Do universities keep admissions data at that granular of a level? I would add a generic “culture fit” component to each candidate score which you could use as a hedge to admit legacies without calling them as such.
This is not new. This is a battle as old as time.
Want to keep out poor people? Require them to live on campus instead of locally at home. Want to keep out the wrong kind of person? Start requiring college essays to get a "culture fit". Or add "geographic diversity" to get less NYC Jews, or require "well rounded" candidates that do more than pass tests to keep out Asian Americans. Or conduct interviews so you can see their race in-person without asking for it on a form.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_and_higher_educat...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...
While I agree with you that vague assessments like "well roundedness" can and have been use for racial discrimination in the past (both intentionally and unintentionally), it doesn't mean we should throw the baby out with the bathwater and solely use standardized tests or test scores to determine admissions.
There is critical value in assessing these hard to measure qualities for creating a student body. Each student in the university is not simply consuming an educational good in isolation from one another but is also offering their experience and perspective to the community. 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.
> 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?
That's pretty much what HOAs and micro-managerial local ordinances are. The whole point of them is that they make it an expensive hassle and generally crappy to either live in an above your social class. It gets kind of plausibly deniable on a city level when you've got nice neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods and they just differentiate by the degree of enforcement.
Obviously none of this stuff is water tight. It's all a sick game of relative probability. Some low class new money professional sports/entertainment types will retire to some waspy neighborhood in the Hamptons and persist but less of those people will do so than if places like that didn't actively try and be a nuisance to live in for the "wrong type of people". Likewise some guys who have a dozen cars in their yard will persist in their locations as the neighborhood gentrifies around them, much to the annoyance of their neighbors, but most of them will cash out and move out because having your neighbors constantly calling the government to harass you using laws that didn't even exist when you moved in gets real old real quick.
I believe that a key component of an effective education is studying the roots of philosophy. Surely you agree that the State should not prevent me from forming a private university that mandates freshmen take a philosophy class.
I also believe that a key component to an effective education is exposure to peers who come from a wide variety of different backgrounds and life experiences. Surely you agree that the State should not prevent me from forming a private university that considers the creation of a diverse student body as one minor factor in admissions.
A university is a public accommodation. You can certainly create a book club among your friends and forbid people of the opposite gender to join or require everyone to be of a different gender, maybe you can even call it a university; but that wouldn't be the same as doing such thing on the level of a large educational facility that e.g. provides the degree of Juris Doctor that allows you to take a bar exam.
So to answer your question, "Surely you agree that the State should not...", I would say "it depends on the particulars".
The SCOTUS decision on affirmative action in college admissions has at least restricted race from that consideration.
The decline and fall of white power America. If only MLK had lived to see it.
Don't give them ideas
The willingness to overtly implement them has been relatively low since the late 1960s.
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.
Easily quantifiable check boxes don’t verify that someone is an interesting conversationalist. Arguably schools are better served by slightly lower standard and a random pick vs everyone whose parents have been min maxing the process since preschool. Overfitting arbitrary criteria is easy, but not productive.
In theory maybe. In practice the overwhelming majority of the time it's just used to admit fewer asians.
> Easily quantifiable check boxes don’t verify that someone is an interesting conversationalist.
If we actually cared about whether people were interesting conversationalists in an objective sense (rather than just interesting to the person making the admissions decision - which mostly just comes down to having the same cultural background), we'd figure out a way to test it. These universities never tried, because they never actually cared about interesting conversationalists in the first place, it's always been nothing but a fig leaf.
> Arguably schools are better served by slightly lower standard and a random pick vs everyone whose parents have been min maxing the process since preschool.
Then make it random, if that's the goal - have an actual fair lottery between everyone who meets the standard. But again, it was never about being random.
Language isn’t culturally agnostic. If classes where taught in Malagasy being well read would refer to a different set of books.
> Then make it random, if that's the goal
That’s not the goal, the point is any system that can be gamed will be gamed. You can’t game random, but you can easily have someone else write a kids collage admission essay which becomes more likely the more you weight it and the higher bar you set.
> we'd figure out a way to test it.
In many ways that’s why the SAT is preferred over the ACT. Having a large vocabulary, being able to express yourself, being able to think logically are all reasonable proxies. It also explains why the math section excludes calculus questions as transcripts already show if someone took calculus so they can focus on something else.
If all you look at is race, you might say yes, but these are very different life experiences. Also, there is such a thing as somebody being so different that it’s not possible for others to relate to them. Likability is not unimportant when it comes to working in a team.
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?
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.
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.
Edit: Self-selection is at best an incomplete explanation. It fails to explain how, when comparing non-Jewish Whites vs Blacks, Whites' 177-point average SAT-score lead results in a 1.4x admission penalty. Meanwhile Asians' 73-point lead over Whites becomes an 8x admission advantage.
Scoring well on the SAT is an advantage for other groups, but somehow a disadvantage for non-Jewish Whites.
The population that applies to Ivies is completely different from the overall population, and different from the population that gets admitted to Ivies.
If there were no requirements to be admitted to Harvard, any tom dick and harry could send his application - only then you can reasonably conclude that the admitted population should reflect the overall population.
But because there are requirements like SAT GPA etc, there is some filtering happening and population that apply is slightly different.
But the affirmative action zealots require that the admitted population must represent the overall population, despite the fact that incoming applications have completely different distribution IQ/SAT/GPA/race wise.
This leads to discrimination, where White/Asian admits, who are overrepresented among applications with high scores, are clamped at certain threshold and then other races are selected with whatever grades they have
Also a per capita comparison assumes that the number of qualified applications follows similar distribution, no? I'm not sure if this is reflected in the provided data.
Also, the overall analysis assumes that per capita distribution is fair but that seems subjective. Even so, two schools skew the data for Black students (75% of Ivies are <1x per capita for Black students) and of course there is no mention of Hispanic students (one of the fastest growing demographics) which is mostly underrepresented on a per capita basis.
And then it doesn't get into international students and if/how they assimilate into a "race". Nor does it reflect stickier topics such as whether Hispanic students culturally assimilate into "White", effectively lessening their numbers under a per capita comparison (it does this for Jewish students).
I appreciate what the data brings to the conversation, but don't believe others' assertions have to take any of it into account considering the number of assumptions one must make to follow a "per capita" AND population SAT = sample SAT comparison.
Does it really assume that? Suppose, for the sake of argument, one group had a nationwide average SAT score of 1500, and all other groups had an average SAT of just 500. Barring any bizarre distributions of those scores, we can infer from only the averages, that the 1500-SAT group would have more individuals that satisfy a university's academic criteria, than the 500-SAT groups. It's far from perfect, but does provide a hint.
> Also, the overall analysis assumes that per capita distribution is fair but that seems subjective.
I must have missed where in those charts a definition of 'fair' is given, and then relied on for further analysis.
> of course there is no mention of Hispanic students
Hispanic students are between Asian and Black on every chart.
> And then it doesn't get into international students
That is correct, international students are entirely excluded, in the sense that all the domestic students in a school are taken to represent 100%. I don't understand how not answering all these additional questions you raise makes the data irrelevant.
There’s no need to construct a hypothetical when there is actual data to dissect. For example, in the cited links, the 25th percentile SAT score for Harvard students is ~200 points greater than the highest mean nationwide score. The middle 50% of all students (25th-75th) range is ~100. And on 7 out of 10 students admitted included SAT scores in their application. So one would have to make additional assumptions (I’m not sure what they are) to claim one’s groups scores lead to penalty and another’s leads to advantage. It could be true, but I don’t see it as a fact, hence my original position that other assertions don’t necessarily need to meet some bar.
We’re also decades after civil rights. People don’t fit in these boxes.
My nephews dad is Irish, mom is black Puerto Rican. Racists would consider him black, his name is Irish, mom is of African and Spanish origin. They don’t speak Spanish at home or really have a deep connection to Hispanic culture. Wtf is he for the college demographic survey?
Likewise for my Filipino friends… are they Asian? Pacific Islander? This particular family speaks English, Tagalog and Spanish at home. Culturally they are very much into traditional Filipino traditions, but their Catholicism practice is close to Spanish style.
I think the GP argument is that you can't argue going all on merit for Jews while demanding that Blacks and Whites are somehow equally represented.
You clearly expressed by that phrasing that you thought that the data in question would at least potentially be a reason to not wring hands about such things, and presented it for that reason.
The point of donor child admissions, as I understand it, is to bring in additional money. Which could potentially enable more low-income students to attend.
The reason why some universities have ended legacy admissions recently seems to be that they have concluded that it doesn't bring in enough money. But they usually still have donor admissions.
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)
Not if the mean SAT score predicts how many students surpass some academic cutoff used by the universities. It's like predicting who will win a best-out-of-3 100m dash, when all you have are the runners' mean 100m times.
I find it baffling how people become incapable of the simplest inferences, and capable of the smallest nitpicks, when they don't like where the data leads.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2007/may/29/internatio...
no take backs, safety schools permitted.
A lawyer for Students for Fair Admissions "quizzed [Harvard College’s long-serving Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid] on the 'Dean’s Interest List,' a special and confidential list of applicants Harvard compiles every admissions cycle. Though the University closely guards the details, applicants on that list are often related to or of interest to top donors — and court filings show list members benefit from a significantly inflated acceptance rate" [1].
[1] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/10/18/day-three-harv...
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 ???
But is that actually happening? Harvard only has around 7k undergraduates. For comparison the UC system has 230k. By all accounts ivy leagues is interested in cultivating an "elite" student body, not to grant as many students access to education as possible.
If the university is suppised to produce good students ir shouldnt be that 1 student in 21 is a complete dud. Because that's how it works, they are duds, who cant be kicked out and they will get their diploma even if they cant read.
In theory (not reality) those who finish top universities should be top people.
To tell it other way: would you be happy if 1 car in 21 didn drive? Or 1 apple in 21 was poisonous?
The top universities have long watered down their achivements anyway. Most is just pure nepotism.
all these named scholarships and named professor titles - are coming from donations
I suspect if we looked at the overall set of students who were admitted to elite universities while their parents have given a $10M donation, that we'd find that that set of students was academically well above-average as compared to the overall population, probably above-average as compared to all students attending all four-year universities, even though they might be below the average of the overall admitted students to that elite university.
That doesn't make them anything close to "complete duds".
What they offer is connections. Those rich kids whose parents bribed their way in? Extremely valuable connection to make. That's why private universities do the whole "eye-watering ticket price, but most students have some level of merit-based scholarship" setup. Mingling the talented and the well-connected is an extremely valuable proposition for everybody involved. If you're looking for a school made of exclusively meritocratic gifted scholars, that's what elite public schools like Cal are for. But if you want a school that creates the most opportunities for success, private schools are where that's at.
At that point you might as well abolish private universities altogether, because what’s their point?
Hint: most of the people pushing for these things would be perfectly fine with that. But won’t admit it.
People with the cash to bribe their way into Harvard, who know smart people, are “top people”.
Would you prefer a doctor who studied hard and was the best of the best, or someone who bribed their way and checks notes played basketball with the president's kid?
If world was fair top universities are supposed to "produce" top students. Not be a club for rich peoples' kids.
That's how it works in many places: you get most points on objective tests - you get in.
Rich people still have a leg up, since they can pay for tutors / prep schools for their kids.
But if the kid is a moron it wont get to a top place.
I prefer to go to a doctor who finished university on merit and skill, not nepotism.
state schools and community colleges do exactly that, how is that working for them?
>> If the university is suppised to produce good students ir shouldnt be that 1 student in 21 is a complete dud. Because that's how it works, they are duds, who cant be kicked out and they will get their diploma even if they cant read.
"complete dud" is doing a lot of work here, it is not necessarily true that legacies are dumb. Even if they are dumber than average, it doesn't mean they cannot go and achieve great things later in life.
For example Malia Obama - does she deserve a harvard admission just because her father was president?
or donald trump - he was admitted and graduated from wharton - does he meet criteria of "top people" ?
It depends? For some good, for some not so good? For a multitude of reasons? One of them being "world is unfair"? Other being money?
Public universities work in Europe. At least to some degree.
Also, this is a philosophical question: should the top universities "manufacture" best students, or are they places where rich peoples" kids can meet each other?
If you hire a programmer do you want: one who can code great, or one who played basketball with the president's kids?
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.
If you do business in the Middle East, you begin to notice the kids of the elites all went to weird no-name Western schools. Turns out they want a Western degree, but don’t want to be away from the capital too long. So they find random universities who will give them a degree for, essentially, no-show remote learning classes. Win-win.
It is a form of pride and pretend superiority, false legitimacy and so on.
As someone without a college degree in tech, and who has attempted but failed to get a tradition “corporate” job based on skills and track record I can sort of understand. Not the same thing at all, but you’d be amazed (or not?) at how much importance some folks put on having a piece of paper even in casual social settings in some circles. Actual skills need not apply.
One could say the same of a billionaire buying their idiot kid an Ivy League education. They're clearly not going to benefit from it. But it looks good and might fool a person here and there.
Too bad too, since the half of undergrads who weren’t cheaters were the nicest, brightest, salt-of-the-earth people.
This may vary by department or over time, but I think there's no reason to believe a Harvard Undergrad Alumni you meet ever did any college level work.
But this was just before all the RateAProfessor sites got big and when I was still proud of my cum laude GPA. About 5 years later is when I started hearing everyone was getting As at Harvard, so I think it was a sudden shift right after your time and certainly not just a Harvard thing.
This made me laugh out loud.
There are majors at every university that are easy to graduate from. Often these are aimed precisely at academically unambitious athletes and well-connected mediocre students.
Harvard is no exception.
Getting into elite schools is the hard part. Graduating is not.
> But I'd guess those could be purchased as well.
Maybe? Not really? If you’re already part of that social circle and socio-economic status (SES), you don’t have to buy it. If you’re not already in that that SES, then building elite connections requires quite a bit of cultivation that, imho, is not easy for most college-aged kids to pull off, largely due to ignorance of SES/class distinctions in the US.
There's no need to buy grades. All grades are A anyway.
I dare say that an international airport is about the last thing Harvard needs.
But also, those off-the-books social connections are another one (how big/common is this - we'll never know - that's the point). Making sure the college president knows who you are, and that you have 14 other family members who are alums. Oh look, my son is applying now too, just letting you know!
In my experience, yes. (It's an outright question on many college applications.) But this law, together with the older one, mandate recording and retaining these data.
> would add a generic “culture fit” component to each candidate score which you could use as a hedge to admit legacies without calling them as such
This is a good way to turn a reporting requirement into criminal conspiracy with intent to defraud the state charges.
Frankly, there are bigger discrimination problems for qualified applicants than legacy for admissions at the most selective colleges. Certainly, nobody is going to prevent "athletic" ability, "extracurricular" experience, or SAT coaching in admissions.
…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).
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.
The reasons that I have for wishing to go to Harvard are several. I feel that Harvard can give me a better background and a better liberal education than any other university. I have always wanted to go there, as I have felt that it is not just another college, but is a university with something definite to offer. Then too, I would like to go to the same college as my father. To be a "Harvard man" is an enviable distinction, and one that I sincerely hope I shall attain.
John F. Kennedy's application essay to Harvard, in its entirety (he got accepted, of course).
Bonus points for brevity I suppose. And to be fair, Harvard (and all other colleges) was way less competitive back then. 1930s college and 2024 college are worlds apart in every way.
I was just thinking it had a strong Strunk & White-ian vibe!
University entrance requirements then were nothing like they are now.
An essay like this would get turbo-rejected today, unless they are on the z-list (and JFK probably would be).
Has there been a prosecution for academic criminal discrimination or criminal conspiracy to avoid discrimination protection in the last 20 years? I mean there's Title IX, but the Supreme Court has blocked even sex discrimination rules.
https://www.npr.org/2024/08/16/nx-s1-5064627/supreme-court-s...
I don't think anyone has been doing it. Race-based discrimination was, until recently, legal.
[https://www.oeod.uci.edu/policies/aa_history.php]
There is still an active executive order requiring all government contractors to do it too. Which includes companies like Google.
It’s been a thing since the 70’s - to various degrees of enforcement.
Depending on how much someone wants to politically punish someone depends on how much they are required to provide documentation and what kind of lawsuits they get into with the DOL. Here is one with Google [https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/ofccp/ofccp20210201], which requires they comply with DOL data gathering requirements and affirmative action requirements ‘or else’. Here is a document from the Clinton whitehouse calling out similar [https://clintonwhitehouse3.archives.gov/WH/EOP/OP/html/aa/aa...].
Schools often get impacted by department of education, NIH, and DOE grants. Sometimes by various state level programs, all of which transitively include similar language. I am not directly in academia so I don’t have links as handy, but the professors I know have all made clear references to the same thing going on.
When they can’t do that, guess what happens [https://www.npr.org/2024/08/22/nx-s1-5086410/the-diversity-w...].
The tricky part here is that in any given zero sum system (aka there are a fixed number of student slots, or open job positions, or affordable housing openings), you can’t ‘positively’ discriminate (aka affirmative action) on race (or any other concrete criteria) without ‘negatively’ discriminating on the same criteria to someone else. It’s a basic control system thing. It’s literally impossible for it to not happen, as even a basic whiteboard session will show.
Which has been impacting East Asians, Caucasians, and often Jews pretty heavily for awhile. This is nothing new, really. Harvard has been trying to limit Jews in its membership in particular since at least the 1920’s if I remember correctly.
But since discrimination (negative) based on race/ethnicity is clearly illegal, but discrimination (positive) based on race/ethnicity is (or was) required, everyone involved except the gov’t is screwed from a documentation perspective as they’ll be documenting criminal activity in order to not be performing criminal activity.
So the next time the political winds change, they’ll have clearly documented malfeasance (looking from the other side of the equation) which can be used by the other side of the equation to screw them over even harder.
This is why the old US stance of ‘don’t be racist, being racist is illegal, and we don’t see race’ was a thing. It minimized the balkanization/tit for tat problem, while allowing punishing obviously obnoxious behavior. Similar to ‘don’t talk about politics/sex/religion at work’.
But, racism still exists of course (it’s a basic human behavior/in group-out group thing and literally no group is immune), and it was far from perfect as it also discouraged discussing a lot of problems - many of which got larger under it. But it’s not like getting them out in the open necessarily solves them either.
Or that there even is a ‘solution’, just different types of problems to pick.
Fun times.
I can believe the former, but not the latter. If it's the former, why do you think they would suddenly start prosecuting now for a difficult to prove criminal conspiracy to allow legacy admissions? Political reasons?
I have worked on some enrolment and "lead generation" systems and databases in the US college space, including for high-schools and summer students.
The slicing and dicing of the data on the students leading to enrolment was quite detailed, even if the multiple SQL databases were not.