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Comment by Manuel_D | Hacker News Reader

The data has been studied in all kinds of outlets. When they reported that the top 1% are 200% likelier to be admitted my reaction was only 200%?! Then I read closer and realized that this is after accounting for academic performance, extra curriculars, class rank, etc.

Apparently the top 1% make up 14% of Ivy League undergraduates [1]. This doest directly translate into 1,300% more likely to be admitted (wealthier people are more likely to apply) but at a glance it would seem that the very rich are advantaged in college decisions mostly because they've got strong academics, test scores, extracurriculars, etc.

1. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/22/college-applicants-from-fami...

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It's funny, the Ivies are actually quite up front that they're goal is to pick "future leaders" of the country, not the most academically gifted students (though this is an important sub-group). The fact that there's a quota of students who are chosen for purely academic talents is particularly telling.

If you have enough drive to get good grades and your parents are worth many millions of dollars you have an excellent chance of being one of society's future leaders, you're they're perfect candidate.

>It's funny, the Ivies are actually quite up front that they're goal is to pick "future leaders" of the country, not the most academically gifted students (though this is an important sub-group). The fact that there's a quota of students who are chosen for purely academic talents is particularly telling.

Yep, they sure did a "heckuva job" picking America's President when Yale picked George W. Bush.

For every high profile failure like W, there are likely numerous other unqualified morons anointed by these institutions as ‘leaders’ running companies and doing overall much more damage. The Ivies are ripe to be burned to the ground.

If the goal is to pick “future leaders”, Yale succeeded as far as admissions are concerned. I think it’s unreasonable to expect that an institution can predict what decisions a teenager will make in their 60’s.

They had a ~1500 in 310m chance of picking someone who would become president. That is a pretty good job given its a 0.00048387096% chance of getting it right.

Yeah so the article isn't about the general comparative application strength of rich vs poor, it's about whether a wealthy advantage exists when controlled for other factors. A meritocratic admission process should not consider family wealth, but these data show that it does. That line chart should, theoretically, be a straight horizontal line; instead we see strong effects of wealth. The Economist once said that a dumb rich kid has a better chance at going to an elite college than a brilliant poor one, and that seems to be the case here.

That logic doesn't follow. Do it in be interesting to perform an analysis on the data to see where exactly the break-even point is.

Is 200% higher acceptance greater than 0.1 GPA or 10 sat points?

The "dumb|lazy rich kid" stereotype is very old and no doubt has some basis, but in the few rich families I've known, the kids were pushed extremely hard to achieve academically.

This doesn't counter the stereotype much, if you take two dumb/lazy kids and stick one in a middle class household offering the necessities, then take the other and stick them in a 1% household that can afford tutors and private schools and supporting year-round extracurriculars, who's going to do better?

Both households can try to "push hard" but what the rich household can do for a child is a strict superset of what the middle class one can.

Sure, but isn’t the purpose of college to educate the most qualified students? If they are actually better academically, why does it matter how they got to be that way? It is corrupt if they aren’t actually good academically and yet still get in to whatever school above more qualified students.

Are they better academically? Or do we assume they are because they went to a better school?

A lot of Ivy League school entries are "legacy" which means a parent went there.

Remember if you let in a minimum number of something that means you wouldn't have without a limit.

Legacy students aren't more gifted academically or they could get in as part of the academic pipeline, right?

I believe GP was complaining that rich people can also make their kids actually more qualified through better, more expensive schooling, not that colleges are letting them in when they are actually under qualified. I agree that legacy admissions should be abolished yesterday.

Yes but the implication didn't quote anything to back it up as being correct.

While certainly it has been shown that students with better upbringing perform better on such things the amount of that is way less than the difference in students.

Thus it isn't as simple as "those who are given all the tools do better" there is also an aspect of something else.

After all "they are just better students" would imply only a similar increase in application acceptance.

The is a large trend of "overrepresented groups are just better" again and I prefer to push back on "I don't have evidence of why else there is overrepresentation so obviously it is fair"...

Especially when Legacy is literally the opposite of fair.

No, the purpose of academia is to enable an educated society.

If we let things fall into a reinforcement loop the result is a bimodally educated society: from there does the intelligentsia then go and rule over the rubble?

I mean, if people from the same families are actually consistently more qualified than the commoners over long spans of time, then sure, let’s have an aristocracy, why not? The root problem with aristocracy isn’t that it is forbidden for some sacred moral reason, it’s that it functionally doesn’t work well.

Differentiation based on traits is not stable across many generations, and the commoners will always eventually generate individuals who are better along whatever dimensions than the aristocracy does.

I don’t think we have to worry about this problem, so long as we prevent the actual corruption. If we are really looking at merit, the families will cycle out after a few generations (again, we do have to prevent the actual corruption).

> let’s have an aristocracy, why not?

You answered that:

> it functionally doesn’t work well.

We're not talking about taking the dregs of society and throwing them into ivy league schools: we're talking about people who didn't have 4 years of debate team and lacrosse and water polo but still managed to do quite well for themselves.

It creates a better environment for everyone involved, since like you noted, creating an aristocracy has traditionally not worked out for either side of the coin.

> let’s have an aristocracy, why not?

/s (if that wasn’t obvious)

My point is that letting in applicants by (aspirational) merit does not create an aristocracy, even if some of the high performing applicants are wealthy. Aristocracy is created through corruption of (aspirational) meritocracy, because you need some non-(aspirationally-)meritocratic force to hold the same families in place generation after generation. They won’t continue to perform well forever. If they did perform well forever (again, they don’t), then aristocracy would be a more workable system than it is.

Except there is a non-meritocratic force involved. These schools judge on extracirriculars for example:

- low-income families are 3x more likely to have problems with their cost: https://mottpoll.org/sites/default/files/documents/031819_Pa...

- many programs and activities that stand out aren't likely to be offered in poorer school districts

- the time outside of school hours they take has a cost: it can be in terms of needing additional transportation, or changing childcare plans for example.

College applications don't measure aspiration, they measure proxies for aspiration we've long known are flawed and heavily affected by wealth.

Honestly it's telling that affirmative action was struck down which in turn is threatening legacy applications, and not the other way around, when it's well known historical fact legacy applications started out as a way to keep out immigrants: at the end of the day these schools have been putting their endowments ahead of what benefits society, and that's not really how things should work.

I would argue that this isn't a failure of academia. Tertiary education is supposed to be for the most qualified candidates.

This is a failure of K-12 public educational systems for not preparing students as well as high income families can.

I’ve known both. Some kids have a huge chip on their shoulder to carry the family legacy or exceed their parents, while some were happy to coast on their trust fund.

I think the biggest difference is that kids without family money don’t have the option to coast.

How were they pushed extremely hard? Private tutors? What else?

You are thinking about it backwards. It's not a matter of what was done for the kids, but what was expected of them. Parents would not tolerate low effort. Also, I didn't know any who employed private tutors, but they did arrange to send their kids to the best schools within reach.

They had tutors. I think tutors aren't necessarily that out of reach, but I know lots of people don't have money for that.

They may not have had teams of tutors, one for each subject, but I guarantee you that they worked with people at some point in their academic careers.

I don't understand this obsession with tutors. If the kids have good teachers at a school with high standards, the only time for tutors is if the kids need remedial help. I'm speculating this focus on tutors comes from the belief that rich kids can achieve at higher levels only because they are getting something extra. I think there is also an underestimation of how much more demanding the better schools are.

And even with the 200%... count me skeptical that these modelers are able to control for the other specific factors of performance. When I did certain extra curriculars, there were certain achievements that were particularly noteworthy. The admissions counselors understood this, but did the modelers in 'all kinds of outlets' catch that?

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