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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

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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.

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 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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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