Stanford to continue legacy admissions and withdraw from Cal Grants
forbes.com
forbes.com
I don't think that the Cal Grants program was ever designed to remove those people from the program. It was designed to make sure they didn't get an advantage. In other words, it was prevent universities from letting people who otherwise would not have made the grade in just because their parents made the grade.
Giving alumni's children an advantage isn't giving an advantage to "the smartest, most charismatic, most talented people" -- it's giving an advantage to the luckiest (the ones who happened to be born into it).
And the phrase "it would be ideal if those born into privilege could also clear the SAT" is such a strange one. OF COURSE rich people can "clear the SAT;" in fact, they get the advantage of MUCH better preparation, etc. So this is absolutely about giving an advantage to kids who could not qualify on their own.
To be clear: I don't think Stanford is doing this to keep poor people out (their scholarships have always been very generous). But I do think the administration probably done some basic calculation: they get more in donations from alumni who want legacy admissions for their progeny than they get from Cal Grants.
And Stanford has decided that accepting some kids who just don't make the grade is worth that economic advantage.
Without it, you end up with some entirely merit-based schools and some true Ivory Towers and the Twain rarely meet.
The calculation was beyond basic - I read somewhere here that it was around $3m that they were getting from Cal Grants.
Around 8 years ago, I heard (from a friend of mine) that the min donation to guarantee admission to Stanford was ~$10m. Wouldn’t be surprised that it’s even a higher number nowadays…
At least the British aristocracy had the concept of noblesse oblige, while the US aristocracy loves to lecture the poors on how they should be pulling themselves up by their bootstraps (and it always bothers me that that analogy was invented to point out the impossibility of actually pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, but somehow came to mean the opposite).
Are people born smart not also "lucky"?
If you went to an elite school and your kid can't get in by competing fairly with other kids, they're subpar and shouldn't get in. Kids of legacies have a massive advantage even if their legacy status is totally ignored.
For example, I'm certain that I can get my kids into MIT (they're a bit young right now). I know exactly what they need to do, how they need to present themselves, what classes to take, courses, extracurriculars, how to stand out, who to ask for letters, who to ask for opportunities like time in a research lab, etc. I've even helped other kids make plans and then get in. Same for my wife for the Ivy League school she attended. Those connections, peers, knowledge, resources, etc. are hard to match. If the kids decide they want to do that.
There's no reason to give these kids (my own included!) any other advantage. They're born with such a massive head start that it's hard to lose, if they put in the work. If they don't, then they shouldn't go to these places.
The only thing legacy admissions do is take away opportunities from students that deserve to be there. Stanford/Harvard/etc. shouldn't get a dime of state or federal funding as long as they continue to do this.
I know a professor charging high schoolers to be his research assistant, because there's too many people asking for research labs roles. I know people that got into top business schools because they already had thousands in MRR in high school.
OP's point is those kids will still probably wield exceptional wealth and power. Wherever they congregate will thus become the de facto centre of the elites.
Calling 99% of the world's universities irrelevant is certainly a take. And not a very intelligent one.
If Stanford was just filled with kids who got high test scores, that purpose would be gone. Plenty of startups have a story "we met in college" and one had brains and another had the social connections and family finances to make things happen.
What about this: public funding (and tax exemption) is reduced in proportion with the number of legacy students a university accepts? The idea being the university should be able to monetise these slots to more than compensate for the decline in public funding. And said slots do not serve a public purpose, but one more particular to the graduates of the university.
Is it a student whose admission decision was influenced by legacy status? Or merely someone who was a child of an alum?
MIT claims to not have legacy status affect admissions decisions. Would their taxes increase if they admit the kid of an alum?
You're not removing the people, you're removing the privilege. Those same people can still apply on the same terms as everyone else.
They often do. Or at least are very close.
I got into an elite engineering school (off the waitlist at the last minute, no donation/legacy), and the admission folks basically told me "we accept the top X, but if we just ignored the top X and took the next (X+1)-2X (or three), the result would be the same."
Basically, these schools are so competitive that if you wiggle things a tiny bit, on the margin, you're not really sacrificing much. However, if they wiggle too much, that would obviously degrade pretty quickly. But from my experience, that hasn't been the case.
So a school like Stanford is probably thinking, within the margin of noise, if we let in folks because their parents did well here as students/faculty/etc, that's probably net positive.
The donor one is a bit different, but again, on the margin, and with some math around donations vs Cal Grant, they probably see it nets out better for them.
The problem has worsened over decades; applications have ballooned ~7x (600% increase) since the 1970s, while class size has only increased by 15%.
You pretend we need the established world order because this is how the world works but the actual world works in certain ways due to policy. The same policies that allow the rich to pay no taxes while the mid and poor do.
I understand your attempt at a pessimistic yet pragmatic view but I think There is an alternative that still works and doesn't actually make universities "irrelevant".
The wealthy unqualified can always be VCs/funders.
Not /s but not /100% serious either.
Details matter. If a conscription term lasts for 9 months and the richest people do their best to get their offspring exempted (which is how it worked in Czechia prior to professionalization of the army), I am not surprised by the lack of overall effect.
If a conscription term lasts 3 years and the local elite feels compelled to take part (Israel), the effect may be much bigger.
Note that college is closer to the latter in its parameters.
Networks of wealth and power will start to congregate elsewhere and if necessary sabotage the place which now hostile to their interests (which includes that of their offspring).
Would the institution carry the same prestige if it was purely meritocratic?
If NO --> Would it be a magnet for overseas talent? Would Xi's daughter want to go to it?
One can recognize the significant societal downsides while also recognizing the picture isn't very simple.
This is an argument for stricter regulation, not more lenient. It means that schools that give such advantages to the already-privileged should not be able to even exist, nor should businesses that give such advantages in hiring, nor should any entity that gives such advantages. In other words, if this rule didn't succeed at making those people (or rather, their advantages) irrelevant, then we need an even harsher rule.
Obviously the situation is much more complex and nuanced, but this framing (amongst others I’m sure) seems appropriate if you are thinking on a 25,50,100 year time scale in terms of impact of your decision. The country is littered with public and private universities who made poor moral choices across the 19th and 20th centuries but I’m not aware of any institutions suffering long-term reputational harm (or threat of insolvency) as a result of those choices. (Then again, maybe it’s because the harm was swift and final at the time)
Even among educational institutions there’s a 19+k private schools and 5,300 universities in the US. The vast majority of them don’t operate anywhere close to that scale.
Everyone else jumped on it and abused the student loan system by jacking up tuition and then applying charity grants to basically all students. Leading to our current Student Loan crisis.
MIT + the more expensive private colleges are effectively a rounding error in terms of number of students matriculating, but they do play in the same market and will price accordingly. But the big driver of what they can get away with is that a college like University of Tennessee is $35,000 annually, for a total ticket likely north of $150k. (Not picking on them, just chose a state at random.)
Worth noting that this is a deliberate political choice. At any time, a state could choose to return to subsidizing in-state college at its public institutions, perhaps in exchange for working in the state after graduation.
Yes, absolutely this, and accelerating heavily in the late 00s after the financial crisis. In some states, especially for non-flagship universities, you can overlay the decrease in state funding and tuition increases and they're nearly the same line
Tuition explosion isn't all just the proliferation of assistant deans and VPs (although that is a problem, too), a huge portion of it is that public higher education is essentially public in name only these days
What stops the higher ed players from regulatory capture of the state agency in charge of those subsidies and milking that cow for all it's got?
I have an argument to make in favor of allowing legacy status for admissions. I am basing this on personal experience and some analysis of data done at similar schools when they were forced to release it due to lawsuits.
The way admissions works in the US now it has basically become a lottery for qualified students. We have more qualified students than we have seats at the top schools. The idea that there are some unqualified students who make it in only because their parents are alumni, at least at Stanford I have never seen. The top schools are all so competitive that they are all pretty similar and they would not do things to jeopardize their reputation or standing. So I think it's just not the case that there are unqualified legacy admits. At Harvard for example the legacy admits had higher SAT scores than the average admitted student which makes sense when you think about it. Children of alumni are probably better prepared for admissions.
So when choosing, Stanford might have to make a choice between two students with the same GPA, the same SAT score, the same interests, etc. and legacy status could decide it and I am ok with that. Building a campus network of people is a huge competitive advantage a school can have. You would be surprised how many people who are non legacy admits have pretty well known parents anyway or have parents who went to an extremely similar school. Singling out legacy admissions is not extremely meaningful and I don't think it's used to let in unqualified students at all.
This is known to be false. Development cases, where donor’s buy admission, are real. They’re limited, but universities do them regularly.
If you look at Jared Kushner’s case, for example, his parents weren’t even legacies!
If they keep this number small, like five per year, would it really dilute Harvard’s brand? I doubt it.
I am making a case that goes against the stereotype of what a legacy admit is. I think that stereotype of a unqualified child of rich alums is not accurate anymore. The Harvard data suggested legacy admits were above the average admitted student. I think that is more likely the case today. Also, to give an example, since an 18 year old was born in 2007, those legacy admits could be children of tech startup founders and Stanford has a strong interest in cultivating tech ties. But the more salient point I am making is that the assumption legacy admits are unqualified I believe not to be true. No one has actually made that case. They argued instead along racial grounds.
> some analysis of data
> stereotype of a unqualified child of rich alums is not accurate anymore
Yeah. What data might that be? Gini coefficient has been rising since 1980, and student achievement / quality of US university freshman classes has declined since at least 1993. So what you're saying couldn't be possible, in fact, you're 200% wrong. It would be completely improbable to observe these trends and for you to also be right.
So I think you read a real report about Varsity Blues or whatever, and I think you are using this report to make believe that you are doing something other than first principles thinking. But the first principles thinking, "more students and greater selectivity, therefore, overall class at Harvard has gotten better," is wrong! It's not knowable from first principles what the quality of Ivy League classes are. The people who have measured see declines everywhere, and there's absolutely no reason to believe that those declines should be smaller among the top students - if anything, top students have far further to fall! How's that for first principles? Clearly a bankrupt approach.
That's not the way I would phrase it. A lottery would mean the outcome is random. There is nothing random about it. They consider essays, extracurriculars, and income, and look for evidence of hardship, diversity, athletic ability, and leadership. 100% subjective, sure, but not random.
If it was a lottery, they'd do a binary classification of "qualified" and "not qualified", and then they'd randomly choose who gets in. IMO that would be an improvement on the current system. Powerball and other big lotteries don't pay out on subjective criteria, each ticket gives you the same chance of winning, with no other information being used.
Result is it's effectively random for each qualified kid.
That’s why the person you are replying to said “qualified.”
You can do things to tip the balance in your favor, but the most important things can come down to chance.
I think it is best to do away with legacy admits especially because of racial history but also because it is a kind of nobility system, but that will make schools rely on government more right now which seems to be as bad for academic freedom and freedom to not fund genocide as the donor model.
Maybe if you’re a Boomer, although even by the time they were going to university, racial discrimination was rapidly being replaced by affirmative action. This is the 2020s - even though some problems from that era still haven’t been solved, brute forcing the solutions from back then won’t make them any better and has already produced a major backlash.
If we’re talking about Asians, I agree with you, as far as non-Bob Jones universities are concerned.
Alumni. Stanford may care most about just that one alumnus, but my suspicion is that they care at least as much about other alumni and alumnae. :)
Often "Alums" nowadays, as Alumni is traditionally male gendered.
Not for stanford. Its goals largely boil down to increase the endowment and create a powerful alumni network. Accepting legacies is a great way to accomplish both those things. This is the same reason schools give preference to athletes even though it brings down the schools academics. Competitive athletics requires skills that translate very well to the workplace(grit, teamwork) so successful athletes are likely to become successful corporate workers.
Boo-hoo, rich university loses money. Like the 21% Trump tax on endowment income, etc. Maybe they'll have to fire some useless, non-teaching administrators and build fewer country club dorms and luxury amenities, right?
But... Stanford would probably argue that admitting a single less-qualified donor child can cover the financial aid expenses of dozens of qualified students whose parents simply have less money. (Financial aid is 5% of Stanford's budget.)
If this is true, California's goal of banning legacy and (especially) donor admits could have an unintended consequence of reducing the number of qualified but non-rich students who will be admitted.
But... many gifts are restricted, you say! Buildings. Endowed faculty chairs. Particular research centers and programs. Specialized scholarships. Etc. Nonetheless, Stanford has to balance its budget, and even restricted gifts save money and allow them to shift dollars from one place to another. (Note debt service is 4% of the budget as well.)
Sounds like an argument for taxing the rich, if they've got so much spare money they can carry dozens of other people's kids through school.
Let’s say the school decides they have enough money without that 7%. They figure out they don’t need to be that rich. Does that mean they can’t do more institutionally or does it mean they can’t do more organizationally (which is just get bigger, more heads, more money)? What does it really mean for them to suddenly become ethical and say they don’t want that blood money anymore?
That’s what I’m trying to figure out. It’s a follow the money situation, and it’s important to figure out who is beholden to that 7% when it comes into their system. If we find out it’s the giant cafeteria building, then maybe we settle for a smaller one. But if we find out it’s making certain people fat in the pockets, then you’re on to something.
——
Aside, society should really start encouraging the most talented to consider the ethics of institutions they go to. Whether that be Palantir or Stanford. Legacy admissions is just straight unethical, and Stanford students need to protest this.
Rich people are going to waste their time and money no matter what, but I didn't want them also wasting yours and mine. The man-hours and percent of the GDP (often paid for with taxes) we put into conflating cause and effect is absurd.
We dodn't need merit-base academia, we need merit-based employment that disregards elite and academic status.
Economists call it costly signaling. The more elite of a status it signals, the costlier it can be, but with guaranteed student loans, the economics of it have become so separated that as the eliteness of a bachelor's degree has gone down, the costliness has gone up.
I am on a co-op board here in NY, pretty much all our young buyers the last 2 years are all gen-Z who went the non-college route and have saved up more than enough to put a downpayment on a home for themselves and have a mortgage instead of college debt.
You pull back the veneer and you find out that mom put down $50k on the house. There was a new coffee shop nearby to me and it had a really cool space, warehouse type, and I was talking to the young owner how cool their business is until they divulged that the space belongs to their dad - ok I guess daddy is just throwing money at you to keep you busy.
With the gap between capital income and labor income widening, it is becoming more difficult to obtain capital with your income at a young age.
Really? How much money did they start with versus how much they earned via working? This feels like a bit of burying the lede here.
You don't become rich by wasting time and money.
Just because rich people waste their time and money with academia, it doesn't mean anyone can become rich, just by wasting time and money on academia.
We effectively already have middle management being used to school elites; they get tours in various companies in the network, which means they build impressive resumes that would "win" any competition based on merit/success history.
Indeed, this may be necessary: the baseline investors committed to a company keep all the free riders on board through growth volatility. Is it too much to show their people the ropes?
It may be necessary, but it's probably self-destructive: foreign investors are often most interested in new technologies, not to profit from them, but to learn enough to compete. So they'll out-bid investors without such strategic aims. They're very much aligned with open-source, because their people leave with knowledge and the company is left without IP protections.
So... it's complicated. Going all-"merit" helped with civil service in the 1870's - 1950's, but people learned any system can be gained, and we can no longer afford slack-maximizing.
We'll have neither, of course. The wealthy will always be able to pay for what they want — merit be damned.
Such a contrast to other systems where for example your HS grades will count 100% - and similar "ungameable" systems.
Elite-College Admissions Were Built to Protect Privilege
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/histor...
The new holistic admissions policy worked as intended, successfully suppressing Jewish admissions.
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/06/23/a-lawsuit...
The 'holistic' admissions lie - The Daily Californian
https://www.dailycal.org/2012/10/01/the-holistic-admissions-...
The False Promise of 'Holistic' College Admissions - The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/12/the-fa...
Lifting the Veil on the Holistic Process at the University of California, Berkeley - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/education/edlife/lifting-...
My professor explained that academics alone is not enough for success in life. He explained that some of the smartest engineers report to average business majors in companies. And he explained that that I cannot get any scholarships with perfect GPA while my roommate, a B student, has scholarships because he plays basketball and will likely get in leadership role in early on. That is good for the university as their graduates are seen as more successful.
It was a hard thing to listen to but I accepted it. I wish he told me the truth though.
Being smart is valuable, but it’s only one ingredient among many. You need to be able to communicate with others, take risks, work hard, have empathy, be a creative problem solver, etc
Being a brain with a body attached is not enough and that’s good
But then that raises the question of why they want to go to an elite university. Well, obviously, because being able to pass as a good student does matter.
I heard the lack of balance in the Bay Area: "wierdos, tech bros, etc.". A geek can contribute either very positively or very negatively to society (ex: tech CEOs, unabomber, etc.),
Maybe too young to judge at university admissions, but still a reasonable proxy (another topic).
You see the same thing with asians today. The competitive-admissions high school I attended went from. 30% asian to almost 70% asian. There was a backlash, almost entirely from very liberal white people. I don’t think any of them disliked Asians per se. But they wanted to preserve a certain culture in the school and all the Asians led to a change in the culture.
Ok, screw that and screw the Ivy League and the WASPs with it.
Citation please.
I knew the director of admissions somewhat at an elite school and he said that they basically put a couple of quantitative metrics (like SAT) on one axis and read essays and considered other metrics like interviews on the other axis for diversity before that term became popular.
The upper right more or less got in, the lower left didn't, and then they debated the middle ground.
I don't know how it is in Ontario now, but when I went through HS there university admissions were your top-K grades for the last couple of years and they didn't factor in which school you attended. There were no shortage of private/alternative high schools in Toronto that catered gaming that system with lax workloads and inflated grades.
My guess is because it was focused on those attending elite institutions:
"In their paper on admissions to highly selective colleges... students at each of the schools in this analysis... Students opting to not submit an SAT/ACT score achieve relatively lower college GPAs when they attend an Ivy-Plus college..."
My guess is the meaning of a high or low GPA versus standardized test changes quite a bit when you have groups very highly selected based on a wealth of other information.
The Dartmouth report has always frustrated because they, along with that other paper, selectively present conditional means rather than scatterplots, hiding the variability around points to make things look more predictive than they are. Means by predictor level are almost useless without knowing the conditional variance for each predictor level. They're basically deliberately pretending that there is no error variance in the prediction equation.
Meta-analyses suggest that both standardized test performance and GPA predict later performance. For example:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10627197.2015.99...
In some literature, GPA is superior, and others, testing.
There are other studies from decades ago showing that when standardized tests are temporarily removed from admissions (e.g., due to a court ruling), it has almost no influence on outcomes of admitted students later, suggesting admissions committees are able to select comparable students without tests.
I'm not saying tests are horrible and should be omitted, I just think people really overstate their predictive utility and it causes a ton of problems down the road.
The problem finding a hard enough test with as little human intervention for assessments. Because human intervention brings with it subjectivity. This subjectivity was manageable when there weren't so many people applying for top schools (e.g. in the early 1900's). But right now its not.
SAT/ACT/GRE are no indicator of success. What this "study" is merely proving is that schools may have regressed in their rigor for grading hard courses.
Which is basically what the SATs are:
Admissions required a triad - top grades, top test scores, and something significant in extra-curricular activities. And finally, an interview. Bomb any of those, and you're out. I was rejected by MIT because of the interview.
There's a lot of luck of the draw when you're applying to schools with a pretty low admittance rate.
I joke with someone I know pretty well in my alma mater's alumni office that I'd probably never get in today and they smile and follow it up with an "oh well, you're fine." :-) And they're not unhappy that I'm an alumnus. 3 people from my school's 59 person graduation class got in; certainly would never happen now.
The ratione behind this was "ending the school to prison pipeline." They saw the correlation between drop out rates and incarceration and thought they could reduce the latter by gaming the former.
This is why you see a lot of college dropouts from that corpus because they can't make it. They were lied to.
The optimal strategy would be to take the easiest classes required to graduate, since there's no national authority to normalize grades across classes.
This, of course, leads to yet more grade inflation. Hard to compete with a >4.0 student when your school doesn't even offer advanced courses!
Legacy admissions are part of the hereditary class system. The reason people go to elite schools isn’t just to receive an education, it’s also a status symbol and networking opportunity. If you do manage to get accepted by an elite school purely on merit, that’s not just an opportunity for you personally, it’s a chance to pass that status down to your children.
But yeah the rest of it is bullshit (and often a fig leaf for discrimination).
The SAT and GRE aren't perfect, but they're a massive help to students who would otherwise be outside the normal path. Get a high score on the SAT, and nobody cares whether you went through traditional K-12.
This is understatement, GRE being required for STEM postgraduate studies was always university requirement for all not something the STEM department would want.
One can argue that the quantitative part have a point but for the language part, you must be kidding me. Unless you are going to English literature it is just plain stupid (maybe even if you study literature).
For non-native speakers, it's just a test of how well they learned English, and nobody in admissions expects them to score as well as native speakers.
Beyond this, there are subject-specific GREs. They're far from perfect, but they're more uniformly comparable across all candidates than grades are.
The real downside is that school is insanely competitive, students study incredibly long hours, and they feel intense pressure to perform well on their exams.
The upside is that the students are much more serious about their studies than in the US, in general.
This is not a hypothetical btw, this really happens.
All the rest, there are very lenient high school diploma requirememts, and no crazy costs like the US. All that want can basically attend, until they fail to pass a few times.
Ironically, the appeal of an "elite" university depends on the public image of the student body. The university has to manage that image through its admissions process. Any open criteria for "merit" will quickly turn the student body into a monocultural freak show. This would in turn diminish the public image of the university -- the exact thing that the students were hoping to benefit from.
Edit: Oh, you think in a century we won’t still be in this situation? Hmmmm.
So just to spell the quiet part out loud, what you're saying is that admissions based purely on merit would mean the student body would become entirely Asian, and this would be a "freak show" that's bad for the university's image?
Quotas to DIE have all been ruled to, in practice, amount to illegal discrimination on the basis of race, but some people truly believe Harvard and UNC were right to discriminate against Asians.
Which makes sense. If it came to your kid, would you give up their spot at an Ivy for the “common good” (assuming you saw it that way)?
Or would your definition of what’s right/wrong change to fit the practicals of the circumstances?
Merit doesn’t have to mean SAT scores.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...
Now all of this runs into the same fundamental issue that any decision like this does, namely, that ideally you want everyone to have an equal chance, but also, you want them to do a good job in their role. Unfortunately, people, through no fault of their own, are born into different circumstances, and some are prepared, in many different ways, better or worse than others, and this strongly affects how well they will perform.
My kids went to a competitive high school, and I saw how the top students funneled themselves into an extremely narrow range of interests. Those kids were nice, but putting 1000 of them in one place would be a freak show.
The choosing of rulers is an interesting and complex problem. An idea with some popularity in HN is "sortition" which is the selection of rulers at random. This could be applied to college admissions in the following way. The college doesn't want to admit the top 1000 applicants according to any short list of KPI's that can be gamed. So they admit from the top 10000 students by manual curation, which is guaranteed to be controversial.
Instead, why not identify the top 10000 applicants, and then send out acceptance letters to 1000 students chosen at random by a neutral third party. (Making up parameters here, just for definiteness). The schools would get the variety they want, with an opaque selection function that can't be inverted, and the same potential benefits that sortition offers for choosing the ruling class.
side note: “monoculture” and “freak show” seem incompatible. an entirely homogenous student body doesn’t sound too freaky
1. Admitting a certain amount of students based on legacy status is not necessarily a bad thing
2. A University should not be eligible for taxpayer funds if they have admissions like (1) or similar holistic criteria.
In a society as diverse as America I think 2 is a fair line to draw. And the universities with large and powerful alumni networks where legacy admissions are most relevant have the least "need" for public funds. They have huge endowments.
This is particularly so because the advantage of this kind of school is networking, and it's in the interest of the disadvantaged to give them opportunity to network with the advantaged.
But it's also no big deal if we don't make that compromise.
Public money is precious, and we should think really hard about taking money from the general public just to give it to wealthy institutions any time we do it.
There's also a difference between giving money to a school, and giving money to a student to buy an education they want
From outside looking in, the American system has a hilariously unequal system. Certain opportunities are hoarded by an insanely small set of schools, almost entirely based on "prestige" and financial dominance. And it's this crazy arms-race/pressure cooker to get in. But once you're in, grade inflation is everywhere and people aren't actually working super hard. No one freaks out about admissions to "mid-tier" schools. It's entirely about a select coterie of schools who people rightly perceive as gatekeeping to an incredible extent.
None of the schools actually emphasize being accessible and hard to graduate from. The incentives are all weird and cater to a small elite population. The name on the degree is more important than earning the degree.
In the same way, if up until last year, your company had any form of DEI, it's pretty toxic to point to any of your colleagues, claim that they were diversity hire and their success is a credit to DEI policies b/c that undermines them in a way that's impossible to provide evidence against.
The implication that "you were only <hired or admitted> because of a policy that gave you credit for <trait/circumstance>" can't have a factual basis unless you have all applications and notes from the admissions/hiring deliberation process, which the person in question almost certainly cannot.
The idea is that merit based admissions is actually pretty complicated, so we can allow individual universities continue to experiment with their own implementations and approaches.
However, we can hold them accountable by grading them based on retrospective data.
I read somewhere that people who graduated at the top of their class generally became average with respect to success.
Also, I suspect success has to be quantified, which might be hard.
He ended up with a BS in Chemistry, went on further academically, and eventually was the general manager of a big factory (I think for GE, but not 100% sure) in the 80s before being killed in a car accident.
There’s a million stories like this. Most debates about who is more “qualified” for what in this context boil down to subjective vibes about whatever people think. At best, it’s pride in Ivy League education, at worst it’s some racist nonsense about the “others” taking status and jobs away.
I went to a random state school that some would eyeroll at. Life has been fine, and I’m glad I didn’t waste my time pursuing some bullshit admissions process.
Other types of discrimination are bad because they create effects that make society worse overall (more sectarian or class-based tension, more corruption, less growth).
Taxpayers, exercising their own self-interest, should pick and choose the good types of discrimination to support. There is no need for morality here.
TLDR, I am in agreement with you, but I wanted to frame the argument in this way.
If the elite colleges are not comprised of the rich and well connected it beats the entire point of an elite college.
At Caltech and MIT for example they have way more people with very high SAT score than they have openings for. Most admitted students at both have math scores of 790 or 800, and reading/writing averages around 750.
The SAT is not reproducible enough to say that someone who scored say a 790 is better than someone who scored a 780. If both retook the test they would likely get different scores and would have a good chance of finishing in a different order.
Same for other standardized test.
The result then is that after you filter by standardized tests you still end up with a more people than you can admit that have high tests scores that give you no information about who would do well and who would not.
There are plenty of people who can get those high scores but would not be able to handle the class work at Caltech, and from what I've heard the same applies to MIT. To figure out who can actually handle the work they have to look beyond standardized tests.
And then some large number of high scoring candidates will miss out until we have a sufficient number of universities.
Irrespective of the mechanism, it is incredibly racist to use one’s race as a scoring mechanism perhaps by definition.
Make them sit some of the university's exams, and if they pass they get in.
Obviously if your test makers aren't very good you'll get full score being only 96th percentile. But you can make tests that don't have full score being that many people. We know because very few people medal on the IMO. Once you have a sufficiently hard test, rank everyone and choose top to bottom.
As people get better and better, you have to expand your universities. Of course, in the US you run into the problem where the towns consider students a pollutant[0] but I'm sure we can start new universities out in the middle of nowhere. We've done it before, we can do it again. And until we do, yes, if you had a bad day, try again next year
0: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-03-02/california-...
Let's say Harvard's admission were to become largely based on social status rather than merit. You could say "so be it", but let it be known that that is what Harvard is. Being one thing while advertising another is lying and the greatest offense.
A positive side effect is that perhaps we won't fetishize Harvard as much and keep insisting that one must get into Harvard. You don't. Harvard's brand depends on you thinking you do, of course.
The current model of academia in the US and elsewhere is wretched. Obscene tuition is one thing. The failure to educate is another. Universities got out of the education business a while ago. Universities are focused on jobs, that's the advertising pitch, which is not the historical and proper mission of the university. So you end up with institutions that are bad at both.
So if these "elite" schools lead to a disenchantment with merit, I see a silver lining. It could provide the needed impetus and motivation to distribute education more widely in smaller colleges with a greater clarity and focus on their proper mission (e.g., Thomas Aquinas College [0]) while creating a robust culture of trade schools. The majority of people do not need a college education! And frankly, it's not what they're looking for.
Germany does something like this. Fewer people go to university there, and they have a well-developed system of trade schools.
Furthermore, you could offer programs that allow students at colleges to take classes in these trade schools.
Let's stop trying to sustain a broken model. The time is ripe for educational reform.
Have the basic grades and test scores? Ok welcome to CS1 where 2/3 of you will not make it thanks for playing
Universities are cartels of prestige and access.
The question is whether universities can still play a role in establishing groundwork values for how people are treated. If they're not participating in public education initiatives, they have no incentive, and efficiency+competition will squish that out.
I think it might weaken the connection between 'elite' status and the particular university, to the point where the university actually becomes something academic, almost technical, again.
Second, I think the legacy folks see their relationship with the university as multigenerational and therefore they donate more. These donations benefit more than just themselves.
Most people would detest the extracurricular noise that some institutions use because often only people with money can afford their kids doing those things and two they are bullshit things. By most people I mean potential students such as those that in great numbers end up in state schools or community colleges.
On the point people vastly prefer GPA - I don’t agree because people on the left prefer DEI and affirmative action.
Who exactly is being punished here? Stanford has no shortage of applicants.
Columbia University, Cornell University, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, Rice University, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, Yale University
But this discussion of rankings reminds me of a quote from John Allen Paulos:
In fact, trying to convert a partial ordering into a total one is, I think, at the root of many problems. Reducing intelligence to a linear ordering—a number on an IQ scale—does violence to the complexity and incomparabilities of people’s gifts.
But Stanford is in the same league for sure.
PS: I'm an ex-Stanford FTE.
Public funds shouldn't pay any tuition costs for anybody that attends Stanford as an undergraduate. I'll admit for PhD programs the benefit is typically via publicly funded research so I think that can stay. But it's absurd that a California taxpayer would fund elites that consider everyone else beneath them.
The Vietnam draft with College deferments broke colleges and universities.
Now every white collar job requires a degree - because every boomer overseeing those roles thinks it’s necessary.
the people who go on and on about meritocracy and despise diversity, etc… love this. they have loudly cried for years about meritocracy but despise any program that takes away clear and obvious advantages to certain people.
it’s similar to the carrot and stick argument. they claim certain classes of people need more money to work while claiming that other class needs less money so they feel the fear. in certain people’s minds, executives will only work for the 100s of millions in carrots while conveniently that other class will only work appropriately if they get the stick.
Conflates two utterly different cases.
Big donor admissions amount to a subsidy of the education costs of all the other, non-donor admissions. Legacy admissions OTOH are just an old boy's club.
This surprised me when I went from my decent but not great-by-ranking (generally ranked in the 50-70 range) undergrad university to a top 10 ranked university for grad school. The undergrad students weren’t noticeably smarter, nor did they work harder on average. They were more ambitious and more entitled. Cheating was rampant (pre-LLMs, I expect it’s even worse now) and professors mostly just didn’t care. The median household income at the top 10 school was more than double what it was at my undergrad school.
That was an enlightening experience.
Perhaps this is better for the school as a whole. But when that argument was made to help students who were previously discriminated against, people swore that didn't matter, because all discrimination is bad.
Legacy students are the easiest way to see that discrimination is not over yet. There are many others but this one is really transparent. There are many potential ways to deal with it, but "end discrimination for them but not for me" isn't a good one.
Universities will likely claim that legacy and (especially) donor admits bring more money into the university, which in theory allows them to increase overall economic diversity (and likely social and demographic diversity as well) of the student body by admitting a larger number of qualified students under a need-blind admission policy.
Placing the notion of discrimination in the context of demanding access to an elite circle is like demanding access to a banquet while denouncing the recipe. It's incoherent.
Isn’t that basically Caltech? They had a 3% acceptance rate in 2023, the lowest in the nation. https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/lowest-accepta...
Indeed. And the irony is that even when poorer students do attend, they find that the expensive habits of the richer students exclude them from mingling with them in many cases.
(Fun fact: one reason for uniforms in Catholic schools was to eliminate wealth from the picture.)
The signs may be more subtle and sublimized to a careless outsider, but in the schools those signals are obvious and stand out just as blatent as anywhere else.
Meanwhile, there's the ultra-talented people IIT turns away every year. Maybe the smart thing would be to also pick up international students as second-chance admits rather than chase away tourists, students, researchers, and workers?
Legacy creates an closed, self-reinforcing, entitled aristocracy.
What kind of society do you want?
Universities were always finishing schools for the elite, for like 1,000 years its been that way, and the best ones in the US are here for that since before the country was incorporated, here since almost half a millennia ago!
The last 80 odd years of dealing with the lower class and proletariat at all is a footnote and will be an experiment of folly deep in a university archive for the next 1,000 years as they merely revert to the mean.
Every problem that universities have go away when they go back to their roots. Its the corporate and public sector that tied access to having a degree from these places, that’s not the university’s problem.
And to your point, correct, if the proletariat were only surrounded by themselves they would not want to be there.
I went to an “elite” public university in India which has a sub 1% acceptance rate. It was mostly extremely smart and driven middle class kids from incredibly diverse social backgrounds. Everyone had the time of their lives. And almost everyone now (20 years later) is doing incredibly well in life. They are doing startups, public policy, research, tech leadership etc. There is zero legacy admissions. And yes there is a network effect, of course. You can count on the friends you made at uni, but not because they inherited the influence. You don’t have to lick boots to have a good life.
Ain't nobody else had time for that.