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Comment by late2part | Hacker News Reader

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

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