% are Asians. 45% Asian is also in line with UCs where prop 209 banned AA and led to 40+% asian campuses.

Question is how many of 1550+ ones are Asians, keeping in mind ~7000 Asians have perfect math scores. My gut feeling is there are many 1550+ Asians being rejected by elites for skewing scores too high to keep legacy admissions charade going, especially at Harvard, because any Asian who scores that high, which rough napkin math is multiple size of their annual enrollment, would have an application to Harvard and eager to accept. Hence the narrative harvard stats paints via omission even by their student journalists, is that legacy does better non-legacy whose down by affirmative action, and legacy slightly worse than Asian Americans, when reality is Asian Americans have more than enough candidates to saturate scores above legacy and affirmative actions so their aggregate score has to be kept down through admission shenanigans.

[0] https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/sat-percentile-r... [1] https://i.redd.it/l6hb0eq4k5271.jpg

I am not sure why that argument would not also apply to white people then where there are ~909,000 who took the test. That leaves a large number of white students who got perfect scores or were 1550+. For example 1% of the total is about ~9000 people. So a strong case could be made that Harvard actually discriminates even more against white students who are not on parity and actually the only group underrepresented by total population size at Ivy League and other elite schools. The Asians who made this argument never mentioned this but actually made the opposite claim that whites were favored over Asians.

Of course, I don't think SAT score alone should determine entrance and no school has said that was all that mattered for admissions and I think that could be valid because the test score is really just one metric and doesn't give a complete picture. For example is the person a good test taker but a lazy student? That would reflect poorly on the student.

Also for the record and to be clear the legacy score of 1523 is still a high score and less than 1 std dev away from a perfect 1600 so it's not like we're talking about legacies who are totally out of range of admissions.

It does also apply to whites, hence anti AA actions was coordinated between white conservatives and some Asian Americans. One common talking point was AA + legacy was a double whammy on poor whites. Also it's not 1% it's 99+ percentile, i.e. any value less than 1%, which can be substantially less than 9000. States that have ban AA have demonstrated increased white and asian enrollemnt, so AA is indeed discriminatory towards whites. But if we use stats for institutions that banned AA in California, Asian enrollment uplift was highest, suggesting Asians are more represented on that end of SAT bell curve.

I agree at some point a 1500 and 1600 score are probably high enough even for elite universities. My broader point is that in composite admissions system like harvard, the score it self can be gamed to generate outcomes like racial composition. And institutes will figure out other ways to circumvent. But if they ever get slapped to move onto a score only admissions, that 1STD will make all the difference.

> merit-based approach.

There are still issues with this. Food insecurity being a primary one. But apparently universal school lunches is not as important to people as having a HUGE military budget. What kind of beast doesn't want to feed kids!?

Edit: Apparently plenty even on HN. Wow. Color me shocked.

There are plenty of choices for higher edu. What's the benefit of forcing a one-size-fits-all business model on all of them? Why should small out of the way esoteric college - or any other for that matter - have to follow Carnegie Mellon or similar?

This isn't being inclusive or diverse, it's assimilation at the institution/industry level. Yeah, ironic.

I agree with you that the end of legacy and race-based admissions is a good thing. I think it's dangerous to think that a meritocracy always leads to good outcomes when there is huge inequality. This best analogy I can give is the "sports stars" analogy. Professional sports is probably the most even playing field I can imagine - there is such a huge incentive to win games that pretty much all else besides skills on the playing field is ignored. But what it results in is a teeny tiny elite making millions, and nearly everyone else barely making enough to get by. So if the rest of the economy was like the sports stars world (and more and more of it is leaning that way), what reason do the rest of the 99.99% have to support this meritocracy? Sure, you can say it's an improvement that the best people are in charge, but if it's clear my genetic talents will prevent me from ever being a star, my incentive is really to tear the whole system down if none of those benefits ever make it my way.

I think one contributing factor you see behind so much increasing social strife, the resurgent interest in unions, etc. is the belief that unless you make it to a top job after a top school, you'll barely be scraping by your whole life.

Pure meritocracy in a "winner take all/most" economy leads to a very unstable society.

> dangerous to think that a meritocracy always leads to good outcomes

People who argue against meritocracy seem to forget that it's the only proposed alternative to the "birthright"-ocracy that civilization has been trying to pry itself from the jaws of for centuries.

Not really. Countries that are consistently at the top of world happiness rankings are ones that (a) both support a dynamic economy through meritocracy and (b) have high taxes and a broad social safety net that limits inequality.

To put it another way, I'm not arguing against meritocracy; I'm arguing that it alone does not lead to good outcomes - i.e. I think it's necessary but not sufficient. It's like when people thought "bringing democracy" to all these countries without democratic institutions would be a good thing. Democracy is generally better than the alternative, but only if there are broad protections like equality under the law for minority groups, otherwise it's just the "2 wolves and a lamb deciding what to have for dinner" issue. Meritocracy is similar. It's generally a good thing but not if it results in a very small number of people hoarding all the spoils while everyone else barely scrapes by.

Why are the reward ratios in professional sports relevant to other occupations in society?

> But what it results in is a teeny tiny elite making millions, and nearly everyone else barely making enough to get by.

That is because a very small number of people can satiate the demand for almost all of the world’s people for entertainment from watching sports. Simple supply and demand.

It has nothing to do with meritocracy or how meritocracy distributed rewards. Making sure doctors/lawyers/engineers are appropriately qualified is not going to result in only a few getting the rewards, because their work does not scale as much (for the most part).

> Why are the reward ratios in professional sports relevant to other occupations in society?

My whole point is that the hollowing out of the middle class and the huge growth in objective measures of inequality in the US are precisely because many other occupations are looking more and more like "sports star" economies.

E.g. just look at how the former "main streets" of many smaller towns in the US have been decimated. There used to be "local leaders" in retail in cities all over the US, now it's extremely difficult to compete if you don't have the scale of Amazon. Just look at all the recent stories about fears of AI taking jobs. E.g. it used to be that lots of people could get copywriting jobs. Now it looks like in a pretty short time frame that only the very, very best copywriters will be employable as so much other work is delegated to AI. Look at how most smaller news outlets have completely disappeared across the country. These smaller news outlets used to be fairly important factors in their community, but now they simply can't compete with the Internet giants for ad dollars.

I can go on and on, but the "winner take all" dynamic of sports economics has been spreading to pretty much any occupation that faces competition over the Internet.

That is true, but I do not see the connection with meritocracy. I see “winner take all” dynamics to be a property of economies of scale, which technological advances and computing have greatly enhanced.

One might say meritocracy might lead to technological advances leading to economies of scale, but the solution to an increasing income/wealth gap would not be getting rid of meritocracy, but rather redistributing some of the wealth so as to provide a floor for quality of life and quality of opportunities (I would hope).

> One might say meritocracy might lead to technological advances leading to economies of scale, but the solution to an increasing income/wealth gap would not be getting rid of meritocracy, but rather redistributing some of the wealth so as to provide a floor for quality of life and quality of opportunities (I would hope).

Yep, that's pretty much what I was trying to say, so my apologies if I wasn't clear. I think the "quality of opportunities" is also a very important point - I made the argument elsewhere that there is no reason for many of the top schools to have such small class sizes in the first place. There is no reason with their huge endowments that they couldn't increase their class sizes and still only admit highly qualified applicants. That's still a meritocracy, but just ensures the "winners" are not arbitrarily selected by making the cutoff so high that you're making random decisions about who to admit (e.g. all ten of these folks had perfect SAT scores but we'll let this guy in because he had a "better personality").

> Professional sports is probably the most even playing field I can imagine - there is such a huge incentive to win games that pretty much all else besides skills on the playing field is ignored.

Match fixing has been a perennial problem in sports.

> So if the rest of the economy was like the sports stars world (and more and more of it is leaning that way), what reason do the rest of the 99.99% have to support this meritocracy?

Pretty sure a big fraction of that 99.99% love the top sports stars.

For example, major league baseball games have higher attendance than Single-A games.

The problem with merit is that it's impossible to determine because the circumstances of people around the world are so vastly different. If you have, say, 1500 spots for a new class, it's going to be impossible to select the best 1500 students. Some elite universities you may even have more than 1500 valedictorians. So what to do? I say you just set a qualifying point to be considered and publicize it (as standardized as you can get, i.e SAT score or similar) and then put every qualifier in a hat and select at random until you fill your spots. Nothing else should matter.

Of course this assumes that merit is actually the only thing universities care about, and I'd say that it's not.

this decision is not motivated by merit, it's entirely motivated by race.

and they have no intentions of using a merit based approach for applicants because that would result in an even more white and asian dominant student pool.

without the legacy pool they now have more wiggle room to juice their "merit-based" approach so that they can admit more blacks without getting busted for illegal affirmative action.

Merit isn't enough.

I went to a po-dunk school in rural Missouri. I would never be able to I compete with kids from a rich Chicago/NY school. In the same way a black kid from a poor inner city wouldn't be able to.

This is part of the problem. The world isn't egalitarian. The poor will continue to get poorer, the rich will get richer.

Solution? Lottery? Don't have a great one.

I agree with you. Saying something is merit based is only half of an answer. What exactly is and isn’t meritorious?

I’m not convinced that scoring well on tests beyond some point is a particularly good way of deciding if a student deserves a spot or not.

“Merit-based” is such a loaded term.

What do you mean by that exactly? What are you envisioning?

EDIT: Wow, a downvote. For this comment? Yikes!

EDIT 2: Oh, I see. I was using the phrase “loaded term” incorrectly. I only meant that “merit-based” is a phrase that can mean a lot of different things.

However, thinking about this more, I do still think it’s a loaded term. Politicians and the adjacents have visibly been using it to push an agenda. (I’m not saying this agenda is right or not. But it’s still clearly an agenda. I mean, that’s what their jobs are: to literally have agendas lol.)

Except for, you know, Letters of Recommendation, which at top schools are often the deciding factor. All else being near-equal (or not), a letter from a Kennedy is going to get you into Brown versus say, a regular high school teacher that many of comfortable-but-not-connected suburban students applying to college will be using. Maybe a local lawyer, if you’re special.

Those are who families who scream “meritocracy” should be directing their ire at, not the applicants (usually with more impressive results and stories considering the background they grew up in, compared to—sorry!—a hum-drum suburban also-ran) _think_ they’re better than, which ultimately is what a meritocracy boils down to.

Ultimately the only answer that will give you, or your kids, peace is accepting the fact that schools will curate the student body they want. They’ve admittedly done a good job at it! Complain all you want about Harvard tilting the scales, they’ve done an amazing job maintaining their reputation and exclusivity. If they don’t accept you, they don’t want you. If they do, they do. It’s that simple.

I want to get rid of letters of recommendation as well. I would personally like to go off of only a single nationwide standardized test.

Nope, these are "racist" now. I'm not going to explain why at the risk of getting downvoted.

I personally could not think of a more boring way to curate a student body, but even more so than that, I think that’s completely unfair to the many, many way-more interesting people who make up top schools’ student bodies: why does Jimmy Also-Ran with the perfect score on a single test and nothing else get to go to college while track-star Olympiad with a 4.0 doesn’t?

Aren’t plenty of PISA high-ranking nations from the East Asian countries to Germany highly reliant upon placement examinations in student educational destinations? It might not feel very American, but it’s widely practiced.

In Germany, it's all about Abitur results: comprehensive exams and portfolio of work in a few subjects you've chosen to focus on, and really only for a few high-demand majors like medicine or law (everywhere) and computer science (at the top tech schools); for every other major, it's a matter of getting decent marks that prove you're likely prepared for university. Not picking mathematics as one of your major Abitur subjects would probably be disqualifying for computer science.

There's nothing like the SAT (single, high-stakes general aptitude test used nationwide); Abitur standards are set and evaluated by each state.

While there's a reputational difference between, say, Technisches Universität München and Ostbayerische Technische Hochschule Amberg-Weiden, fees are the same at both, and cost of living of course is higher for TUM just because Munich is really expensive.

At least in tech in Germany, there is nothing resembling the prestige merely attending MIT/Stanford/CMU carries in the US. Of course there's a network effect from studying at TUM or RWTH instead of OTH-AW, but not nearly as pronounced. There are no private, elite universities, no university-sponsored sports teams, no legacy admissions, no giant individual donors hoping to secure a university spot for a lazy/dull kid. Lazy/dull rich kids go to private high schools if they can't hack it in public university-prep school.

Thanks for the very comprehensive information. Curious what you think of this opinion about the lack of elite schools in Germany not being a good thing-

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36789051

Because universities are academic institutions, not track-and-field training facilities (or at least they are in countries that take education seriously, unlike the US). Who cares how boring it is?

With that, the US is widely recognized to have the best universities in the world. A lot of countries claim to take education seriously, but the result is often very mediocre.

Very few people will pick IIT or Beijing University if they are offered spot at Harvard.

People go to Harvard not for the excellence of the education, which I'm sure is good but is pretty much equivalent to top state public schools, but for the network and the signaling.

Network - one of the best things you can do is put a bunch of intelligent, highly motivated people in one room and have them work on stuff together. Top tier universities are basically this. The actual education offered on top isn't that relevant as long as it's passable - these people will find a way to educate themselves

Signaling - having Hardvard on your resume is a global signal of your status and opens up so many more doors by simply having it listed by your name

There are plenty of academic opportunities at Harvard that are not available at state schools. Because they attract many of the top students in the world, they're able to offer highly accelerated or advanced courses that other schools can't.

> the US is widely recognized to have the best universities in the world

Recognized by whom? I would certainly be more impressed if someone went to ENS Paris than Harvard.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say an Olympiad 4.0 student — many of whom exist, I went to school with a few — has a much more promising academic career than someone who managed to get good-not-great grades and a single perfect test score.

Aside from the dedication of waking up to practice a sport every morning, think of how much time and discipline is it takes to balance being an amazing athlete with being a great student. They likely have all the mental fortitude and academic talent they need to succeed in college, no question, regardless of if they had a bad test day, or their pencil broke, or they had to use the bathroom and ran out of time, etc.

Someone with As and Bs, maybe a C, who did nothing else of note and managed to get a perfect test score one time doesn’t seem near as surefire a bet. If anything it shows you didn’t apply yourself.

What's the difference between training for track meets and training for a standardized test? In either case the student is applying themselves to excellence in a very niche skill - running really fast, or taking a test.

The difference is that one has to do with academic study, and one doesn't.

Edit: you’re acting like performance on the test is completely arbitrary. Clearly, it should be designed to avoid this, and to actually test academic mastery. For example, someone planning to study physics should be asked to solve difficult physics and math problems. Someone planning to study history or literature should be asked to write long-form essays on those topics. And so on.

I feel like a lot of people in this thread are only familiar with the American system and thus assume that “standardized tests” all have to be like the SAT, i.e. answering a ton of relatively basic multiple-choice questions as quickly and accurately as possible. That is not the case.

In this scenario where you have a track star with a 4.0 and a “boring” student who happened to luck out and get a perfect SAT score, did these students take the same classes? Because maybe the reason the track star didn’t do as well is because they don’t know as much as the athlete.

The track star olympiad sounds like they have a bright career in track. I don't see what that has to do with academics.

A track star olympiad sounds like someone that has a sense of dedication and a work ethic that will serve them well in academics. A person who has scored well on a single test they had a long time to prep for but displays no other outstanding qualities seems like someone that might be overwhelmed and not able to keep up with the academic requirements of university.

definitely doesn't play out that way at top schools lol

I know many people that have gone to top schools on athletic scholarships and achieved academicly and beyond school. I don't know many with high standardized testing scores and not thing else going for them at top schools, so it is hard to say how that plays out. I know many that have ended up at not top schools because they have high testing scores which would have helped them get into top schools if they had anything else going for them. Many of those have failed at not top schools. So what do you mean when you say things don't play out that way at top schools?

The problem with a single nationwide standardized test is that kids will spend an inordinate amount of time (and money) studying for it. Major downside is that time is mostly wasted learning tricks to answer questions instead of learning something valuable. People spend years studying for IIT exam in India and there is zero chance of scoring well on the test without prep.

And because they spent so much time studying for those tests, they did not study real interesting skills that could be useful for their career later as well...

The fact of the matter is that unless you pick names out of a hat wealthy people will always have an advantage. But standardized testing can reduce the correlation with wealth in ways that other factors can’t.

Yes, standardized testing isn’t perfect. It is biased towards those with time and money to prepare. But it’s also biased towards people who are good at problem solving, critical thinking, and a work ethic to actually do the preparation.

> I want to get rid of letters of recommendation as well. I would personally like to go off of only a single nationwide standardized test.

That is not good. China has that, and I would not consider the culture it fosters healthy at all. What you then get is kids who literally have no life beyond studying for the test and the results of one point on the exam having a massive effect on ranking and therefore outcome.

Not to detract from your larger point, but these days, it might depend on the Kennedy.

They're all bad! https://www.joshbarro.com/p/the-kennedys-were-always-bad

Even this random one seems weird and out of touch:

https://www.insider.com/jfk-grandson-jack-schlossberg-viral-...

The answer has always been to close the delta between the value of a Harvard degree and wherever else your kid can actually get into. The unspoken (or uncomfortable) aspect of that is that Harvard et al. receive outsize prestige because they're associated with outsize wealth, and access to that wealth through the personal and professional connections one can garner there.

Wealth concentration in society is the fundamental issue. When median wealth is higher and the range smaller, influential families will have less with which to "bid up" a spot at Harvard. They might choose another institution, that "wherever else" we mentioned earlier. So now your kids are friends. Or maybe not (it's not such a big deal, since they're not THAT much wealthier than you are). This becomes the dominant paradigm.

Decentralize education, as it were.

Exactly so. I know a guy who got into the top MBA program in the nation (U of C). He had no undergrad degree, but was born to a wealthy family. His wife was born to an even wealthier family, and he quickly after flunking out of undergrad within a few years found a career as an executive.

Connect the dots on how all that works.

(Curiously he insists he's a "pulled himself up by his bootstraps" type character)

Now we just need widely agreed, easily measurable, non game-able definition of "merit". :)

Legacy admissions should not be legal in public universities. Massive public schools like UMass, Mich, StonyBrook, GATech, Minnesota, Penn State still take legacy admissions.

It's nice to see CMU follow in the footsteps of other top private tech schools like MIT & Caltech that claim to not use legacy status. It's no surprise that Ivies, Stanford and most private colleges all heavily favor legacy. Afterall, a large part of a prestige university's job is lend an appearance of competence to the not-as-competent kids of the elite.

source I used - https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/colleges-that-c...

I have a hard time defining my own stance on this point.

For example, my alma mater GAtech allows for automatic admissions of my immediate relatives provided they reach some bar like 3.5 gpa + 1400 SAT (math+reading).

Do you think this should be illegal? It’s quite clearly an attempt to create an enduring GT community. It’s also clearly not the same as racially discriminatory admissions.

I do see the argument that it’s unfair…but should it be full blown illegal? “Non-legacy” isn’t a protected class in America unlike race,sex,religion, etc.

Yes, that should not be allowed. The best should get in, not a relative.

I concede that maybe it’s not the way “things ought to be”

But what’s your legal argument for why this practice should be prohibited?

What is your argument for why this practice should be allowed? It’s a public school, why should your family has an advantage because you went there? Is the goal of public school to maintain a club or provide access to education? If the latter, I don’t see how any kind of exclusivity other than merit makes sense.

My argument is that the university is free to conduct admissions as it sees fit within the bounds of the law.

A preference for family members of alums is totally legal. Are you suggesting that the federal government should dictate admission procedures?

(I'm not the previous poster.)

Hell yeah, the government should have a say in how publicly funded schools run their admissions. Why should a school running on public funds get to favour students differently based on who they are related to? Do they have a greater right to that public money?

Yes, even for private orgs federal money always come with strings attached. This is also how fed can force states do things states may not necessarily want. Here we aren’t even speaking about private orgs, but public universities that often are part of state run systems. They aren’t free to conduct admissions as they see fit, but as the public sees fit.

It’s currently straightforwardly legal AFAIK, how could one make a legal argument against it? Do you mean some sort of legal philosophy argument, not literally a legal argument?

I meant literally legal. My point being this practice is legal so universities may accept whoever they want.

I wish _all_ students with that profile were automatically accepted. I went to GT and while I guess it's nice in some ways that its now considered an elite university, I much preferred the persona of admitting everyone and weeding out people out so that they could give kids without stellar resumes a chance.

Me too! Unfortunately the only way to do that at tech is to aggressively expand student body size.

> I much preferred the persona of giving everyone a chance and weeding out people out so that they could give kids without stellar resumes a chance.

FWIW, idk when you got out but I graduated in 2018 and the professor’s love for low GPAs was still around in full force.

Yeah right. Just as schools are already working around affirmative action rulings to continue to effect actual institutional racism, they will find a way to continue to give legacies a leg up in the admissions process. With the size of endowments of top schools these days they effectively operate as for-profit hedge funds that happen to have educational institutions attached. Does anyone seriously think a school would say "thanks for that library you donated but your grand kid only has a 3.8 gpa so maybe look at state schools."

They didn't say they're eliminating open "donations for admissions" systems. They said they're eliminating legacy admissions, i.e. "Your parents went here so you can get in, too". It effects multi-generation middle class families more than the really rich ones.

> “I do think there was a time when perhaps legacies needed a boost” -Dean Emeritus of Admission Mike Steidel

Is there any way of charitably interpreting Mike Steidel's words? I have a tough time reading anything here but classist bigotry preserving the status quo :-/

Yes, there are charitable ways.

You make an institution stronger (in fundraising, in love for the institution, in traditions, etc) by creating multigenerational relationships. When you're asked for money, it may be "eh, whatever it was my college" or it could be "Yes-- it's where my grandpa, pop, and I all went."

But there's a lot of negative consequences, too.

I mean he's speaking about the past - so he's saying perhaps sometime in the past it was maybe needed, but he's saying that it's not needed anymore.

It's just a way to not have to specifically say something negative about the college, even if it's about the college's past. He's not preserving bigotry, he's just trying to not tarnish the brand.

Status quo, maybe, not not explicitly bigoted. Building a culture through generations, a sense of loyalty to an institution and a lifelong interest in seeing that institution flourish (and be funded) is a reasonable goal of a University.

His comments more broadly make no sense to me.

“Over time, the quality of the applicant pool increased to the point where we really didn’t have [give legacies a boost]” - how does that work? If the applicant pool gets better, then if anything privileged groups need a stronger boost.

"Steidel said the tipping point came perhaps three or four years ago as standardized testing became optional at many institutions, including Carnegie Mellon" - is this supposed to mean that they can now boost preferred groups more easily because they don't have to overcome the testing differential, so they actually might have stronger legacy preferences than before, but better hidden?

Next step: Ending use of athletic ability in admissions.

Sports programs at university pay for themselves. They pay for themselves because people buy tickets to games, which they do to see exceptional athletes.

Maybe at schools with big football/basketball programs. At a school like MIT which was being discussed yesterday, sports certainly do not directly pay for themselves.

Do legacy admissions not pay for themselves?

I didn't say anything about legacy admissions. In fact, I'm all in on not-exclusively-academic-merit based admissions for private universities. I will happily trade a few bottom-of-the-rung merit-based admissions in exchange for students that either benefit me in some way (by subsidizing my education and/or providing good networking opportunities) or try and make up for the mistreatment of disadvantaged groups.

Sports programs at the top ~20 universities pay for themselves (and that too just the top sports). The rest are a money sink.

Football and (men's) basketball pay for themselves. The other sports do not. At many smaller universities, not even football and basketball can achieve net revenue for sports.

Source: look at databases like https://www.sportico.com/business/commerce/2021/college-spor...

I get that. I just never really understood why higher education and semi-pro athletics are so deeply linked together. They are totally different things!

> Sports programs at university pay for themselves.

I don't see why this even matters (besides the fact that it's not really true except for the biggest sports at some of the biggest sport schools).

The debate is over whether it's fair that some students get the benefits that come with being an Ivy League grad without having the academic prowess to otherwise be admitted. Whether or not they are able to cover their costs is immaterial to that discussion.

I actually heard someone else make a similar argument for children of big donors, i.e. that schools rely on those big donors for their missions. And I'm like "You're just arguing that you're cool with nearly all forms of corruption and bribery as long as the money is put to a good use."

It boils down to this: If you have some fraction of your students who get in, not on their primary merits as students, but for some other reason that benefits the rest of the student body in some way, eliminating that fraction of the students benefits a handful of students who were at the very top of the waitlist to get in, at the cost of the benefits those preferentially selected students provided.

In both athletics and the kids of rich donors cases, I'd be happy to defend that being a bad trade-off. The networking value of the rich kids going to the same university as me far outweighs the slight increase in average academic prowess of the university (emphasis on slight: remember, these are students who ranked below every other student in the merit-based application pool).

Athletics is a smaller effect size than the rich kids, but at the end of the day by providing very valuable labor to the university for approximately free, they completely pay for the sports programs (some of which the merit-admitted enjoyed, such as having a very large gym open 24 hours a day), in addition to feeding money back into the university, subsidizing everyone else's education. Couple that with the fact that these students are disproportionately NOT taking up seats in the most competitive programs, and it's still a net positive for the student body.

I can make the same argument for AA. A diversity of backgrounds and perspectives, including students who managed to overcome a lot more adversity than the average rich kid, or white-collar family admittee will make for a better, richer learning experience for everyone.

Which is why Harvard had AA. Turns out government funded institutions are banned from discriminating based on race though. But discriminating based on wealth, parental social status, or athletic ability is still cool.

As well you should.

> providing very valuable labor to the university for approximately free

Which is perhaps exploitative of the student athletes, who should receive more of a cut of that the revenue they produce.

> they completely pay for the sports programs (some of which the merit-admitted enjoyed, such as having a very large gym open 24 hours a day)

Is that universal though? Not all schools’ sports programs do as well, and isn’t it a wasteful distraction for colleges to be spending tens of millions on stadiums and scoreboards instead of academics? It just seems like another example of excess infecting an institution of learning.

Obviously campus sports is an age old tradition. But the amount of excess just feels like a phenomenon orthogonal to its original role. If schools are going to be lavishly investing in school sports, why not also school music scenes, school art galleries, school esports, school drag car racing, basically taking any competitive, prestige-driven, money-making aspect of society and stuffing it into an academic setting? And then optimizing for admittees who can fulfill those lucrative roles?

Arguably a lot of categories would pay for themselves, but I'm assuming you don't have a Youtuber or pro gamer program at Carnegie Mellon for instance.

what business is the university in? Education or selling sports tickets?

> Sports programs at university pay for themselves.

Then spin them out as a sports club, owned by the university. Don't waste the athlete's times with classes, and don't waste class space with athletes that can't cut it.

(The reason that doesn't happen is because the athletes will actually start asking for a share of the billions of dollars earned by the club.)

Sports programs used to be a net income source, but I think that ended with Title IX, because schools became forced to spend on non-income-producing programs.

However, athletic programs are still given tremendous emphasis by schools because success in sports is effective in attracting donors. Whatever administrators say, college athletics is not at all about building character. It's about drawing money.

Why should athletics be uniquely disadvantaged among activities that aren't exclusively academic? Perhaps you think that a test result is all that should count though in which case we'll have to agree to disagree.

I'd assume it's because academic ability and knowledge makes more sense for determining admissions in an academic context, and has a higher chance of being relevant after the student graduates. This is unlike athletics where unless you go pro, the skill becomes functionally useless once you enter the workforce.

But schools will also take into account things like being a concert pianist, volunteer activities, etc. You can argue that they should just admit the "smartest" students as well as they're able to determine same but basically no university does that. Selective schools do obviously look at academics; it's just not the only thing they look at.

> the skill becomes functionally useless once you enter the workforce.

This is laughably false and makes me think you've either never participated in organized athletics or have never had a job. The most important trait for success in the workforce is grit. The same is true for athletics at the highest level. Yes, some of the athletes made it on genetics alone but the vast majority had to work incredibly hard to become a college athlete. Being a successful athlete translates very well into the workforce.

And teamwork. (Which admittedly doesn't apply as much to some sports.)

This is the standard justification sales and MBA types use.

They are missing that it takes grit to get through a lot of tough degree programs as well. People in those degree programs constantly talk about those who move over to easier degrees in business as lacking grit.

Sports is mostly used as an in-club in the workplace. If you work in an engineering first company it's crazy to see the dichotomy from how sales values past athletic accomplishments versus how R&D does.

It is also beyond bizarre how often high school and college athletic success is not correlated with health & fitness once high school/college is finished.

> it takes grit to get through a lot of tough degree programs as well.

We're talking about college admissions here though. How can you tell if a high schooler has grit? I can tell you that academic success is not the only answer. I got a perfect 36 ACT, 1600 SAT, and a high GPA and completely lack grit. I just succeeded in school by doing the bare minimum and having a high IQ. Should these schools just be trying to accept the people with the highest IQ? Searching for people who are the absolute best at what they do seems to be a much better measure of grit to me.

And your sales analogy seems a bit flawed. Why is it strange that different segments of the business value different things? Sales is mostly about just cold calling potential clients until someone bites. It makes tons of sense that the org values the grit and teamwork that organized sports builds more than the R&D org does.

I go back and forth on this. Athletics definitely have outsize influence on college admissions that should be diminished, but surely it should still count for something, right? Most people wouldn’t argue against considering artists’ portfolios and musicians’ performances in admissions. What makes athletics a less important pursuit?

> Most people wouldn’t argue against considering artists’ portfolios and musicians’ performances in admissions.

I would, unless it was an arts college.

The point is, schools are institutions with a purpose. For most of them, that purpose is education, not playing games. Therefore, being able to play games shouldn't have any relevance in whether you're admitted to those schools.

The presence of athletics at these institutions clearly demonstrates that it's part of their purpose, just as the sciences, humanities, and arts/music are.

Sure but we are talking about what the purpose should be not what it is.

Culturally, the separation of athletics and education is going to be extremely difficult to accomplish.

Although not everyone is a fan, Football is the cornerstone of American culture.

People against athletic admissions have zero clue about what excellence requires and means. It's an attitude I can only describe as disgusting because it creates a prejudice against people who have actually worked at something and taken risks to succeed. It is equivalent to banning music scholarships.

Who benefits from removing those who actually develop a physical competence and commit to training and competition?

> Who benefits from removing those who actually develop a physical competence and commit to training and competition?

The people who are there for academics, as opposed to being there to play a game.

There are only so many places in a class. Reserve them for people who go to a school to learn.

If you want to play sports, go join a league and practice excellence or whatever..

The federal funding going to these universities is to subsidize education, not athletics.

Would you say the same in reverse? Should baseball teams also not discriminate based on athletic ability? Academic excellence requires dedication and commitment as well, perhaps we should reserve a few spots on the team for strong students.

Not sure if you’re being serious but that is indeed how it works at many places. I was straight up told that I could get a spot on some schools’ track teams over others who were faster than me because my test scores would increase the team average

Sorry, I should’ve been more clear. I am referring to sports at the highest levels, just like Harvard is academia at the highest level. Maybe it sounds like a joke but that’s only because it’s so ridiculous to even consider.

Colleges aren't just trying to produce academics, they're happy to produce business, non-profit, and political leaders as well.

Some of us come from parts of the world where these things simply do not exist. So it is a very, very foreign concept.

So you're good at sports, or some instrument, or whatever. That's nice - but why should it give you an edge over other people when it comes to school admission?

What makes a western education so valuable is that it has produced the rounded character that enabled the culture. Athletics was and is education. In countries where there are no athletics, education is just rote indoctrination. Someone who has played a team sport is more equipped to lead - e.g. scale their capabilities - than someone who has not because it's about tacit knowledge and physical experience you can't just memorize. An athlete is necessarily more educated than a non-athlete, just by definition. The most dominant organizations in the world recruit from athletic programs for this reason.

Thanks to the replication crisis, statistically, probably half your professors were frauds anyway, especially if you went to a top tier school in the last decade or two, and almost none of them would have been athletes. They don't have the character required to succeed in a physical discipline, and they hate athletes because people from physical culture are difficult to bully and decieve.

Want to learn how to work on a team? Sail a boat with a crew. Want to learn to push boundaries and take risks? Race downhill on anything. Want to solve coordination problems? Play football/soccer. Want to appreciate nature? Surf. Want charisma? Ride a horse. Want to understand cumulative effort and long term strategic goals? Powerlift. Want to understand endurance? Run marathons or be a triathlete. Want to learn ego discipline and humility? Play tennis. Want to read people? Try fencing. Want to learn what performance really means? Do any of these at a serious level. Dismissing athleticism is just farcically ignorant and effete.

Maybe the argument against these is that they require class, but I know poor kids who have achieved at the highest levels of most of them, and they earned the class distinction and respect for their skill that comes with the competence. Merely learning to call things problematic and fall into line commands no respect from anyone, and it has created a layer of anxious impostors driving institutions into the ground.

The people receiving athletic scholarships to elite universities have accomplished something amazing. It requires extreme dedication, teamwork, sacrifice, and an understanding of competition/iterative improvement.

Applicants who are equally successful in other pursuits also get credit as they should. An elite artist/musician, community leader, or committed activists are valuable to society and universities should be free to encourage extracurricular excellence in their student body. They are also free to not hold those values and admit purely on test scores + gpa if they like.

It's weird to me that "stop being racist" some how has led to universities considering giving up legacies, "prestige"/donation based admissions and even athletic admissions.

If it's the case that affirmative action was being used to mask other unfair practices that will be utterly ghastly.

> If it's the case that affirmative action was being used to mask other unfair practices that will be utterly ghastly.

That has actually been the case and stance many leftists took on AA. I think it was, at one point, recognized as a bandaid on a deep, bleeding wound. Neither a correct nor sufficient solution but it was the only one that could get through the door.

It’s all about woke optics.

Ultimately the existence of elite universities is the root of the problem. Most colleges take a huge majority of the students who apply, so neither legacy students nor affirmative action make too much a difference for them. Universities should be more like this and less like incubators for the ruling class.

All of the drama recently revolves around wealthy students being denied their rubber stamps or underprivileged students being denied their golden ticket. It’s bad that college performs these functions, so let’s work to fix that.

Exactly, the universities are extremely wealthy and could in principle choose to use that money to increase intake, but then it dilutes their status as a luxury brand, so they don't do it. But what business is it of the university to be a luxury brand anyway? They should be simply maximising the public good, and that means taking way more students with the huge endowments they have.

Is your argument that we should not have elite universities in the US? Seriously?

Yes

I was just watching a podcast interview in which a British-German professor employed at an Ivy League university in the US, was talking about the elite universities in the US, and how there is no equivalent in Germany. [1] The interview is in German, but what he is basically saying is that the American attitude is to very openly and purposefully create and maintain this system of elitism and everyone is openly in competition with each other. All of this is alien to us here in Germany.

At first glance it seems like we got the better deal. But then you think more about it more. All the German elite send their kids to study in the US instead of studying in Germany, because there they get to network with the elite kids from all over the world. But this is not a very good thing for Germany. First of all, we have less say in how he next generation of elite in our country think. Secondly all the smart and talented people in Germany who cannot afford to emigrate get no chance to mingle with these elite kids.

So if we had a system of elite unis here in Germany it might on some level be better.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4Y9SomH9Nc

Elites all around the world send their kids to schools to study in the U.S., or places like Oxford. Presumably more countries besides the U.S. or the U.K. have systems of elite universities. Even if Germany had such schools, you think your elites would be content with them? The problem isn't with educational egalitarianism, it's with global hegemony and your country's elites trying to sidle up with the facilities of the hegemon. Don't get rid of your egalitarianism to cater to the fickle whims of your elites.

A buddy of mine at Stanford invited me to one of their CS/Eng Grad Student Socials a couple years ago.

There was a pretty large clique of Germans there. Over drinks, I came to find out all those Germans attended the same university (TU Munich), and more specifically, attended the same handful of elite private Gymnasiums.

Even though they all attended a public university which doesn't have legacy admissions, these children of the elite still networked and knew each other since grade school.

The same thing happens in the UK (did you attend an independent or comprehensive school?) as well, and even Canada to a certain extent though a lot of this was also driven by housing prices.

The US is probably going to revert to this kind of elite signaling.

P.S. all those Germans were blonde and blue eyed except for one Turkish German who was clearly uncomfortable and was chatting with us Americans and Asians instead.

You obviously got it wrong. The parent commenter explained that there is no elitism in Germany, because a professor said it in an interview, in German. Don't you know that Germany is the sacred, holy land, unique amongst all other lands on Earth, where elitism doesn't exist? You must have confused them with Austrians.

The children of the elite are not studying CS at TUM. The parent commentator made a good point that gymnasiums is where a lot of elitism happens, but I was talking about universities and I do not think we were talking about the same "elite" demographics. Moreover, my OP was about how having a culture with elitist elements can provide a ladder for talented but not connected individuals, which is lacking in Germany, because for the most part there is a bigger divide between the educated middle class professions are the truly wealth capital owners in this land.

Yep. You weren't denying that there is elitism in Germany, and I definetly wouldn't be surprised by old money types sending kids abroad to the US to study. The same thing happens in Canada as well - they all send their kids to Ivy Leagues if they can

> children of the elite are not studying CS at TUM

It was an an Eng Grad Student thing, so not just CS@Stanford, so it was mostly TUM Mgmt Majors -> McK -> Stanford MS&E or Visiting Student Researchers from TUM's MBA or Masters of Mgmt

I'd disagree that these kids weren't the children of the elite. Being the child of a doctor, lawyer, or businessperson definetly places you in the elite (aka top 5% net worth) anywhere.

> educated middle class professions are the truly wealth capital owners in this land

I can definetly see that, but people who were Doctors, Lawyers, or Small Businessowners in West Germany (almost everyone at the event was probably born between 1990-2000, so their parents started their careers in West Germany) will probably have the tools to accumulate net worth and become "New Money" (as most HNers inevitably are as well despite what they say).

I went to a second-tier public school that never had legacy admissions. Is it really a big deal? Or is this largely symbolic? Do you see kids in your classes who are rich and visibly a level below everyone else intellectually or emotionally? (I did meet a few students who were born rich and enrolled in my second-tier university after failing out of first-tier universities, so that might be my exposure to the practice)

>Is it really a big deal?

Probably not in general. At least outside of a relatively small number of schools. IMO, what you're seeing is a bunch of schools that really don't take legacies much into account (if at all) all coming out of the woodwork to put themselves on the side of the angels without having to actually change any of their policies.

This is exactly what bothers me. This talk about Legacies and even AA for top schools is downright insulting to people like me that worked hard at second-tier institutions and are just ignored afterward as a result. We make up the vast majority of college graduates, why don't we get even a fraction of the support or attention?

> Do you see kids in your classes who are rich and visibly a level below everyone else intellectually or emotionally?

Not at all. The purpose of legacy admissions is predominantly to get students who could go to plenty of universities at your tier to go to your university, based on the fact that their parents are alumni. You do end up with a minority-within-a-minority population of rich students who are only there because they share a last name with a building, but frankly those students are also valuable to the rest of the student body from a networking perspective.

I'm opposed to the change. The value in a university education is not just from "going to school". You have the prestige of the university (helped by attracting noteworthy alumni), networking opportunity (helped by having current students with connections through their parents), academic quality of the student body (having the rich kids subsidize merit-based scholarships boosts this, too).

On the whole, legacy admissions (and preferential admission of rich kids in general) benefits the student body as a whole. It's the raison d'etre of private schools, and eliminating it maybe lets in another say ~1-5% of your student body's worth of students who wouldn't have gotten in otherwise, in exchange for lowering the value of getting in for everybody.

Wesleyan as well: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/19/us/wesleyan-university-en...

I'm guessing ivy leagues won't let go that easily.

> Good. With the end of affirmative action, legacy status in admissions becomes much harder to justify.

Placing University of Pittsburgh, a public university which has almost a 67% acceptance rate, in the same conversation with private universities that have acceptance rates in or near the single digit percentages borders on journalistic fraud.

I would also say that Pitt, unlike a lot (most) of universities mentioned, had many programs attempting to help those from more humble backgrounds get into the university. It used to have a very strong night school. It also had many programs in the summer for students who were "on the edge" of getting in but needed to learn some extra skills (like how to study, how to use libraries, extra classwork learning how to write, etc.).

I don't know what kind of programs Pitt still has, though. So my information could be outdated.

I'm amazed at how schools with legacy and donation-based admissions can maintain high rankings when you never know if someone with a degree from there just got it because their parents donated $5M. Before someone says "the student still has to graduate," Harvard has a 97% graduation rate.

The ranking systems are likely flawed and measure things outside of merit, or measure merit in a non-holistic way.

See also the massive grade inflation at these schools

The rankings effectively measure prestige. Someone with $5 million to give to a university will very likely have a prestigious career, even if they're completely incompetent.

I mean it is just like the YC model, 1% of the companies will give outsized rewards which will more than justify investing in the 99%. Same way, Harvard is probably propped up by the 1% of kids who it takes in who do great things and the rest can just enjoy the privilege of being alumni of such a "great institution". These top institutions take in not only unworthy rich kids but also the cream of the crop in science, leadership etc...

Can we end education resource scarcity please. More open courses by schools and less credentialism by employers could make these debates irrelevant.

Underrated point. Weird to see how in HN, the bastion of self-taught hackers, autodidact polymaths, and people who think secondary education is a waste of time and money, try to argue in favor of the entrenched credentialist power of universities.

There’s not a scarcity of education. Anyone is free to attend community college with guaranteed transfer to a larger state university provided they meet their GPA requirements.

EDIT: I do agree with you about employers overvaluing credentials though. Ultimately that’s not something you can unilaterally remove in a free society.

Good get rid of Affirmative Action, get rid of Legacy status.

Athlete's are fine. Having to go to a college with a bad football team always sucked personally so let's keep that pipeline up.

Very good decision. Let’s see if them Ivy Leagues with enormous endowments would follow…likely not because that’ll cause a big drop in gifts and donations.

> likely not because that’ll cause a big drop in gifts and donations.

This is a topic that I haven't had much interest in so sorry if I'm being dumb here, but I struggle to see how this could be a good thing?

I guess the way I'm seeing this is that if you're too not smart enough to get into these universities but are lucky enough to have parents with lots of money, you can basically bribe your way in.

While this seems unfair on the surface, and I suppose it is from certain lenses, it is surely also in effect acting as a "stupid rich person" tax for higher education?

I mean to your point here, if Ivy League universities receive a big drop in donations wouldn't that practically guarantee they'll either need to charge higher tuition fees to those less fortunate who get in on merit, or they'll need to lower the quality of their education?

Could someone help me out here? I'm aware I'm saying something stupid. I don't see how this could possibly be a good thing for those less well off who get in on merit? Are they not in favour of their education costs being partly offset by large donation from wealthy people?

or we could just… tax the rich instead? the not stupid ones too?

Pragmatically speaking "tax the rich" isn't going to happen and these kind of de facto "wealth taxes" are far easier to implement.

Here in the UK we have a problem with public health care funding and I have no idea why we don't simply offer priority service for rich people who are willing to pay stupid amounts of money for priority service. In doing we could redirect that extra funding to those who need it most but can't afford private health care.

I guess exploiting the stupidity and vanity of rich people seems like a much more pragmatic (and arguably fairer) solution than trying to implement wealth taxes or 70% income taxes.

It's funny to me how cynical and skeptical HN is about diversity-related admissions, but how quickly everyone jumps to point out the positives of legacy admissions.

These aren't people who are being objective. We are now mask-off with regard to how this is simply an emotional matter centered around what is most advantageous to whatever group. The least we could do is be open about the role of self-interest here.

Or people are less emotional about wealth. (Or people are wealthy.)

Don't you think there's just as much self-interest behind the the primary argument of relying exclusively on "merit"? This is likely being promulgated by a demographic who over-indexes on this dimension and is lacking in any other that may be included in a holistic admissions process.

>Don't you think there's just as much self-interest behind the the primary argument of relying exclusively on "merit"?

Oh, absolutely.

If they were admitting legacy students who were hundreds of points lower on the SATs and bad grades, then yeah, it’d be as bad as affirmative action. But in practice it’s only ever used to break ties.

If affirmative action was implemented the same way legacy admissions is, I doubt the lawsuit against Harvard would ever exist, and opposition essentially non-existent.

>If they were admitting legacy students who were hundreds of points lower on the SATs and bad grades

They are.

At university (UK, nowhere amazing) I was admitted on merit as a straight A student. My tutor had been forced to be the admissions officer for the school of Physics that year against his will. So he decided to have some fun and admitted everyone. I was scandalised when he told us this, I'd worked like a dog to EARN my place.

But he simply said "Anyone who can pass year 1 should get to do year 2, the same for year 2 and year 3. And anyone who passes all of them should get their degree." and I found this logic hard to argue with.

The result was that we had admitted 10 people with no maths qualification to a Physics degree. 8 failed, transferred subject or otherwise left. But 2 passed and got their degrees.

2 People got a life changing experience, I was no worse off and neither was the university. And this taught me an important lesson about opportunity. Ever since, when I am applying a standard/requirement to deny someone an opportunity (say a job interview, a date, or anything else) I stop and think hard about whether it's really necessary or if I am just being prejudiced.

Very good. Meritocracy for the win. Not skin, not sobstory, skill and talent.

Some worries though:

Reproducing learning is way over-evaluated, as it can be reliably tested. Its the most worthless skill though, ever since the internet was invented. The ability to recombine approaches and create novel solutions to novel problems, that adhere to engineering approaches and principles, thats were the money is. Hard to test for that and i guess the tiger-mum kids will have to learn TRIZ inside out.

Also i find the cohort timing pressure detrimental. In my opinion, the option to study (because you are bored and dissatisfied with your station in life) should be open to anyone at any time. Even if it does not work out, it creates the ability to move and propels the person on.

Finally, i would detach the political and not society survival relevant pieces of university from the other parts. Sports, sociology, arts go into one university, physics, math, machine building, biology, chemistry and agriculture go into another. Keep the whole bipartisanship from the science.

I hope this continues. Then, we will see legislation pass to re-classify endowment funds as hedge funds. CMU has $3 Billion of assets in its endowment portfolio.

Endowments have been getting a free ride in terms of tax treatment, disclosure, and other activities that are regulated for hedge funds. Now that they're upsetting the elite class, the class will respond by re-classifying endowments as hedge funds.

Affirmative action isn't the only racist policy that universities have been practicing. They've also been racially discriminating tuition subsidization. With re-classification of endowments as hedge funds, their activities will become transparent. Scrutiny over subsidized tuition will become possible. Black students receiving a disproportionate amount of subsidy, for instance, will be an act of racial discrimination, and financially regulated entities like hedge funds cannot racially discriminate.

Endowments let institutions weather out political mood swings and changes in enrollment. Any institution that serves a purpose besides "being a branch of the government" needs a war chest of some kind, and if they can use the proceeds to make student lives better, why not have a large endowment?

Im kind of surprised how much media attention and outrage admissions to schools generates. one year of out school, the whole thing just is so irrelevant. Idk who really cares what these small subset of schools does. There are so many public schools that offer education and opportunities and even those are blown of proportion.

"'[Legacy] has never been a primary or ‘plus’ factor in Pitt admissions of undergraduates.' [...] Pitt declined to say how many legacies are part of its entering classes."

So this may not have been a radical move anyway, at least at Pitt. Call me when Harvard decides to do this.

Admissions rates for legacy students are much higher than for the general applicant pool, sometimes by an order of magnitude. But that raw comparison doesn’t shed much light on how much the legacy status actually helps, as opposed to the differences among legacy applicants and the general applicant pool.

Is there any data that shows how these students compare to other students who are comparable in terms of family income, high school type, GPA, SAT? I would assume that all of these variables could be significantly different for children of alumni (especially of elite institutions, where admissions is most competitive), so it would be helpful to know what these numbers look like after removing some obvious confounders.

I've seen it before and IIRC the SAT for athletes is terrible and the SAT for legacy is not that worse than average white admission. Can't find that source right now, but here is another one showing identical SAT between legacy and non-legacy. [0]

I am biased to this hypothesis probably as a legacy who also had higher test scores than the average admit, went to a shitty public school, etc. Another underdiscussed motivation for legacy admissions is that schools view it as a signal that you are more likely to attend so if they admit you they can keep their admission percentages lower.

[0]: https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-why-elite-colleges-...

This is not going to have the effect people think. My experience is that legacy admissions are more or less a tie breaker. Legacy candidates that gain admission due to their legacy status are well qualified candidates (+ you often get the added benefit of a higher yield).

HOWEVER, where less than qualified candidates do gain admission is when there is a significant donor involved (there is often a meaningful overlap with alumni for obvious reasons, but not necessarily). Getting rid of legacy admissions will not change this dynamic. So really the only people that are going to lose out are legacies that are “on the bubble” from a resume standpoint whose parents aren’t rich…

In my day, all high school students in my State in Australia took the same exams to determine eligibility for entrance into tertiary institution courses. These scores were the only thing known about the student and the only thing considered.

This was regardless of whether you went to an expensive private school, public school or any other factor.

Why is merit alone not the criteria everywhere? Is membership of some group as criteria to entry not discriminatory to others?

Curious how many selective schools don't have legacy admissions. Most schools will take anyone regardless.

I tried downloading the "common data set" mentioned in the article but for some reason their site only lets you download the submission form, not the database itself.

I couldn't have benefited personally as my parents' institutions were in different countries from the US and my university is a non-legacy one anyway.

All this assumes that admissions is a formulaic process. The application probably still asks where your parents went to school. Admissions are still made of humans that may be subject to biases. Faced with two equivalent candidates, one legacy and one not, it should be a 50/50 decision on which to pick. But in reality some cognitive bias will tilt the process in favor of one. My guess is it would be the legacy candidate.

It is a bit surreal to see this headline hit the top of HN, as I sit in a CMU owned office building, looking out the window at Univ of Pittsburgh buildings.

Surprised that it's effectively the opposite in India. IITs (and other institutes in India) have reservations for schedule castes and tribes and I hope in the coming decades they will change this to reservations for lower income groups. Preference is even given to women with the same score/profile.

Does the US have something similar? Why/Why not?

Admissions are easy to do right. Just give anyone with a valid educational background (like college/high school completed) a chance to participate in a strictly observed live exam, which is then graded anonymously. 100% fair, leaves no place for discrimination. This is how many countries do it in Europe and it just works.

But what about economically disadvantaged minority groups? That's easy to fix too. Just give schools in poorer areas lots of extra funding and resources, and their skills should improve, so that they do well in exams without any ridiculous "positive discrimination" based on skin color or ethnicity. As a bonus you also help poor people who may not belong to a disadvantaged ethnic minority, but still suffer from same lack of opportunities.

Of course all this requires money, which the 1% isn't willing to give. But from anyone else's perspective it's plain stupid that the system first fails to give people of poorer background proper education, and then tries to fix this by discriminating based on ethnicity, which only partially correlates with poverty and bad schooling.

We will never have this because neither side wants it:

Schools do not want it because they lose total control over who they accept. Harvard wants to accept the children of the current ruling class knowing that they will become the next one, and in doing so keeping alive the mythos of Harvard as ruling class incubator.

The other side, which we can call the affirmative action supporters, don't want it either because they see it as a racist by proxy system. And also because it turns out that Asians and Indians (and others too) would do exceedingly well with this system.

What do you put on the exam? Harvard isn't just looking for academic success. They're looking for the next generation of leaders. How do you test for that?

IQ is a pretty good proxy for that.

In France, admission to the best higher education institutions, like Ecole Polytechnique, is done through an anonymously-marked written exam with questions about math, physics, etc. Admission is entirely based on how you scored on that exam, with the top N scores guaranteed admission (and the ones below that have to expect some people above to decline for whatever reason, which in the case of Polytechnique is rare, unless they got into something equally prestigious like Ecole Normale Superieure).

This system has produced three Nobel recipients (Becquerel in physics, Tirole and Allais in economics), many famous mathematicians and physicists (Carnot, Cholesky, Chasles, Coriolis, Fresnel, Mandelbrot, Navier, Poisson, Poincare, Thevenin, Lagrange, etc.), three French Presidents (Giscard d'Estaing most recently), many military leaders, astronauts, CEOs, etc. and indeed also Hacker News posterboy Fabrice Bellard (and that's just for one school, Ecole Polytechnique).

It works.

>"Just give schools in poorer areas lots of extra funding and resources, and their skills should improve, so that they do well in exams without any ridiculous "positive discrimination" based on skin color or ethnicity. As a bonus you also help poor people who may not belong to a disadvantaged ethnic minority, but still suffer from same lack of opportunities."

Many poorer areas already receive extra funding, but their SAT results are still well below those in richer areas with lower school funding. There are many examples of this, and a number of potential causes have been described (including selection bias, rich parents volunteering more, and others). One example of this is the District of Columbia.

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/per-pupi...

I think the main (only?) reason universities do this is because it drives donations from alumni with children, which is probably a large percent of donating alumni.

Has anyone done the analysis on how this is expected to impact overall university funding if it becomes widespread?

No skin in this game, just curious.

I’d like to see more numbers for context. How many students were favored by legacy status, and approximately how much favoritism?

They often mix legacy numbers with athletes for some reason… I guess to make the numbers more dramatic? Or maybe because insecure intellectuals look down on athletes in general?

What difference do the numbers make if the policy is better? If it changes 1 or 100 outcomes, in my mind this is absolutely the correct call.

Numbers would be great and they should definitely produce them, but I don’t think they would change my thinking they legacy admissions is negative.

The news likes to stoke outrage and context (especially numerical context) helps moderate it.

Also, small problems often have different solutions than large problems. Solutions that don’t scale are fine if the numbers are small.

My point is that this is just an objectively good thing because it’s the “right” way to handle things. Even if the “wrong” way has minimal impact.

The title on HN (currently "Children, alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt") is a little confusing; children and other relatives of alumni don't have an admissions edge. This isn't about some sort of early college program!

They WERE, essentially, letting people buy their kid's admission. Maybe not directly, but if you're a rich alumnus, you have to suspect that your donation history will figure into your kid's admission or not.

Even if the school says it doesn't, they could be lying.

Carnagie is the worst. We beat them at football and others sports most of the time. They're not even cool enough to have the first nuclear pile like UoC even if chicago can barely field a team. Tho chicago does have a mean scavenger hunt.

Legacy admissions can be gamed too with modest donations just enough to make the system gameable. With large donors it’s a different story though, those do help the universities and the number of students who enter this way is a pretty low ratio.

Does this mean they won’t take a call from well connected politicians and billionaires ?

Recent and related:

We Don’t Do Legacy (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36774369 - July 2023 (106 comments)

It would have been great if the article made clear to what extent these "legacies" would not have otherwise qualified to be admitted to the university

It’s kinda funny how Americans want to be praised for NOT doing some fucked up things again and again /facepalm

This is good, although I probably benefited from it because one of my recommendation letters was from an alumnus.

Hard to believe legacy admissions are legal anywhere. An obvious injustice--and efficiency drain--on society.

Admission for the children of faculty and staff (esp. if tuition is waived) is such an incredible benefit for the people that work at these institutions that I hope that is not also being abandoned. Legacies/big donors/alums sure, I don't care, but I'd hate to see university workers lose one of the best benefits they get.

i'm ok with this seeing as professors don't exactly make a lot of money, or if they do its because they dedicate 120% of their time doing so

Right? my wife is tenured at a big college and I make more than double her salary as an SWE. we're not going to have children so the benefit doesn't apply to us but i've seen it used to, for example, get a janitors kids into a college they would normally never afford (jesuit colleges offer this for staff across a network of other jesuit colleges, so for example you could be at loyola and your kids could go to fordham so long as they meet some academic requirements)

They should get free tuition for their kids but that shouldn’t guarantee them a spot and take away a spot from someone more aligned to the school’s selectivity.

Gonna hurt alumni contributions. Which matters more to schools with smaller endowments.

Who needs these ivy leagues when u can get superhuman knowledge for $20 bucks!

I'm amazed it was ever legal in the first place. It's open nepotism.

Nepotism has never been illegal.

In the private sector.

In many governments, it is quite illegal.

Making a distinction about the "private sector," but being vague for some reason about the country we're discussing?

The US. There is no other country.

Making a distinction about the "private sector," but being vague for some reason about the country we're discussing?

I wrote "many governments" because I am not fully versed in the policies and laws of every nation on the planet. Perhaps you can fill us in?

Not sure how to phrase this. It's illegal in the US government, but it still exists all over unofficially and it's openly acknowledged standard practice in many NGOs.

It's very difficult to get a job at NASA. I forget the exact number, but something like 75% of people who "work for NASA" are contractors and only a small minority are actual government employees. In order to get a full-time job, it helps to have previous experience usually in the form of a graduate fellowship. In order to get a fellowship, it helps to have undergrad summer experience. In order to get undergraduate experience, it's very helpful to have high school summer program experience. In order to get high school experience, you'll need to live in the area and probably have some connections which means parents or family who work at the NASA facility in question.

In my experience, national labs were similar but to a much lesser extreme, often just because they're remote and sometimes antiquated and children of lab employees often can't wait to get away.

When I worked at at the UN, (NGO, not formal government) coworkers were genuinely confused about how I got a job there with no family connections in higher places. I had the same conversation with several bewildered coworkers who plainly told me about their parent or uncle who got them their job. I was told that nepotism is much, much more common and openly acknowledged in Europe than in the US.

Sure, but it's legal in many governments too. The classic example is the Office of the First Lady: an institutionalized nepotistic government position for which one qualifies solely by being married to the highest elected position in the US, the President.

As long as you keep it in the family.

Nepotism is how groups function everywhere. The race-based admissions was a weird new thing, from a hyper-focused conspiracy that appears to be losing its grip.

Race-based admissions was a pretend way to remediate slavery and Jim Crow without spending any money or focusing on the harms done to the descendants of slaves. Almost everybody who thinks that the racism of Affirmative Action was a terrible thing also thinks compensating the descendants of slaves for the unpaid work and legal segregation that their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents (and so on, 10-20 times) endured would be 100x worse.

The reason for AA was because you couldn't get anything that specifically calculated and addressed the harms of slavery and Jim Crow past the advocates of "meritocracy." Was the literal pricing of slaves not the ultimate capitalist proof of merit?

So.. file a claim against the southern plantation owners who benefited in excess of the compensation paid? What's the relevance of any of this to anything?

I don't think this is nepotism, strictly speaking. The applicants aren't related or necessarily personally known to the people making the decision, they're merely related to prior graduates.

It may be reflective of corruption and produce inequitable and undesirable outcomes, but nepotism is something else.

If nepotism were illegal, we would have a 100% inheritance tax across the board.

There tend to be more laws pro-family than anti- for some reason . . .

Why would "anti-family" laws make sense? People who come from stable families are statistically much much more likely to be happy, successful and contribute to society.

There's no need to be antisemitic, but I get what you're saying.

For much of their history, legacy admissions were a tool to keep out less desirable Jewish/Catholic/non-WASP applicants [0][1]

[0]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23055549

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/13/us/legacy-admissions-coll...

It's glad to hear that children will no longer have an admissions edge at these schools. I thought it was absolutely ridiculous how they were letting 8 year olds into college campuses.

I wonder whether this applies to actual donors.

Private colleges fundamentally drive inequality. Access to elite university is essentially pay to play because all admission criteria advantage the wealthy.

Not the Iveys. They have very large scholarships if your family can’t afford it and you get in.

I'm referring to admission. Athletic achievement, high impact volunteer work, high impact internships, high SAT score, number of AP, essay writing, all of these require $$$ to be compete at the top level. A poor kid that has to work summers and part time during the school year cannot compete.

That’s why you base it on SAT and the like, and drop the other stuff. Studying for the SAT doesn’t have a huge impact

That would be great. And given that Ivys use a wide range of other criteria, mostly subjective, means that the wealthy kids have a massive advantage. SATs are probably the least differentiating criteria for Ivys as everyone is already at 1450+.

The games been rigged for far too long.

“Merit-based” means many different things. Explain yourselves.

Did they also end discrimination against asian and white men?

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