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.
Many universities have adopted need-blind admissions (not including donor admits), eliminated or reduced student loans, and/or expanded undergraduate admissions - all efforts that support economic diversity.
Stanford (for example) implemented need-blind for domestic student admissions (but still not international), and largely eliminated (or at least reduced) undergraduate student loans. Undergraduate class size seems to have expanded from ~6500 (?) in 1983 to ~7500 today, and may continue to expand slightly:
https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2025/04/president-levins-r...
However, it's worth noting that Stanford acceptance was above 25% for the class of 1979 (vs. 3.6% for the class of 2029.) Application growth has drastically outpaced admissions and class growth.
https://irds.stanford.edu/data-findings/undergraduate-admiss...
Additionally, administrations have generally expanded much faster than the undergraduate student population.
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.
This is very high level technical success, or tech elite probably upper middle or lower upper class. It isn't true elite - where did the regular company CEOs and Politicians study? Those are the truly elite universities I'm talking about.
> The politicians in my country are rarely highly educated,
This is what I'm getting at. Most countries are like this, the truly wealthy and powerful aren't technical geniuses, they're good at networking and politics.
Looking forward to inspiring consensus to do it at the federal level voluntarily too. The federal administration catalyzing that won’t be controversial after its done.
The current board members at these schools just need to be inspired by another school.
W Stanford
Ain't nobody else had time for that.