California bans legacy admissions at private universities

And the purpose of employment is 'hiring whomever the boss thinks will make the most money for him', without even pretending to provide a public good, yet the same suspects are hand-wringing about how workplaces should be meritocratic.

Likewise, when AA-admissions were killed, those people were also all for meritocracy.

Mayhaps the demand for meritocracy is just a fig leaf. It's never been about fairness, it's about preserving access to power.

FWIW, the state is also (indirectly ) paying for this change. Private universities can exempt themselves from this law by not accepting state dollars, but I don't think donors can fill the resulting hole.

> If somebody's shelling millions funding a university, don't see a problem with enrolling his son.

The state shells more. A lot more, and is leveraging that so that mere-multi-million-dollar-donors-offspring don't get an advantage over non-donors (eventually. The lawmaker is cleverly taking a tick-tock ratcheting approach where each law builds on top of the last)

The rate of applying is low enough that the baseline acceptance rate doesn't tell you anything. With acceptance rates of 4% and 30%, Harvard could be admitting legacies by a lower standard, or a higher standard, or exactly the same standard. If you don't know what the pools are like, you have no way to tell.

Note that if (1) your goal is to admit everyone above a certain quality threshold, and (2) you aren't able to measure quality with perfect accuracy, then the correct thing to do is to hold legacies to a lower standard. Because they have better parents, they regress to a higher mean than random applicants do.

Sure, alumni interviews may favor legacy, though if alumni start broadly asking about it I could see legislation targeting that being inspired.

> allowing in legacies is mandated from above and documented, you're gonna have a hard time showing criminal conspiracy

OP seemed to suggest creating a dummy variable to stand in for legacy. If that were to happen, and you could find communications basically admitting the purpose of that variable is to evade the law, yes, I could see criminal charges being brought.

More pointedly, you're describing an issue common to anti-discrimination law in general.

…but there is no paper trail so they might not be able to “fast track” legacy kids into the university so easily, it’s logistically hard to cheat for so many kids during the many steps of the process without creating a ton of evidence.

I don’t think it will make the problem go away, but I do think it will reduce the number of legacy rich kids getting accepted, simply because the bar is put higher (for parents’ influence).

would you rather have no legacy admits and ZERO scholarships whatsoever ?

or would you prefer to have some number of legacies + scholarships and new buildings funded from their donations ???

Edit: I guess, though, that the point of degrees from schools like these is not the degree, but the connections. But I'd guess those could be purchased as well.

Unless you're suggesting that Asians are overrepresented because their parents are part of an elite old-boys network that gives them an unfair advantage, I think you're missing the point here. If you want to suppress the number of Asians in school because their numbers at ivies are out of proportion with their numbers in the broader population, it sounds like you want more legacy-style admissions rules, not fewer. Maybe this is what you're suggesting and I just I'm just misunderstanding you.

By that math, every single slot in an ivy league school "belongs" to an Asian candidate and even a single white person is already over-representation.

(Didn't separate White from Jewish since they don't have mean scores for just Jewish, possibly they should be first according to the estimate in the text below, but that doesn't really matter for the point made)

if you look at the ethnic breakdown of children in the US in 2023 (https://datacenter.aecf.org/data/tables/103-child-population...):

48% non hispanic white

26% hispanic

14% non hispanic black

6% asian

5% mixed

1% native

When you look at these statistics through this lens you see that white relative underrepresentation is slightly reduced, hispanic significantly increased. broadly speaking, when you look at younger ages the country is a little bit less white and a lot more hispanic.

Yeah and imagine how awful it would be if they got the experience and perspective of asians.

Seriously, the supposed benefits of these things are made up and no-one ever checks whether they're assessing the things they nominally claim to be assessing. The racism isn't some accidental side effect, it's the whole point.

Value To Whom, university administrators?

Has benefit to students ever been demonstrated and proven?

Can you clearly state what is your hypothesis?

1 - it is preferable to be well rounded instead of narrowly specialised ?

2 - this preference can be taught at the age of ~18 and is not innate, and is not ingrained at early childhood ?

3 - excluding narrowly focused students and getting well-rounded ones instead benefits these students?

4 - university administrators are competent as assessing these yearning of the soul from a student’s essay?

> Having everyone maxed out on test scores at the expense of such diversity would be a travesty to the thing that makes campus life vibrant.

What’s next? Cities imposing such restrictions? Should NYC or Austin require people to pass vibe check to ensure that the city life is vibrant?

For example, The Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates median pay for tech workers in 2023 was $104K - https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology

My understanding is that Stanford, Berkeley, Caltech and UCLA are more selective and UCSD has better academics.

If you're a selfmade tech founder millionaire......maybe have some faith in the caliber of your own child ?

I don’t know if a single k-12 private school that has tuition anywhere near that in the South Bay Area, except Harker for the upper grades only. Presentation, Bellermine, etc. are all half that.

It is.

Before AB1780 it something we heavily considered only because we're Asian American and Asian American admissions at top private like Yale and Harvard have fallen after the Supreme Court's AA ruling, while legacy admissions skyrocketed.

Now that AB1780 exists, and will most likely have teeth in the next 30 years, there's no reason to partake in that zero sum game anymore.

> 2 million is a genuinely small amount for OP.

It comes out to top Bay Area private school tuition for 2 kids over a 16-20 year timeline.

Check.

The actual classroom education at Harvard isn’t that good, imho. There are some signature classes that are definitely amazing, the access to resources for self-directed learning are incredible, and the competition and collaboration with one’s peers can push people to perform at new highs, but the base classroom instruction is generally not very good.

> showing up to work hours late

Maybe

> and coked out everyday

Stereotype, but maybe.

> doing diddly-squat

This can happen with anyone anywhere, imho. That said, what you consider “diddly-squat” may have more value than you think. See below.

> maybe at first nothing would change, but over time all those companies would be overtaken by those run by state school kids

This part of your comment makes me think that you and I see the college and labor markets very differently.

1. There are “worker bees” at elite schools and at state schools. These are the folks that seem to have a tireless ability to complete discrete tasks. The top worker bees at state schools are definitely on par with Ivy worker bees in terms of potential productivity, but not as much on ambition (as a whole).

2. There are “social capital” people at elite schools and at major state schools. These are folks who will rely mostly on their social capital to find work (as an employee or as a company owner). The main differences are that elite schools graduates will more often play for higher stakes often on a national or international level, while the state school folks will more often be playing for relatively smaller stakes on a regional, state, or local level.

3. The social capital people can show up to work late, coked out, and doing what some folks think is diddly squat, as long as they use their social capital to move things forward for their organization. This can be rain making for business deals, connecting the right people for a collaboration, or assembling a team of good worker bees who can do stuff for them. Worker bees tend to see the social capital people as grifters (and some are), but they are often linchpins in certain domains and businesss. Ignore them at your own peril.

4. Last but not least, you get the folks with social capital who are also good worker bees. These folks are pure gold, and they can be found at state schools and elite schools. They are rare. Most are amazing to be around. They frequently do amazing things.

5. Your idea of “state school kids” taking over the world is pure fantasy in my opinion. State school kids simply won’t have the connections or opportunities to do things at a scale that facilitates this.

> and companies would no longer trust Ivy graduates as good hires.

I don’t think that grads of any university are guaranteed good hires, and thinking so is a recipe for disaster.

Ivy grads can be highly productive in a generic corporate context, but only if they are solid worker bees (not every Ivy grad is), and only if you give them and endless number of hoops to jump through with accompanying rewards to get them to mid-career.

Most places of employment aren’t really set up like this.

- Our tax dollars fund government-run schools that cost an $26k per student per year. Fewer than half the students at those schools meet or exceed grade standards for Math and English.

- The median cost of a religious school is about half the cost of government-run schools: https://x.com/RahimNathwani/status/1840965145604079997

- Parents who choose to send their children to non-government-run schools get no vouchers: we pay taxes to fund government employees, and then use what's left to pay for the schools our children need.

add: come to think of it, I guess private university can just not accept financial aids from the government and keep their own admission policy if they have enough money to subsidize students who need financial aids. Whether you like it or not, federal money comes with (or should come with) strings attached (or manipulation in your words)

What's wrong with Mark Zuckerberg (the character) is that he doesn't want to be cool, he wants to win. He resents Eduardo for "beating" him by getting into the Phoenix. What matters is winning, and to be fair to him, that's what Harvard is all about. It's about having things that other people don't. And while most Harvard students who I know, once they got there, accepted that they were going to be the middle of the class within the top of the class, some people have something wrong with them and they can't stop.

But taking a step back, folks aren't really that opposed to "positive discrimination" when forced to actually reveal their preferences. We call positive sexism is chivalry, and positive racism affirmative action and it's broadly supported. The population most strongly opposed to positive racism are people who want or are indifferent to negative racism so it's hard to know how to read that.

This has been clumsily misreported by looking at incorrect numbers. It's acceptance rate as a percentage of applicants, not as a percentage of the total enrollment.

This entire sensationalist apparatus relies on sloppy reporting, imaginative thinking and fixing the facts around a presumed narrative. It can't withstand scrutiny because it's manufactured for ad revenue and content engagement.

Scandalous tall tales about Harvard letting in unqualified black students through a secret administrative backdoor is one of the ways grifters sell boner pills through podcasts and wordpress sites.

One of the important functions of the current university system is to cherry-pick the smartest, most charismatic, most driven, and most ambitious poor children and give them a seat at the table, indoctrinating them in the ways of the well-to-do and providing them opportunities within polite society. Basically, take anyone who rolled an 18 on one of their D&D attribute scores and make them a lord. By doing this, you decapitate the leadership of any potential revolution. Anyone who has enough charisma, intelligence, ambition to organize the poors into a movement that actually has a chance of success instead has a much easier pathway of going to university, getting a degree and a middle-class job, and enjoying a comfortable existence without the risk of being killed in the revolution. Keep your friends close and your (potential) enemies closer.

Pure lottery admissions doesn't have this property. The biggest threat is that you miss someone talented, who then gets pissed off and overthrows the system. You want to have humans looking over the application packets of everybody, and you want lots of competing admissions departments so that if one of them screws up, that person gets snatched up by another university.

It's not only money. It's a American way to have a class system.

One can reasonably argue that such protected categories are necessary for a just and fair society, but let's be clear about what it is we're advocating.

The (aggregate) government is the only one who can, as it's the only one who granted the status. The idea that something is ironclad because it's enshrined in law, is a failing to consider history. Laws change.

If you want to argue that it's unlikely, this also depends largely on those who have the money (or power) to fight for the change. I would agree there is not enough public sentiment, despite the wealth inequality implications, for private universities. Planned Parenthood? I think we got awful close.

Either way, it could be done. It is important not to dismiss the possibility.

And if you want to compare it to a bank - a bank pays taxes

Maybe less asians applied? Maybe less asians qualified? Maybe more asians bowed out than normal and runnerups took their slots, maybe, due to negative publicity, the asians went to different colleges? That seems far more likely than your conspiracy theory.

We can observe similar drops in Asians' share of admission, as well as similar levels, before the race-neutral treatment began. That's enough to, at a glance, dismiss this as evidence of anything per se.

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

As a random example, we benefit as a society when ketchup isn't runny. Congress doesn't want to waste time on this, so the FDA is granted a broad mandate to define foods. The FDA uses this mandate to provide a definition of the viscosity that defines ketchup as well as a way to measure said viscosity.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/21/155.194

> The consistency of the finished food is such that its flow is not more than 14 centimeters in 30 seconds at 20 °C when tested in a Bostwick Consistometer

It goes on to define the flow-testing procedure in excruciating detail to prevent loophole abuse.

> Check temperature of mixture and adjust to 20±1 °C. The trough must also be at a temperature close to 20 °C. Adjust end-to-end level of Bostwick Consistometer by means of the spirit level placed in trough of instrument. Side-to-side level may be adjusted by means of the built-in spirit level. Transfer sample to the dry sample chamber of the Bostwick Consistometer. Fill the chamber slightly more than level full, avoiding air bubbles as far as possible. Pass a straight edge across top of chamber starting from the gate end to remove excess product. Release gate of instrument by gradual pressure on lever, holding the instrument down at the same time to prevent its movement as the gate is released. Immediately start the stop watch or interval timer, and after 30 seconds read the maximum distance of flow to the nearest 0.1 centimeter. Clean and dry the instrument and repeat the reading on another portion of sample. Do not wash instrument with hot water if it is to be used immediately for the next determination, as this may result in an increase in temperature of the sample. For highest accuracy, the instrument should be maintained at a temperature of 20±1 °C. If readings vary more than 0.2 centimeter, repeat a third time or until satisfactory agreement is obtained. Report the average of two or more readings, excluding any that appear to be abnormal.

I would recommend opening the federal register and just clicking on random pages. This is what regulators actually create. It's mindnumbingly boring and necessary work that allows you to go to the grocery store, buy a bottle of ketchup, and not have to worry about it slowly being enshittified to save money.

One of the first lessons of the classics is in the danger to a society of empowering only those with the most base ambitions. To the degree we have elite rot in America, it’s largely perpetuated by incredibly-wealthy idiot dynasties.

More pragmatically, look at our current crop of elites. What fraction got there by being proximate to an elite’s kid in college (versus simply becoming conversant with money)?

> Undergraduate-level lectures taught by bored TA's

One, this doesn’t describe most classes at Stanford or USC. Two, I went to a public university. Behind the bored TA is a professor with office hours, research they need help with and internship connections.