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.
> 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.
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.
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)
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.
> 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…
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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 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
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
If you reduce the choice to public funding vs wealthy alumni stewardship, and there seems to be no meaningful pathway to circumventing the current assault on public funding, then why should you alienate your wealthy alumni?
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)
That’s a lot of money on tap, 99.99% of US organizations have less than $1Bn in reserves.
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.
Consider adding for or five more 9s to that. There are 50+ million corporations in the county, and then you need to add all the churches, clubs and nonprofits.
My 4 nines + your 4 or 5 nines = 1 in 100 million to 1 in 1 billion.
Even adding all the churches, clubs, and nonprofits I don’t think it’s that rare. The Mormon church for example has ~293 billion in assets. Even the Church of Scientology is apparently worth ~2 billion.
Maybe 1 in 10 million? What do you think the numerator in denominator are here? I'm guessing less than a hundred organizations with a billion dollars in reserve.
There are less than 2,000 us companies with a billion dollar market cap, out of ~40 million companies.
I expect the reserves would be a substantially less than that. Maybe somewhere in the ballpark of low triple digit organizations with a billion+ dollar reserve. Maybe 200 nationally?
Sure, if we assume that the total budget for the 17 national labs is $14B, that would imply that the average lab is a bit less than $1B/year to run. Hence $40B can run an "average" lab for around 50 years. Or am I missing your point?
The poor choices started in the early 90's when the SCOTUS decided that MIT didn't have to pay taxes as long as they gave enough charity discounts to students.
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.
As I understand matters, it started in the 70s and 80s as states pulled back from funding public institutions. This funding was the mechanism which allowed public institutions to be affordable to families such that a person could pay for a year of public college by working in a grocery store over the summer.
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.
>As I understand matters, it started in the 70s and 80s as states pulled back from funding public institutions.
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?
Yes, you are correct that a corrupt state will deliver poor results. A key bulwark against in many places is effective oversight of public assets and administrations. But a corrupt state also could do much worse than $35k for undergraduate tuition. Which suggests priorities are being set to accomplish a different set of goals.
Also keep in mind that the primary mechanism here is not adding regulation. Rather, it's about things like ensuring universities have enough open slots for the children matriculating through their K-12 programs. Think about it more in the way states are generally capable of managing and subsidizing/funding student education at the K-12 level.
Bigger picture: consider why it should even be seen to be such a massive difference in capability for a state to run a public education program for the 4 years after high school vs the first 13 years.
Has this - “effective oversight of public assets and administrations” - happened in other systems with significant state involvement, like secondary ed, healthcare or infrastructure projects?
My view is skewed towards California, where admittedly examples of cost decreases through economies of scale are lacking.
Yes. Water systems, trash collection, fire departments, parks, etc. generally are cost-effective and well administered that they are typically excluded from these discussions.
K-12 is particular is an area where critics demean public systems, but where we have yet to see anyone scale an alternative at lower cost/higher quality targeting the same goals. (Apologies if someone has done it, I am not aware.)
Note: this means that systems that exclude classes of students do not count as they have different goals. Obviously, one could more cheaply build a private education system for rich kids who all have similar capabilities. But that is not the goal of public systems, who are tasked with educating the poor and rich, the deaf, the blind, those who speak other languages, etc. Generally, they are able to do this for less money per pupil than elite private schools that are not able to serve all students.
Anyway the point getting lost here is that states do subsidize public universities, but not as much as they did in prior decades. The debate you seem to be aiming toward is whether we should have public universities, to which I would say that we should have more of them, and they should cost students less by having taxes cover a larger share of those institutions.
Edit: I want to come back to this for a moment. Water and sewers are really core functions of public governments, and in the US they basically work near 100% of the time. They involve tremendous ongoing logistical work at timescales ranging from emergency pipe burst to capacity planning for decades in the future.
The notion that government involvement means poor/expensive service delivery is a fiction constructed from the outliers of government work.
> The debate you seem to be aiming toward is whether we should have public universities
Apologies if my argument came out that way. I agree with a need for public universities, I just disagree with the need to have them at any cost. Ad absurdium, a public university that costs $1,000 / $10,000 / $100,000 / $1,000,000 per student are all a good deal to a purist because hey, a need is a need.
The current system, however, incentivizes extracting maximum value for the stakeholders (administration) while delivering minimum results to customers (students). With a single-payer there's even a stronger incentive to inflate the operating costs.
If you went through US higher education, you've probably witnessed a few tricks designed for maximum revenue extraction.
* credits from one [cheaper] accredited institution are not transferable to another [expensive one], ensuring that you'd be subjected to a higher tuition
* courses that can be delivered online are not
* courses that are delivered online are paywalled to ensure only those who have registered and paid can view the precious content (something Open Courseware stood up against)
* there's no system where one can test out of pre-requisites by taking similar courses cheaper (or free) elsewhere. E.g., if you self-studied through some MIT or Stanford courses online, you still have to pay full tuition at Fill In The Blank State University
Granted, it's not always about effort duplication and resource waste. California Community Colleges, for instance, is good at centralizing student registration, identity management, and financials, so that each community college doesn't have to run a fully staffed department doing all that.
Ideally, though, an eager high school student should be able to
* load up on as many courses as they can manage online on their own schedule
* have an ability to test out of the courses for a fee that's lower than the full price of the course
* arrive at the university and pay full tuition for the courses that do require in-person training (nursing, medical sciences, any course requiring labs)
You're right, end of the day a public university is an extension of secondary school, but with higher concentrations of students (and hence fewer locations required and all sorts of economies of scale at play). There's no reason that grades 13-16 should cost more than grades K-12, so why do they?
> disagree with the need to have them at any cost.
I think we can all agree with that. I think a sane position is to return to the level of state support of e.g. the 1960s or 1970s. This worked in a substantially poorer US until we chose to stop doing it.
> There's no reason that grades 13-16 should cost more than grades K-12, so why do they?
This is the key point. Like most things, this is driven by policy choices. The choice is made to achieve certain aims, or to ensure other aims are not achieved. We have the object lesson that subsidized college broadly worked in the US until we collectively decided to stop doing it. We can choose differently when there is political will to do so.
FWIW I would suspect that most of the explicit revenue extraction is less about the types of things you indicated and more about the # of full-fare international students a college is able to recruit. There's a huge difference between a $35k in-state student on financial aid and a $55k student who will pay cash.
This is the first time I've seen this framing. Typically folks blame bloated admin and fancy dorms. Where can I learn more about this take on the student loan crisis.
> Stanford has considered alumni and donor status for academically qualified students in the past
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
This seems reasonable. California doesn't want to subsidize the education of the privileged few who qualify as "legacy admission". And Stanford doesn't want to give up the financial support from alumnus.
Yup. And you can think of legacy admissions as college "whales", people who pay full price for an advantage and subsidize the price for less wealthy students. It's absolutely an imperfect system, but it at least redistributes a little wealth along the way
I don't think I've ever heard this. The alumni of the university has always, from my experience, been used to refer to everyone that graduated; gender playing no role at all.
Saying “always” based on your experience with a word that is over 2000 years old without knowing the history is a great way to be wrong. In this case, if there is a group of multiple people, the correct word is alumni, unless the entire group is female, when the word becomes alumnae. Alumni is correct even for a hypothetical group with a billion women and 1 man. If there is just 1 person, it is alumnus for a male and alumna for a female. Most universities would use alumni because there is always 1 male in the group and they want to use the plural. A women’s only university would use alumnae. That said, English speakers have a tendency to mispronounce alumni as alumnae, so trying to maintain a minimum understanding of how to use the word correctly might be a losing battle.
It’s one of those “well actually” things that the Latin nerds would point out. So the Latin nerds who went into college administration decided to change it to be a clearly English derivation.
Its not just about money. Having legacies at the school is what makes non legacies want to attend. If applicants didnt care about networking with the rich and powerful theyd go to caltech, the reality is that having connections to powerful people is the main value add undergrad at ivies provides versus upper tier state schools. Why would stanford ever get rid of their main value add?
We know this argument does not apply in practice because tons of people want to go to top universities that do not consider legacy like MIT. Outside America, universities that regularly feature in global top 20 lists like Oxford, Cambridge, ETH Zurich and Imperial College London etc also do not do legacies and they also get tons of interest.
You're making big assumptions here regarding students desires to attend stanford. Ignoring everything else though, having two elite universities that cater to merit is better than one just for the sake of doubling the number of students.
> Ignoring everything else though, having two elite universities that cater to merit is better than one just for the sake of doubling the number of students.
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.
Interesting point. Elite universities offer a good education, a respected credential, and connections. Stanford is also a startup factory, being (not coincidentally) adjacent to Silicon Valley and containing a business school in addition to the engineering school.
Better faculty to student ratio (1:6 vs. 1:19). Closer proximity to actual Santa Clara (Silicon) Valley (and Google, NVIDIA, etc.) More NCAA championships and Olympic medals. Still leading in "big game" football series (though currently on a losing streak.) More Turing awards.
Not as many Nobel prizes - or elements on the periodic table - however. Berkeley (having many more undergrads) also has more alumni.
(But note for both schools that good researchers are not necessarily good undergraduate instructors.)
> More NCAA championships and Olympic medals. Still leading in "big game" football series (though currently on a losing streak.)
As a side note, I always found this obsession with sports to be a fascinating aspect of american culture. Being from an entirely different culture, it’s unclear to me why on earth would anyone give a fuck about this.
I have heard that in some countries soccer (aka "football") is a big thing for some reason.
Also the Olympics seem to be a big thing every four years, particularly in the country where they are being held; Berkeley and Stanford do pretty well in that competition.
Sports can be big in a country, sure, but US is the only country I can recall where sports matters as a criteria to choose a university to go to (as an in op).
But just in case - it’s cool, I wasn’t being judgmental.
Stanford undoubtedly did the math and determined they would lose money overall (gifts are 7% of Stanford's income, tuition and fees 13%).
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.)
Universities definitely favor unrestricted gifts. But, to the degree that you make a restricted gift, you can be sure that there's often money shuffling in the background to the degree the gift is substantial.
>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.)
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.
I think it works in the opposite direction. Rich parents basically buy admission for their mediocre offspring at a university made prestigious by the abundance of very intelligent but less wealthy students.
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.
Stanford presumably determined that the loss of donation money would be greater than what they would have to spend to cover financial aid without help from Cal Grants.
You are not reading what I'm saying acceptingly. I am suggesting the math they did only helped them conclude they would have less money. It did not lead to a conclusion that they can't keep being an elite institution servicing and creating high level academics at fair prices while still being profitable and growing financially. Very roundabout way of suggesting they are greedy at their core.
"Follow the money" is a good point. Universities spend an enormous amount of money, and it's often hard to see what it's actually being used on. Stanford has so many administrative staff that they built a separate campus for them in Redwood City. https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu
I'm okay with academia being an institution of the elite, as long as we stop pretending that their BS (or BA) will make everyone successful. We can't all be elite; that's not how that works.
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.
When a Bachelor's degree became a proxy for "can show up and complete assigned work" for employers that was the start of its decline as an academic credential.
First it went from "comes from money and has no need to work, whatsoever" thorough "eventually needs to get a job but can live off rich parents for four plus years" before the current state.
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.
That's already happening with technical/trade/alternate school to career paths are rising up and some colleges are panicking with declining enrollment.
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.
Almost every gen-Z I have met who owns a house got a loan from the bank of mommy and daddy.
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.
> 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.
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.
> we need merit-based employment that disregards elite and academic status
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.
When you are brokering deals with wealthy clients or executing trades with millions, the notion of trust is much more important than merit. And what better is a sign of trust that coming from the circles, and with nothing to stake but reputation?
I agree that participation in the middle class shouldn't depend on borrowing six figures as a teenager. I dream of the day where any worker has economic security
"It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others."
For those who want to compare the HN comments here against the SCOTUS ruling that ended Affirmative Action, read and be amazed (or not) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36520658
I always found it wildly fascinating how US schools have things like legacy admissions, athletic scholarships, standardized admission test, admission letter, letters of recommendation, extracurricular activities, and what have you.
Such a contrast to other systems where for example your HS grades will count 100% - and similar "ungameable" systems.
Right. It is called holistic review. Originally invented to limit the number of Jewish people in top universities (not kidding)! Now being used to limit the number of Asians.
Elite-College Admissions Were Built to Protect Privilege
This is very eye opening. As a geek with strong academic background always felt cheated by the system.
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.
This only seems confusing to people who valorize intelligence as the most valuable trait one can have. What really matters is the impact you can have on others lives: making them a lot of money, saving them a lot of time, making them happy, etc contributing to them or addressing their needs
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
This reminds me of a documentary I watched some time ago, I wish I could remember its name. This is what I remember about it:
The entire premise was following 2 people, one guy barely graduated community college, the other was incredibly intelligent. Went to an elite university, got a masters really young, and I believe was a member of Mensa.
The difference was in other areas. The first guy had a lot of persistence and didn’t stop when things got hard. Ended up becoming a very successful person, married with kids, had their own business.
By contrast the other guy despite being legitimately one of the smartest people in the world, simply withered into obscurity, had trouble maintaining gainful employment, relationships etc. A very stark contrast to the first person.
I realize the point of a documentary is to highlight extremes but I think it does say something about the relative value of intelligence as it correlates to successful outcomes
Certain types of management and leadership skills are learned more effectively in an elite sports team than in any engineering coursework. I think a lot of people who conceptualize the world in very rigid, rules-oriented ways fail to appreciate that.
The problem I have (full disclosure: I'm a professor) is that those things have nothing to do with a university. If they're doing non-academic things, the elite academics of the university are irrelevant.
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.
Aside from "success", it is very reasonable to want to admit "well-rounded" or "balanced" individuals as net pluses to society.
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).
I don’t think that’s the whole story. The Ivy League are WASP institutions, and WASP culture always highly valued “well rounded” students and looked down on people who single mindedly perused an end. Back in the day, they didn’t need to screen for this explicitly, since it was already universal in the applicant pool. They just needed a test to sort out the smart ones from the dumb ones. When the applicant pool changed, holistic admissions became a way to maintain that cultural trait.
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.
That's fair. I shouldn't do that. Also, powerful institutions with massive endowments and government research grants should not be treated as the social institutions of one specific ethnic or racial subgroup, since they're clearly not drawing all of that wealth solely from the contributions of that subgroup.
> Ok, screw that and screw the Ivy League and the WASPs with it.
I understand the sentiment and sometimes share it. But I’m also sad to recognize that while elite asians like me can excel within the systems created by WASPs, we probably wouldn’t have created such systems ourselves.
What other group in history has created a system so fair that they were replaced-without being conquered—within the very institutions they themselves created? My dad was born in a village in Bangladesh and my brother went to Yale and is an executive at J.P. Morgan (two of the WASP-iest institutions in America). WASPs are a minority in these institutions now. This sort of thing basically only happens in Anglo countries.
I think that's really begging one of the important questions here. _Is_ the system fair now?
The system clearly wasn't originally fair (when elite schools excluded women, people of color, etc).
They became more open after decades of struggle driven in large part from the outside, and helped along by the GI bill, as well as a broader shift towards getting more public funds.
The demographics have changed, but to the degree that it's more fair, is that because WASPs created them that way, or because women and other racial groups changed society more broadly?
>I think that's really begging one of the important questions here. _Is_ the system fair now?
Define "fair" for a system designed not only to filter an elite out of the rest of society, but in fact to have that elite's size remain detached from larger demographic trends. Is it fair for Zoomers to have an easier time in college admissions than Millennials, while being subject to what are supposedly stronger DEI measures?
What, in fact, do we think this system ought to be aiming for, and how is that fair?
For the moment it seems to me that the system is arbitrary and we're being fooled, in a way, into imposing conceptions of fairness and/or merit onto it that it really aimed at and which always served more as happy-face masks for the arbitrary organizational shoggoth underneath.
It’s critical to distinguish between being open to outsiders when you have the power to exclude them, versus advocating in your own interest to be included. Everyone advocates for their own inclusion when they have no power—that’s just human self interest. But such advocacy can’t create a fair system, by definition. Minorities and immigrants exist everywhere and advocate for themselves. But most societies don’t allow them to advance. Uyghurs in China can say whatever they want, but it won’t make a difference.
WASPs were unusual in creating systems that saw openness to outsiders as a virtue, and then actually giving up their own power to allow others into the institutions they built. The first black Harvard student was admitted in 1847. Two Japanese students got a degree from Harvard law school in 1874. But if you look at societies where African and Asian people have the power to exclude, those places aren’t very open to outsiders.
> WASPs were unusual in creating systems that saw openness to outsiders as a virtue
In your view, did that view of openness to outsiders as a virtue manifest in other ways? It's been a while since I had to study the period but the colonial northeast was perennially at war with the native population and French Canadian colonists. E.g. it seems Harvard was founded during the Pequot war. In that same year of 1636, Roger Williams set up Rhode Island because he had been banished from Massachusetts after being convicted of heresy. So in general, it seems like WASPs were founding schools in an environment where being native, French, or indeed the wrong kind of Anglo-Puritan was worth attacking. I'm not seeing the openness to outsiders.
> The first black Harvard student was admitted in 1847.
Harvard was founded in 1636, so it seems like they went a full two centuries with total segregation before it finally admitted _one guy_. Again, not so much a culturally inculcated openness to outsiders so much as a slightly imperfect execution of exclusion.
> But if you look at societies where African and Asian people have the power to exclude, those places aren’t very open to outsiders.
I'm trying to think of what a fair comparison would be. I do think there's a meaningful difference between a dominant/imperial power that (begrudgingly, slowly) allows room for its own citizens of diverse racial backgrounds, vs a previously colonized or dominated country making space for foreign powers.
So e.g. the oldest university in Asia is University of Santo Tomas, which was founded by the Spanish colonizers and is a Catholic university, and I think was under Spanish governance until the Philippine Revolution. Should the new fledgling country have made sure that it saved space for white students? I'm not sure whether they actually did, but I think that's a very different ethical question than, "should Harvard/Yale/Brown in New England built on native land with wealth substantially built off the triangle trade, admit BIPOC students?". The oldest "university" in the modern sense in China is Tainjin University, founded in 1895; i.e. they didn't have a university until a couple generations after the 2nd opium war. Should it have saved space for foreign students? The first "universities" in India were founded during British rule. Etc etc.
But where there _isn't_ a strong power imbalance, I would be curious to see historical examples of any group having an especially better or worse record on inclusion.
> I'm trying to think of what a fair comparison would be.
You should be able to think of a dozen examples off the top of your head. Virtually every society has minorities and immigrant groups (which have nothing to do with colonial history).
> I do think there's a meaningful difference between a dominant/imperial power that (begrudgingly, slowly) allows room for its own citizens of diverse racial backgrounds
Why would a dominant power ever make room for people outside their in-group? Where does that notion even come from? That's not how most societies work. Some multi-ethnic empires in history showed various degrees of tolerance for outgroups (e.g. Muslims that ruled over the Indian subcontinent imposed jizya on non-Muslims only some of the time). But you have to go back to the Romans to find a major power that allowed outside ethnicities to rise to the uppermost reaches of society (without being conquered by outside groups).
You can't explain the unusual inclusiveness of American society by pointing to anything minorities did. Minorities always advocate in their own interest--that's commonplace, but almost never works. The Uyghurs can tell the Chinese "we don't want to be oppressed" all they want, but that's not persuasive to the Chinese because that's just an expression of self-interest. It's not contrary to the self interest of the Chinese for the Uyghurs to be oppressed.
The unusual thing is the dominant group actually giving up power voluntarily. For that to happen, there must be something in the dominant culture to which minorities can appeal, something that can be used to persuade the dominant group to give up its own self interest.
We probably wouldn't have even minded or noticed it if the people who replaced us continued the same egalitarian tradition we had. I think for many of us the destruction of that is much more upsetting than everything else (or at least that's what triggers the reaction.)
Yes, that's been a blackpill for me. When you look at these institutions today you see what looks like assimilation, but it's superficial. For example, you might see WASPs and non-WASPs at Harvard aligned in support of social programs. But the former are motivated by self-sacrifice at the expense of their own group, while the latter often are motivated by self-interest in favor of their own group. Similarly, for the former, any sort of ethnic identity or in-group preference is condemned while for the latter those attitudes often are promoted or encouraged. At Harvard, it is not taboo for anyone to say "my ancestors built this country”—except for those whom that statement is the most true.
> Asian and Jewish kids today can game the system.
This is just a cope. Poor Asians outperform in standardized metrics as well. New York’s selective admissions high schools, for example, are dominated by asians but have almost half of students qualifying for free or reduced price lunch.
To another example, comparing Asian kids and Hispanic kids raised in the bottom quantile of the income distribution, the Asian kids are over three times more likely to end up in the top income quantile as adults: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/27/upshot/make-y...
This is not the perception I heard. People from SE Asia are welcome to comment on this (and they would provide a better perspective than I can) but I know several Cali people of Flipino or Vietnamese descent whose parents are not wealthy surgeons, and they also favor the holistic approach. It also becomes a problem of numbers. Hispanic and Asian kids are the fastest growing denominations in the US. It is very likely that many of them are recent immigrants and are not wealthy. Of course, I am not saying that having a sad story in and of itself is a hall pass. All I am saying is many comments here state that focusing SOLELY on grades and tests is fair, despite the fact that is not true. I went to a Top 5 college. I was not rich. I grew up with a mom that saved ice cream buckets to reuse them. I saw many rich kids' siblings take entire summers off to study and plan their applications. Whereas kids where I grew up in Detroit held summer jobs at country clubs, ice cream shops, and mall stores to help with bills. How are standardized tests fair with this context in mind?
I am getting heavily down voted. I will say this. I was a white kid, whose parents were not wealthy. I was a refugee. And I am in favor of the holistic approach. I think it speaks volumes on here when rich white guys who are typically progressives line up with Trump policies on this matter (the other big one being Israel). I think this is where you take a hard look in the mirror, and question whether what you believe is right. I am not arguing further on this topic. I am a living experience of it. Reducing entire applicants to those metrics that are believed on here to be objective is reductionist, and I promise you, the most accomplished engineers and founders will not come from that pool of applicants you worship.
I’m not talking about perception I’m talking about statistics. There’s lots of poor asians—they are the highest poverty rate group in NYC—and they outperform on standardized metrics as well. Moreover, putting aside that the data shows test prep has limited benefits, you don’t have to be “rich” to prep for standardized tests: https://www.city-journal.org/article/brooklyns-chinese-pione....
> I know several Cali people of Flipino or Vietnamese descent whose parents are not wealthy surgeons, and they also favor the holistic approach
Asians are heavily propagandized to support affirmative action.
Honestly, this paranoiac racist you're replying to is sufficient propaganda against quota-based affirmative action systems, which have been illegal for decades anyway, so it's honestly quite weird he's insisting everyone who opposes them hates "fairness".
Detroit has Black, Asian, Jewish, etc kids of all backgrounds working summer jobs - just like every other diverse major city. Guess you were a refugee fleeing Russian bot hate farms.
I grew up there. Rarely saw any asian kids, although it is changing these days. The Jews were in the affluent neighborhoods (like Grosse Pointe), they wished to be white and avoided Detroit at all costs. But nice try. I am white. Detroit areas I grew up in were mostly black. The few whites there were not rich (we were not rich). But again. I don't expect someone defending legacy systems to understand this. What part of Detroit are you from? Or are you just an apologists for your rich masters who seek to buy their way out of a holistic review, so their kids can attend top schools and America can become segregated again, except this time, on the basis of income and equality? I am not a Russian bot. Are you an Israeli bot that is charged with covering a genocide somewhere? Maybe that's why you want to undermine fairness in the US. Aren't our taxes enough little bot bud?
Who is defending legacy systems? I just see someone saying bigoted nonsense and call it bigoted nonsense.
If you actually cared about fairness in the US, you wouldn't be roleplaying 8-mile to make a point about how easy breezy it is for ethnic minorities because you had it so tough endowed by presenting as the skin tone w/ endless benefit-of-the-doubt in the US. Grosse Point is predominantly populated by self-identified White people.
The part of Detroit where I'm from is none of your business, but based on your twig narrow view of the city, and not mentioning the any of the cities with "Hills" in their name to wax Antisemitic, I know you're from the Detroit area in the same way that DTW is. Heck, any dart thrown at Wayne county would be just as likely to find your particular set of prejudices. Which suburb are you representing? Probably roughed it from the mean streets of Royal Oak, loitering the Farmer Jacks parking lot, gambling on hands of Euchre with your Windsor loonies. Or maybe you were trying to blend into downriver by building deer blinds with the closeted Confederacy. In any case, even if you arrive at the right conclusions, your arguments are self-defeating and unpersuasive.
You didn't see Jewish kids because many present as White and you yourself probably made it feel unsafe for them to identify. And you didn't see Asian kids working summer jobs because you could buy your shampoo at chain grocery stores.
Claiming that regionally underrepresented ethnic minorities are specifically gaming systems while being Schrodinger's Oppressed white refugee really takes the wind out of your own sails when advocating for one means of mitigating racist institutions by employing your own racist rhetoric. You learned your prejudices from the American neighbors that your parents were more comfortable being around, because it's definitely not an export from the Balkans.
That's a lot of words for petty racism. France and Germany don't do holistic admissions or use racial criteria, and of course for historical reasons don't have Jewish quotas either.
But go on and tell us about all the scholarly achievements of the countries who do use ethnic quota systems for their university admissions.
Jewish quotas were removed decades ago. In fact, today, many donors and beneficiaries of the legacy system are Jewish. Today, the disenfranchised are not Jews. In fact, Jews are among the richest ethnic group in the US (look at their median household income). There is a reason many deans got fired from Ivy leagues when they attempted to protect free speech. It is because Ackman and most donors are Jewish, and their threats could make a dean bark on command. I imagine you are still living in the 60s. Most of the disenfranchised in the US today are blacks, Hispanic, SE Asians, and refugees. Half of the billionaire class in these United States today are Jews... So your argument about quotas is ridiculous. Europeans were not allowed education under the French monarchy. We can go back further in fact. Or look at different settings (Ghaza children being denied food and education?). Ridiculous reasoning on your part.
You're the one insisting we need to reduce the number of Asians and Jews at universities. I'm the one saying admissions criteria should be racially and ethnically blind -- not to mention that the universities should drastically increase the size of their freshman classes to keep up with population growth. Go on and cry more about how a quota system isn't keeping some groups down to benefit the groups you favor.
The OP mentioned Jews and Asians (look at the original comment bud). I don't cry. I define my country, and I will do everything in my power to make sure it does not disenfranchise anyone for the benefit of rich minorities at the expense of those who regard America as their homeland. You being a Jew does not entitle you to disenfranchise others, although I sense a theme given the situation abroad. Quotas have been eliminated for decades. The current victims of the world are still the blacks that are trapped in ghettos, the Palestinians being starved by fellows of yours, and many Americans that escaped wars. Our job is making sure anyone in America is given a fair shot. Giving suburban kids points because they never had to hold a job is not something I am willing to do in any of my companies. Feel free to do it in yours
Nobody was proposing "giving suburban kids points because they never had to hold a job". Nor was anyone proposing an entitlement to disenfranchise others based on race or ethnicity, except for you, with the reference to "rich minorities at the expense of those who regard America as their homeland".
Who regard ... ? Implying that the "rich minorities" do not regard America as their home? Go on, explain to me how Chinese kids applying for university have dual loyalties and are exploiting the decent honest American.
"The current victims of the world"? You're reinventing white nationalism for minorities, bud.
Maybe I am not. But then again, maybe you are just academically inclined. I was responding to the ethnic argument the OP posted. Just becuase you tested well does not make you intelligent buddy. Any user here is welcome to compare you and I's accomplishments. I am willing to share my Linkedin with a 3rd party, you do the same. And theyy come up with a verdict. Here is a tip btw. I shared my opinion, you shared yours. Insulting my intelligence makes it no wonder you lived in tents. It is disrespectful. I guess life has yet to kick vulgarity and lack of class out of the tent boy, did it?
People you do like: "the current victims of the world", who apparently aren't a "tent boy", who don't suffer a "lack of class".
Seems like the people you actually like are economically well-off people from aggrieved "victim" identities who feel the need for quota systems to stop those nasty "academically inclined" economically well-off people ("suburban kids", I think were your words) from the non-"victim" identities from competing with your precious ones on fair and even grounds.
I took a grad marketing class once with a business professor who studied this sort of thing. GMATs rather than SATs but same idea. Basically GMATs mattered more than anything else especially metrics such as letters of recommendation that were basically worthless.
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.
In Quebec, grades are normalized using a statistical formula that factors in how well students from your high school tend to perform in university[0]. This means an average student at an "elite" school could end up with a similar score to a top student from a weaker school.
Wow, interesting. Do students take that into account when selecting which CEGEP to attend?
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.
I'm not sure if universities knew the origin HS at the time because applications within the province were centralized in a single system, also because there was talk at one point of making the HS known which implies it wasn't?
I don't know how it was when you were applying, but when I applied in 2018 the universities knew your HS and Waterloo was doing adjustments based on your high school.
Over the past 7 years other schools have done so as well. Waterloo's adjustment factor list got FOI'd and made public if you want to find yours.
Ok! The one I can find only goes back to 2016 and I was applying a bit before that. The grid has a lot of missing data since Waterloo probably doesn't have enough data for each cohort and HS to make a good estimate, I guess that would make a province-wide system like in Québec superior since they can adjust based on outcomes from all universities.
After seeing the list I'm kind of sad, I had the choice between two schools at 10 and 13, and chose the one with 13. A 3% difference can make or break an application in any competitive program... Well, at least it wasn't one of those schools with 20 point factor, wow.
There's a reason the military kept using the ASVAB even during the worst parts of COVID pandemic. ASVAB is a very solid predictor of success in training, and in Navy experience it's predictive value generally correlates with with how academic/technical the training pipeline is.
That paper is pretty misleading and flies in the face of most peer-reviewed research (I don't know that journal, for what it's worth).
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:
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.
Basically standardized tests (and GPAs--however corrected) are both good predictors. Depending upon the institution's objectives, other factors may play in as well though they may not correlate that well to GPA in university which may or may not be a good thing depending on your perspective. My personal opinion in that it doesn't really matter past a certain point. (You don't want people to flunk out but the objective isn't really to get good university grades.)
So? In many countries high school grades also aren't standardized and counts 100% for admission. The system still works reliably and not worse than in america.
The SAT isn't strong enough to predict anything. It can generally be answered by someone in their sophomore year at college or even their freshman, depending on what level of courses they are taking.
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.
It should be. I don't think it is, especially not among the favoured parts of the student population (athletics, legacies, "disadvantaged", "minorities").
HS grades are a joke. All it takes is an unforeseen medical emergency or a teacher who hates you to tank your future. Thank god for standardized tests, otherwise I’d be living a very different life.
I doubt the typical students scoring 1540+ have time pressure on the SAT. Sure extra time might help someone get from 1400 to 1440, but it’s not going to get you 1400 to 1600.
I was the valedictorian in my high school. I did nothing to earn it, never did any work, and wound up at Caltech grossly underprepared. It took me over a year and a half to figure out how to work and study.
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.
I think it depends on the school at the time. I got rejected by one school probably because I didn't have a varsity letter and had a so-so interview. I got accepted to at least two others that were at least as "good" at the time.
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.
Which is the luck of the draw thing. If you're on the bubble for whatever random reasons, a decline or accept on even a marginal measure because you did/didn't click with someone can make the difference.
I was well aware of the vagaries of chance, which is why I applied to the top 10 engineering universities in the country. I was accepted by Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins, and Caltech. As a backup I had ASU.
I knew nothing about Caltech, and by amazing luck it was perfectly suited to what I wanted and my personality.
For a while now, I've been running the D Coffee Haus monthly meetings, where myself and fellow nerds meet and talk about nerdly stuff. It's as much fun as the same thing at Caltech.
I don't remember what schools I applied to in general. But I didn't get into Dartmouth and did get into MIT which was something of shocker. Did go to the latter as an undergrad (though had never visited the campus) and have stayed involved. Started a non-profit at the former as a grad student at Dartmouth and still involved so all good. At the time, didn't seem to make a lot of sense to go to west coast (or UK) in part for schools as air travel was still relatively expensive.
HS grades are gameable. Just look at public highschools across the US. A significant percentage of graduates can't read. And the policies won't let teachers fail or hold-back students so they cook their grades to push them through the system.
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.
Also not that uncommon for the star HS quarterback to be functionally illiterate yet passing all classes with the required GPA for athletics participation.
To be fair, the absurd thing is that in order to have a career in sport he excellent at, he needs to go to university. Not being university material is stupid reason for not being able to do sports professionally.
Agreed. And it's becomming more common in the US pro leagues to see players who only completed high school. But the majority still play at least a year or two at the college level. It's a filter, and D1 college sports is a big business in its own right.
If HS grades were used for admissions in the US, it would incentivize college-bound high schoolers to avoid challenging classes like AP classes, advanced STEM classes, history classes beyond state requirements, etc.
The optimal strategy would be to take the easiest classes required to graduate, since there's no national authority to normalize grades across classes.
You just give multipliers for advanced classes then. That's how my high school calculated GPA - if you took all "A" level classes your max GPA was 4.0, but if you took AP classes and aced them you could end up with a 4.3 or something like that
That's how almost all highschools and colleges do advanced classes, Honors classes are graded on a 4.5 scale and AP classes on a 5.0 scale (and also count for college credit so you get to skip some intro classes after admission).
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!
High school grades are gameable, probably moreso than athletic scholarships or standardized tests.
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).
Having HS grades count 100% is a really bad idea. Not because of anything about the schools, but because HS age isn't representative of people's abilities. I had terrible HS grades due to a complete lack of interest. After growing up a little and getting my act together, I got A's in college. Thank goodness they didn't base my admission on HS grades.
They had that previously in some places. California universities used to not have affirmative action (quotas) but they apparently removed consideration of test scores to help achieve the racial composition they felt was “correct” in another way, since it was resulting in a skew towards whites and Asians in their view. Not sure what the process is today.
Yea, especially since the people who get the highest grades in HS, in the US where you have a decent amount of latitude to pick your classes, are generally just the students who refused to take any hard class.
My high school gave an extra half point for honors and a whole point for AP classes*, but my experience was that regular classes were easier by _far_ more than that (at least in cases where all three levels were offered). I had disliked biology in middle school and separated from the "AP crowd" to take honors environmental science instead, and it felt at least two or three letter grades easier than the other AP sciences.
Of course the top tier students were likely to achieve an A regardless, so the more challenging courses would look better. For me though it probably would've been optimal to choose easier classes; admissions might not even be aware that a more difficult option was offered.
* If I recall correctly though, colleges were usually interested primarily in the unweighted GPA.
Standardized tests work much better than high school grades, and also handle cases like young students who go to university at or before the "normal" age of a high school student.
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).
Have you actually taken the exam or looked into a sample test?
There is no intelligence in most parts, it is just you memorizing a lot of words that you will never hear or use. Maybe you are confusing different parts of the exam.
> 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.
That's different test/s. Programs will require TOEFL/IELTS for that purpose.
The vocabulary is not that difficult. If you regularly read literature as a child and adolescent, you will know most of the vocab in the test. Most people consider reading and having a decent vocabulary as signs of education and intelligence.
Beyond that, the verbal GRE is mostly about making connections between different words and concepts - just a test of reasoning ability.
TOEFL/IELTS are for a completely different purpose. That's why I said that the verbal GRE is only really meaningful for native speakers. You wouldn't expect someone who learned English as a second language to have the same command over the language as a native speaker. That doesn't mean that they're not smart.
Ungameable… lol. Take a look at Asian countries for what happens when you rely only on grades… cheating becomes the norm since numbers are all that matter.
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.
Forced to TA students like this in the US, both foreign and domestic, I'd say the real downside is that this produces incredibly brittle individuals. "Failure isn't an option" is not an attitude compatible with pushing your own boundaries or even just life in general.
But social mobility for serious kids is much easier in the United States than elsewhere. It's also in USA that going to your local state university or community college isn't a large barrier to your future career, and transfers are common.
And when it comes to the levers of power, connections are still what defines future leaders in Asia, not grades. This entire idea of "serious students" are ultimately just a bone to throw to the masses.
> But social mobility for serious kids is much easier in the United States than elsewhere.
This is an unrelated point, is your contention that the US is better off with unserious students? Social mobility / wealth accumulation for the masses does suck in other countries but it's great that people are still seriously motivated by schools. It's a big reason those students immigrant to the US and companies here hire those people in masses.
>This is an unrelated point, is your contention that the US is better off with unserious students?
It's that America has the capacity to fully absorb it's talent so it's not a problem. The reason why other countries have more is because they don't have the capacity to absorb them due to less opportunities so the competition is higher. Many of those "serious" students in China or India will still end working in factory jobs and delivery drivers because they weren't good enough.
>It's a big reason those students immigrant to the US and companies here hire those people in masses
Eh, if they were hiring domestic students I wouldn't say there would be much of difference. Unless if you are running a startup, most of these "serious" students will be just writing basic CRUD apps. Value comes from experience here, not talent. Well, if I was American though, I wouldn't bother competing againt millions of desperate Chinese or Indians for opportunity cost anyways, I'd be going more into law or finance. And those fields are less diverse.
I was just about to comment on Asian countries and mobility.
If you do academics only, there's also the phenomenon where getting into the right Kindergarten-level school determines your entire school career. In many countries, your current school is a significant factor of your next school.
Imagine not getting into the right Kindergarten having life-long consequences.
Doing an SAT prep course is cheating, fyi. These tests were meant to be a fair assessment and that required not teaching to or training for the test. That, of course, went out the window, but when I was in high school there was at least lip service to it and statements from administrators that we shouldn’t be taking SAT prep courses. We were instructed to take the official prep exam to know the format, but otherwise go in blind.
My wife is Asian (born there) and when I told her and her family this they were literally speechless.
No, at least not for all subjects. I think over here medicine still has an admission test. Engineering used to have one long ago.
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.
I think a century from now, we'll look back on privatized higher education the way we look back on privatized health care: Something that evolved by a series of compromises, that society depends on, but that is perpetuating inequality while also gouging us and not making us healthier.
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.
> Any open criteria for "merit" will quickly turn the student body into a monocultural freak show.
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?
The same group in society has been lamenting “too many Jews” in higher education for generations — and has several Supreme Court cases against their discrimination.
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.
I think if you look at polling, people’s feelings on admissions is heavily influenced by whether the criteria helps/hurts them. Especially when it comes to students and parents.
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?
For a large majority purely numerical merit based wouldn't change what school they could go to, but it would make it so much easier for them to plan and know where they can go since now its no longer based on the whims of some random bureaucrats.
So most people would benefit, a tiny minority who currently unfairly get into elite colleges would be hurt.
That’s certainly one possibility for “merit” but “merit” could mean lots of things. Stanford goes big into athletics. Perhaps merit could mean they’ll only take students who placed in the top 10 in their state in some athletic competition. Perhaps merit means if your parents didn’t attend, you won’t get in.
monocultural means all the students spent all their free time doing the type of stuff that helps get you into elite institutions and none of their time doing other things. By hyper focusing on a few activities that are known to be liked by admissions you create a monoculture.
You are interpreting “cultural” too narrowly. It could also just mean that if you only focus on grades you get the kind of people who get good grades—-and not the people who don’t do as well grade wise, or have other priorities and bring a diversity of experience to campus culture. This doesn’t have to be a dog whistle for anything racial.
I think that's the trick. These university admissions committees are essentially choosing the ruling class for the next generation. What makes a good ruling class depends on more than just test scores and grades, so admissions committees look at other things the applicant has done, and at least they used to also do an interview with an alumnus. All of this is fairly gameable though, and the kind of person who would excessively game these metrics might not be person who they want to choose. Knowing that someone is the child of someone who already was admitted and indoctrinated into the values of the university is a pretty good signal that this person is more likely to be the kind of person they want to admit.
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.
Well, my post sure was a doozy. I wasn't thinking along racial lines, and I'm sorry if it seemed to imply that. Downvotes humbly accepted.
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.
Legacy admissions and holistic (discriminatory) admissions should be disallowed as long as these universities receive public fundings directly or indirectly.
Yep, I think these two things can be true at the same time:
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.
I think you could still compromise on 2. by requiring legacy or other discriminatory admissions practices to be a small percentage of the students they give full ride merit scholarships on, or similar.
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.
Id be interested to read about some "holistic" admissions success stories. There must be by this point tons of examples of students admitted "holistically" who are now doing great things because of the opportunity they were given.
Most, if not all, Canadian admissions are holistic. All the universities are pretty easy to get into as long as you have the grades, especially for undergrad. As a result, for undergrad at least, no one really cares what school you went to.
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.
I dunno about other colleges, but Caltech you earned the degree. Many students dropped out because of the workload. There were a couple that were able to coast through, but they had IQs easily over 160.
You should be extremely skeptical of people who claim to have tested IQs above 130 and also believe those tests are not inherently noisy at the top end. Many modern tests lump everyone with 130+ into the same category [1]. An IQ of "easily over 160" is not a clinically valid finding by any standard IQ test that I am aware of.
This is because standard IQ tests are generally designed to measure around the median of the distribution (70-130), and so there is a lot of variance in measurement at the top end. If you happen to have a bad testing day and you make a dumb mistake, your measured IQ might drop by a fairly large number of points -- or, conversely, if you got lucky and guessed right, your measured IQ could be much higher than reality.
For example, the original Raven's Progressive Matrices says [2; page 71]
> For reason's already given, Progressive Matrices (1938) does not differentiate, very clearly between young-children, or between adults of superior intellectual capacity.
where "superior intellectual capacity" is defined as an IQ of ~125 or higher, and (if I am interpreting it correctly), the table on page 79 of [2] says missing a single question could drop a 20-year old from scoring 95 percentile to scoring 90 percentile. That's 5 IQ points on a single question! If you had a bad day, or didn't get enough sleep, you could test significantly worse than your actual "IQ."
Anyone that actually has an IQ of 160 with even a modicum of self awareness should understand that the IQ test they took is inherently noisy at the top end of the scale because sometimes people have off days.
Consider that Hal Finney was next door to me in the dorm. I've never met a smarter fellow.
I agree that actually measuring his IQ would have been a dodgy idea, but there was no doubt he was a unicorn. He himself never made any claims about it. It was just something you realized about him after a while.
I agree with you that smart people exist, and I have met a few in college as well.
The main thing I want to add is that using IQ to quantify intelligence at the top end of the scale is scientifically bogus and in my opinion harmful because it validates depressed / insecure / chronically online people who use their "160 IQ" as a way to put down other people or to peddle pseudo-scientific nonsense. Those people often need genuine psychiatric help and (in my opinion) such validation only harms them.
I'm sure that Hal Finney was exceptionally smart, though. :)
Hal hid his intelligence. You'd never know it until you got to know him. He was well-liked, and even put up with the likes of me. (A lot of techers put up with me, and even generously helped me to not flunk out. I had a lot of growing up to do.)
I would have had a lot less trouble with Quantum Mechanics if I'd realized that nobody understands it, it's just that the math works. I thought it was just me that thought it was crazy.
I've heard MIT was similar. But their graduates have never had quite the prestige and easy in to influential circles as the boys (eventually girls, too) down the street.
It was easily the most work and effort I had to put into anything, tons of peoole dropping/failing out, and the average GPA for most students was not that hot. Definitely not close to the well-known Harvard-tier 3.65+
A classmate dropped out in his sophomore year, and 10 years later asked to come back and finish. Caltech said sure, and aced the courses and earned his degree.
I asked him, were you smarter after 10 years? He laughed and said nope, he was just willing to work this time!
(Another gem about Caltech - once you're admitted, they'll give you endless chances to come back and finish. Your credits did not expire.)
One of my friends finally graduated after 6 years there. He endured endless students mumbling "7 years, down the drain!" as they passed by. (The line was from Animal House.)
Almost all our Canadian hires have been at Waterloo at some point. Even when we do random resume pulls and interviews, Waterloo seems to have the most competent set of candidates when you’re talking about new grads.
> All the universities are pretty easy to get into as long as you have the grades, especially for undergrad.
The is partially true but leaves out an important difference between Canadian and American admissions. In Canada you are admitted to a particular major, not the university as a whole.
E.g. At the University of Waterloo, CS and some of the engineering majors can have < 5% admissions rate and are extremely merit based. At the same time, applying for the general Bachelor of Arts at UWaterloo is uncompetitive and very easy to get admitted.
I was #3 in highschool out of a 550 graduating class. I thought I was bright.
Went to Cal for mechanical engineering, and while I survived the engineering classes, the physics classes wore me out and the math classes were almost impossible for me. I barely made it out of there.
I honestly wish I went somewhere easier so that it wasn't a constant struggle to keep up and survive. I think I would have actually learned more.
I took a Math 1A class (intro to calc) at Cal where the prof turned his back on class at the start of the hour, then proceeded to mumble incoherently for 60 minutes while filling a chalkboard with equations. He’d turn back around at the end of the hour. Many students brought pillows. I learned literally nothing in lecture.
This professor wasn’t demanding, he was just making zero effort to actually teach.
Great researchers are not necessarily great teachers, especially for intro courses. Anecdotally, I think this is a common issue at “prestigious” schools.
I know that feelings but be assured, it’s better to be mediocre when you’re surrounded by amazing people than to be the best in a place where no one cares. I can guarantee you learnt more than other places even if you don’t feel like that at the moment.
I've had 20 years to think about this, and while it was always fun to get the positive vibes telling people I went to Cal, I still think UC Davis or SLO would have been better.
It's not like my only other option was to go to CSU East Bay, although I know people that built decent careers from there too to be honest.
I’ve heard people say this about difficult colleges or degrees before, so you’re not alone. The push to make something overly hard can simply leave some capable people behind by not matching their style or pace of learning. But also I think some of the less famous universities simply care about teaching while the top ones leave that to random grad students and instead brag about their research credentials. The thing is, professors doing research doesn’t help students learning.
I think all that matters is that most if not all professors care about teaching. And my experience at top universities has been that most still care about teaching and the grad students they need to rely on is because of the class size. There were definitely some that were basking in their own glory from the past, but those were few. Can’t tell about all universities, but I’d assume it’s the same everywhere. The reality is that given what it takes to become a tenured professor, you’re bound to have at least a few who generally suck at teaching.
It comes down to the notion that America is a classless society being farcical. There has always been an elite that jealously guards their power and influence. Entrance into it - or the ersatz version that is the bourgeoisie - has always (along with immigration) been modulated based on what was most likely to preserve the existence of that elite.
And it's not a conspiracy; it just shows how much power that elite has, that they're able to make these things happen when they need them to. A sudden turn away from nativism and condoning of proto-anarchy when the black population (first slave, then free) threatened to upend the social order. Socialism lite (and more immigration, but only from preferred European nations) to head off full-blown socialism after capitalism first drove to excess and then blew itself up. Truman getting the VP spot. Bank bailouts (so many bank bailouts). Even the begrudging "opening" of elite institutions to Jews, blacks, Asians (staring down the barrel of their own, rival, institutions).
Anything to prevent their power and influence decentralizing in an enduring manner.
Isn't the point that _all_ admissions from a range of institutions over a period of years (decades?) were "holistic" admissions, and thus basically all post-college success stories are holistic success stories? Further, _it's actively harmful_ as well as unfounded to post-hoc try to say that person X would _only_ have been admitted under a holistic framework.
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.
This has actually been one of the ideas floated by regulators.
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.
> Also, I suspect success has to be quantified, which might be hard.
I wouldn't say hard. It's expensive, time consuming, and the people who can perform qual to quant conversions usefully need to have a foot firmly planted on each side of the subject matter fence.
More to the point, nobody's really interested in compiling this kind of data. Adding dimensions beyond income to your definition of "success" would result in e.g. revealing there isn't anyone from your school successfully practicing family law.
This may not count as “holistic”, but my grand-uncle went to City College of NY when it was both open admissions and free. He had the equivalent of an 8th grade education in his home country.
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.
Seems reasonably. You and to discriminate? That's disappointing, but nobody is going to stop you, but the public tax dollars sure as hell shouldn't support your discrimination
Gating based on SAT is literally discrimination. It is also not fair, because those kids got lucky being born to the right parents.
But just because it's discrimination and unfair, doesn't mean it's bad.
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.
The entire notion of "elite" universities is discriminatory. If going to your average state university with high admissions was okay then there wouldn't nearly be as much drama.
If the elite colleges are not comprised of the rich and well connected it beats the entire point of an elite college.
> If the elite colleges are not comprised of the rich and well connected it beats the entire point of an elite college.
Depends on how you define "elite", and I assume you mean some sort of hereditary or economic-class-based definition. But elite colleges could (and should) still work if they run on competency-based merit. I believe elite talent in as many fields of endeavour should absolutely be catered to.
> The entire notion of "elite" universities is discriminatory.
Well, when you put it that way, many things are discriminatory, for better or worse.
> If the elite colleges are not comprised of the rich and well connected it beats the entire point of an elite college
The functional purpose of a meritocratic elite is to concentrate the smartest and most ambitious in your nation (in each generation) so they can cross leverage each other. This dates back to feudal societies switching to a civil exam system during Enlightenment. (Also in imperial China.) That’s a productive form of discrimination.
I think it's the opposite actually. I think the moment you're consciously, systematically trying to optimize for "smartest and most ambitious" on a meritocratic basis is the point in which your respective field falls into decline and is relegated to slow, incremental improvements rather than revolutionary jumps. Primairly because "the smartest and most ambitious" are more about seeing that specific field as vehicle for wealth and prestige rather than actual passion. Many of the legends of the past were not good enough for the elite institutions of their time.
I mean really, it's the question of why this over preexisting patronage systems. And looking at the "achivements" of this so-called "meritocratic elite" this last century (especially in enshittification) leaves alot to be desired.
It's just one self-serving 1% attempting to ursurp another 1%. And they certainly aren't going to be solving your problems. They don't have the ability to solve the coordination problem, the housing crisis, involution, climate change and Donald Trump.
> Primairly because "the smartest and most ambitious" are more about seeing that specific field as vehicle for wealth and prestige rather than actual passion
...why? STEM programs have weed-out classes for a reason. Astrophysics PhDs, similarly, are not vehicles for wealth or prestige, but must (and do) filter out below-standards candidates early.
> And looking at the "achivements" of this so-called "meritocratic elite" this last century (especially in enshittification) leaves alot to be desired.
That wasn't created by the meritocratic elite, that was created by the "preexisting patronage systems" where rich pays to get their kids influential credential so that they can continue to have outsized influence on the country...
> They don't have the ability to solve the coordination problem, the housing crisis, involution, climate change and Donald Trump.
The current system is what caused those, why do you think that is much better?
>The current system is what caused those, why do you think that is much better?
I don't think it's better. But I don't think it's worse either. It's exchanging one elite for another with the similar incentives. But what I would object though is how the education system has been essentially appropiated as a system of elite differentiation (and social mobility) rather than improving the 80% as function of overall social welfare. Why are we caring about a handful of colleges compared the hundreds of others we have? The opportunity cost really is to better spend our resources and time pushing up the average, mediocre student rather than focusing on all these unproductive signalling mechanisms. And I think from there, that's where the real saviours will emerge.
Yes, perfectly reasonable to pull state funding for private enrichment. Now, all we have to do is get rid of the racism in “holistic admission” and use a demonstrably fair system like performance on standardized tests.
What about schools where standardized tests are insufficient?
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.
The inability for a test to have sensitivity at the top end isn’t some fixed property of the universe. It’s just a property of the SAT. Harder tests are possible. The only thing that matters is that candidates know that it’s not at the whim of some human who has decided that 25% Jews is enough or 33% Asians is enough or whatever and that it’s by a fixed scoring rubric.
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.
Wish granted, you now 1000 spots in your freshman class and 5000 applicants with identical scores and 4.0 GPAs. And there's another 8000 applicants whose scores are within the individual variance of the test. You wouldn't drop their application just because they had a bad day would you? We're a meritocracy here so no cheating and choosing randomly—that's not how you get the very best. What's the next criteria?
So I made a bad test and now I have a problem? Because you can make tests quite difficult. e.g. the GRE mathematics section is trivial to score maximum on, but there's no reason for that to be the case. It could be made harder.
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
Also props to Stanford. It's not just completely reasonable but morally just to not take public funding you don't need. Only moderate props, because presumably they did the math and picked the more profitable of the two... but props none the less.
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.
This would sort of work except that Harvard already built an endowment of $50 billion based on all that lying. Unless you're going to claw back that money, you're just letting them pull the ladder up behind them.
Moving to a pure merit-based system would be a great idea IF universities were primarily designed to educate people. They are not—anyone with half a brain can get a world-class education from ChatGPT, Wikipedia, Khan Academy, and library books. Paying a university "for the education" is like paying $100,000 for tap water because it’s served in a fancy glass with a Latin motto printed on it.
Connections matter most in the oncoming era of dwindling opportunities (because each one is more valuable and leverages more resources). Legacy enables alumni to meet each other.
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 there’s a couple justifiable reasons to have legacy admissions. One, help the poor, smart kids meet the rich kids. Together, they can get more done than separately.
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.
I think legacy admissions are bad and wrong. But I also don't think that removing legacy admissions will make a dent, not on the state of college admissions, and especially not on any broader socioeconomic context. Prestige schools doing bad things only highlights that it's a mistake to let prestige schools exist in the first place.
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.
No, I'm saying that prestige schools are a symptom of a broader socioeconomic failing - something about how power is obtained and maintained, which I struggle to articulate properly. Shutting down prestige schools does nothing for the broader failing in broader society; at best, it papers over a visible sign of the failing.
You’re close. The issue is we can’t discuss class, so they look for all sorts of other analogs which they can get the wealthy folks on board with. DEI is acceptable to the wealthy because they ultimately see less of a threat there than from a person of the same race from the South or Midwest. In the workplace, the female Stanford legacy can still be underprivileged then thanks to gender versus the white male from a poor state with a land grant degree.
I think legacy admissions is only supported by the elites —be they leftists or rightists. Normal leftists and normal rightists don’t support legacy admissions (pay to play). I think the vast majority of people would support fair admissions (GPA + something else that signals academic aptitude).
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.
I think you can gauge that from the historical performance of students from those sources. Of course, there is a lag as schools either improve or dilute grades.
I think even most democrats oppose it: https://manhattan.institute/article/study-finds-most-democra.... Though unfortunately, it appears that what swings democrats from support to non-support is learning that it hurts asians, not just white people. :-/
You can't be a leftist and support legacy admissions. You can be a right-liberal and support legacy admissions, but even the mildest mild-mild leftism would reject that kind of thing.
If you look at the political tendencies of the elite universities that themselves practice legacy admissions, those tendencies are overwhelmingly to the left of the American political center. I know it’s popular to make a “no true Scotsman” argument against anyone to the right of Mao Zedong but it’s silly.
I think you are failing to distinguish individual elements of the universities you are commenting on. Administration and faculty are very different people. Admin need faculty for prestige, but faculty need admin for funding. Are a majority of prominent faculty members advocating for legacy admissions?
You’re implying that there’s some crypto-right-wing people somewhere in the university and that these people are solely responsible for legacy admissions, but you’re not even willing to state this absurd implication, let alone provide any evidence for it.
I think the thing to understand is that university professors are upper middle class.
They are not particularly aligned with the working class or with leftism. They're usually centrists or liberals.
I think your confusions stems from believing that liberals are the left. Liberals however, are pro-free trade ultra-propertarians. Liberals are to the right of anti-free trade populists.
So by what definition of leftist thought could this possibly be okay?
Wikipedia has one (ideologies that seek social equality and egalitarianism), which this is clearly incompatible with. It's certainly unacceptable to socialists, communists, anarchists, syndicalists or social democrats.
Liberals are not leftists. Liberals are mostly inviolable-property + free-trade type people.
Soviet Russia was not an egalitarian society, it was a brutal dictatorship governed by an effective ruling class of party members. Mainland China is the same. If that’s your standard of “leftism”, you’re drawing the line somewhere to the far left of any self-proclaimed communist party that has ever held power in any country. This is clearly absurd.
You’re the commie version of those annoying right wingers who like to start semantic arguments that the Nazis weren’t really right wing.
Leftism is an incoherent and false ideology fundamentally unsuited to the governance of human societies. Once you recognize that fact, the hypocrisy of actual leftists will cease to surprise you.
Liberals are not leftists. They are not egalitarians and they are not really for social equality.
Allowing universities legacy admissions is a position so far to the right that I don't think any political party anywhere outside of the US propagates for it. There isn't a social democrat in Denmark or something who has vaguely leftist view but who also believes that universities should admit people based on their parents having gone there.
If anyone really favored social equality they would support abolishing the elite universities entirely. Anything short of that still produces an identifiable class of people who attended these institutions, and it’s the existence of that class in the first place rather than its partly hereditary nature that runs counter to social equality.
Was there a point in recent memory where it wasn’t? As a non-American I’d always considered them to be the Oxford and Cambridge (respectively) of the US.
Some would say Harvard and Yale are the Oxford and Cambridge of the US. But we’re a big country, and we have a lot of schools. Many lists of top schools include these, alphabetically ordered:
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.
They all became each other. The second (or maybe first) most popular degree at Harvard now is CS. Students apply to all the Ivy+ schools and a few backup options, maybe 20 in total, and you pick the best one you get accepted to. All the students have done the same things, they have very similar GPAs and scores, they all mostly went to Ivy feeder high schools, they do all the same extra curriculars like math and CS club and teaching underprivileged kids to code. It's all the same. Maybe they are more easily distinguished for grad school.
Seems fair. Stanford isn't in the business of conferring education. It's in the business of conferring status.
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.
Has Thomas Sowell ever commented on legacy admissions? I can't find anything but I imagine he would not be a fan, just like he isn't a fan of affirmative action.
They went to jail because they bribed people who were not authorized to accept bribes instead of the people who were (with the latter people charging much more, of course).
While I was being glib, that is an insignificant detail in the context of this post about legacy admissions.
The point is you can gain admission via some nebulous definition of merit, some combination of merit and knowing someone who gained admission before, or paying for admission.
Also, while the “institution” receives the money, I guarantee some people (the highest admins and their friends - fund managers, construction contractors, etc) gain more than most others (e.g. adjunct teachers and students).
It's a dangerous precedent. Ending legacy and donor admissions and other forms of preference to elites' kids will inevitably lead to loss of value of higher education on one side, and elites being uneducated and Trump-style dumb, on the other. Because elites will still remain the elites no matter what, unless society plunges into bloodbath, physically killing or exiling all of them, French revolution-style - but at least now they can be educated.
A compromise would be to double the undergrad class size while limiting legacy to something less than or equal to what it is today in absolute terms. Many more deserving students would get and Stanford would get to keep its cash cow. But of course that would entail Palo Alto to let it expand, which it very much wants to do. And good luck with that.
some people in my circle are reacting to this kind of thing exactly how i expected.
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.
> admit the relatives of their alumni or big donors
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.
i wouldn't be opposed to legacy admits if they were required to pay full tuition and judged to a higher standard: the legacy admit must have both a higher gpa, and sat score than the inbound class average.
Legacy is better than people think. The undergrad academics at T10 universities really aren't anything special. People want to go because of the connections with wealthy & well-connected students, but then complain when wealthy well-connected students get a easier ride. You fill Harvard of Stanford with only people with 1600 SATs will turn them into places you dont really want to go to.
> The undergrad academics at T10 universities really aren't anything special.
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.
Definitely has the opposite experience going from an around 100 ranked university to an around 20 ranked university. Maybe it depends on the department but I noticed a massive difference in the students, difficulty of classes, how well the professors taught in multiple classes in multiple departments. There were exceptions but there was definitely a general trend.
When you prefer legacy students, you perpetuate the kind of discrimination in effect when their parents and grandparents were admitted.
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.
> When you prefer legacy students, you perpetuate the kind of discrimination in effect when their parents and grandparents were admitted.
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 of these universities have vast investment funds. Expanding would indeed allow them to provide more education, but that does not appear to be their goal.
Expanding need-blind isn't the same as overall expansion.
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:
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.
But it's the people here that want more access to these elite circles.
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.
Yes. Imagine if you could get an elite Wall Street or Consulting job based significantly on who your dad is. That would be unfair, discriminatory, and otherwise pretty terrible, except for the already elite and wealthy. Oh, wait...that already happens, and it's indeed terrible in all the ways you would predict. This really needs to be cracked down on, but the rich and powerful will always support it.
Research from Opportunity Insights shows legacy preferences reduce social mobility while multiple studies find no evidence legacy admits enhance campus culture or alumni giving beyond what could be achieved through need-blind admissions.
Top universities don’t exist for social mobility, that is merely happenstance that the people that want to pay have gatekept access to the purse by having attended university.
> The undergrad academics at T10 universities really aren't anything special. People want to go because of the connections with wealthy & well-connected students, but then complain when wealthy well-connected students get a easier ride.
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.)
Which was always absurd as there's no less vestimentary affluence signaling in uniform high schools than in any other.
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.
It sounds hyperbolic and they probably mean high school students with 1500+ SAT-I, 5 AP everything, and other community leadership achievements.
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?
Exactly, that Austrian woman that tried to get rid of all her wealth found out that its impossible because even if she’s at £0 she knows too many people that will support her ideas, drive too much publicity to her causes, and food, shelter, board seats, academia, and everything else is always accessible. The path doesn’t have to be forged.
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.
This is such a bizarre and gross take. Yes our history is a history of class struggle. But history does progress. For thousands of years we were supposed to be property of kings so shall we mean revert to that?
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.
> They are doing startups, public policy, research, tech leadership etc.
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.
A lot of the CEOs in the US currently come from this uni. It's called IIT, in case you're curious. There's also IIMs which are based on the same model but for business studies. Also no legacy admissions. Also produce a metric ton of CEOs and execs. There are none more elite than these, at least in India. The politicians in my country are rarely highly educated, otoh.
Thanks yes I have worked with a bunch of people from IITs.
> 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.
I agree, this article is relevant to my interests because Stanford is doing just that! At the state level
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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…
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.
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-...
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.
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.
>it's giving an advantage to the luckiest (the ones who happened to be born into it).
Are people born smart not also "lucky"?
"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?
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?
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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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.
> 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.
> 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 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Given the sheer number of “universities” that have sprung up, in practical terms he is almost certainly right.
That is mostly an American thing.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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 which country, and where did they graduate from? Not all colleges are alike.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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> 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?
> 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.
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.
If you reduce the choice to public funding vs wealthy alumni stewardship, and there seems to be no meaningful pathway to circumventing the current assault on public funding, then why should you alienate your wealthy alumni?
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)
These are some of the richest entities - forget about universities - just entities full stop, in the entire country.
Stanford’s endowment is less than $40bn.
That’s a lot of money on tap, 99.99% of US organizations have less than $1Bn in reserves.
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.
Consider adding for or five more 9s to that. There are 50+ million corporations in the county, and then you need to add all the churches, clubs and nonprofits.
My 4 nines + your 4 or 5 nines = 1 in 100 million to 1 in 1 billion.
Even adding all the churches, clubs, and nonprofits I don’t think it’s that rare. The Mormon church for example has ~293 billion in assets. Even the Church of Scientology is apparently worth ~2 billion.
Maybe 1 in 10 million? What do you think the numerator in denominator are here? I'm guessing less than a hundred organizations with a billion dollars in reserve.
There are less than 2,000 us companies with a billion dollar market cap, out of ~40 million companies.
I expect the reserves would be a substantially less than that. Maybe somewhere in the ballpark of low triple digit organizations with a billion+ dollar reserve. Maybe 200 nationally?
Above 90% = 1/10, 99% = 1/100, 99.9% =1/1,000… the pattern is 1 then a zero for each 9.
So 8 9’s = 100,000,000
yeah, I understand decimals.
If its 200/100,000,000, that would be 99.9998 or 2 more digits.
So, at full burn, enough to run a national laboratory for half a century. This is what rich looks like.
The national laboratory budget is $14bn/yr.
Sure, if we assume that the total budget for the 17 national labs is $14B, that would imply that the average lab is a bit less than $1B/year to run. Hence $40B can run an "average" lab for around 50 years. Or am I missing your point?
funding is not even per year to year, but your point is still valid
The poor choices started in the early 90's when the SCOTUS decided that MIT didn't have to pay taxes as long as they gave enough charity discounts to students.
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.
As I understand matters, it started in the 70s and 80s as states pulled back from funding public institutions. This funding was the mechanism which allowed public institutions to be affordable to families such that a person could pay for a year of public college by working in a grocery store over the summer.
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.
>As I understand matters, it started in the 70s and 80s as states pulled back from funding public institutions.
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
Does subsidizing lower the cost, or just mask it by having it covered from a different wallet, e.g. robbing Peter to pay Paul?
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?
> 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?
Yes, you are correct that a corrupt state will deliver poor results. A key bulwark against in many places is effective oversight of public assets and administrations. But a corrupt state also could do much worse than $35k for undergraduate tuition. Which suggests priorities are being set to accomplish a different set of goals.
Also keep in mind that the primary mechanism here is not adding regulation. Rather, it's about things like ensuring universities have enough open slots for the children matriculating through their K-12 programs. Think about it more in the way states are generally capable of managing and subsidizing/funding student education at the K-12 level.
Bigger picture: consider why it should even be seen to be such a massive difference in capability for a state to run a public education program for the 4 years after high school vs the first 13 years.
Has this - “effective oversight of public assets and administrations” - happened in other systems with significant state involvement, like secondary ed, healthcare or infrastructure projects?
My view is skewed towards California, where admittedly examples of cost decreases through economies of scale are lacking.
Yes. Water systems, trash collection, fire departments, parks, etc. generally are cost-effective and well administered that they are typically excluded from these discussions.
K-12 is particular is an area where critics demean public systems, but where we have yet to see anyone scale an alternative at lower cost/higher quality targeting the same goals. (Apologies if someone has done it, I am not aware.)
Note: this means that systems that exclude classes of students do not count as they have different goals. Obviously, one could more cheaply build a private education system for rich kids who all have similar capabilities. But that is not the goal of public systems, who are tasked with educating the poor and rich, the deaf, the blind, those who speak other languages, etc. Generally, they are able to do this for less money per pupil than elite private schools that are not able to serve all students.
Anyway the point getting lost here is that states do subsidize public universities, but not as much as they did in prior decades. The debate you seem to be aiming toward is whether we should have public universities, to which I would say that we should have more of them, and they should cost students less by having taxes cover a larger share of those institutions.
Edit: I want to come back to this for a moment. Water and sewers are really core functions of public governments, and in the US they basically work near 100% of the time. They involve tremendous ongoing logistical work at timescales ranging from emergency pipe burst to capacity planning for decades in the future.
The notion that government involvement means poor/expensive service delivery is a fiction constructed from the outliers of government work.
> The debate you seem to be aiming toward is whether we should have public universities
Apologies if my argument came out that way. I agree with a need for public universities, I just disagree with the need to have them at any cost. Ad absurdium, a public university that costs $1,000 / $10,000 / $100,000 / $1,000,000 per student are all a good deal to a purist because hey, a need is a need.
The current system, however, incentivizes extracting maximum value for the stakeholders (administration) while delivering minimum results to customers (students). With a single-payer there's even a stronger incentive to inflate the operating costs.
If you went through US higher education, you've probably witnessed a few tricks designed for maximum revenue extraction.
* credits from one [cheaper] accredited institution are not transferable to another [expensive one], ensuring that you'd be subjected to a higher tuition
* courses that can be delivered online are not
* courses that are delivered online are paywalled to ensure only those who have registered and paid can view the precious content (something Open Courseware stood up against)
* there's no system where one can test out of pre-requisites by taking similar courses cheaper (or free) elsewhere. E.g., if you self-studied through some MIT or Stanford courses online, you still have to pay full tuition at Fill In The Blank State University
Granted, it's not always about effort duplication and resource waste. California Community Colleges, for instance, is good at centralizing student registration, identity management, and financials, so that each community college doesn't have to run a fully staffed department doing all that.
Ideally, though, an eager high school student should be able to
* load up on as many courses as they can manage online on their own schedule
* have an ability to test out of the courses for a fee that's lower than the full price of the course
* arrive at the university and pay full tuition for the courses that do require in-person training (nursing, medical sciences, any course requiring labs)
You're right, end of the day a public university is an extension of secondary school, but with higher concentrations of students (and hence fewer locations required and all sorts of economies of scale at play). There's no reason that grades 13-16 should cost more than grades K-12, so why do they?
> disagree with the need to have them at any cost.
I think we can all agree with that. I think a sane position is to return to the level of state support of e.g. the 1960s or 1970s. This worked in a substantially poorer US until we chose to stop doing it.
> There's no reason that grades 13-16 should cost more than grades K-12, so why do they?
This is the key point. Like most things, this is driven by policy choices. The choice is made to achieve certain aims, or to ensure other aims are not achieved. We have the object lesson that subsidized college broadly worked in the US until we collectively decided to stop doing it. We can choose differently when there is political will to do so.
FWIW I would suspect that most of the explicit revenue extraction is less about the types of things you indicated and more about the # of full-fare international students a college is able to recruit. There's a huge difference between a $35k in-state student on financial aid and a $55k student who will pay cash.
"We should prefer privatization because public entities are too easily corrupted by those same private companies"
This is my new favorite take on libertarian ideals.
Reagan in to 60's started it by cutting California university funding
This is the first time I've seen this framing. Typically folks blame bloated admin and fancy dorms. Where can I learn more about this take on the student loan crisis.
The loan (and hence tuition) crisis is because US taxpayers provide blank checks to students with no underwriting.
Those are not incompatible statements.
> Stanford has considered alumni and donor status for academically qualified students in the past
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.
> 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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
This seems reasonable. California doesn't want to subsidize the education of the privileged few who qualify as "legacy admission". And Stanford doesn't want to give up the financial support from alumnus.
Yup. And you can think of legacy admissions as college "whales", people who pay full price for an advantage and subsidize the price for less wealthy students. It's absolutely an imperfect system, but it at least redistributes a little wealth along the way
> alumnus
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. :)
> Alumni.
Often "Alums" nowadays, as Alumni is traditionally male gendered.
Alumni if there is even one man. Alumnae if there isn't. Alumnus/alumna for individuals. That's just how Latin works.
Aluminum works for me.
Aluminium
I don't think I've ever heard this. The alumni of the university has always, from my experience, been used to refer to everyone that graduated; gender playing no role at all.
Saying “always” based on your experience with a word that is over 2000 years old without knowing the history is a great way to be wrong. In this case, if there is a group of multiple people, the correct word is alumni, unless the entire group is female, when the word becomes alumnae. Alumni is correct even for a hypothetical group with a billion women and 1 man. If there is just 1 person, it is alumnus for a male and alumna for a female. Most universities would use alumni because there is always 1 male in the group and they want to use the plural. A women’s only university would use alumnae. That said, English speakers have a tendency to mispronounce alumni as alumnae, so trying to maintain a minimum understanding of how to use the word correctly might be a losing battle.
It’s one of those “well actually” things that the Latin nerds would point out. So the Latin nerds who went into college administration decided to change it to be a clearly English derivation.
Its not just about money. Having legacies at the school is what makes non legacies want to attend. If applicants didnt care about networking with the rich and powerful theyd go to caltech, the reality is that having connections to powerful people is the main value add undergrad at ivies provides versus upper tier state schools. Why would stanford ever get rid of their main value add?
We know this argument does not apply in practice because tons of people want to go to top universities that do not consider legacy like MIT. Outside America, universities that regularly feature in global top 20 lists like Oxford, Cambridge, ETH Zurich and Imperial College London etc also do not do legacies and they also get tons of interest.
You're making big assumptions here regarding students desires to attend stanford. Ignoring everything else though, having two elite universities that cater to merit is better than one just for the sake of doubling the number of students.
> Ignoring everything else though, having two elite universities that cater to merit is better than one just for the sake of doubling the number of students.
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.
Interesting point. Elite universities offer a good education, a respected credential, and connections. Stanford is also a startup factory, being (not coincidentally) adjacent to Silicon Valley and containing a business school in addition to the engineering school.
What does stanford offer undergrads that berkeley doesnt? IMO access to legacies and the larger alumni network is about it.
Better faculty to student ratio (1:6 vs. 1:19). Closer proximity to actual Santa Clara (Silicon) Valley (and Google, NVIDIA, etc.) More NCAA championships and Olympic medals. Still leading in "big game" football series (though currently on a losing streak.) More Turing awards.
Not as many Nobel prizes - or elements on the periodic table - however. Berkeley (having many more undergrads) also has more alumni.
(But note for both schools that good researchers are not necessarily good undergraduate instructors.)
> More NCAA championships and Olympic medals. Still leading in "big game" football series (though currently on a losing streak.)
As a side note, I always found this obsession with sports to be a fascinating aspect of american culture. Being from an entirely different culture, it’s unclear to me why on earth would anyone give a fuck about this.
I have heard that in some countries soccer (aka "football") is a big thing for some reason.
Also the Olympics seem to be a big thing every four years, particularly in the country where they are being held; Berkeley and Stanford do pretty well in that competition.
Sports can be big in a country, sure, but US is the only country I can recall where sports matters as a criteria to choose a university to go to (as an in op).
But just in case - it’s cool, I wasn’t being judgmental.
Stanford undoubtedly did the math and determined they would lose money overall (gifts are 7% of Stanford's income, tuition and fees 13%).
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.)
Universities definitely favor unrestricted gifts. But, to the degree that you make a restricted gift, you can be sure that there's often money shuffling in the background to the degree the gift is substantial.
>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.)
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.
If rich people stopped going to Stanford, Stanford will loose its reputation in a few generations.
I think it works in the opposite direction. Rich parents basically buy admission for their mediocre offspring at a university made prestigious by the abundance of very intelligent but less wealthy students.
That 7% from rich people, where does it go?
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.
Stanford presumably determined that the loss of donation money would be greater than what they would have to spend to cover financial aid without help from Cal Grants.
You are not reading what I'm saying acceptingly. I am suggesting the math they did only helped them conclude they would have less money. It did not lead to a conclusion that they can't keep being an elite institution servicing and creating high level academics at fair prices while still being profitable and growing financially. Very roundabout way of suggesting they are greedy at their core.
"Follow the money" is a good point. Universities spend an enormous amount of money, and it's often hard to see what it's actually being used on. Stanford has so many administrative staff that they built a separate campus for them in Redwood City. https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu
edit/correction: 21% was the original proposal but it was reduced to 8% in the final bill that was passed
I'm okay with academia being an institution of the elite, as long as we stop pretending that their BS (or BA) will make everyone successful. We can't all be elite; that's not how that works.
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.
When a Bachelor's degree became a proxy for "can show up and complete assigned work" for employers that was the start of its decline as an academic credential.
First it went from "comes from money and has no need to work, whatsoever" thorough "eventually needs to get a job but can live off rich parents for four plus years" before the current state.
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.
Right. It's like "this person likely has a student loan they need to repay so they will probably come to work."
That's already happening with technical/trade/alternate school to career paths are rising up and some colleges are panicking with declining enrollment.
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.
Almost every gen-Z I have met who owns a house got a loan from the bank of mommy and daddy.
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.
How did they save for the down payment? The ROI for college isn't what it used to be, but there isn't a clear non-college path in the US, either.
> 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.
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.
> Rich people are going to waste their time and money no matter what
You don't become rich by wasting time and money.
Statistically you do exactly this if you, or your family already are. It's called the "Third generation curse"
Right, which is why I wrote "become" :-)
Yes, but your forgot "self-made". It's possible to "become" rich by inheritance, lottery, etc.
Exactly my complaint
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.
You do by wasting other people's time and money.
lmao heard of DOGE?
> we need merit-based employment that disregards elite and academic status
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.
When you are brokering deals with wealthy clients or executing trades with millions, the notion of trust is much more important than merit. And what better is a sign of trust that coming from the circles, and with nothing to stake but reputation?
How likely is it we'll have the one when we don't even have the other?
We'll have neither, of course. The wealthy will always be able to pay for what they want — merit be damned.
I agree that participation in the middle class shouldn't depend on borrowing six figures as a teenager. I dream of the day where any worker has economic security
"It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy
For those who want to compare the HN comments here against the SCOTUS ruling that ended Affirmative Action, read and be amazed (or not) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36520658
I always found it wildly fascinating how US schools have things like legacy admissions, athletic scholarships, standardized admission test, admission letter, letters of recommendation, extracurricular activities, and what have you.
Such a contrast to other systems where for example your HS grades will count 100% - and similar "ungameable" systems.
Right. It is called holistic review. Originally invented to limit the number of Jewish people in top universities (not kidding)! Now being used to limit the number of Asians.
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-...
This is very eye opening. As a geek with strong academic background always felt cheated by the system.
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.
This only seems confusing to people who valorize intelligence as the most valuable trait one can have. What really matters is the impact you can have on others lives: making them a lot of money, saving them a lot of time, making them happy, etc contributing to them or addressing their needs
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
This reminds me of a documentary I watched some time ago, I wish I could remember its name. This is what I remember about it:
The entire premise was following 2 people, one guy barely graduated community college, the other was incredibly intelligent. Went to an elite university, got a masters really young, and I believe was a member of Mensa.
The difference was in other areas. The first guy had a lot of persistence and didn’t stop when things got hard. Ended up becoming a very successful person, married with kids, had their own business.
By contrast the other guy despite being legitimately one of the smartest people in the world, simply withered into obscurity, had trouble maintaining gainful employment, relationships etc. A very stark contrast to the first person.
I realize the point of a documentary is to highlight extremes but I think it does say something about the relative value of intelligence as it correlates to successful outcomes
I’d be interested if you can remember this documentary’s name. I want to show it to my kids.
Certain types of management and leadership skills are learned more effectively in an elite sports team than in any engineering coursework. I think a lot of people who conceptualize the world in very rigid, rules-oriented ways fail to appreciate that.
Suuure, but in my experience you get the meathead who makes a sports analogy every time something needs to be done.
Had to listen to someone talking about "humping it across the line" this week.
The problem I have (full disclosure: I'm a professor) is that those things have nothing to do with a university. If they're doing non-academic things, the elite academics of the university are irrelevant.
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.
Just being smart won't get you anywhere.
It will get you into Mensa.
Aside from "success", it is very reasonable to want to admit "well-rounded" or "balanced" individuals as net pluses to society.
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).
But a massive number of the bay area "weirdos" seem to come from elite schools; or is my frame of reference not representative?
Maybe is just the concentration of technical talent (usually introverts, home buddies), whom put less emphasis on social skills.
He told you the truth
Counterexample: Caltech uses holistic admissions and no one has found any signs of it limiting Asians.
I don’t think that’s the whole story. The Ivy League are WASP institutions, and WASP culture always highly valued “well rounded” students and looked down on people who single mindedly perused an end. Back in the day, they didn’t need to screen for this explicitly, since it was already universal in the applicant pool. They just needed a test to sort out the smart ones from the dumb ones. When the applicant pool changed, holistic admissions became a way to maintain that cultural trait.
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.
> The Ivy League are WASP institutions, and WASP culture always highly valued blah blah blah
Ok, screw that and screw the Ivy League and the WASPs with it.
I think it's interesting how it's universally acceptable to hate on WASPs. Even, perhaps especially, among people who say they are opposed to bigotry.
That's fair. I shouldn't do that. Also, powerful institutions with massive endowments and government research grants should not be treated as the social institutions of one specific ethnic or racial subgroup, since they're clearly not drawing all of that wealth solely from the contributions of that subgroup.
> Ok, screw that and screw the Ivy League and the WASPs with it.
I understand the sentiment and sometimes share it. But I’m also sad to recognize that while elite asians like me can excel within the systems created by WASPs, we probably wouldn’t have created such systems ourselves.
What other group in history has created a system so fair that they were replaced-without being conquered—within the very institutions they themselves created? My dad was born in a village in Bangladesh and my brother went to Yale and is an executive at J.P. Morgan (two of the WASP-iest institutions in America). WASPs are a minority in these institutions now. This sort of thing basically only happens in Anglo countries.
Good reading: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/05/opinion/george-bush-wasps...
> created a system so fair
I think that's really begging one of the important questions here. _Is_ the system fair now?
The system clearly wasn't originally fair (when elite schools excluded women, people of color, etc).
They became more open after decades of struggle driven in large part from the outside, and helped along by the GI bill, as well as a broader shift towards getting more public funds.
The demographics have changed, but to the degree that it's more fair, is that because WASPs created them that way, or because women and other racial groups changed society more broadly?
>I think that's really begging one of the important questions here. _Is_ the system fair now?
Define "fair" for a system designed not only to filter an elite out of the rest of society, but in fact to have that elite's size remain detached from larger demographic trends. Is it fair for Zoomers to have an easier time in college admissions than Millennials, while being subject to what are supposedly stronger DEI measures?
What, in fact, do we think this system ought to be aiming for, and how is that fair?
For the moment it seems to me that the system is arbitrary and we're being fooled, in a way, into imposing conceptions of fairness and/or merit onto it that it really aimed at and which always served more as happy-face masks for the arbitrary organizational shoggoth underneath.
It’s critical to distinguish between being open to outsiders when you have the power to exclude them, versus advocating in your own interest to be included. Everyone advocates for their own inclusion when they have no power—that’s just human self interest. But such advocacy can’t create a fair system, by definition. Minorities and immigrants exist everywhere and advocate for themselves. But most societies don’t allow them to advance. Uyghurs in China can say whatever they want, but it won’t make a difference.
WASPs were unusual in creating systems that saw openness to outsiders as a virtue, and then actually giving up their own power to allow others into the institutions they built. The first black Harvard student was admitted in 1847. Two Japanese students got a degree from Harvard law school in 1874. But if you look at societies where African and Asian people have the power to exclude, those places aren’t very open to outsiders.
> WASPs were unusual in creating systems that saw openness to outsiders as a virtue
In your view, did that view of openness to outsiders as a virtue manifest in other ways? It's been a while since I had to study the period but the colonial northeast was perennially at war with the native population and French Canadian colonists. E.g. it seems Harvard was founded during the Pequot war. In that same year of 1636, Roger Williams set up Rhode Island because he had been banished from Massachusetts after being convicted of heresy. So in general, it seems like WASPs were founding schools in an environment where being native, French, or indeed the wrong kind of Anglo-Puritan was worth attacking. I'm not seeing the openness to outsiders.
> The first black Harvard student was admitted in 1847.
Harvard was founded in 1636, so it seems like they went a full two centuries with total segregation before it finally admitted _one guy_. Again, not so much a culturally inculcated openness to outsiders so much as a slightly imperfect execution of exclusion.
> But if you look at societies where African and Asian people have the power to exclude, those places aren’t very open to outsiders.
I'm trying to think of what a fair comparison would be. I do think there's a meaningful difference between a dominant/imperial power that (begrudgingly, slowly) allows room for its own citizens of diverse racial backgrounds, vs a previously colonized or dominated country making space for foreign powers.
So e.g. the oldest university in Asia is University of Santo Tomas, which was founded by the Spanish colonizers and is a Catholic university, and I think was under Spanish governance until the Philippine Revolution. Should the new fledgling country have made sure that it saved space for white students? I'm not sure whether they actually did, but I think that's a very different ethical question than, "should Harvard/Yale/Brown in New England built on native land with wealth substantially built off the triangle trade, admit BIPOC students?". The oldest "university" in the modern sense in China is Tainjin University, founded in 1895; i.e. they didn't have a university until a couple generations after the 2nd opium war. Should it have saved space for foreign students? The first "universities" in India were founded during British rule. Etc etc.
But where there _isn't_ a strong power imbalance, I would be curious to see historical examples of any group having an especially better or worse record on inclusion.
> I'm trying to think of what a fair comparison would be.
You should be able to think of a dozen examples off the top of your head. Virtually every society has minorities and immigrant groups (which have nothing to do with colonial history).
> I do think there's a meaningful difference between a dominant/imperial power that (begrudgingly, slowly) allows room for its own citizens of diverse racial backgrounds
Why would a dominant power ever make room for people outside their in-group? Where does that notion even come from? That's not how most societies work. Some multi-ethnic empires in history showed various degrees of tolerance for outgroups (e.g. Muslims that ruled over the Indian subcontinent imposed jizya on non-Muslims only some of the time). But you have to go back to the Romans to find a major power that allowed outside ethnicities to rise to the uppermost reaches of society (without being conquered by outside groups).
You can't explain the unusual inclusiveness of American society by pointing to anything minorities did. Minorities always advocate in their own interest--that's commonplace, but almost never works. The Uyghurs can tell the Chinese "we don't want to be oppressed" all they want, but that's not persuasive to the Chinese because that's just an expression of self-interest. It's not contrary to the self interest of the Chinese for the Uyghurs to be oppressed.
The unusual thing is the dominant group actually giving up power voluntarily. For that to happen, there must be something in the dominant culture to which minorities can appeal, something that can be used to persuade the dominant group to give up its own self interest.
We probably wouldn't have even minded or noticed it if the people who replaced us continued the same egalitarian tradition we had. I think for many of us the destruction of that is much more upsetting than everything else (or at least that's what triggers the reaction.)
Yes, that's been a blackpill for me. When you look at these institutions today you see what looks like assimilation, but it's superficial. For example, you might see WASPs and non-WASPs at Harvard aligned in support of social programs. But the former are motivated by self-sacrifice at the expense of their own group, while the latter often are motivated by self-interest in favor of their own group. Similarly, for the former, any sort of ethnic identity or in-group preference is condemned while for the latter those attitudes often are promoted or encouraged. At Harvard, it is not taboo for anyone to say "my ancestors built this country”—except for those whom that statement is the most true.
Gonna say the same thing to you I said to the more woke-leaning guy in this thread: you're reinventing white nationalism for minorities, bud.
> WASP culture always highly valued “well rounded” students and looked down on people who single mindedly perused an end
Citation please.
E.g. https://groveatlantic.com/book/flight-of-the-wasp/
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> Asian and Jewish kids today can game the system.
This is just a cope. Poor Asians outperform in standardized metrics as well. New York’s selective admissions high schools, for example, are dominated by asians but have almost half of students qualifying for free or reduced price lunch.
To another example, comparing Asian kids and Hispanic kids raised in the bottom quantile of the income distribution, the Asian kids are over three times more likely to end up in the top income quantile as adults: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/27/upshot/make-y...
This is not the perception I heard. People from SE Asia are welcome to comment on this (and they would provide a better perspective than I can) but I know several Cali people of Flipino or Vietnamese descent whose parents are not wealthy surgeons, and they also favor the holistic approach. It also becomes a problem of numbers. Hispanic and Asian kids are the fastest growing denominations in the US. It is very likely that many of them are recent immigrants and are not wealthy. Of course, I am not saying that having a sad story in and of itself is a hall pass. All I am saying is many comments here state that focusing SOLELY on grades and tests is fair, despite the fact that is not true. I went to a Top 5 college. I was not rich. I grew up with a mom that saved ice cream buckets to reuse them. I saw many rich kids' siblings take entire summers off to study and plan their applications. Whereas kids where I grew up in Detroit held summer jobs at country clubs, ice cream shops, and mall stores to help with bills. How are standardized tests fair with this context in mind? I am getting heavily down voted. I will say this. I was a white kid, whose parents were not wealthy. I was a refugee. And I am in favor of the holistic approach. I think it speaks volumes on here when rich white guys who are typically progressives line up with Trump policies on this matter (the other big one being Israel). I think this is where you take a hard look in the mirror, and question whether what you believe is right. I am not arguing further on this topic. I am a living experience of it. Reducing entire applicants to those metrics that are believed on here to be objective is reductionist, and I promise you, the most accomplished engineers and founders will not come from that pool of applicants you worship.
I’m not talking about perception I’m talking about statistics. There’s lots of poor asians—they are the highest poverty rate group in NYC—and they outperform on standardized metrics as well. Moreover, putting aside that the data shows test prep has limited benefits, you don’t have to be “rich” to prep for standardized tests: https://www.city-journal.org/article/brooklyns-chinese-pione....
> I know several Cali people of Flipino or Vietnamese descent whose parents are not wealthy surgeons, and they also favor the holistic approach
Asians are heavily propagandized to support affirmative action.
Honestly, this paranoiac racist you're replying to is sufficient propaganda against quota-based affirmative action systems, which have been illegal for decades anyway, so it's honestly quite weird he's insisting everyone who opposes them hates "fairness".
Detroit has Black, Asian, Jewish, etc kids of all backgrounds working summer jobs - just like every other diverse major city. Guess you were a refugee fleeing Russian bot hate farms.
I grew up there. Rarely saw any asian kids, although it is changing these days. The Jews were in the affluent neighborhoods (like Grosse Pointe), they wished to be white and avoided Detroit at all costs. But nice try. I am white. Detroit areas I grew up in were mostly black. The few whites there were not rich (we were not rich). But again. I don't expect someone defending legacy systems to understand this. What part of Detroit are you from? Or are you just an apologists for your rich masters who seek to buy their way out of a holistic review, so their kids can attend top schools and America can become segregated again, except this time, on the basis of income and equality? I am not a Russian bot. Are you an Israeli bot that is charged with covering a genocide somewhere? Maybe that's why you want to undermine fairness in the US. Aren't our taxes enough little bot bud?
Who is defending legacy systems? I just see someone saying bigoted nonsense and call it bigoted nonsense.
If you actually cared about fairness in the US, you wouldn't be roleplaying 8-mile to make a point about how easy breezy it is for ethnic minorities because you had it so tough endowed by presenting as the skin tone w/ endless benefit-of-the-doubt in the US. Grosse Point is predominantly populated by self-identified White people.
The part of Detroit where I'm from is none of your business, but based on your twig narrow view of the city, and not mentioning the any of the cities with "Hills" in their name to wax Antisemitic, I know you're from the Detroit area in the same way that DTW is. Heck, any dart thrown at Wayne county would be just as likely to find your particular set of prejudices. Which suburb are you representing? Probably roughed it from the mean streets of Royal Oak, loitering the Farmer Jacks parking lot, gambling on hands of Euchre with your Windsor loonies. Or maybe you were trying to blend into downriver by building deer blinds with the closeted Confederacy. In any case, even if you arrive at the right conclusions, your arguments are self-defeating and unpersuasive.
You didn't see Jewish kids because many present as White and you yourself probably made it feel unsafe for them to identify. And you didn't see Asian kids working summer jobs because you could buy your shampoo at chain grocery stores.
Claiming that regionally underrepresented ethnic minorities are specifically gaming systems while being Schrodinger's Oppressed white refugee really takes the wind out of your own sails when advocating for one means of mitigating racist institutions by employing your own racist rhetoric. You learned your prejudices from the American neighbors that your parents were more comfortable being around, because it's definitely not an export from the Balkans.
That's a lot of words for petty racism. France and Germany don't do holistic admissions or use racial criteria, and of course for historical reasons don't have Jewish quotas either.
But go on and tell us about all the scholarly achievements of the countries who do use ethnic quota systems for their university admissions.
Jewish quotas were removed decades ago. In fact, today, many donors and beneficiaries of the legacy system are Jewish. Today, the disenfranchised are not Jews. In fact, Jews are among the richest ethnic group in the US (look at their median household income). There is a reason many deans got fired from Ivy leagues when they attempted to protect free speech. It is because Ackman and most donors are Jewish, and their threats could make a dean bark on command. I imagine you are still living in the 60s. Most of the disenfranchised in the US today are blacks, Hispanic, SE Asians, and refugees. Half of the billionaire class in these United States today are Jews... So your argument about quotas is ridiculous. Europeans were not allowed education under the French monarchy. We can go back further in fact. Or look at different settings (Ghaza children being denied food and education?). Ridiculous reasoning on your part.
You're the one insisting we need to reduce the number of Asians and Jews at universities. I'm the one saying admissions criteria should be racially and ethnically blind -- not to mention that the universities should drastically increase the size of their freshman classes to keep up with population growth. Go on and cry more about how a quota system isn't keeping some groups down to benefit the groups you favor.
The OP mentioned Jews and Asians (look at the original comment bud). I don't cry. I define my country, and I will do everything in my power to make sure it does not disenfranchise anyone for the benefit of rich minorities at the expense of those who regard America as their homeland. You being a Jew does not entitle you to disenfranchise others, although I sense a theme given the situation abroad. Quotas have been eliminated for decades. The current victims of the world are still the blacks that are trapped in ghettos, the Palestinians being starved by fellows of yours, and many Americans that escaped wars. Our job is making sure anyone in America is given a fair shot. Giving suburban kids points because they never had to hold a job is not something I am willing to do in any of my companies. Feel free to do it in yours
Nobody was proposing "giving suburban kids points because they never had to hold a job". Nor was anyone proposing an entitlement to disenfranchise others based on race or ethnicity, except for you, with the reference to "rich minorities at the expense of those who regard America as their homeland".
Who regard ... ? Implying that the "rich minorities" do not regard America as their home? Go on, explain to me how Chinese kids applying for university have dual loyalties and are exploiting the decent honest American.
"The current victims of the world"? You're reinventing white nationalism for minorities, bud.
I don't know man, my parents were so poor that we lived in a tent some summers and I still managed to score among the top on standardized tests.
Maybe you're just not as intelligent as you think you are, so you're looking for someone to blame and settled on ethnic biases.
Maybe I am not. But then again, maybe you are just academically inclined. I was responding to the ethnic argument the OP posted. Just becuase you tested well does not make you intelligent buddy. Any user here is welcome to compare you and I's accomplishments. I am willing to share my Linkedin with a 3rd party, you do the same. And theyy come up with a verdict. Here is a tip btw. I shared my opinion, you shared yours. Insulting my intelligence makes it no wonder you lived in tents. It is disrespectful. I guess life has yet to kick vulgarity and lack of class out of the tent boy, did it?
People you don't like: Jews, Asians, "tent boy".
People you do like: "the current victims of the world", who apparently aren't a "tent boy", who don't suffer a "lack of class".
Seems like the people you actually like are economically well-off people from aggrieved "victim" identities who feel the need for quota systems to stop those nasty "academically inclined" economically well-off people ("suburban kids", I think were your words) from the non-"victim" identities from competing with your precious ones on fair and even grounds.
High school grades in the U.S. aren’t standardized and aren’t reliable. A standardized test like the SAT is the strongest predictor of college success: https://www.reddit.com/r/Sat/comments/1alp6vh/the_evidence_i... (collecting evidence)
I took a grad marketing class once with a business professor who studied this sort of thing. GMATs rather than SATs but same idea. Basically GMATs mattered more than anything else especially metrics such as letters of recommendation that were basically worthless.
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.
In Quebec, grades are normalized using a statistical formula that factors in how well students from your high school tend to perform in university[0]. This means an average student at an "elite" school could end up with a similar score to a top student from a weaker school.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_score
Wow, interesting. Do students take that into account when selecting which CEGEP to attend?
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.
Most university have their own "adjustment factors" for competitive programs, to counteract this.
I'm not sure if universities knew the origin HS at the time because applications within the province were centralized in a single system, also because there was talk at one point of making the HS known which implies it wasn't?
I don't know how it was when you were applying, but when I applied in 2018 the universities knew your HS and Waterloo was doing adjustments based on your high school.
Over the past 7 years other schools have done so as well. Waterloo's adjustment factor list got FOI'd and made public if you want to find yours.
Ok! The one I can find only goes back to 2016 and I was applying a bit before that. The grid has a lot of missing data since Waterloo probably doesn't have enough data for each cohort and HS to make a good estimate, I guess that would make a province-wide system like in Québec superior since they can adjust based on outcomes from all universities.
After seeing the list I'm kind of sad, I had the choice between two schools at 10 and 13, and chose the one with 13. A 3% difference can make or break an application in any competitive program... Well, at least it wasn't one of those schools with 20 point factor, wow.
Selective universities in the US all do the same thing with high school grades.
There's a reason the military kept using the ASVAB even during the worst parts of COVID pandemic. ASVAB is a very solid predictor of success in training, and in Navy experience it's predictive value generally correlates with with how academic/technical the training pipeline is.
That paper is pretty misleading and flies in the face of most peer-reviewed research (I don't know that journal, for what it's worth).
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.
Basically standardized tests (and GPAs--however corrected) are both good predictors. Depending upon the institution's objectives, other factors may play in as well though they may not correlate that well to GPA in university which may or may not be a good thing depending on your perspective. My personal opinion in that it doesn't really matter past a certain point. (You don't want people to flunk out but the objective isn't really to get good university grades.)
So? In many countries high school grades also aren't standardized and counts 100% for admission. The system still works reliably and not worse than in america.
“Not worse” in what sense? Is there a Stanford/MIT/Caltech/Harvard/N-others of equivalent global prestige/regard in those countries?
Can you quantify that claim?
The SAT isn't strong enough to predict anything. It can generally be answered by someone in their sophomore year at college or even their freshman, depending on what level of courses they are taking.
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.
Why does it matter if a college student, after three years of education, can do well on the entrance exam? Isn't that a given?
It should be. I don't think it is, especially not among the favoured parts of the student population (athletics, legacies, "disadvantaged", "minorities").
Standardized tests are the least gameable. HS grades are pretty poor proxy given the wide range of quality in HS.
HS grades are a joke. All it takes is an unforeseen medical emergency or a teacher who hates you to tank your future. Thank god for standardized tests, otherwise I’d be living a very different life.
On the other hand, I didn’t even graduate high school yet have led a very successful life.
These days, people game them by claiming a disability so they get extra time.
I doubt the typical students scoring 1540+ have time pressure on the SAT. Sure extra time might help someone get from 1400 to 1440, but it’s not going to get you 1400 to 1600.
40 points is 40 points.
Other countries probably have a more centralized, standardized schooling system. In the USA schooling is at the local and state level.
> Other countries probably have a more centralized, standardized schooling system.
Which is basically what the SATs are:
* https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/sat
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT
This is what Baccalaureates, Abitur, Gaokao, etc. are: much more standardized high-school final exams, used as a metric for university admissions.
I was the valedictorian in my high school. I did nothing to earn it, never did any work, and wound up at Caltech grossly underprepared. It took me over a year and a half to figure out how to work and study.
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.
I think it depends on the school at the time. I got rejected by one school probably because I didn't have a varsity letter and had a so-so interview. I got accepted to at least two others that were at least as "good" at the time.
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.
I found out years later that I was a marginal candidate, and ironically it was the interview that made the difference.
Which is the luck of the draw thing. If you're on the bubble for whatever random reasons, a decline or accept on even a marginal measure because you did/didn't click with someone can make the difference.
I was well aware of the vagaries of chance, which is why I applied to the top 10 engineering universities in the country. I was accepted by Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins, and Caltech. As a backup I had ASU.
I knew nothing about Caltech, and by amazing luck it was perfectly suited to what I wanted and my personality.
For a while now, I've been running the D Coffee Haus monthly meetings, where myself and fellow nerds meet and talk about nerdly stuff. It's as much fun as the same thing at Caltech.
I don't remember what schools I applied to in general. But I didn't get into Dartmouth and did get into MIT which was something of shocker. Did go to the latter as an undergrad (though had never visited the campus) and have stayed involved. Started a non-profit at the former as a grad student at Dartmouth and still involved so all good. At the time, didn't seem to make a lot of sense to go to west coast (or UK) in part for schools as air travel was still relatively expensive.
HS grades are gameable. Just look at public highschools across the US. A significant percentage of graduates can't read. And the policies won't let teachers fail or hold-back students so they cook their grades to push them through the system.
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.
Also not that uncommon for the star HS quarterback to be functionally illiterate yet passing all classes with the required GPA for athletics participation.
To be fair, the absurd thing is that in order to have a career in sport he excellent at, he needs to go to university. Not being university material is stupid reason for not being able to do sports professionally.
Agreed. And it's becomming more common in the US pro leagues to see players who only completed high school. But the majority still play at least a year or two at the college level. It's a filter, and D1 college sports is a big business in its own right.
If HS grades were used for admissions in the US, it would incentivize college-bound high schoolers to avoid challenging classes like AP classes, advanced STEM classes, history classes beyond state requirements, etc.
The optimal strategy would be to take the easiest classes required to graduate, since there's no national authority to normalize grades across classes.
You just give multipliers for advanced classes then. That's how my high school calculated GPA - if you took all "A" level classes your max GPA was 4.0, but if you took AP classes and aced them you could end up with a 4.3 or something like that
That's how almost all highschools and colleges do advanced classes, Honors classes are graded on a 4.5 scale and AP classes on a 5.0 scale (and also count for college credit so you get to skip some intro classes after admission).
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!
High school grades are gameable, probably moreso than athletic scholarships or standardized tests.
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).
Having HS grades count 100% is a really bad idea. Not because of anything about the schools, but because HS age isn't representative of people's abilities. I had terrible HS grades due to a complete lack of interest. After growing up a little and getting my act together, I got A's in college. Thank goodness they didn't base my admission on HS grades.
They had that previously in some places. California universities used to not have affirmative action (quotas) but they apparently removed consideration of test scores to help achieve the racial composition they felt was “correct” in another way, since it was resulting in a skew towards whites and Asians in their view. Not sure what the process is today.
Athletic scholarships and standardized test admissions are way less gameable than HS grades
Yea, especially since the people who get the highest grades in HS, in the US where you have a decent amount of latitude to pick your classes, are generally just the students who refused to take any hard class.
Or the ones that do 10+ faked “AP” classes over the summer and transfer those credits in. Not kidding.
In my high school, the honors classes gave an extra point for your GPA average. So the "easy A" classes weren't quite the ticket.
My high school gave an extra half point for honors and a whole point for AP classes*, but my experience was that regular classes were easier by _far_ more than that (at least in cases where all three levels were offered). I had disliked biology in middle school and separated from the "AP crowd" to take honors environmental science instead, and it felt at least two or three letter grades easier than the other AP sciences.
Of course the top tier students were likely to achieve an A regardless, so the more challenging courses would look better. For me though it probably would've been optimal to choose easier classes; admissions might not even be aware that a more difficult option was offered.
* If I recall correctly though, colleges were usually interested primarily in the unweighted GPA.
Athletics + Test cheating:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varsity_Blues_scandal
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2023-12-01/...
https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2019/03/admission-case-inf...
That’s not gaming that’s cheating.
Standardized tests work much better than high school grades, and also handle cases like young students who go to university at or before the "normal" age of a high school student.
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.
> GRE aren't perfect
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 native speakers of English, the language part of the exam is just seen as a general test of intelligence.
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.
Have you actually taken the exam or looked into a sample test?
There is no intelligence in most parts, it is just you memorizing a lot of words that you will never hear or use. Maybe you are confusing different parts of the exam.
> 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.
That's different test/s. Programs will require TOEFL/IELTS for that purpose.
Yes, I have taken the test in question.
The vocabulary is not that difficult. If you regularly read literature as a child and adolescent, you will know most of the vocab in the test. Most people consider reading and having a decent vocabulary as signs of education and intelligence.
Beyond that, the verbal GRE is mostly about making connections between different words and concepts - just a test of reasoning ability.
TOEFL/IELTS are for a completely different purpose. That's why I said that the verbal GRE is only really meaningful for native speakers. You wouldn't expect someone who learned English as a second language to have the same command over the language as a native speaker. That doesn't mean that they're not smart.
There is intelligence. You could take just a few days to prepare to get 95th to 99th percentile while other people take 6 months to prepare.
Ungameable… lol. Take a look at Asian countries for what happens when you rely only on grades… cheating becomes the norm since numbers are all that matter.
Cheating is not the norm in Asian countries.
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.
Forced to TA students like this in the US, both foreign and domestic, I'd say the real downside is that this produces incredibly brittle individuals. "Failure isn't an option" is not an attitude compatible with pushing your own boundaries or even just life in general.
Worth noting that “failure is not an option” wasn’t even said by Gene Krantz. That ethos doesn’t work at NASA any more than anywhere else.
But social mobility for serious kids is much easier in the United States than elsewhere. It's also in USA that going to your local state university or community college isn't a large barrier to your future career, and transfers are common.
And when it comes to the levers of power, connections are still what defines future leaders in Asia, not grades. This entire idea of "serious students" are ultimately just a bone to throw to the masses.
> But social mobility for serious kids is much easier in the United States than elsewhere.
This is an unrelated point, is your contention that the US is better off with unserious students? Social mobility / wealth accumulation for the masses does suck in other countries but it's great that people are still seriously motivated by schools. It's a big reason those students immigrant to the US and companies here hire those people in masses.
>This is an unrelated point, is your contention that the US is better off with unserious students?
It's that America has the capacity to fully absorb it's talent so it's not a problem. The reason why other countries have more is because they don't have the capacity to absorb them due to less opportunities so the competition is higher. Many of those "serious" students in China or India will still end working in factory jobs and delivery drivers because they weren't good enough.
>It's a big reason those students immigrant to the US and companies here hire those people in masses
Eh, if they were hiring domestic students I wouldn't say there would be much of difference. Unless if you are running a startup, most of these "serious" students will be just writing basic CRUD apps. Value comes from experience here, not talent. Well, if I was American though, I wouldn't bother competing againt millions of desperate Chinese or Indians for opportunity cost anyways, I'd be going more into law or finance. And those fields are less diverse.
I was just about to comment on Asian countries and mobility.
If you do academics only, there's also the phenomenon where getting into the right Kindergarten-level school determines your entire school career. In many countries, your current school is a significant factor of your next school.
Imagine not getting into the right Kindergarten having life-long consequences.
Doing an SAT prep course is cheating, fyi. These tests were meant to be a fair assessment and that required not teaching to or training for the test. That, of course, went out the window, but when I was in high school there was at least lip service to it and statements from administrators that we shouldn’t be taking SAT prep courses. We were instructed to take the official prep exam to know the format, but otherwise go in blind.
My wife is Asian (born there) and when I told her and her family this they were literally speechless.
And yet the innovation density is lower
HS grades are quite gamble—-the high school wants to show off better admissions stats and so gives out easy A’s.
This is not a hypothetical btw, this really happens.
I thought most countries just do general country-wide admission tests?
No, at least not for all subjects. I think over here medicine still has an admission test. Engineering used to have one long ago.
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.
I think a century from now, we'll look back on privatized higher education the way we look back on privatized health care: Something that evolved by a series of compromises, that society depends on, but that is perpetuating inequality while also gouging us and not making us healthier.
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.
In the US, you can look back on the previous century of privatized education. No need to wait.
Edit: Oh, you think in a century we won’t still be in this situation? Hmmmm.
> Any open criteria for "merit" will quickly turn the student body into a monocultural freak show.
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?
The same group in society has been lamenting “too many Jews” in higher education for generations — and has several Supreme Court cases against their discrimination.
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.
I think if you look at polling, people’s feelings on admissions is heavily influenced by whether the criteria helps/hurts them. Especially when it comes to students and parents.
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?
For a large majority purely numerical merit based wouldn't change what school they could go to, but it would make it so much easier for them to plan and know where they can go since now its no longer based on the whims of some random bureaucrats.
So most people would benefit, a tiny minority who currently unfairly get into elite colleges would be hurt.
That’s certainly one possibility for “merit” but “merit” could mean lots of things. Stanford goes big into athletics. Perhaps merit could mean they’ll only take students who placed in the top 10 in their state in some athletic competition. Perhaps merit means if your parents didn’t attend, you won’t get in.
Merit doesn’t have to mean SAT scores.
It could mean many things, but you’d still need to explain the monocultural freakshow remark.
I think you injected a lot of assumptions in there.
Only that "monocultural" is a dog whistle for "Asian". If you have a plausible alternative hypothesis for what that could mean, I'm all ears.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...
monocultural means all the students spent all their free time doing the type of stuff that helps get you into elite institutions and none of their time doing other things. By hyper focusing on a few activities that are known to be liked by admissions you create a monoculture.
You are interpreting “cultural” too narrowly. It could also just mean that if you only focus on grades you get the kind of people who get good grades—-and not the people who don’t do as well grade wise, or have other priorities and bring a diversity of experience to campus culture. This doesn’t have to be a dog whistle for anything racial.
Nah, he's just describing CalTech. :-)
I think that's the trick. These university admissions committees are essentially choosing the ruling class for the next generation. What makes a good ruling class depends on more than just test scores and grades, so admissions committees look at other things the applicant has done, and at least they used to also do an interview with an alumnus. All of this is fairly gameable though, and the kind of person who would excessively game these metrics might not be person who they want to choose. Knowing that someone is the child of someone who already was admitted and indoctrinated into the values of the university is a pretty good signal that this person is more likely to be the kind of person they want to admit.
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.
Well, my post sure was a doozy. I wasn't thinking along racial lines, and I'm sorry if it seemed to imply that. Downvotes humbly accepted.
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.
which monoculture?
side note: “monoculture” and “freak show” seem incompatible. an entirely homogenous student body doesn’t sound too freaky
Legacy admissions and holistic (discriminatory) admissions should be disallowed as long as these universities receive public fundings directly or indirectly.
Yep, I think these two things can be true at the same time:
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.
I think you could still compromise on 2. by requiring legacy or other discriminatory admissions practices to be a small percentage of the students they give full ride merit scholarships on, or similar.
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.
I like this idea, like there could be tiers of grant eligibility instead of all or nothing.
I there is a difference in funds given gratis, and funds used to pay for service rendered.
There's also a difference between giving money to a school, and giving money to a student to buy an education they want
Id be interested to read about some "holistic" admissions success stories. There must be by this point tons of examples of students admitted "holistically" who are now doing great things because of the opportunity they were given.
Most, if not all, Canadian admissions are holistic. All the universities are pretty easy to get into as long as you have the grades, especially for undergrad. As a result, for undergrad at least, no one really cares what school you went to.
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.
I dunno about other colleges, but Caltech you earned the degree. Many students dropped out because of the workload. There were a couple that were able to coast through, but they had IQs easily over 160.
They didn't do legacy admits as far as I knew.
But what it's like today, I have no information.
You should be extremely skeptical of people who claim to have tested IQs above 130 and also believe those tests are not inherently noisy at the top end. Many modern tests lump everyone with 130+ into the same category [1]. An IQ of "easily over 160" is not a clinically valid finding by any standard IQ test that I am aware of.
This is because standard IQ tests are generally designed to measure around the median of the distribution (70-130), and so there is a lot of variance in measurement at the top end. If you happen to have a bad testing day and you make a dumb mistake, your measured IQ might drop by a fairly large number of points -- or, conversely, if you got lucky and guessed right, your measured IQ could be much higher than reality.
For example, the original Raven's Progressive Matrices says [2; page 71]
> For reason's already given, Progressive Matrices (1938) does not differentiate, very clearly between young-children, or between adults of superior intellectual capacity.
where "superior intellectual capacity" is defined as an IQ of ~125 or higher, and (if I am interpreting it correctly), the table on page 79 of [2] says missing a single question could drop a 20-year old from scoring 95 percentile to scoring 90 percentile. That's 5 IQ points on a single question! If you had a bad day, or didn't get enough sleep, you could test significantly worse than your actual "IQ."
Anyone that actually has an IQ of 160 with even a modicum of self awareness should understand that the IQ test they took is inherently noisy at the top end of the scale because sometimes people have off days.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_classification#IQ_classific...
[2] https://rehabilitationpsychologist.org/resources/SPM%20with%...
Consider that Hal Finney was next door to me in the dorm. I've never met a smarter fellow.
I agree that actually measuring his IQ would have been a dodgy idea, but there was no doubt he was a unicorn. He himself never made any claims about it. It was just something you realized about him after a while.
I agree with you that smart people exist, and I have met a few in college as well.
The main thing I want to add is that using IQ to quantify intelligence at the top end of the scale is scientifically bogus and in my opinion harmful because it validates depressed / insecure / chronically online people who use their "160 IQ" as a way to put down other people or to peddle pseudo-scientific nonsense. Those people often need genuine psychiatric help and (in my opinion) such validation only harms them.
I'm sure that Hal Finney was exceptionally smart, though. :)
Hal hid his intelligence. You'd never know it until you got to know him. He was well-liked, and even put up with the likes of me. (A lot of techers put up with me, and even generously helped me to not flunk out. I had a lot of growing up to do.)
I would have had a lot less trouble with Quantum Mechanics if I'd realized that nobody understands it, it's just that the math works. I thought it was just me that thought it was crazy.
I've heard MIT was similar. But their graduates have never had quite the prestige and easy in to influential circles as the boys (eventually girls, too) down the street.
Same at Georgia Tech.
It was easily the most work and effort I had to put into anything, tons of peoole dropping/failing out, and the average GPA for most students was not that hot. Definitely not close to the well-known Harvard-tier 3.65+
Thats the exception then; at Stanford all you need to graduate is a pulse.
In CS/CE/math/physics?
Walter, can you give a rough timeframe to go with that anecdote?
It was the same in the '90s. Something like a third didn't make it through in 4 years, although a long tail managed it in 5 or more.
A classmate dropped out in his sophomore year, and 10 years later asked to come back and finish. Caltech said sure, and aced the courses and earned his degree.
I asked him, were you smarter after 10 years? He laughed and said nope, he was just willing to work this time!
(Another gem about Caltech - once you're admitted, they'll give you endless chances to come back and finish. Your credits did not expire.)
One of my friends finally graduated after 6 years there. He endured endless students mumbling "7 years, down the drain!" as they passed by. (The line was from Animal House.)
late 70's
Assuming you work in tech, that's because the only school that matters is Waterloo and 90+% of Waterloo students move to the USA after grad.
Almost all our Canadian hires have been at Waterloo at some point. Even when we do random resume pulls and interviews, Waterloo seems to have the most competent set of candidates when you’re talking about new grads.
Because they already have 2 years of experience due to co-op.
> All the universities are pretty easy to get into as long as you have the grades, especially for undergrad.
The is partially true but leaves out an important difference between Canadian and American admissions. In Canada you are admitted to a particular major, not the university as a whole.
E.g. At the University of Waterloo, CS and some of the engineering majors can have < 5% admissions rate and are extremely merit based. At the same time, applying for the general Bachelor of Arts at UWaterloo is uncompetitive and very easy to get admitted.
Pretty sure this is true for most universities in the US as well. It was for me nearly 30 years ago at a big state school
> But once you're in, grade inflation is everywhere and people aren't actually working super hard.
Clearly you’ve never enrolled in a EECS class at Cal
I was #3 in highschool out of a 550 graduating class. I thought I was bright.
Went to Cal for mechanical engineering, and while I survived the engineering classes, the physics classes wore me out and the math classes were almost impossible for me. I barely made it out of there.
I honestly wish I went somewhere easier so that it wasn't a constant struggle to keep up and survive. I think I would have actually learned more.
I took a Math 1A class (intro to calc) at Cal where the prof turned his back on class at the start of the hour, then proceeded to mumble incoherently for 60 minutes while filling a chalkboard with equations. He’d turn back around at the end of the hour. Many students brought pillows. I learned literally nothing in lecture.
This professor wasn’t demanding, he was just making zero effort to actually teach.
Great researchers are not necessarily great teachers, especially for intro courses. Anecdotally, I think this is a common issue at “prestigious” schools.
I know that feelings but be assured, it’s better to be mediocre when you’re surrounded by amazing people than to be the best in a place where no one cares. I can guarantee you learnt more than other places even if you don’t feel like that at the moment.
I've had 20 years to think about this, and while it was always fun to get the positive vibes telling people I went to Cal, I still think UC Davis or SLO would have been better.
It's not like my only other option was to go to CSU East Bay, although I know people that built decent careers from there too to be honest.
I’ve heard people say this about difficult colleges or degrees before, so you’re not alone. The push to make something overly hard can simply leave some capable people behind by not matching their style or pace of learning. But also I think some of the less famous universities simply care about teaching while the top ones leave that to random grad students and instead brag about their research credentials. The thing is, professors doing research doesn’t help students learning.
I think all that matters is that most if not all professors care about teaching. And my experience at top universities has been that most still care about teaching and the grad students they need to rely on is because of the class size. There were definitely some that were basking in their own glory from the past, but those were few. Can’t tell about all universities, but I’d assume it’s the same everywhere. The reality is that given what it takes to become a tenured professor, you’re bound to have at least a few who generally suck at teaching.
It comes down to the notion that America is a classless society being farcical. There has always been an elite that jealously guards their power and influence. Entrance into it - or the ersatz version that is the bourgeoisie - has always (along with immigration) been modulated based on what was most likely to preserve the existence of that elite.
And it's not a conspiracy; it just shows how much power that elite has, that they're able to make these things happen when they need them to. A sudden turn away from nativism and condoning of proto-anarchy when the black population (first slave, then free) threatened to upend the social order. Socialism lite (and more immigration, but only from preferred European nations) to head off full-blown socialism after capitalism first drove to excess and then blew itself up. Truman getting the VP spot. Bank bailouts (so many bank bailouts). Even the begrudging "opening" of elite institutions to Jews, blacks, Asians (staring down the barrel of their own, rival, institutions).
Anything to prevent their power and influence decentralizing in an enduring manner.
Isn't the point that _all_ admissions from a range of institutions over a period of years (decades?) were "holistic" admissions, and thus basically all post-college success stories are holistic success stories? Further, _it's actively harmful_ as well as unfounded to post-hoc try to say that person X would _only_ have been admitted under a holistic framework.
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.
This has actually been one of the ideas floated by regulators.
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.
Maybe the way would be to correlate all admissions with success, and add a feedback loop.
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.
> Also, I suspect success has to be quantified, which might be hard.
I wouldn't say hard. It's expensive, time consuming, and the people who can perform qual to quant conversions usefully need to have a foot firmly planted on each side of the subject matter fence.
More to the point, nobody's really interested in compiling this kind of data. Adding dimensions beyond income to your definition of "success" would result in e.g. revealing there isn't anyone from your school successfully practicing family law.
This may not count as “holistic”, but my grand-uncle went to City College of NY when it was both open admissions and free. He had the equivalent of an 8th grade education in his home country.
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.
Seems reasonably. You and to discriminate? That's disappointing, but nobody is going to stop you, but the public tax dollars sure as hell shouldn't support your discrimination
Gating based on SAT is literally discrimination. It is also not fair, because those kids got lucky being born to the right parents. But just because it's discrimination and unfair, doesn't mean it's bad.
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.
The entire notion of "elite" universities is discriminatory. If going to your average state university with high admissions was okay then there wouldn't nearly be as much drama.
If the elite colleges are not comprised of the rich and well connected it beats the entire point of an elite college.
> If the elite colleges are not comprised of the rich and well connected it beats the entire point of an elite college.
Depends on how you define "elite", and I assume you mean some sort of hereditary or economic-class-based definition. But elite colleges could (and should) still work if they run on competency-based merit. I believe elite talent in as many fields of endeavour should absolutely be catered to.
> The entire notion of "elite" universities is discriminatory.
Well, when you put it that way, many things are discriminatory, for better or worse.
> If the elite colleges are not comprised of the rich and well connected it beats the entire point of an elite college
The functional purpose of a meritocratic elite is to concentrate the smartest and most ambitious in your nation (in each generation) so they can cross leverage each other. This dates back to feudal societies switching to a civil exam system during Enlightenment. (Also in imperial China.) That’s a productive form of discrimination.
I think it's the opposite actually. I think the moment you're consciously, systematically trying to optimize for "smartest and most ambitious" on a meritocratic basis is the point in which your respective field falls into decline and is relegated to slow, incremental improvements rather than revolutionary jumps. Primairly because "the smartest and most ambitious" are more about seeing that specific field as vehicle for wealth and prestige rather than actual passion. Many of the legends of the past were not good enough for the elite institutions of their time.
I mean really, it's the question of why this over preexisting patronage systems. And looking at the "achivements" of this so-called "meritocratic elite" this last century (especially in enshittification) leaves alot to be desired.
It's just one self-serving 1% attempting to ursurp another 1%. And they certainly aren't going to be solving your problems. They don't have the ability to solve the coordination problem, the housing crisis, involution, climate change and Donald Trump.
> Primairly because "the smartest and most ambitious" are more about seeing that specific field as vehicle for wealth and prestige rather than actual passion
...why? STEM programs have weed-out classes for a reason. Astrophysics PhDs, similarly, are not vehicles for wealth or prestige, but must (and do) filter out below-standards candidates early.
> And looking at the "achivements" of this so-called "meritocratic elite" this last century (especially in enshittification) leaves alot to be desired.
That wasn't created by the meritocratic elite, that was created by the "preexisting patronage systems" where rich pays to get their kids influential credential so that they can continue to have outsized influence on the country...
> They don't have the ability to solve the coordination problem, the housing crisis, involution, climate change and Donald Trump.
The current system is what caused those, why do you think that is much better?
>The current system is what caused those, why do you think that is much better?
I don't think it's better. But I don't think it's worse either. It's exchanging one elite for another with the similar incentives. But what I would object though is how the education system has been essentially appropiated as a system of elite differentiation (and social mobility) rather than improving the 80% as function of overall social welfare. Why are we caring about a handful of colleges compared the hundreds of others we have? The opportunity cost really is to better spend our resources and time pushing up the average, mediocre student rather than focusing on all these unproductive signalling mechanisms. And I think from there, that's where the real saviours will emerge.
Props to California for doing this. Stanford showing its true colors here.
Yes, perfectly reasonable to pull state funding for private enrichment. Now, all we have to do is get rid of the racism in “holistic admission” and use a demonstrably fair system like performance on standardized tests.
What about schools where standardized tests are insufficient?
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.
The inability for a test to have sensitivity at the top end isn’t some fixed property of the universe. It’s just a property of the SAT. Harder tests are possible. The only thing that matters is that candidates know that it’s not at the whim of some human who has decided that 25% Jews is enough or 33% Asians is enough or whatever and that it’s by a fixed scoring rubric.
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.
I'd argue for what the ETH and the Independent University of Moscow do.
Make them sit some of the university's exams, and if they pass they get in.
Wish granted, you now 1000 spots in your freshman class and 5000 applicants with identical scores and 4.0 GPAs. And there's another 8000 applicants whose scores are within the individual variance of the test. You wouldn't drop their application just because they had a bad day would you? We're a meritocracy here so no cheating and choosing randomly—that's not how you get the very best. What's the next criteria?
So I made a bad test and now I have a problem? Because you can make tests quite difficult. e.g. the GRE mathematics section is trivial to score maximum on, but there's no reason for that to be the case. It could be made harder.
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-...
[flagged]
Also props to Stanford. It's not just completely reasonable but morally just to not take public funding you don't need. Only moderate props, because presumably they did the math and picked the more profitable of the two... but props none the less.
Here's another perspective.
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.
[0] https://www.thomasaquinas.edu/
This would sort of work except that Harvard already built an endowment of $50 billion based on all that lying. Unless you're going to claw back that money, you're just letting them pull the ladder up behind them.
If as you hypothesise universities are focussed on jobs, how do you explain the countless utterly useless degrees they keep pumping out en mass?
The best way to do this has always been to accept a ton of students and weed out a big percent of them in intro courses.
Have the basic grades and test scores? Ok welcome to CS1 where 2/3 of you will not make it thanks for playing
Moving to a pure merit-based system would be a great idea IF universities were primarily designed to educate people. They are not—anyone with half a brain can get a world-class education from ChatGPT, Wikipedia, Khan Academy, and library books. Paying a university "for the education" is like paying $100,000 for tap water because it’s served in a fancy glass with a Latin motto printed on it.
Universities are cartels of prestige and access.
Connections matter most in the oncoming era of dwindling opportunities (because each one is more valuable and leverages more resources). Legacy enables alumni to meet each other.
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.
Speaking as a curious European, just how much in 'donations' is required to get your kid into a place like Stanford?
I think there’s a couple justifiable reasons to have legacy admissions. One, help the poor, smart kids meet the rich kids. Together, they can get more done than separately.
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.
I think legacy admissions are bad and wrong. But I also don't think that removing legacy admissions will make a dent, not on the state of college admissions, and especially not on any broader socioeconomic context. Prestige schools doing bad things only highlights that it's a mistake to let prestige schools exist in the first place.
I think it might.
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.
I think I'm not understanding your comment correctly--are you saying that you think Stanford should be shut down?
No, I'm saying that prestige schools are a symptom of a broader socioeconomic failing - something about how power is obtained and maintained, which I struggle to articulate properly. Shutting down prestige schools does nothing for the broader failing in broader society; at best, it papers over a visible sign of the failing.
It’s interesting to see that merit best admissions is pushed from both sides of political spectrum - legacy admissions and DEI.
You’re close. The issue is we can’t discuss class, so they look for all sorts of other analogs which they can get the wealthy folks on board with. DEI is acceptable to the wealthy because they ultimately see less of a threat there than from a person of the same race from the South or Midwest. In the workplace, the female Stanford legacy can still be underprivileged then thanks to gender versus the white male from a poor state with a land grant degree.
both DEI and legacy are going away so it works in your favour.
I think legacy admissions is only supported by the elites —be they leftists or rightists. Normal leftists and normal rightists don’t support legacy admissions (pay to play). I think the vast majority of people would support fair admissions (GPA + something else that signals academic aptitude).
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.
How do you compare GPA across different schools?
Isn’t that why standardized tests like the SAT/ACT… exist?
I think you can gauge that from the historical performance of students from those sources. Of course, there is a lag as schools either improve or dilute grades.
Hmm. Yeah it is a hard problem to solve. It is basically a mass interviewing system.
I agree with you but I meant both democrats and republicans are pushing merit based admissions. Gavin Newsom against legacy and Trump against DEI.
On the point people vastly prefer GPA - I don’t agree because people on the left prefer DEI and affirmative action.
I think even most democrats oppose it: https://manhattan.institute/article/study-finds-most-democra.... Though unfortunately, it appears that what swings democrats from support to non-support is learning that it hurts asians, not just white people. :-/
You can't be a leftist and support legacy admissions. You can be a right-liberal and support legacy admissions, but even the mildest mild-mild leftism would reject that kind of thing.
If you look at the political tendencies of the elite universities that themselves practice legacy admissions, those tendencies are overwhelmingly to the left of the American political center. I know it’s popular to make a “no true Scotsman” argument against anyone to the right of Mao Zedong but it’s silly.
I think you are failing to distinguish individual elements of the universities you are commenting on. Administration and faculty are very different people. Admin need faculty for prestige, but faculty need admin for funding. Are a majority of prominent faculty members advocating for legacy admissions?
You’re implying that there’s some crypto-right-wing people somewhere in the university and that these people are solely responsible for legacy admissions, but you’re not even willing to state this absurd implication, let alone provide any evidence for it.
I'm not implying anything. I am forwardly stating that you are generalizing a very diverse group of institutions.
I think the thing to understand is that university professors are upper middle class.
They are not particularly aligned with the working class or with leftism. They're usually centrists or liberals.
I think your confusions stems from believing that liberals are the left. Liberals however, are pro-free trade ultra-propertarians. Liberals are to the right of anti-free trade populists.
Your “no true Scotsman” argument is tedious and irritating. Please stop annoying me with it.
It's a no-true-Scotsman argument. Things have definitions.
How can you say that they are leftists, when they do not fit the common definitions and you refuse to provide your own?
So by what definition of leftist thought could this possibly be okay?
Wikipedia has one (ideologies that seek social equality and egalitarianism), which this is clearly incompatible with. It's certainly unacceptable to socialists, communists, anarchists, syndicalists or social democrats.
Liberals are not leftists. Liberals are mostly inviolable-property + free-trade type people.
Soviet Russia was not an egalitarian society, it was a brutal dictatorship governed by an effective ruling class of party members. Mainland China is the same. If that’s your standard of “leftism”, you’re drawing the line somewhere to the far left of any self-proclaimed communist party that has ever held power in any country. This is clearly absurd.
So you're saying that Soviet Russia doesn't fit the Wikipedia definition of leftism.
I don't see how that makes US university professors leftists. What definition of leftism are you using?
You’re the commie version of those annoying right wingers who like to start semantic arguments that the Nazis weren’t really right wing.
Leftism is an incoherent and false ideology fundamentally unsuited to the governance of human societies. Once you recognize that fact, the hypocrisy of actual leftists will cease to surprise you.
Leftism isn't one ideology. There are many kinds of leftism.
But why do you refuse to define it?
And yet they don't.
Liberals are not leftists. They are not egalitarians and they are not really for social equality.
Allowing universities legacy admissions is a position so far to the right that I don't think any political party anywhere outside of the US propagates for it. There isn't a social democrat in Denmark or something who has vaguely leftist view but who also believes that universities should admit people based on their parents having gone there.
If anyone really favored social equality they would support abolishing the elite universities entirely. Anything short of that still produces an identifiable class of people who attended these institutions, and it’s the existence of that class in the first place rather than its partly hereditary nature that runs counter to social equality.
Harvard-style elite universities, absolutely, and actual leftists do support abolishing them.
CMU-style, or ETH-style or Independent University of Moscow-style elite universities are however probably an efficient use of resources.
Pick up a copy of Palo Alto and read thru that. Lots of interesting Stanford history there.
Phrased differently, "California stops offering cal grants to qualified low-income students accepted into Stanford"
Who exactly is being punished here? Stanford has no shortage of applicants.
DEI for rich mid-wits is fine for anyone else it’s Communism.
Stanford became Harvard.
Was there a point in recent memory where it wasn’t? As a non-American I’d always considered them to be the Oxford and Cambridge (respectively) of the US.
Some would say Harvard and Yale are the Oxford and Cambridge of the US. But we’re a big country, and we have a lot of schools. Many lists of top schools include these, alphabetically ordered:
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.
They're West coast. "Elite" schools in the U.S. are typically East coast (old monied).
Just want to point out that “old money” in the USA is a different thing than “old money” in Europe. The whole USA is only around 350 years old.
Some of the American old money came from European old money.
Very, very few. Those were mostly loyalists and left in 1776.
That would be Harvard - MIT.
But Stanford is in the same league for sure.
They all became each other. The second (or maybe first) most popular degree at Harvard now is CS. Students apply to all the Ivy+ schools and a few backup options, maybe 20 in total, and you pick the best one you get accepted to. All the students have done the same things, they have very similar GPAs and scores, they all mostly went to Ivy feeder high schools, they do all the same extra curriculars like math and CS club and teaching underprivileged kids to code. It's all the same. Maybe they are more easily distinguished for grad school.
Seems fair. Stanford isn't in the business of conferring education. It's in the business of conferring status.
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.
No surprise. C'mon, they host the Hoover Institution and celebrities and rich people pay coaches to get their kids in. It's a power funnel racket.
PS: I'm an ex-Stanford FTE.
Has Thomas Sowell ever commented on legacy admissions? I can't find anything but I imagine he would not be a fan, just like he isn't a fan of affirmative action.
People went to jail for those bribes. It’s not a legal tactic to begin with
They went to jail because they bribed people who were not authorized to accept bribes instead of the people who were (with the latter people charging much more, of course).
Just because the bribes were too small. If they were large enough to help build a building, then they become legal again.
It was because the bribes benefited a small number of administrators instead of being equitably distributed across administrators
No, it's because the money went to individual employees directly, rather than being received by the institution.
While I was being glib, that is an insignificant detail in the context of this post about legacy admissions.
The point is you can gain admission via some nebulous definition of merit, some combination of merit and knowing someone who gained admission before, or paying for admission.
Also, while the “institution” receives the money, I guarantee some people (the highest admins and their friends - fund managers, construction contractors, etc) gain more than most others (e.g. adjunct teachers and students).
You’re defining a country club. Every layer of our society grosses me out.
It's a dangerous precedent. Ending legacy and donor admissions and other forms of preference to elites' kids will inevitably lead to loss of value of higher education on one side, and elites being uneducated and Trump-style dumb, on the other. Because elites will still remain the elites no matter what, unless society plunges into bloodbath, physically killing or exiling all of them, French revolution-style - but at least now they can be educated.
The GI Bill fundamentally changed college.
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.
A compromise would be to double the undergrad class size while limiting legacy to something less than or equal to what it is today in absolute terms. Many more deserving students would get and Stanford would get to keep its cash cow. But of course that would entail Palo Alto to let it expand, which it very much wants to do. And good luck with that.
some people in my circle are reacting to this kind of thing exactly how i expected.
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.
> admit the relatives of their alumni or big donors
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.
I mean this means that the alumni are worth more money than the state awards, right?
the rich people win again!
Despicable.
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i wouldn't be opposed to legacy admits if they were required to pay full tuition and judged to a higher standard: the legacy admit must have both a higher gpa, and sat score than the inbound class average.
I’m not from the US so apologies if I miss something that seems obvious, but why should they have a higher standard instead of the same standard?
You didn’t miss anything. That was a bizarre statement.
as a legacy you could choose to apply as non-legacy. but your odds would be lower (you're competing with more people)
So being legacy puts you at a disadvantage with no advantage?
you'd be in a different pool for consideration, less competitors, higher odds.
Then you are against legacy admits as your policy would actively discriminate against them.
it would not. your odds would be better (you'd be in a different pool, competing with fewer peiple).
That doesn't reconcile with what you said:
> judged to a higher standard: the legacy admit must have both a higher gpa, and sat score than the inbound class average
yeah i didnt write it clearly, but i meant "legacy admit" to mean a "legacy admit pathway", which a legacy applicant could choose to not use.
Legacy is better than people think. The undergrad academics at T10 universities really aren't anything special. People want to go because of the connections with wealthy & well-connected students, but then complain when wealthy well-connected students get a easier ride. You fill Harvard of Stanford with only people with 1600 SATs will turn them into places you dont really want to go to.
> The undergrad academics at T10 universities really aren't anything special.
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.
Definitely has the opposite experience going from an around 100 ranked university to an around 20 ranked university. Maybe it depends on the department but I noticed a massive difference in the students, difficulty of classes, how well the professors taught in multiple classes in multiple departments. There were exceptions but there was definitely a general trend.
Ambition and a sense of entitlement (manifest destiny) built America.
When you prefer legacy students, you perpetuate the kind of discrimination in effect when their parents and grandparents were admitted.
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.
Stanford undergrad is only 22% white so this clearly isn't happening in practice.
> When you prefer legacy students, you perpetuate the kind of discrimination in effect when their parents and grandparents were admitted.
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 of these universities have vast investment funds. Expanding would indeed allow them to provide more education, but that does not appear to be their goal.
Expanding need-blind isn't the same as overall expansion.
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.
But it's the people here that want more access to these elite circles.
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.
Yes. Imagine if you could get an elite Wall Street or Consulting job based significantly on who your dad is. That would be unfair, discriminatory, and otherwise pretty terrible, except for the already elite and wealthy. Oh, wait...that already happens, and it's indeed terrible in all the ways you would predict. This really needs to be cracked down on, but the rich and powerful will always support it.
The rich having their way is the blueprint for a third-world country.
Research from Opportunity Insights shows legacy preferences reduce social mobility while multiple studies find no evidence legacy admits enhance campus culture or alumni giving beyond what could be achieved through need-blind admissions.
The same Opportunity Insights found that legacies were more qualified than typical applicants.
Top universities don’t exist for social mobility, that is merely happenstance that the people that want to pay have gatekept access to the purse by having attended university.
> You fill Harvard of Stanford with only people with 1600 SATs will turn them into places you dont really want to go to.
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...
Yes sure there will be some elite purely academic places, but Caltech so small its a blip, most high schools are larger.
> The undergrad academics at T10 universities really aren't anything special. People want to go because of the connections with wealthy & well-connected students, but then complain when wealthy well-connected students get a easier ride.
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.)
Which was always absurd as there's no less vestimentary affluence signaling in uniform high schools than in any other.
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.
They'll turn into Cal, where people absolutely want to go.
You couldn't even do that - only about 500 people get a perfect SAT score per year.
It sounds hyperbolic and they probably mean high school students with 1500+ SAT-I, 5 AP everything, and other community leadership achievements.
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?
US universities have always thrived on full price paying foreigners, especially at the graduate level. They also make for very cheap and docile TA's
People with 1600 SATs tend to be ultra-productive, down-to-Earth individuals. (My high school had dozens of them.)
Legacy creates an closed, self-reinforcing, entitled aristocracy.
What kind of society do you want?
Stanford has become legacy + LGBTQ only for undergrads. Even their math departments are filled with only them!
Everyone at Stanford and Harvard has 1600s. even the legacies
Exactly, that Austrian woman that tried to get rid of all her wealth found out that its impossible because even if she’s at £0 she knows too many people that will support her ideas, drive too much publicity to her causes, and food, shelter, board seats, academia, and everything else is always accessible. The path doesn’t have to be forged.
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.
This is such a bizarre and gross take. Yes our history is a history of class struggle. But history does progress. For thousands of years we were supposed to be property of kings so shall we mean revert to that?
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.
> They are doing startups, public policy, research, tech leadership etc.
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.
A lot of the CEOs in the US currently come from this uni. It's called IIT, in case you're curious. There's also IIMs which are based on the same model but for business studies. Also no legacy admissions. Also produce a metric ton of CEOs and execs. There are none more elite than these, at least in India. The politicians in my country are rarely highly educated, otoh.
Thanks yes I have worked with a bunch of people from IITs.
> 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.
IIT is arguably better than a lot of "elite" American universities.
The 'roots' were places of intellectual amusement, only for the very affluent idle and the clergy.
Ain't nobody else had time for that.
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They really shouldn't get public money then
I agree, this article is relevant to my interests because Stanford is doing just that! At the state level
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
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