> 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].

[1] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/10/18/day-three-harv...

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.

Is that true? Harvard could be more elite by offering no financial aid, but they swing the opposite direction.

Zero legacies.

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.

everybody pays tuition. legacies also donate heavily.

all these named scholarships and named professor titles - are coming from donations

I've seen a study showing that basically only legacies who donated had their children accepted.

> [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.

Yes, this is why the elite private schools must be forced to admit by lottery.

Wouldn’t that destroy their whole value proposition (both for the poor but talented and the rich but not as gifted)?

At that point you might as well abolish private universities altogether, because what’s their point?

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.

Yup.

Hint: most of the people pushing for these things would be perfectly fine with that. But won’t admit it.

I'll gladly admit it. Harvard and Yale are antidemocratic institutions and their power needs to be shattered.

Since when do public universities not practice donor admissions?

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.

>>Zero legacies.

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.

What is the point of that? They already have the connections and power. They're not learning anything. What's the point?

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.

It would seem to be hard to convince someone you had skills in a social setting. Hence the use of a proxy.

Sometimes it’s also a flex to have to certificate but clearly not have the actual skills.

> 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.

In the old days Ivy league type schools gave “gentleman C’s”. Harvard rarely fails someone. Grade inflation is highest at Ivy league type schools.

> 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.

I would say that certain majors being easy is a much smaller issue than getting the grades you want in any major.

> My question is can donors buy not only admission but also grades? My guess is yes.

There's no need to buy grades. All grades are A anyway.

Harvard could use an international airport.

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.

it's a reference to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbNdcdO3_Go

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!