Hacker News Reader

Comment by sashank_1509 | Hacker News Reader

Let me try to make a defense of Legacy Admissions (highly unpopular I know). I come from a country with a purely meritocratic examination based college admissions system. I even cracked the hard examination and attended a top college. But the fact is the exam world is the exam world and the real world is the real world. The real world doesn’t run on examinations and IQ tests. Real impact means connections, wealth, and then maybe intelligence if considering technology. If you remove the people born into privilege, from attending your college, all you succeed is in making your college irrelevant, not those people irrelevant. It’s better if rather than being a fully closed circle, they also interact with the smartest, most charismatic, most talented people in a country etc. Of course it would be ideal if those born into privilege also could clear the SAT etc, but then it would also be great if we were ruled by a benevolent philosopher king, that’s not the real world, in the real world concessions have to be made.

View on HN

> If you remove the people born into privilege, from attending your college, all you succeed is in making your college irrelevant,

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.

you're missing his point. Cal Grants removes an advantage that actually functions in the real world.

You could make the same argument for why any kind of prejudice should be allowed since, for example, racism provides an advantage that functions in the real world. This seems like a bad defence for legacy admissions.

Legacy admissions are preference, not prejudice.

When there limited resources, prefering one type of person is prejudicing against the others.

There are hundreds of colleges, many of which have high acceptance rates and perfectly fine instruction. Are these applicants or the people in this thread then displaying preference or prejudice in the institutions they apply? And if so, what makes it different than the institutions do the same?

Where's the special admission program for lottery-winners, con-artists and pickpockets? Those also function in "the real world" - so why not at Stanford?

In the real world, individuals can't do much. It's only through the collective cooperation and the trust behind such cooperation that allows things to happen. Social Elites come with a wealth of trust from the legacies of families and connections that slowly built them up over hundreds of years. And such bonds survive even without the state, predate it and ultimately build it.

That is the "real world". Everything else is just an abstraction, propped up by a system that has only existed for a definite period of time and will not exist outside of that.

I can't help but notice the contrast in the tone (and content) of this HN discussion, compared to the one on the ruling that ended affirmative action[0] for university admissions. Then, the majority of commenters were on the side of meritocracy. HN is consistently pro-elite, perhaps because a good chunk of folk here see themselves as intellectual elites.

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36520658

The whole point of the OP is that if you have merit-based students AND the landed gentry, the landed gentry get at least 4 years of interaction with smart but poor(er) backgrounded people.

Without it, you end up with some entirely merit-based schools and some true Ivory Towers and the Twain rarely meet.

The problem, in my mind, is the interaction of legacy admissions with other forms of background-based admission.

Once I'm overlooking poor test scores for the 'landed gentry' background, I've got little defence when people demand I overlook poor test scores for other backgrounds too.

Before I know it, a trivial amount of arguably-unfair-ness that was flying under the radar becomes a non-trivial amount, and now everyone's mad at me.

It’s not background, it’s donations.

While I hate the taste, it makes sense to combine smart with powerful if you want to produce industry.

The rich don’t need to be particularly competitive academically - they are hyper-advantaged socially.

Exposing them to intelligent thought keeps them from being powerful ignoramuses, and encouraging the academically gifted to rub shoulders with those that can help them to implement their ideas is also an advantage.

I hate it but it actually makes sense to me.

I’m not sure that was the motivation in this case though, easily could have been an accounting decision.

> Exposing them to intelligent thought keeps them from being powerful ignoramuses

But would it not also, for the same reasons be good if the rich and powerful were exposed to Native Americans, military veterans, wheelchair users, religious minorities, minority sects of religious majorities, young parents, trans folk, mature students, reformed convicts, people with mental health problems, and so on?

Probably not so useful, since they would not be forced to acknowledge that those people were at least in some ways superior to them? If they know they are surrounded by intellectually superior people, it is probably the first time they are confronted with that kind of contrast. (But that’s just a guess. I suspect that the answer would be highly variable by the individual case)

> While I hate the taste, it makes sense to combine smart with powerful if you want to produce industry.

What if you want to produce equality?

Equality of outcomes, or equality of opportunity? Because shooting for equality of outcomes has got a really, really bad track record. Essentially, it is only possible in an unfree society, and even then it has never been proven to work. Ever. Not even one time.

Nobody wants equality. People merely don’t want to be thwarted in their pursuit of a worthwhile life.

We should do what we can to ensure that special barriers aren’t erected for anyone and that everyone can succeed on their merits, but also we must balance that ideal with the fact that some people wield disproportionate power, either as a result of their merits or otherwise.

There is no easy solution, only less bad compromises

We can start with equality of opportunity if you like. But there's no way to achieve equality of opportunity in generation N+1 unless you achieve approximate equality of outcomes in generation N, because one generation's outcomes are the next generation's opportunities.

How do you expect to achieve equality of outcomes when some people are born with an IQ of 90, and others with 110? Some with 80, others with 120? And for every 130, there’s a 70 that can barely function in society, and for every 140 there’s a 60 that simply cannot?

People are not born with equal potential in athleticism or intellect. It’s inconvenient, but it’s true.

The only way to achieve equality is to severely attenuate potential to the lowest common occurrence. Pol Pot tried that.

How do you expect to achieve even equality of opportunity when those differences exist?

First, you don't need to achieve exact equality, just approximate equality. That approximate equality can incorporate a range of levels of wealth and still be enormously more equal than what we have today. It is fine if someone with an IQ of 130 has 100x the wealth of someone with IQ 70. It's not fine if someone with an IQ of 130 has 10^9x the wealth of someone with IQ 70. It's also not fine if someone with IQ 130 has 10^9x the wealth of someone else with IQ 130. (It's questionable whether IQ is even a meaningful measure, but I'm just using it here as a proxy for whatever kind of "innate ability" we want to posit.)

Second, you don't need to achieve equality of all forms of outcomes, just economic means (and political rights, etc.). Not everyone can be a concert pianist or a venture capitalist, but that's okay as long as concert pianists and venture capitalists don't have 1000x the wealth of everyone else.

It's perfectly fine for people to have different aptitude and even different levels of aptitude in general. It's just not fine for those differences to translate into enormous differences in baseline well-being (e.g., food, shelter, time).

Ironically, of course, if we achieved this, it would then be much less objectionable for Stanford to do whatever it wants, because it would mean we've created a society where going to Stanford doesn't really matter so much. But the question is what does Stanford (and everybody else) need to do in the meantime to get to that point.

Equality of opportunity is relatively easy: you provide people with the same opportunities, that they must meet at their own innate capacity and motivation.

I don’t defend that a doctor should make 20x what a nurse does, or that the c-suite should make 20000x what the janitor makes. But it’s also fine that some people don’t produce anything of value, at all, while others produce a lot of value for society. A meritocracy with a mechanism to limit suffering and harm to those who cannot participate seems a reasonable solution. We don’t need or want to incentivise parasitism at high or low levels.

>it's giving an advantage to the luckiest (the ones who happened to be born into it).

Are people born smart not also "lucky"?

Not always: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/poverty-shrinks-b...

>Even at this early age, the researchers found, infants in the lower socioeconomic brackets had smaller brains than their wealthier counterparts.

I have no comment on that but, side note, was every researcher mentioned a woman?

"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." -Stephen Jay Gould

I see where this quote is coming from… but Einstein is a bad example. His success was not from golden Stanford opportunities.

Every life decision was him opting out of responsibility and prestige to spend more time on his interests.

So “people of equal talent, and commitment to their work at the cost of all other qualities of life including relationships” looks very different than that quote wants to suggest.

The quote seems quite on the nose to me. Einstein wasn't raised by paupers.

No, he just was forced to be a refugee from his own country. Do we really have to compare suffering?

The context of this discussion is an argument that we need to find the Albert Einstein of the world to help them go to Stanford. My argument is that Einstein never went to the proverbial Stanford. In fact he avoided those things.

Einstein was a patent clerk rather than a professor. He explicitly chose not to “go to Stanford”.

> 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.

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…

Applicants who get admitted due to a (very) large donation are a tiny pool, and unrelated to the legacy admission question.

Their benefit is also much clearer, the $10M donation you mentioned can clearly and directly help a lot of students.

> Their benefit is also much clearer, the $10M donation you mentioned can clearly and directly help a lot of students.

The benefit is clear, I would argue the detriment is also clear: Stanford is arguing that bribery is an acceptable method of doing business, not something that deserves opprobrium.

Bribery is the main way of doing business in America in 2025:

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-08-08/trump-se...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/07/universities...

https://www.reuters.com/investigations/trumps-war-big-law-le...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/08/07/tim-...

The crazy thing is that they refused CalGrants not because it forces them to end legacy and donor admissions, but because they’d have to publish data about such admissions.

So the calculation was that a report showing how much unfairness there is in the admissions process will hurt the Stanford ‘brand’ by more that $3M per year. Ouch.

I mean, I think this decision also shows how much unfairness there is. I guess the difference is this is a one-time thing that people may forget about, whereas reports would be required on an ongoing basis.

Ok, fine, then can we stop pretending in the bullshit of the meritocracy then, and that everyone who graduated from these elite schools is so deserving?

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).

IMO the "bootstraps" thing was always an insulting joke. Something the wealthy would say to knowingly insult the poor. Go do the impossible you stupid poor person while they laugh so hard their monocles fall into their brandy. Its like spitting on someone just cause you can. Yes, this is an absurd characterization, an almost cartoonish villain trope. It's a silly world!

But something happened: people who didn't understand it was meant to indicate somthing impossible started using it like it was some moralizing good. And here we are, saying dumb shit on the internets.

The point is the saying is that it's not physically possible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. It's always very funny when people say it as if it means the opposite.

I don't think SAT tests for talent and charisma. It does test for smart for some definition of smart.

Top schools in the US, of any variant, mostly don't really want good SATs as a sole measure. They may be an important factor. But admissions are far more multi-faceted--however imperfect. And however unsatisfying that may be to some people with top SAT scores.

Let me refute that defense. I went to the kinds of schools we're talking about and I had a lab at them for over a decade.

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'm certain by the time your kids are applying for MIT the standards will be much higher and your advice will be less relevant.

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.

You're thinking like an outsider instead of an insider.

My friend's kids are going there ahead of mine. I know plenty of people there, including folks involved in admissions. I'm contacted to write letters for candidates. etc. You stay plugged into the system.

I have no idea what mechanism a faculty member would use to charge a highschool student. But I think that's rather unethical and useless. Finances of labs are such that this money is worthless.

In any case, plenty of labs, mine included have several highschool students at any one time. But guess how you get in? With connections.

> Finances of labs are such that this money is worthless.

Depends on how much money we’re talking about

Things start getting “interesting” maybe around $50k. And yes there are people who will pay that much

University professors are also grossly underpaid relative to the difficulty of the job

In my experience the kinds of kids who are worth having in the lab are not from the kinds of families that can afford 50k.

In any case, I would never charge a summer student. And I have no idea how my university would do that if I tried. There's no mechanism. And even if there was, that money would go to the university not my lab. So it's useless.

I very much doubt this is going on. It's definitely not happening at top 10 places.

> In my experience the kinds of kids who are worth having in the lab are not from the kinds of families that can afford 50k.

This is a fundamental issue in my view. The types of people who will do good work are precisely the type who have not been trained by privilege to believe that they can get by without doing good work. But it is those with the privilege who are most able to get themselves into positions where good work would be beneficial. Hence the incentives are exactly backwards and we need to make a deliberate effort to exclude exactly the types of people who most "naturally" will crowd into certain jobs and positions, and include those who are least likely to naturally do so.

> In any case, I would never charge a summer student. And I have no idea how my university would do that if I tried. There's no mechanism. And even if there was, that money would go to the university not my lab. So it's useless.

The university wouldn't know what was going on, and there wouldn't be anything technically illegal.

Speaking fees are one obvious way to do this.

Most of the time, college professors don't want anything to do with high school students, or even undergrads most of the time. They only do it because they are told to or there is some personal benefit to them.

> I have no idea what mechanism a faculty member would use to charge a highschool student. But I think that's rather unethical and useless. Finances of labs are such that this money is worthless.

The faculty member is keeping the money for themselves. Some might call it a bribe.

It's unethical (and possibly worse) but it is happening. The students themselves aren't doing actual research, they're given busywork because it's understood to be resume padding.

> But guess how you get in? With connections.

Over time, "connections" degrade into kickbacks and corruption. My point is that these lab positions are going to be meaningless in a decade due to bribery.

It will be similar to how every student at top high schools is an executive in a club because those schools have fake clubs that don't meet or do anything.

> 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

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.

The whole argument seems incongruous with the actual news.

The state isn't pulling subsidies for the school to beautify its campus or some such.

It is canceling financial aid grants to low income students that are accepted to Stanford.

This is presented as a punishment of Stanford, which has no shortage of applicants.

They're doing that because it's the only leverage they have, because of our screwed-up system. In a more just world, the kind of "pay me $1 billion" stuff that Trump is doing to UCLA would instead be done tenfold to the most elite institutions to force them to entirely remake their operations on a more equitable footing.

Is it leverage if it doesn't harm Stanford, and didn't impact their choice?

I might as well have said they're going to crush 10 puppies a day until Stanford relents

I am curious to learn more about your perspective! Would it be possible to contact you somehow? (your profile doesn't have an email!)

> If you remove the people born into privilege, from attending your college, all you succeed is in making your college irrelevant, not those people irrelevant.

Calling 99% of the world's universities irrelevant is certainly a take. And not a very intelligent one.

Given the sheer number of “universities” that have sprung up, in practical terms he is almost certainly right.

That is mostly an American thing.

The point of going to an Ivy is to interact with the rich and powerful. It is a way for people to jump up a few social classes all in one go.

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.

You're making a great case to shut all of them down and shun the graduates

Why? The current system graduates kids from poor to not poor. Sure it is a small number, but it is one of the pathways for social mobility in our society.

Or it perpetuates the poor, by allowing only a few to change. The way some of you explain it makes it look like a crude hunger games kind of system.

College in general was meant as a way for people to rise up, and for my generation (early millennials) it worked. My first job in software engineering paid way more than my parents combined income.

Society has managed to mess that pipeline up, first through massive student loans, and now through just general unemployment.

But the system worked for a long time.

The Ivy leagues are something different. Society can only have so many "elites", or else they stop being elite and just start being irritating rich people. There needs to be a path for new blood to enter the elites, so feeder lanes exist.

This all worked rather well for at least half the 20th century, but recently the elites have gone a bit too far into the "eat the poor" territory, and society is starting to crumble around the edges.

>College in general was meant as a way for people to rise up

No, college started out as academic institutions of learning, not instruments of social mobility. It was never intended as a job training program, rather a place of academics to work together on a topic, and was heavily restricted to the aristocrats and elites from the start.

Alot of the problems here is stemming precisely from trying to use higher education for a purpose it was not originally designed to do.

Yes. University needs to be university. It's never been good at being other things.

People have completely forgotten why it mattered on resumes to begin with. Association with a university signaled an appreciation for philosophy, now it signals tolerance for administrative abuse.

OP wasn't talking about Ivy-league schools. He said that if you don't admit the privileged elite (regardless of their academic skills and knowledge), "all you succeed in is making your college irrelevant." But we know that cannot be true, because there are many universities that admit few (if any) legacy students, continue to attract applicants, and continue to graduate successful, talented people who do well in life.

Apart from anything else, some members of the "elite" are actually smart and driven enough to be able to parlay their early life advantages into meeting the academic requirements of top schools, and those who aren't tend to end up with top school alumni running many aspects of their affairs for them anyway. Especially if they're the sort of elites that are interested in investing in startups or being active in politics or having science endowments named after them.

Top schools are also entirely capable of attracting members of privileged elites to network at their events without shepherding them through the curriculum.

And the last person you want to found a startup with is a legacy dumbass who fronts all the money. In that scenario you aren't a co-founder, you're an employee. The VC industry exists for a reason.

> The point of going to an Ivy is to interact with the rich and powerful

I went to an Ivy. That was not the point, and a lot of these comments have little in common with reality.

Let's be real, legacy admissions are about increasing donations to a school - everything else is just BS rationalization.

So how they think it will protect or improve their brand is irrelevant?

Having a good brand increases the likelihood of donations.

To whatever extent this is true (I'm not convinced it is, schools that aren't prestige aren't "irrelevant"), it is an indictment on the schools. This argument is a capitulation to the signaling hypothesis of higher ed. I believe at the least a weak version of the hypothesis, but I absolutely do not believe we should just roll over and say "well, that's the way it is". It may be the way things work, but this is a very important is/ought distinction. I think we should be fighting _very_ hard for the "ought" version.

Yeah in my view, the primary value of undergrad in college, is the social connections you make and the status it grants you. If this was not the primary value of college what else can it be. What should it ought be. It certainly is not knowledge nor can it be knowledge. You learn far more in a single year on the job than in your four year college degree (and I say this as an engineer). In fact I think a STEM degree is mostly superfluous except for the connections you make in college which is very important.

A 4 year college is primarily about teaching you how to think critically. It’s also about proving to a company that you can be responsible enough to show up every day and get you work done. Finally it’s about ensuring you have a base level of knowledge so that all that learning you claim you’ll do in one year on the job can actually occur.

“I didn’t learn anything in college” is either exaggerated arrogance, or you were doing something very, very wrong in undergrad.

I absolutely have gotten industry jobs through my work network and, doubtless, through where I went to school to some degree. But basically zero of those have been through people I met in school. The school network aspect is almost certainly overstated in most cases. I've never gotten a job offer through a classmate or college professor.

i got my first industry job through interview performance, but in later job transitions my university affiliation ended up playing a major role because certain employers are extremely focused on certain feeder schools, at least for periods of their existence often through founder bias or because it buys a certain kind of harmony based on shared experience and shared world-view.

Atlassian’s founders are two college mates - one from rich background, one who couldn’t afford a computer until 12. One example of a multi billion dollars company offsets the idea.

Sure. College mates start companies together. I'm friends with a bunch of people who started a now defunct gaming company more or less out of school. I know others who basically got their jobs because people they knew from undergrad activities were editors or whatnot.

But there's this mythology that the main reason you go to Harvard (which I didn't attend) is to network with movers and shakers isn't generally true in the main.

People say that university is designed to teach you to 'think critically'. They say that a lot. I wonder, then, why it is that most people leaving university are not substantially better at thinking critically than any random person I meet.

There is real work and learning that happens in universities and there are people who actually care about those things but that work is tertiary to the primary function of the university, which is ensuring the continued existence of itself

the uncomfortable thing that this thread is dancing around is the fact that college is not useful or necessary for the large majority of people who attend. People repeat things like “teaches critical thinking” because that’s what others say

No, people repeat things like “teaches critical thinking” because the statistics would show it’s true.

Which statistics in which study? Given the current system any sampling from college/university would be cherry picking vs general populous (unless you also sample general population with similar constraints to ensure a like for like comparison) so can't really be trusted.

I’m sorry half this country currently believes that foreign countries pay our tariff's. Demographically speaking the vast majority of those people didn’t go to college.

Your anecdotal evidence is not reflected in reality.

I taught a critical thinking course to junior analysts in my organization. I did not observe any correlation between people with college degrees and critical thinking skills. If anything, people with life experience (multiple previous jobs) seemed to come in with higher critical thinking skills.

In which country, and where did they graduate from? Not all colleges are alike.

Critical thinking is not something that can be taught. It's a family of skills that can be learned through years of practice. Academic degrees usually place a heavy emphasis on practicing the subset of critical thinking skills relevant to the field. And you can often see the differences in the graduates. People who studied CS, mathematics, law, and history tend to approach problems in different ways.

Of course, not every graduate meets the standards of the degree they got. Many don't have sufficient internal motivation to work hard and learn. And universities often lack strong sources of external motivation. No matter whether it's the government or the student who pays for the education, there is a heavy pressure to have people graduate in time, even when they have not reached the expected standards.

I would be interested in looking at such a course, all the ones I saw were pretty dull.

I found the most systematic way of teaching critical thinking is to do a lot of maths.

That might have been sampling bias. If they were hired and not fired quickly, they had probably already passed some test for critical thinking. This is like testing whether familial wealth affects SAT scores by comparing the results of rich and poor kids at MIT.

In my case it was that I was doing something very wrong in undergrad. But somehow the fact that I didn't do a damn thing but alcohol and drugs and cram one week before finals didn't stop me from getting good grades and graduating. Somehow the lack of all that knowledge that I was supposed to learn didn't didn't disadvantage me at all. Somehow just holding the stupid credential that was the only thing I got out of it is the only thing anyone cares about.

I interact with lots of engineers, some who got CS or Math degrees, and some who went to bootcamps. The difference in competence is very noticeable.

I've made far more connections in the workforce than university.

You can certainly find exceptions but while I have friends from what can reasonably be described as elite schools--and am even on a volunteer non-profit board associated with one--I can't really think of a single case where relationships developed in school translated into a single paying job. On the other hand, basically every job I've had after ones right out of school were essentially the direct result of workplace interactions.

> Yeah in my view, the primary value of undergrad in college, is the social connections you make and the status it grants you.

For those of us who went to state schools, it was about learning. Going to a 2nd tier state college instantly changed my social class from "family of laborers" to "highly paid white collar".

> You learn far more in a single year on the job than in your four year college degree (and I say this as an engineer).

Maybe. I've met plenty of experienced devs who didn't know fundamentals that colleges teach. College also teaches other skills, such as writing, presentation, and appreciation for the arts. Ideally it also teaches people how to be responsible members of a democratic society.

> In fact I think a STEM degree is mostly superfluous except for the connections you make in college which is very important.

Most people don't have access to a fully stocked chemistry lab, or super computer clusters. College is a place where you are surrounded by other people who also want to learn, so your own learning is greatly accelerated by the conversations you are able to have.

There are countless times I'd be stumped in a math class trying to understand a topic and I wouldn't get it until I sat down and tried to explain it to someone else in my study group.

When have you heard of someone learning linear algebra, calculus of variations, thermodynamics and real analysis in a single year on the job?

Studying hard is harder work than having a normal job, much harder work. I've never been stressed in a job, but I have been stressed trying to learn too much in school.

> You learn far more in a single year on the job than in your four year college degree (and I say this as an engineer)

I do not believe this is true in the slightest. I learned more in a single OS class than i learned in years of industry work. What you learn in industry tends to be distinct from what you learn in college, and if it isn't, then your college curriculum was probably a waste.

This is a good defence of a programme I've generally found abhorrent.

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.

This requires a precise and careful definition of legacy student, I think.

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?

I suspect it's a question that it's very hard to find direct answers to especially given how admissions on the margins are probably at least somewhat arbitrary. There are a lot of reasons why children of parents who attended an elite school probably have something of a leg up irrespective of how much money the parent has donated.

Exactly. I feel like you'd have to write such a law to be based on provable influence, rather than solely on outcomes. The last thing we want is for a school like Ohio State or Michigan to lose public funding and tax exemptions just because a lot of families have multiple generations of students attending them.

A lot of the big state universities are pretty powerful magnets for people living in those states for a variety of reasons even before you factor in that a parent or two went there.

> given how admissions on the margins are probably at least somewhat arbitrary

Not really. The university would need to certify it did not consider legacy status or donations during admissions. If someone decides to get sneaky, that’s tax fraud.

> If you remove the people born into privilege, from attending your college, all you succeed is in making your college irrelevant, not those people irrelevant.

You're not removing the people, you're removing the privilege. Those same people can still apply on the same terms as everyone else.

I think you missed the point. Part of the value of the college is the connections with these people.

So then it's even better if they end up in other schools right?

More exposure to less connected people who can derive value from knowing the child of someone who accomplished something.

And students who get into the highly competitive schools where this matters most get by on nothing but a top-tier education?

Seems like everyone wins honestly.

I think a better way to phrase what you're thinking is the social mobilizing utility/effect of college depends on making these connections.

> Of course it would be ideal if those born into privilege also could clear the SAT.

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.

Admissions has a tricky job since there are many more outstanding students than they have slots for - even limiting to perfect test scores and grades (usually with top quality essays, recommendations, etc. as well.) Many applicants end up with the same admission ranking (and those rankings still have a large margin of error as you note). Selection becomes arbitrary, based on ancillary factors (hmm, how many concert pianists vs. cellists are we admitting? do we have too many prospective CS majors and too few history majors?) Which is why they argue that at the margin they can consider demographics (for example balancing the number of men and women), geographic origin, socioeconomic status, athletics, donor status, etc. Truly random would be fairer however.

The problem has worsened over decades; applications have ballooned ~7x (600% increase) since the 1970s, while class size has only increased by 15%.

Wow. Your underlying thesis is that the schools value and relevancy is only tied to the connections you can make. Which maybe in effect, in a broken system, is true. Just a class divider to try and get to the elite connections and climb status (from what I read about Ivy leagues) but education should not be that. It should about education and forming professionals not perpetuating inequality through unfair pay to win strategies.

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.

Stanford effin’ University is not going to become irrelevant just because they stop admitting children of alums who otherwise wouldn’t qualify.

In this vein, think of the Stanford brand. You can not only ensure your own success, but you are buying a leg up for future generations of your family… even at full price, it’s a bargain.

Not /s but not /100% serious either.

Countries that have military conscription do something similar: you mingle with everyone from the poorest to the very rich. Almost nothing comes out of it. Intentional networking can happen anywhere in life.

Israel says that their military conscription indeed lowers some class barriers and helps the "startup nation" work.

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.

Israel's success is because it teaches people leadership and risk taking , not because it mingles them with dumb money. There are studies about it e.g. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289369969_The_effec...

Maybe more countries should attempt to teach people leadership... if this is true, it looks like a fairly low-hanging fruit to be plucked.

Talking to some older Czechs who experienced the system, perhaps teaching people … anything at all would prove superior. Apparently the worst thing about it was the complete disrespect for people’s time and talent.

It seems to be working somewhat for the Swiss, although their conscription model is rather unusual in many ways.

Yep. The big companies set the real qualifications when they hire. Schools are just preparing them for that, pretending otherwise with made up standards/exams is a misstep—the big companies prize connections.

Reasonable argument, but preference for students whose parents went to the exact same school seems like a very inefficient way to insert more wealth and power into the student body.

Those diplomas are super important to those connected and wealthy people, arguably moreso because it’s a form of reputation laundering - “I’m not just billionaire X’s child, I also got into to Stanford a university for smart people”.

People forget that while having a meritocracy is best for society, society doesn't make decisions, individuals do. And those individuals make decisions for their own benefit, not that of society. Colleges strike a balance by having some fraction be meritocracy, but going all in would be fatal.

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).

There are implications for US soft power.

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.

IIT?

> If you remove the people born into privilege, from attending your college, all you succeed is in making your college irrelevant, not those people irrelevant.

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.

The last thing we need is to waste more tax money hiring an army of useless bureaucrats to micromanage corporate hiring practices. Inequality and privilege are preferable to that kind of dystopia. I've always found it bizarre how so many "progressives" think it's acceptable to use force to realize their preferred society.

> The last thing we need is to waste more tax money hiring an army of useless bureaucrats to micromanage corporate hiring practices.

Does that include preventing discrimination based on race, religion, ethnic origin, gender, and age?

Conservatives are literally using force to realize their preferred society. What world do you live in?

And it’s ridiculous and should be repudiated, not copied and expanded in a different direction.

> I've always found it bizarre how so many "progressives" think it's acceptable to use force to realize their preferred society.

All law is the use of force to realize a preferred society.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com