Hacker News Reader

Comment by lobsterthief | Hacker News Reader

The percentage of Harvard international students who fall into this category is statistically insignificant. It’s not even worth framing.

View on HN

It's not about the percentage of Harvard international students who fall into this category, it's about the percentage of students in this category who go to Harvard.

Also fairly low. There's plenty of high-prestige institutions in the world.

As someone from europe I'd say Harvard and MIT are the #1 prestige institutions, and a lot of people will not settle for less.

A lot? Those institutions only accept a relatively small total number of foreign students. Everyone else has to "settle for less" whether they want to or not.

If Dad gifts a new building on campus you odds at getting accepted go up tenfold.

I dont see why that is ever considered a problem. They are literally a private institution selling a service. Why shouldn't you be able to pay your way to the front of the line.

It's fine as long as they're open about it. It's when they say "We're a very selective institution that only accepts the academic best of the best from the entire world" and then also allow pay to play, clarifying "Also the people whose parents donated us buildings juuuuust so happen to be the academic best of the best from the the entire world" that people start to question just how selective admission really is, and just how world-class their student body and standards really are.

If they kept stats on who was an endowment/legacy admit and gave them a different colored diploma so people could filter them out when assessing things like grades and graduation rate and they didn't effect the curve I think there would be less criticism of the process.

I think they do keep stats on legacy admits.

I dont see why they would get different diplomas provided they complete the same coursework. If they are inferior, they should only help others on the curve.

I do think they would be more upfront about options for entry.

>If they are inferior, they should only help others on the curve.

Not if they're given unearned grades

Everyone at Harvard is given unearned grades. It's the poster child for GPA inflation.

I forget the exact stat, but I think the median GPA there is about an A-.

Depends in what. HEC in France is the top for finance.

Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College would disagree.

There is no need for there to be one and only one such institution.

MIT, really? I think of MIT as being high prestige mostly for people that actually want a science or tech-related career, not for old-money people looking to make family connections.

> MIT as being high prestige mostly for people that actually want a science or tech-related career...

Apparently you've not been to MIT in a while - it offers degrees in business management, finance, plus 17 in arts, humanities, and social sciences, not to mention grad programs. MIT admits more than its fair share of fruit-cakes with money:

https://catalog.mit.edu/degree-charts/

Believe it or not, I've never been to MIT.

As a percentage of -students- yes but as a percentage of world power children? That’s a much smaller cohort, and is the cohort that matters in this context.

[flagged]

That is just insane. How much do you think it costs or how poor do you think people in say france are where only criminals can afford it?

I didn’t say France, did I? I’m talking about africa, the middle east, much of asia, and parts of eastern europe. E.g.., maybe not Poland, but probably Russia.

Then you should be more specific instead of using weasel words like “much of the world”.

Asia, Middle East, and Africa are literally “much of the world.” They account for the vast majority of the world’s population.

There are a lot of ways to group countries and form a majority of the global population. You left it open to interpretation.

It’s still unclear to me why Africa, the Middle East, much (which part?) of Asia, and parts of Eastern Europe are uniquely capable of political corruption that France and Poland are not.

I remember when you claimed the APA didn't apply to this. At least now you don't bother to defend based on legality and are cool with forcing your 'totally not corrupt' single totalitarian viewpoint on the country in order to counter... corrupt totalitarianism.

Get rid of Harvard and the person you mentioned would just... go somewhere else. You aren't actually advocated FOR anything, just saying 'there are bad people in the world'. Um, ok, yeah, we know that. That's why we disagree with you empowering those we see as bad people but that you defend illegally empowering/illegal behavior of because you happen to agree with them.

The APA doesn’t apply to this—issuing visas as a discretionary function of the executive, and thus unreviewable under section 701(a)(2). Where am I being inconsistent?

Have any of the challenges to the administration prevailed on APA grounds in an appellate court?

"In an appellate court" doing a lot of heavy lifting for you, isn't it? How many APA cases has this administration lost in district courts?

Lawyers rely on appellate court decisions to understand what the law actually is or isn’t. District court orders granting TROs don’t even include meaningful legal reasoning. Lots of these are being overturned. E.g. https://www.npr.org/2025/05/22/nx-s1-5407923/voa-voice-of-am....

The Supreme Court stands ready to overturn Humphreys Executor. https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house/deadline-legal-bl.... The prospect of the Supreme Court upholding using the APA to challenge direct presidential action is nil. Courts aren’t empowered to micromanage discretionary presidential actions.

The cases where appellate courts have upheld injunctions against the administration have been mainly on due process and first amendment groups. Courts are empowered to protect individual rights from executive action.

[flagged]

Please don't cross into name-calling or personal attack, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. We've had to ask you this more than once before and your account has unfortunately been continuing to break the rules pretty badly.

I used that example because it’s my family. My mom’s family’s landholdings have grown in value as our capital city grows, so my aunts and uncles are selling plots and buying houses in California in cash. This is after distributing my grandfather’s estate among a dozen kids. From a country where the per-capita GDP is $2,400 per year. How do you think that happened? This background is table stakes for being part of the 0.1% that has the means to emigrate out of these countries and send their kids to elite American schools.

[flagged]

I don’t think my family was involved in corruption. But they are part of a landed gentry class that cooperated with the British colonial administration. My mom’s surname is an honorific reserved for people in a high position within a rigid class hierarchy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begum

But yes, I think that, in the aggregate, it’s not good to have a large number of people like me injected straight into America’s major institutions. We dilute what I think is a core american value against elitism and hierarchy. And our presence gives our home grown elite permission to drop certain beneficial safeguards on their behavior, such as the WASP taboo against conspicuous consumption. This is highly visible in Northern Virginia where I grew up. It was always full of elites, but now it’s full of elites that don’t feel pressured to keep a low profile and at least pretend they’re not elites.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com