Do universities keep admissions data at that granular of a level? I would add a generic “culture fit” component to each candidate score which you could use as a hedge to admit legacies without calling them as such.
> I would add a generic “culture fit” component to each candidate score which you could use as a hedge to admit legacies without calling them as such.
This is not new. This is a battle as old as time.
Want to keep out poor people? Require them to live on campus instead of locally at home. Want to keep out the wrong kind of person? Start requiring college essays to get a "culture fit". Or add "geographic diversity" to get less NYC Jews, or require "well rounded" candidates that do more than pass tests to keep out Asian Americans. Or conduct interviews so you can see their race in-person without asking for it on a form.
> require "well rounded" candidates that do more than pass tests to keep out Asian Americans
While I agree with you that vague assessments like "well roundedness" can and have been use for racial discrimination in the past (both intentionally and unintentionally), it doesn't mean we should throw the baby out with the bathwater and solely use standardized tests or test scores to determine admissions.
There is critical value in assessing these hard to measure qualities for creating a student body. Each student in the university is not simply consuming an educational good in isolation from one another but is also offering their experience and perspective to the community. Having everyone maxed out on test scores at the expense of such diversity would be a travesty to the thing that makes campus life vibrant.
>What’s next? Cities imposing such restrictions? Should NYC or Austin require people to pass vibe check to ensure that the city life is vibrant?
That's pretty much what HOAs and micro-managerial local ordinances are. The whole point of them is that they make it an expensive hassle and generally crappy to either live in an above your social class. It gets kind of plausibly deniable on a city level when you've got nice neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods and they just differentiate by the degree of enforcement.
Obviously none of this stuff is water tight. It's all a sick game of relative probability. Some low class new money professional sports/entertainment types will retire to some waspy neighborhood in the Hamptons and persist but less of those people will do so than if places like that didn't actively try and be a nuisance to live in for the "wrong type of people". Likewise some guys who have a dozen cars in their yard will persist in their locations as the neighborhood gentrifies around them, much to the annoyance of their neighbors, but most of them will cash out and move out because having your neighbors constantly calling the government to harass you using laws that didn't even exist when you moved in gets real old real quick.
> You can join any private club you want with any composition of well-rounded people. What does that have to with higher education?
I believe that a key component of an effective education is studying the roots of philosophy. Surely you agree that the State should not prevent me from forming a private university that mandates freshmen take a philosophy class.
I also believe that a key component to an effective education is exposure to peers who come from a wide variety of different backgrounds and life experiences. Surely you agree that the State should not prevent me from forming a private university that considers the creation of a diverse student body as one minor factor in admissions.
Realistically, formal higher education is not simply a private matter. It's a part of the complex web of accreditation, government subsidies and entrenched social institutions (not necessarily state institutions).
A university is a public accommodation. You can certainly create a book club among your friends and forbid people of the opposite gender to join or require everyone to be of a different gender, maybe you can even call it a university; but that wouldn't be the same as doing such thing on the level of a large educational facility that e.g. provides the degree of Juris Doctor that allows you to take a bar exam.
So to answer your question, "Surely you agree that the State should not...", I would say "it depends on the particulars".
Private universities aren't. They get loads of research funding, tax breaks, people paying for their education with government backed loans. All American universities are to some extent public.
"Surely you agree that the State should not prevent me from forming a private university that considers the creation of a diverse student body as one minor factor in admissions."
The SCOTUS decision on affirmative action in college admissions has at least restricted race from that consideration.
> There is critical value in assessing these hard to measure qualities for creating a student body. Each student in the university is not simply consuming an educational good in isolation from one another but is also offering their experience and perspective to the community.
Yeah and imagine how awful it would be if they got the experience and perspective of asians.
Seriously, the supposed benefits of these things are made up and no-one ever checks whether they're assessing the things they nominally claim to be assessing. The racism isn't some accidental side effect, it's the whole point.
There’s definitely some racism, but intangible qualities can also boost some Asian students who otherwise look like basically everyone else applying to top schools.
Easily quantifiable check boxes don’t verify that someone is an interesting conversationalist. Arguably schools are better served by slightly lower standard and a random pick vs everyone whose parents have been min maxing the process since preschool. Overfitting arbitrary criteria is easy, but not productive.
> intangible qualities can also boost some Asian students who otherwise look like basically everyone else applying to top schools.
In theory maybe. In practice the overwhelming majority of the time it's just used to admit fewer asians.
> Easily quantifiable check boxes don’t verify that someone is an interesting conversationalist.
If we actually cared about whether people were interesting conversationalists in an objective sense (rather than just interesting to the person making the admissions decision - which mostly just comes down to having the same cultural background), we'd figure out a way to test it. These universities never tried, because they never actually cared about interesting conversationalists in the first place, it's always been nothing but a fig leaf.
> Arguably schools are better served by slightly lower standard and a random pick vs everyone whose parents have been min maxing the process since preschool.
Then make it random, if that's the goal - have an actual fair lottery between everyone who meets the standard. But again, it was never about being random.
Language isn’t culturally agnostic. If classes where taught in Malagasy being well read would refer to a different set of books.
> Then make it random, if that's the goal
That’s not the goal, the point is any system that can be gamed will be gamed. You can’t game random, but you can easily have someone else write a kids collage admission essay which becomes more likely the more you weight it and the higher bar you set.
> we'd figure out a way to test it.
In many ways that’s why the SAT is preferred over the ACT. Having a large vocabulary, being able to express yourself, being able to think logically are all reasonable proxies. It also explains why the math section excludes calculus questions as transcripts already show if someone took calculus so they can focus on something else.
The “supposed benefits” of well-roundedness? As GP said, they don’t doubt it is used for discriminatory reasons as well, but are you implying there aren’t benefits to being well-rounded and it is a made up characteristic?
Yes, in my experience "well-rounded" is 100% a made up characteristic that generally means "person like the person doing the assessing". Another reply mentions "interesting conversationalist", which mostly selects for someone having the same cultural background, and is the opposite of "diversity" or whatever this week's excuse for doing this stuff is.
You are making a lot of assumptions here. People don’t find others interesting conversationalists if they have the same background. Maybe if all you focus on is skin color, you may be right, but does somebody in Ukraine have the same background as somebody who grew up in South Florida? Does somebody who grew up in the San Francisco have the same background as somebody who grew up in Marin?
If all you look at is race, you might say yes, but these are very different life experiences. Also, there is such a thing as somebody being so different that it’s not possible for others to relate to them. Likability is not unimportant when it comes to working in a team.
Laptop professionals are remarkably similar wherever in the world you find them these days. London, New York City, San Francisco, Tokyo, Paris, etc. have all been converging on a similar set of tastes, fashions, beliefs, and consuming habits. So it's possible to have great geographic diversity, without introducing much diversity in terms of culture, class, political and religious beliefs, etc.
And conversely great diversity without geographic diversity or racial diversity. Diversity is oversimplified and measured incorrectly from the DEI perspective.
This is quite similar to the strongest argument for legacy admissions, even if the sons and daughters of the wealthy and powerful don't have the best test scores they contribute significantly to the value of going to that institution for other students by virtue of offering them access to those who are going to inherit wealth and power.
Before wringing our hands too much about antisemitism or anti-Asian prejudice in universities, this is what the demographics of the Ivy League looked like in 2023:
As a note of caution: these demographic statistics are somewhat misleading because they use the demographics of the US as a whole, but the correct demographic set is to use for 18 year olds (70 year olds generally aren't applying to college)
When you look at these statistics through this lens you see that white relative underrepresentation is slightly reduced, hispanic significantly increased. broadly speaking, when you look at younger ages the country is a little bit less white and a lot more hispanic.
Perhaps we should investigate the systemic discrimination that is causing lower birth-rates in whites. There are whole academic fields for similar disparate outcomes in other groups, so why not treat this case the same way?
The point of this law is to reward merit and hard work and discourage universities from offering back-doors for wealthy donors and alums. The point of it is to encourage fairness.
Unless you're suggesting that Asians are overrepresented because their parents are part of an elite old-boys network that gives them an unfair advantage, I think you're missing the point here. If you want to suppress the number of Asians in school because their numbers at ivies are out of proportion with their numbers in the broader population, it sounds like you want more legacy-style admissions rules, not fewer. Maybe this is what you're suggesting and I just I'm just misunderstanding you.
I'm not suggesting anything, just adding needed context to the discussion. E.g. if you want to suggest that these institutions are rife with systemic white supremacy, be my guest. Just include in your assertions explanations for why there are, per capita, 8x as many Asians, 11x as many Jews, and 1.4x as many Blacks, as there are non-Jewish Whites, in the Ivies, despite Whites' many privileges.
Edit: Self-selection is at best an incomplete explanation. It fails to explain how, when comparing non-Jewish Whites vs Blacks, Whites' 177-point average SAT-score lead results in a 1.4x admission penalty. Meanwhile Asians' 73-point lead over Whites becomes an 8x admission advantage.
Scoring well on the SAT is an advantage for other groups, but somehow a disadvantage for non-Jewish Whites.
The population that applies to Ivies is completely different from the overall population, and different from the population that gets admitted to Ivies.
If there were no requirements to be admitted to Harvard, any tom dick and harry could send his application - only then you can reasonably conclude that the admitted population should reflect the overall population.
But because there are requirements like SAT GPA etc, there is some filtering happening and population that apply is slightly different.
But the affirmative action zealots require that the admitted population must represent the overall population, despite the fact that incoming applications have completely different distribution IQ/SAT/GPA/race wise.
This leads to discrimination, where White/Asian admits, who are overrepresented among applications with high scores, are clamped at certain threshold and then other races are selected with whatever grades they have
Just to add more context to the provided data. It provides mean nationwide SAT score numbers, and the provided comparison assumes that nationwide scores are reflective of Ivy applicant scores.
Also a per capita comparison assumes that the number of qualified applications follows similar distribution, no? I'm not sure if this is reflected in the provided data.
Also, the overall analysis assumes that per capita distribution is fair but that seems subjective. Even so, two schools skew the data for Black students (75% of Ivies are <1x per capita for Black students) and of course there is no mention of Hispanic students (one of the fastest growing demographics) which is mostly underrepresented on a per capita basis.
And then it doesn't get into international students and if/how they assimilate into a "race". Nor does it reflect stickier topics such as whether Hispanic students culturally assimilate into "White", effectively lessening their numbers under a per capita comparison (it does this for Jewish students).
I appreciate what the data brings to the conversation, but don't believe others' assertions have to take any of it into account considering the number of assumptions one must make to follow a "per capita" AND population SAT = sample SAT comparison.
> It provides mean nationwide SAT score numbers, and the provided comparison assumes that nationwide scores are reflective of Ivy applicant scores.
Does it really assume that? Suppose, for the sake of argument, one group had a nationwide average SAT score of 1500, and all other groups had an average SAT of just 500. Barring any bizarre distributions of those scores, we can infer from only the averages, that the 1500-SAT group would have more individuals that satisfy a university's academic criteria, than the 500-SAT groups. It's far from perfect, but does provide a hint.
> Also, the overall analysis assumes that per capita distribution is fair but that seems subjective.
I must have missed where in those charts a definition of 'fair' is given, and then relied on for further analysis.
> of course there is no mention of Hispanic students
Hispanic students are between Asian and Black on every chart.
> And then it doesn't get into international students
That is correct, international students are entirely excluded, in the sense that all the domestic students in a school are taken to represent 100%. I don't understand how not answering all these additional questions you raise makes the data irrelevant.
> Does it really assume that? Suppose, for the sake of argument, one group had a nationwide average SAT score of 1500, and all other groups had an average SAT of just 500. Barring any bizarre distributions of those scores, we can infer from only the averages, that the 1500-SAT group would have more individuals that satisfy a university's academic criteria, than the 500-SAT groups. It's far from perfect, but does provide a hint.
There’s no need to construct a hypothetical when there is actual data to dissect. For example, in the cited links, the 25th percentile SAT score for Harvard students is ~200 points greater than the highest mean nationwide score. The middle 50% of all students (25th-75th) range is ~100. And on 7 out of 10 students admitted included SAT scores in their application. So one would have to make additional assumptions (I’m not sure what they are) to claim one’s groups scores lead to penalty and another’s leads to advantage. It could be true, but I don’t see it as a fact, hence my original position that other assertions don’t necessarily need to meet some bar.
A lot of the nonsense comes from the bonkers categories. Hispanic origin is sort of like being Jewish from a statistical perspective - it’s a layer, not a state.
We’re also decades after civil rights. People don’t fit in these boxes.
My nephews dad is Irish, mom is black Puerto Rican. Racists would consider him black, his name is Irish, mom is of African and Spanish origin. They don’t speak Spanish at home or really have a deep connection to Hispanic culture. Wtf is he for the college demographic survey?
Likewise for my Filipino friends… are they Asian? Pacific Islander? This particular family speaks English, Tagalog and Spanish at home. Culturally they are very much into traditional Filipino traditions, but their Catholicism practice is close to Spanish style.
A policy that would exclude all Jews would potentially affect some 8 million Americans, same as a policy that lowers White participation by 3%. Which would be worse, and why?
I think the GP argument is that you can't argue going all on merit for Jews while demanding that Blacks and Whites are somehow equally represented.
If you hadn't said "Before wringing our hands too much about antisemitism or anti-Asian prejudice in universities," that might have been true. If you had just said "here is this data", then you would have "just presented the data".
You clearly expressed by that phrasing that you thought that the data in question would at least potentially be a reason to not wring hands about such things, and presented it for that reason.
You didn't imply it might potentially maybe apply. You definitely, clearly, stated it not only applies but what the "correct" conclusion to come to was.
> The point of this law is to reward merit and hard work and discourage universities from offering back-doors for wealthy donors and alums. The point of it is to encourage fairness.
The point of donor child admissions, as I understand it, is to bring in additional money. Which could potentially enable more low-income students to attend.
The reason why some universities have ended legacy admissions recently seems to be that they have concluded that it doesn't bring in enough money. But they usually still have donor admissions.
Looking at mean SAT grades is close to irrelevant when your (supposed) strategy is to pick Top-N candidates. If for example every single person got exactly the mean score allotted to them by their race, you'd actually expect that the top 5.9% of universities would all be 100% Asian, the next 57.8% of universities would be purely "White (incl. Jewish)", the next 18.7% of universities purely Hispanic and bottom 12.1% purely Black.
By that math, every single slot in an ivy league school "belongs" to an Asian candidate and even a single white person is already over-representation.
(Didn't separate White from Jewish since they don't have mean scores for just Jewish, possibly they should be first according to the estimate in the text below, but that doesn't really matter for the point made)
> Looking at mean SAT grades is close to irrelevant when your (supposed) strategy is to pick Top-N candidates.
Not if the mean SAT score predicts how many students surpass some academic cutoff used by the universities. It's like predicting who will win a best-out-of-3 100m dash, when all you have are the runners' mean 100m times.
I find it baffling how people become incapable of the simplest inferences, and capable of the smallest nitpicks, when they don't like where the data leads.
We're stuck with a math problem. If you admit purely based on test scores then black and latino applicants would be significantly underrepresented and non-Jewish white applicants would be slightly underrepresented. If you address these problems by insisting on a full balancing then you're going to have to reduce Asian and Jewish admittance. But increasing black and latino admittance at the expense of non-Jewish white admittance when the latter group was already underrepresented is not only the same kind of quota system but not even satisfying the goal of proportionate representation -- and that's the one that seems to be happening. So what do you want to do?
Arguably, the problem of underrepresentation became already unsustainable during Affirmative Action by the classification of African immigrants as black. Because the latter displace African-Americans who do worse in test scores than Africans.
Addressing the underlying barriers preventing blacks/latinos from getting into elite universities, rather than trying to fix the symptoms by instituting illiberal policies like reverse discrimination.
Then you need people to stop getting mad at universities when admission based on test scores causes those groups to be underrepresented. They're not the ones who can fix the test scores and nothing is going to fix them before the next round of applications.
break us colleges into tiers based on academic rigor. assuming you met XXXX standardized test score you are automatically sorted into one of the appropriate schools at random on your 18th birthday.
They ask on the admission form if you are a legacy, and legacy applicants answer yes because it helps them get in. So that’s very easy to track. Parents who get their kids admitted by donating millions of dollars presumably get a more “white glove” service, and I don’t know if that’s tracked in the same way.
> Parents who get their kids admitted by donating millions of dollars presumably get a more “white glove” service, and I don’t know if that’s tracked in the same way
A lawyer for Students for Fair Admissions "quizzed [Harvard College’s long-serving Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid] on the 'Dean’s Interest List,' a special and confidential list of applicants Harvard compiles every admissions cycle. Though the University closely guards the details, applicants on that list are often related to or of interest to top donors — and court filings show list members benefit from a significantly inflated acceptance rate" [1].
if a donor's kid get accepted in exchange for $10 mln donation - that funds 20 scholarships to underrepresented students - is it a good policy or not???
would you rather have no legacy admits and ZERO scholarships whatsoever ?
or would you prefer to have some number of legacies + scholarships and new buildings funded from their donations ???
>if a donor's kid get accepted in exchange for $10 mln donation - that funds 20 scholarships to underrepresented students - is it a good policy or not???
But is that actually happening? Harvard only has around 7k undergraduates. For comparison the UC system has 230k. By all accounts ivy leagues is interested in cultivating an "elite" student body, not to grant as many students access to education as possible.
If the university is suppised to produce good students ir shouldnt be that 1 student in 21 is a complete dud. Because that's how it works, they are duds, who cant be kicked out and they will get their diploma even if they cant read.
In theory (not reality) those who finish top universities should be top people.
To tell it other way: would you be happy if 1 car in 21 didn drive? Or 1 apple in 21 was poisonous?
The top universities have long watered down their achivements anyway. Most is just pure nepotism.
If someone pays $10M for their kid to get into the school, that's not a legacy admission; that's dynamic pricing. Legacy admissions are where the person getting in pays no more than the normal rate of tuition.
> [it] shouldnt be that 1 student in 21 is a complete dud. Because that's how it works, they are duds, who cant be kicked out and they will get their diploma even if they cant read.
I suspect if we looked at the overall set of students who were admitted to elite universities while their parents have given a $10M donation, that we'd find that that set of students was academically well above-average as compared to the overall population, probably above-average as compared to all students attending all four-year universities, even though they might be below the average of the overall admitted students to that elite university.
That doesn't make them anything close to "complete duds".
You're completely missing the point of private universities. The value proposition isn't in a better education: they offer a marginally, if it all, better education than equivalent tier public schools.
What they offer is connections. Those rich kids whose parents bribed their way in? Extremely valuable connection to make. That's why private universities do the whole "eye-watering ticket price, but most students have some level of merit-based scholarship" setup. Mingling the talented and the well-connected is an extremely valuable proposition for everybody involved. If you're looking for a school made of exclusively meritocratic gifted scholars, that's what elite public schools like Cal are for. But if you want a school that creates the most opportunities for success, private schools are where that's at.
If the only point of private universities is to create and maintain a permanent ruling class, then absolutely they should be abolished. But I don't think that's the case. There are many non-elite private universities in the US.
Why would I go through all of the bullshit to get my kid into Harvard, if they don’t get to rub elbows with some Rockefeller heir? Do you think anyone wants to have Johnny learn the viola and sign up for 38 activities?
People with the cash to bribe their way into Harvard, who know smart people, are “top people”.
So you go to university to get usable skills, or to meet people?
Would you prefer a doctor who studied hard and was the best of the best, or someone who bribed their way and checks notes played basketball with the president's kid?
If world was fair top universities are supposed to "produce" top students. Not be a club for rich peoples' kids.
That's how it works in many places: you get most points on objective tests - you get in.
Rich people still have a leg up, since they can pay for tutors / prep schools for their kids.
But if the kid is a moron it wont get to a top place.
I prefer to go to a doctor who finished university on merit and skill, not nepotism.
state schools and community colleges do exactly that, how is that working for them?
>> If the university is suppised to produce good students ir shouldnt be that 1 student in 21 is a complete dud. Because that's how it works, they are duds, who cant be kicked out and they will get their diploma even if they cant read.
"complete dud" is doing a lot of work here, it is not necessarily true that legacies are dumb. Even if they are dumber than average, it doesn't mean they cannot go and achieve great things later in life.
For example Malia Obama - does she deserve a harvard admission just because her father was president?
or donald trump - he was admitted and graduated from wharton - does he meet criteria of "top people" ?
> state schools and community colleges do exactly that, how is that working for them?
It depends? For some good, for some not so good? For a multitude of reasons? One of them being "world is unfair"? Other being money?
Public universities work in Europe. At least to some degree.
Also, this is a philosophical question: should the top universities "manufacture" best students, or are they places where rich peoples" kids can meet each other?
If you hire a programmer do you want: one who can code great, or one who played basketball with the president's kids?
Can you believe that Jared Kushner's father only had to donate $2.5 million to get his son into Harvard? That's chump change for an institution that rich. They should have asked for more.
To be fair, and I can't believe I am even defending Jared Kushner of all people, but that $2.5M donation was made in 1998. That was a very high donation for the time. The price of tuition and academic donations has absolutely rocketed in the nearly three decades since then (way ahead of general inflation). That's equivalent to at least a $10M donation nowadays.
My question is can donors buy not only admission but also grades? My guess is yes. At that point, why not just buy the degree and save everyone a lot of time?
Edit: I guess, though, that the point of degrees from schools like these is not the degree, but the connections. But I'd guess those could be purchased as well.
> why not just buy the degree and save everyone a lot of time?
If you do business in the Middle East, you begin to notice the kids of the elites all went to weird no-name Western schools. Turns out they want a Western degree, but don’t want to be away from the capital too long. So they find random universities who will give them a degree for, essentially, no-show remote learning classes. Win-win.
The son of the high ranking individual is appointed in a high position in some ministry. Anyone who cries nepotism is quickly reminded that he holds a prestigious western degree, and that is the reason for the appointment.
It's the same impulse that led Romania's former dictator's wife to amass fake diplomas as a world-class chemist, from both Romanian and European universities (including being admitted as a fellow in the UK's Royal Institute of Chemistry), despite only having four years' worth of actual education when she was 10, and already being the most powerful woman in the country.
It is a form of pride and pretend superiority, false legitimacy and so on.
Pretend prestige. They have the connections and power but not pedigree.
As someone without a college degree in tech, and who has attempted but failed to get a tradition “corporate” job based on skills and track record I can sort of understand. Not the same thing at all, but you’d be amazed (or not?) at how much importance some folks put on having a piece of paper even in casual social settings in some circles. Actual skills need not apply.
> What is the point of that? They already have the connections and power
One could say the same of a billionaire buying their idiot kid an Ivy League education. They're clearly not going to benefit from it. But it looks good and might fool a person here and there.
Many years ago, I was a grad TA at a school that is now top 10 in the US. Based on that experience, I think everyone paying full freight at these schools is buying their grades. It was de facto impossible to fail any student for cheating, or to punish them in any real way.
Too bad too, since the half of undergrads who weren’t cheaters were the nicest, brightest, salt-of-the-earth people.
Grades are almost guaranteed at Harvard Undergrad. A grader who gives out any Bs or less for any properly submitted paper can expect an outraged Professor to make them stop before he has to deal with the backlash which may include a lawyer.
This may vary by department or over time, but I think there's no reason to believe a Harvard Undergrad Alumni you meet ever did any college level work.
What year did you graduate that you developed this opinion? I received many Bs across a variety of departments while doing my BA from '96-2000. Getting As was significantly harder than it had been in highschool because of how much smarter and more hard-working the average student was at Harvard than they had been at the elite private school I had previously been on a scholarship to. The one time I contested a B I got rejected by the head of department in a meeting that took less than 30 seconds; he was so brutal about my result compared to those who got an A I never dared to contest another grade again - the curve they graded against was very strong in my time...
I was roughly the same timeline and didn't go to Harvard (had friends that did), but the grade inflation was already known. It certainly wasn't as pervasive as it is now, but at my school "crying to the professor" was a classic tactic to get grades bumped up.
But this was just before all the RateAProfessor sites got big and when I was still proud of my cum laude GPA. About 5 years later is when I started hearing everyone was getting As at Harvard, so I think it was a sudden shift right after your time and certainly not just a Harvard thing.
> My question is can donors buy not only admission but also grades?
This made me laugh out loud.
There are majors at every university that are easy to graduate from. Often these are aimed precisely at academically unambitious athletes and well-connected mediocre students.
Harvard is no exception.
Getting into elite schools is the hard part. Graduating is not.
> But I'd guess those could be purchased as well.
Maybe? Not really? If you’re already part of that social circle and socio-economic status (SES), you don’t have to buy it. If you’re not already in that that SES, then building elite connections requires quite a bit of cultivation that, imho, is not easy for most college-aged kids to pull off, largely due to ignorance of SES/class distinctions in the US.
The red line goes right to South Station, from which you can catch the silver line to the airport. The planes departing Logan fly right over Somerville at 60-90 second intervals when the wind is blowing the right direction.
I dare say that an international airport is about the last thing Harvard needs.
Checking a box is not how real power and influence works. Yes, donations are a big one.
But also, those off-the-books social connections are another one (how big/common is this - we'll never know - that's the point). Making sure the college president knows who you are, and that you have 14 other family members who are alums. Oh look, my son is applying now too, just letting you know!
I've heard that places like MIT quietly tell their alumni that their children have a better chance because "they know what they're getting into." And this may be true. But it's a way for them to have their cake and eat it too. They loudly proclaim they don't allow legacies. Then they quietly give them a boost on "cultural fit."
> Do universities keep admissions data at that granular of a level?
In my experience, yes. (It's an outright question on many college applications.) But this law, together with the older one, mandate recording and retaining these data.
> would add a generic “culture fit” component to each candidate score which you could use as a hedge to admit legacies without calling them as such
This is a good way to turn a reporting requirement into criminal conspiracy with intent to defraud the state charges.
Yeah, I don't think so. There's no paper trail. Whether it's in person interviews or not, having a "culture fit" isn't what's in the law. Unless, allowing in legacies is mandated from above and documented, you're gonna have a hard time showing criminal conspiracy. If the form doesn't allow you to put in "legacy" commentary, there will even be "evidence" that it wasn't. If you want to embarrass them, just do it. Spend the capital (political or otherwise) to put it in the media, but pretending it's going to criminal court is kinda out there without some other political motive.
Frankly, there are bigger discrimination problems for qualified applicants than legacy for admissions at the most selective colleges. Certainly, nobody is going to prevent "athletic" ability, "extracurricular" experience, or SAT coaching in admissions.
There is no paper trail so there won’t be many criminal cases…
…but there is no paper trail so they might not be able to “fast track” legacy kids into the university so easily, it’s logistically hard to cheat for so many kids during the many steps of the process without creating a ton of evidence.
I don’t think it will make the problem go away, but I do think it will reduce the number of legacy rich kids getting accepted, simply because the bar is put higher (for parents’ influence).
Sure, alumni interviews may favor legacy, though if alumni start broadly asking about it I could see legislation targeting that being inspired.
> allowing in legacies is mandated from above and documented, you're gonna have a hard time showing criminal conspiracy
OP seemed to suggest creating a dummy variable to stand in for legacy. If that were to happen, and you could find communications basically admitting the purpose of that variable is to evade the law, yes, I could see criminal charges being brought.
More pointedly, you're describing an issue common to anti-discrimination law in general.
Here's a perfect example of a college essay turning legacy into culture fit:
The reasons that I have for wishing to go to Harvard are several. I feel that Harvard can give me a better background and a better liberal education than any other university. I have always wanted to go there, as I have felt that it is not just another college, but is a university with something definite to offer. Then too, I would like to go to the same college as my father. To be a "Harvard man" is an enviable distinction, and one that I sincerely hope I shall attain.
John F. Kennedy's application essay to Harvard, in its entirety (he got accepted, of course).
Bonus points for brevity I suppose. And to be fair, Harvard (and all other colleges) was way less competitive back then. 1930s college and 2024 college are worlds apart in every way.
Has there been a prosecution for academic criminal discrimination or criminal conspiracy to avoid discrimination protection in the last 20 years? I mean there's Title IX, but the Supreme Court has blocked even sex discrimination rules.
Can you point to the requirement? I see that it says you can’t discriminate and enforcement mechanisms to document that discrimination isn’t happening.
I’m really not sure what you’re asking. You can paste the executive order #’s into google. You can search for affirmative action lawsuits on google, they are all related.
Depending on how much someone wants to politically punish someone depends on how much they are required to provide documentation and what kind of lawsuits they get into with the DOL. Here is one with Google [https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/ofccp/ofccp20210201], which requires they comply with DOL data gathering requirements and affirmative action requirements ‘or else’. Here is a document from the Clinton whitehouse calling out similar [https://clintonwhitehouse3.archives.gov/WH/EOP/OP/html/aa/aa...].
Schools often get impacted by department of education, NIH, and DOE grants. Sometimes by various state level programs, all of which transitively include similar language. I am not directly in academia so I don’t have links as handy, but the professors I know have all made clear references to the same thing going on.
The tricky part here is that in any given zero sum system (aka there are a fixed number of student slots, or open job positions, or affordable housing openings), you can’t ‘positively’ discriminate (aka affirmative action) on race (or any other concrete criteria) without ‘negatively’ discriminating on the same criteria to someone else. It’s a basic control system thing. It’s literally impossible for it to not happen, as even a basic whiteboard session will show.
Which has been impacting East Asians, Caucasians, and often Jews pretty heavily for awhile. This is nothing new, really. Harvard has been trying to limit Jews in its membership in particular since at least the 1920’s if I remember correctly.
But since discrimination (negative) based on race/ethnicity is clearly illegal, but discrimination (positive) based on race/ethnicity is (or was) required, everyone involved except the gov’t is screwed from a documentation perspective as they’ll be documenting criminal activity in order to not be performing criminal activity.
So the next time the political winds change, they’ll have clearly documented malfeasance (looking from the other side of the equation) which can be used by the other side of the equation to screw them over even harder.
This is why the old US stance of ‘don’t be racist, being racist is illegal, and we don’t see race’ was a thing. It minimized the balkanization/tit for tat problem, while allowing punishing obviously obnoxious behavior. Similar to ‘don’t talk about politics/sex/religion at work’.
But, racism still exists of course (it’s a basic human behavior/in group-out group thing and literally no group is immune), and it was far from perfect as it also discouraged discussing a lot of problems - many of which got larger under it. But it’s not like getting them out in the open necessarily solves them either.
Or that there even is a ‘solution’, just different types of problems to pick.
No one has been prosecuting it, or none of the 6000 some odd universities/colleges have discriminated in the last 20 years?
I can believe the former, but not the latter. If it's the former, why do you think they would suddenly start prosecuting now for a difficult to prove criminal conspiracy to allow legacy admissions? Political reasons?
