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Comment by screye | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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?

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.

(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?

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.

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