Hacker News Reader

> 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

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.

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

I am talking about now. In the past, there was even a Jewish Quota. (Side Note: According to Bill Buckley there was also an Irish Catholic Quota). I am talking about right now in a post SFFA and post Varsity Blues era. I can't really comment on whether development cases exist or how many there are. Today, admissions are scrutinized not only to comply with law but various pressure groups and law firms. Development cases and legacy admissions are often conflated.

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.

> the assumption legacy admits are unqualified I believe not to be true.

> 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.

As I mentioned in another comment, the objective of elite schools is not to just admit 1600 SAT (or whatever the metric is these days). It's to admit "good" students and then to look at other factors. You have successful parents that went to the school isn't the only other factor but it's not a terrible one for both financial and other reasons. Neither is admitting students who didn't completely ace the SATs but also have other notable accomplishments.

SAT is a very very low bar to pass, especially Mathematics, it is ridiculously easy to get 800. Oxford and Cambridge basically have their own entrance exams that even the best students (eg IMO medalists) won't score full marks.

> The way admissions works in the US now it has basically become a lottery for qualified students.

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.

For any student who meets the qualifications, it is essentially random. There is a process that seeks to find the best students but it is flawed in the same way the job interview process is. Plenty of exceptional applicants get rejected and more than a few accepted students don’t succeed at the level one would expect.

But that doesn't make it a "lottery" as claimed in the post I responded to. Every application gets a score and then the ones with the highest scores get offered admission.

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.

The randomness is whether the committee reading your essays read them before or after lunch, or if something you wrote reminded them of their first romance, etc. etc. etc. The scores may not be "random" in the truest sense of the word, but the latent state that determine them is unknowable a priori and therefore the scoring ends up being highly stochastic.

But at institutions with sub 10% admit rates, it is random. It's not a uniform distribution because you can do things to help your odds, but unless your family has a building on campus or you're an olympian or something... admission isn't guaranteed.

People are getting hung up on the word "random." It's not random in the literal sense but it is at least somewhat arbitrary unless you're below some academic cutoff or you're well above it and have some other at least relatively notable achievements.

Random doesn't mean unlikely to happen, so I actually think it is random in the literal sense for almost all applicants. Much of life is.

You can do things to tip the balance in your favor, but the most important things can come down to chance.

I don't really disagree. I probably prefer other terms in those circumstances. But a lot of the ultimate decisions depend on how particular people felt about an essay or some other aspect of a submittal.

And how that particular person felt on that particular day was in part a function of how well they slept, whether they read your application before or after lunch (c.f. Hungry judge effect), and any uncountable other things. Random.

Some people's world views aren't robust enough to handle the idea that some of what they got they didn't deserve. It's unfair in the best way. It's luck. It's grace. Every person with access to this website has been granted things well beyond what is "fair".

They consider all those factors and then aim for a mix. No admissions board wants a class of 100% track stars or 100% economic hard-luck cases or 100% rich kids, etc. But they are faced with a bunch of kids who meet the GPA etc. criteria and also fit into each of these buckets.

Result is it's effectively random for each qualified kid.

That's all true, but you haven't described a lottery, you've described subjective criteria.

They do all that and then have 10x - 100x the students left in the pool. They can’t make offers to them all, so it ends up being mostly random in that final selection.

That’s why the person you are replying to said “qualified.”

How about for schools that had racial segregation within living memory? Can't be an old legacy there if you are the wrong race. Even without formal segregation there was discrimination of some amount. Can argue it went both ways at different points with affirmative action programs but most schools with AA weighted legacy just as high.

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.

> How about for schools that had racial segregation within living memory?

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.

I’m not a boomer. I have kids who are in high school. Racial discrimination is very much within my living memory, obviously affected other parents in my cohort, and still exists all over the city I live in.

> Racial discrimination is very much within my living memory, obviously affected other parents in my cohort, and still exists all over the city I live in.

If we’re talking about Asians, I agree with you, as far as non-Bob Jones universities are concerned.

The word used was segregation, not discrimination.

Come visit Baltimore and I’ll take you for a drive around the city. You can tell me if it isn’t de facto racially segregated. And then you can visit the actual South where racial segregation was “law”, and you can explain to me how actual patterns established under segregation haven’t been locked into amber.

Are schools still segregated? That’s the topic.

Again, come visit Baltimore, or go visit the South.

I have. To my knowledge, schools are not segregated by law.

I try really hard to be precise on HN because I recognize and even begrudgingly respect pedantry. This is why I wrote “de facto segregation” in my original post, just because I was concerned that somebody responding to my post might not be clear about the topic of discussion. And while I can reluctantly respect pedantry, I have zero patience for people who combine pedantry with careless reading.

If you think that 'these neighborhoods tend to be black, and these neighborhoods tend to be white, but for largely historical and cultural reasons, and people are free to move and live where they want' is "de facto segregation," then I think you have seriously watered down the term.

This isn't pedantic nitpicking. Segregation is a deeply evil employment of the state machinery to enforce and persist strict racial divisions in a society.

People choosing to stay near their friends, family, and community centers & therefore the census showing large clustering of self-identified racial groups, is not in any way the same thing.

If you go visit the South, you’ll find that many of the segregated neighborhoods that were once segregated by law are still effectively segregated. And beyond that, you’ll find that economic opportunity in many of those neighborhoods is massively restricted. You’ll ask yourself “why don’t more of these people just avail themselves of the same economic opportunities (education, jobs, training, public transportation) that their counterparts in wealthy neighborhoods took advantage of?” And then you’ll notice that in subtle ways many of those things don’t exist: the schools are terrible, the public transportation doesn’t run there, and the jobs don’t exist. One day you’ll notice that the one public light rail line in your city doesn’t have a stop in the wealthier neighborhoods, even though one was planned in the original design, or that specific lines and road projects were blocked because wealthy people objected and bought up essential land and built on it, and so on.

At the end of the day you just have to be open to figuring this stuff out. If your view is that people were herded into airless ghettos, and then just stayed there with all the lack of opportunity that entailed, because they were making rational free choices to deprive themselves and their children of economic opportunity, you’re living in a fantasy world.

De facto segregation != de jure segregation.

It happens that some neighborhoods are dominated by a certain race / ethnicity, while in others it goes the other way. Unless you want to go back to busing there’s not an easy fix for this problem

De facto segregation today is often a consequence of de jure segregation yesterday. Eliminating bad laws is just step one. Remediation for past ills is step two.