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Harvard University is fighting to keep its admissions process under wraps

173 points by Jerry2 8y ago

montrose 8y ago
"Legacy applicants, or students with a parent who attended Harvard, were accepted to the school at the rate of about 34%, according to data from six admissions cycles analyzed by an economist hired by the group suing the school. That’s compared to an admissions rate of about 6% of non-legacy students, according to an analysis of Harvard data."
- deleted 8y ago
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- swimfar 8y ago
  And I'm sure some of that is because the children of Harvard graduates tend to be more qualified (in terms of other application criteria) than the general population or applicant pool. If an additional 1000 2.0 students applied to Harvard next year this number would look even worse. But would the change be meaningful? That's not to say they don't take legacy into account. But, as presented, those numbers can be misleading.
  - JoshTriplett 8y ago
    Some of it also likely occurs because the children of Harvard graduates will have a better idea of what the process is looking for, not least of which because they have an N=1 daa point of a successful application. Similarly, if you're trying to have a successful interview with a company, it helps to talk to people who have interviewed there before, preferably people who have interviewed there successfully. (The process may well have other issues that make "legacy" applications more likely, but a higher acceptance rate of such applications doesn't inherently suggest a problem.)
  - michaelt 8y ago
    If children of graduates are more qualified _naturally_ then why does Harvard _need_ it to be _policy_ that they take legacy status into account? MIT and Caltech seem to do fine with legacy-blind admissions.
    - arethuza 8y ago
      I'm not from the US so don't really know what I'm talking about - but my impressions from this side of the pond are that MIT and Caltech seem to have rather different reputations from Harvard?
    - usepgp 8y ago
      I would imagine that both MIT and Caltech have a higher acceptance rate for legacy for this reason. However a side effect of them not keeping track is that we will never have the breakout of those rates.
      - fjsolwmv 8y ago
        That's backwards reasoning.
    - albntomat0 8y ago
      Probably proportionally based for each one. Legacy applicants are X% more qualified naturally (well educated parents, etc), and get Y% from the admissions. Given the numbers for Harvard, MIT, etc, there are plenty of qualified applicants for each spot.
  - montrose 8y ago
    Than the general population possibly, but not than the applicant pool, which is the comparison that matters. It seems more likely that in the applicant pool the non-legacy kids would be smarter. Imagine how confident of your ability you'd have to be to apply to Harvard as a random kid from a public high school in Iowa. Whereas if you'd grown up expecting to go there because your parents did, the threshold for applying would be pretty low.
announcerman 8y ago
Why would they keep it secret? To stop others from gaming the system or because the system can't be gamed since its biased from the start?
- deleted 8y ago
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- setr 8y ago
  It might also be because the system is not actually consistent or well-defined. They might, say, depend primarily on reviewer judgement, and can measure reviewer correctness on hit/miss student ratios for those admitted, while not actually encoding it in strict law. Exposing this however would inevitably require that they do, strictly, define their terms and conditions, which may lead to worse outcomes, if its not easy to produce non-gameable rules, or rules that actually match successful reviewer judgement.
- generic_user 8y ago
  Harvard is being sued for racial discrimination against Asian Americans in there admissions policies. They created set of personality criteria for admissions. The criteria was entirely subjective, things like 'positive personality', and 'likability'. Then gave Asians consistently low scores on theses subjective criteria. And then weighed the criteria high enough to knock them out of positions which they would have otherwise qualified for if the admissions was based on standard academic criteria. Bias and racism is predictable when you choose to abandon Meritocracy based on objective measurable criteria. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollment-applicants.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollme...
  - intended 8y ago
    What sucks is that bias and racism is also baked into many “objective” criteria. Take test scores - just having the right parents will push your sores up on average. Having better performance regular ties into wealth and upbringing. No surprise then that the dominant economic group will hold an advantage is such tests. The damned intertwined nature of all these issues is what makes it hard to set up an actual objective measure. Which then brings us back to subjective decision making.
pcstl 8y ago
"The school says releasing the information could put it at a competitive disadvantage" Likely because people might find their policies unethical, which would stop them from making choices that maximize the perceived value of a Harvard degree?
- eganist 8y ago
  > Likely because people might find their policies unethical, which would stop them to making choices that maximize the perceived value of a Harvard degree? Which assumptions are you relying on which result in one begetting the other?
  - pcstl 8y ago
    If they reveal their policies, those are highly publicized and enough moral outrage is generated, they'll have to commit to changing their policies or risk having their reputation permanently stained. Of course, being Harvard University, they would probably wouldn't take too hard a blow, but it would still devalue them.
    - eganist 8y ago
      I guess I'm missing a point. Why would it devalue them with their target audience?
      - llampx 8y ago
        Currently, Harvard, Yale and the other Ivy Leagues are perceived as the best education money can buy. If it turns out that it's not actually that hard to get into Harvard if you have money or are legacy (and that the education itself is middling), it may lead to a hit in reputation. It may not make a difference to the Cruella DeVille types directly, but public perception is a thing. If enough of the public perceives a Harvard degree as ill-gotten, the value of that degree goes down. Ergo, they start losing applicants to the other Ivys.
        8y ago
lordnacho 8y ago
If the emperor were ever naked, this would be it. Contrast this "trade secret" to a chat with an Oxford don, and you'll find the don is quite straightforward in admitting they are fallible. Some admits are duds, and some are hits. Decisions are made based on a small amount of information, but only the dons decide what happens. They try hard to let in disadvantaged kids, but it's a crap shoot deciding who has potential and who doesn't. They rarely care about anything other than academics. (I'm not sure how they recruit the rowers.) It's just laughable that an admissions process is a trade secret, and unless there's a compelling explanation given, I would assume they claim this because they are being sued by Asians about bias, and giving places to legacies, which is just as bad for a place that sells itself on excellence.
- vowelless 8y ago
  > It's just laughable that an admissions process is a trade secret More and more, I view these Ivy league colleges (and a few others like MIT, Stanford, etc) as private clubs not too dissimilar from country clubs. Beyond the anti Asian bias, I think something more revealing will be the number of legacy admits. Education is getting more decentralized and so the only real value of these institutions is brand recognition and network. If that is indeed a good analogy, then it makes sense Harvards admission criteria is a trade secret.
  - tdumitrescu 8y ago
    I don't think the (high rate) of legacy acceptances has ever been considered a secret at the top ivies? "Harvard's incoming class of 2021 is made up of over 29 percent legacy students, reports The Harvard Crimson." https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/06/harvards-incoming-class-is-one-third-legacy.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/06/harvards-incoming-class-is-o... At the school I went to, even before I applied I knew that their admissions process funneled legacy applications into an entirely separate pool from normal applications.
  - rjzzleep 8y ago
    Was there ever a doubt in that? I wish I had known that University is for networking and making connections. Maybe my life would have been easier. My ex's internship at Harvard was as simple as her dad knowing a prof that is friends with a harvard one. No prep, no interview, no nothing. It opened a lot of doors and that's great, but the interesting thing was that when things are so easy to attain, I had to do a lot of convincing to actually get her to attend it. And when I contrast it to the amount of stones that were thrown in my way, I can't help but be a little bit jealous
DeadReckoning 8y ago
I support affirmative action but not people lying that they're unbiased.
tomcam 8y ago
I cannot wait for the legal discovery process commences. It’s going to be a bloodbath, because Harvard has discriminated against Asians far more subtly and systematically than they did with Jews.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  Discrimination against Jews was far more than systematic, it was institutional and not really a secret. Moreover, an overall overrepresentation of Asians are admitted, which us completely a different kind of 'bias' than simply not admitting them at all. Though I'd disagree with the whole if it, if they went 'strictly SAT' or something, and suppose 50% of every class was Asian-American, whereupon Asian-Americans only make up 5% of the overall population of the US thereby meaning a 10x overrepresentation ... well - that's a problem by any social measure. So it's far more complicated than simply 'they don't like some people and don't want them there'.
  - llampx 8y ago
    > Though I'd disagree with the whole if it, if they went 'strictly SAT' or something, and suppose 50% of every class was Asian-American, whereupon Asian-Americans only make up 5% of the overall population of the US thereby meaning a 10x overrepresentation ... well - that's a problem by any social measure. The "I don't see colors" part of me is cringing at what this implies. Aren't Asian-Americans supposed to be more than their race?
    - sonnyblarney 8y ago
      Yes, definitely, but people are also 'much more than their SAT scores'.
  - YorkshireSeason 8y ago
    a problem by any social measure. Why is this a problem at all? Elite universities should admit the best students. Science / truth is and should be epistocratic, rather than democratic, fair or equal. If other ethnies cannot educate their children up to Asian standards, then that's a failure of the other ethnies. Punishing Asians for consistently raising better children is victim blaming. All the more, so since it's very easy to raise successful children: study hard & consistently, value education and do lots of maths. We should celebrate the Asian focus of intellectual excellence rather than punish them.
arethuza 8y ago
Based upon my experiences in business, quite a lot of the time when someone says they don't want to share the details of a "soft" process (rather than engineering or scientific methods) its because they don't actually have anything like a documented repeatable process and they are just using "judgement" to make the decision - which for something like recruitment or admissions is likely to be influenced by personal and organisational biases.
cncrnd 8y ago
I used to be anti affirmative action. Then, I met a lot of students at a similar tier school who were basically shoved there by their parents. Little original thought or unique qualities, just sent to an expensive private school and drilled on the SAT like monkeys. So now I am in support of affirmative action, maybe out of disappointment in my traditional upbringing classmates.
- hyperfallible 8y ago
  SAT training leads to modest gains of around 20-30 points on average. Also I don't see how racial background is a unique quality.
  - cncrnd 8y ago
    If that were actually true, no one would train for the SAT. It's a simple test easily trained for, not some ideal measure of aptitude. It's not about race. You want people with diverse upbringings because they will do different things, and because they had the chance to go to a good school maybe they can do those different things better.
    - hyperfallible 8y ago
      that's what the evidence tell us.
    - bobcostas55 8y ago
      It's absolutely true. Take a look at these papers, they have data on how much test prep increases scores: * http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/Briggs_Theeffectofadmissionstestpreparation.pdf http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/Briggs_Theeffectofadmissionst... * https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/89/2/435/2235270 https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/89/2/435/223527... There is very little room for training in the SAT.
      - cncrnd 8y ago
        Again, results depend on the person and effort exerted.
kapauldo 8y ago
It's a private institution. So long as it doesn't accept public money or break any discrimination laws, it should be allowed to keep its admission process private. Does anyone honestly think George bush was admitted because of his grades? Let's find something meaningful to be outraged about. We are never going to win this one and it's not worth fighting.
- SenseiMaster 8y ago
  Many private institution receive hundreds of millions to billions of dollars from the government.
- BigChiefSmokem 8y ago
  Financial aid (FAFSA) is a federal program (meaning public tax dollars are used to keep it running) that channels a lot of money to all schools, including the Ivy League. I'd argue in a court of law that assistance to their student body should be cut immediately if they don't open up their record and policy books. We can proceed from there.
- deleted 8y ago
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mathattack 8y ago
Glad that the mention athletics. I used to be surprised that Sports matter so much. I recall interviewing a not so bright Princeton grad. I was surprised, given the high esteem I held the school. When he mentioned playing lacrosse, I asked how much that helped in admissions. He said, “About as much as Football at Ohio State.” At least he was honest!
- spiritcat 8y ago
  Not sure what you're getting at, but our Buckeye student athletes are held to rigorous standards dammit!
- jdhn 8y ago
  Lacrosse is huge in the Ivy League world. Yes, they have football, but lacrosse is the big hitter.
RickJWagner 8y ago
One of the greatest minds of our times, Thomas Sowell, words it this way: "When Jonas Salk applied to selective Townsend Harris High School in New York, and later to the then-selective City College of New York (CCNY), there might well have been some other student, not quite as academically qualified, who could have been admitted instead, on the basis of having overcome greater handicaps than Jonas Salk had. But the relevant question is: Would that other student have been equally likely to create a vaccine that would banish the scourge of polio?"
- StanislavPetrov 8y ago
  >But the relevant question is: Would that other student have been equally likely to create a vaccine that would banish the scourge of polio?" We'll never know, because that other student was racially profiled and denied an opportunity on that basis.
  - berbec 8y ago
    True. The horrible truth is that affirmative action cuts both ways; it can give advantages to under-represented groups, but only at the expense of the majority. Admissions is a zero-sum game. Every student admitted is a spot not available to someone else. It a horrible system, but so is every other system. What you can say for affirmative action is that it tries to game the system towards those who generally get screwed over otherwise.
    - StanislavPetrov 8y ago
      >What you can say for affirmative action is that it tries to game the system towards those who generally get screwed over otherwise. Judging people on their immutable characteristics is always ignorant, counterproductive, and polarizing by definition. There are a myriad of ways for us to help people who have been generally screwed by society that don't involve judging them based on their race or other physical traits. A color blind, class-based affirmative action system would be far, far preferable to anything that Harvard or other proponents of race-based affirmative action are doing. Give an automatic bonus to people who went to school in a poverty stricken area. Give an automatic bonus to those whose parents didn't graduate from college. There are tens of millions of poor, white Americans whose families have lived generations in poverty who rightfully seethe while they sit in their sweltering, air-condioner-free trailers and listen to rich, entitled people talk about the "historic privilege" of whites.
fatjokes 8y ago
Harvard wouldn't be in this mess if they just give up the bullshit myth that it is at all a meritocracy. They should just have a fixed admissions ratios: - X% of seats for children of wealthy alumni, to maintain their alumni and donor network. - Y% of seats based on academic or artistic merit: to maintain their brand. Sure, throw sports in there if you insist. - Z% of seats by pure lottery. This helps Harvard mitigate any population skew introduced by X% and Y%. They can tell anybody who doesn't like it to go fuck themselves. No more pretending to be fair and all that bullshit.
- djhartman 8y ago
  Is this something you could know for any university? I imagine most private ones anyway would be pretty secretive about how many positions they reserve for so-called "legacy" students.
- kornish 8y ago
  Without the perception of meritocracy, I think the brand does slip significantly and Harvard has created a bigger problem for itself. As soon as you formally acknowledge that you're letting some people in due to legacy or lottery, the value of the reputation diminishes because any given person may have been accepted on lottery. People know who's legacy and who's not, but the university can't acknowledge it publicly for that reason.
  - bilbo0s 8y ago
    It's more simple than that. They will never fully open the black box, because people will optimize for its contents. There is an UNBELIEVABLE amount of entitlement thinking and out and out attempts to cheat that go on at places like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford. If no one knows what admissions is looking for other than straight A's, then you just get straight A's and do the extras that YOU think are important. (Which as it turns out, is what they really want to determine.)
    - AboutTheWhisles 8y ago
      If they haven't opened the black box, then how do you know what they really want to determine?
imgabe 8y ago
Should trade secrets even apply to an organization that is supposed to be a non-profit? What are they even competing against?
- fjsolwmv 8y ago
  Why not? Nonprofit just means no one is a capital shareholder taking profit. It means nothing about the mission, values, or economic rights of the organization. The NFL is a nonprofit.
guard0g 8y ago
I'd venture to say that this is just the start of the coming race wars. As the American demographic increasingly turns brown, there could be significant social upheaval versus the "status quo."
- chickenfries 8y ago
  > the coming race wars Well, that's not something I'm used to hearing, besides from people like Richard Spencer or other white nationalists. Care to elaborate on why you think race wars are imminent? Somehow I don't see them happening over Harvard admissions...
  - turtlecloud 8y ago
    Harvard admissions is just the tip of the iceberg. Balkanization of the USA is evident. Which multi ethnic societies in history have done well? Is this a globalist agenda pushed by elite ruling class? Can they disintegrate our tribal tendencies and replace them with global values?
rjkennedy98 8y ago
Whatever the issues with trying to admit a diverse class, the fact that American universities still give privileges to legacy students is an outrage.
bitwize 8y ago
I bet some nastythings would be exposed if their admissions policy were revealed. Like you'd still lose points for being Jewish or a visible minority.
wishart_washy 8y ago
This topic is so endlessly fascinating because it encapsulates debates on meritocracy, privilege, wealth, and recruiting that have a ripple effect across a lifetime. I attended an Ivy and a lot of the stereotypes are true. The varsity athletes are sharper than you would expect. Because the Ivy League agreed to not give scholarships to athletes (unlike Stanford), teams have a gentleman's agreement with admissions to keep a specific average GPA and SAT/ACT score. So for every gifted athlete that's a dull crayon from Groton you also got a high-achieving student-athlete. I was a TA, and the varsity athletes were the only ones who showed up consistently. They had limited time and needed to be efficient with their schoolwork. The club athletes are the rich parents + boarding school crowd. I briefly played club lacrosse - these kids were a caricature of what you would expect. The network effect is real btw. A running joke at Stanford is that the athletes go to Stanford Community College. The briefs in Fisher vs. UT are a great legal primer on the state of university admissions these days. https://www.oyez.org/cases/2015/14-981 https://www.oyez.org/cases/2015/14-981
- duxup 8y ago
  Not to say they're not sharp.... but I belive at most of those schools there is a system of automatic scholarships based on income. So while you don't get a sports scholarship, athletes are still not paying either way. Not to knock their academics or anything, but the no sports scholarship is just no 'sports' scholarship. On another aside, at a lot of schools athlete attendance is recorded by other students and reported to the coaches, at times even a non mandatory attendance class is mandatory as far as the coaches see it so at those schools they show up ;) They might not be as sharp, but they know they have to show up.
kevintb 8y ago
It’s fascinating how many of those who defend Harvard eventually make some comment along the lines of “unimaginative, robotic Asians”. Underneath their arguments is a racist belief they simply can’t shake.
pimmen 8y ago
This is just such a weird world for me as a Swede. Here, the universities are under the same transparency rules like government agencies, meaning that you can even ask to go through your professor's inbox if you want (if they work on classified stuff, they need to keep that stuff separate). Also, we have laws mandating how you can portion admission policies: 33% from high school grades, 33% from our version of the SAT and the rest they can negotiate with the government about what they want to use but it has to be transparent. You can also freely check the government's website and see, for every year, on what basis people were admitted for every university program in the country.
- andromeduck 8y ago
  how are the emails anonymized?
  - pimmen 8y ago
    A program and year maps to an entry in a database. There you will see how the groups were partitioned, what the lowest GPA was in the group for grades, what the lowest score on the scholastic aptitude test was in the second group and some information about the other third, depending on the program in question. You will also see how many were not immediately accepted but put on the reserve list instead and you can also see the same statistik but for people without a Swedish national identification number and for women or men. It's all available in a simple search engine, here's the link (in Swedish): https://statistik.uhr.se/ https://statistik.uhr.se/
  - pimmen 8y ago
    Sorry, the emails you said. Correspondence with students of personal matters is classified, they aren’t allowed to hand that out. Everything else is just up for grabs!

173 points by Jerry2 8y ago

"Legacy applicants, or students with a parent who attended Harvard, were accepted to the school at the rate of about 34%, according to data from six admissions cycles analyzed by an economist hired by the group suing the school. That’s compared to an admissions rate of about 6% of non-legacy students, according to an analysis of Harvard data."

deleted 8y ago
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swimfar 8y ago
And I'm sure some of that is because the children of Harvard graduates tend to be more qualified (in terms of other application criteria) than the general population or applicant pool. If an additional 1000 2.0 students applied to Harvard next year this number would look even worse. But would the change be meaningful? That's not to say they don't take legacy into account. But, as presented, those numbers can be misleading.
- JoshTriplett 8y ago
  Some of it also likely occurs because the children of Harvard graduates will have a better idea of what the process is looking for, not least of which because they have an N=1 daa point of a successful application. Similarly, if you're trying to have a successful interview with a company, it helps to talk to people who have interviewed there before, preferably people who have interviewed there successfully. (The process may well have other issues that make "legacy" applications more likely, but a higher acceptance rate of such applications doesn't inherently suggest a problem.)
- michaelt 8y ago
  If children of graduates are more qualified _naturally_ then why does Harvard _need_ it to be _policy_ that they take legacy status into account? MIT and Caltech seem to do fine with legacy-blind admissions.
  - arethuza 8y ago
    I'm not from the US so don't really know what I'm talking about - but my impressions from this side of the pond are that MIT and Caltech seem to have rather different reputations from Harvard?
  - usepgp 8y ago
    I would imagine that both MIT and Caltech have a higher acceptance rate for legacy for this reason. However a side effect of them not keeping track is that we will never have the breakout of those rates.
    - fjsolwmv 8y ago
      That's backwards reasoning.
  - albntomat0 8y ago
    Probably proportionally based for each one. Legacy applicants are X% more qualified naturally (well educated parents, etc), and get Y% from the admissions. Given the numbers for Harvard, MIT, etc, there are plenty of qualified applicants for each spot.
- montrose 8y ago
  Than the general population possibly, but not than the applicant pool, which is the comparison that matters. It seems more likely that in the applicant pool the non-legacy kids would be smarter. Imagine how confident of your ability you'd have to be to apply to Harvard as a random kid from a public high school in Iowa. Whereas if you'd grown up expecting to go there because your parents did, the threshold for applying would be pretty low.

announcerman 8y ago

Why would they keep it secret? To stop others from gaming the system or because the system can't be gamed since its biased from the start?

deleted 8y ago
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setr 8y ago
It might also be because the system is not actually consistent or well-defined. They might, say, depend primarily on reviewer judgement, and can measure reviewer correctness on hit/miss student ratios for those admitted, while not actually encoding it in strict law. Exposing this however would inevitably require that they do, strictly, define their terms and conditions, which may lead to worse outcomes, if its not easy to produce non-gameable rules, or rules that actually match successful reviewer judgement.
generic_user 8y ago
Harvard is being sued for racial discrimination against Asian Americans in there admissions policies. They created set of personality criteria for admissions. The criteria was entirely subjective, things like 'positive personality', and 'likability'. Then gave Asians consistently low scores on theses subjective criteria. And then weighed the criteria high enough to knock them out of positions which they would have otherwise qualified for if the admissions was based on standard academic criteria. Bias and racism is predictable when you choose to abandon Meritocracy based on objective measurable criteria. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollment-applicants.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollme...
- intended 8y ago
  What sucks is that bias and racism is also baked into many “objective” criteria. Take test scores - just having the right parents will push your sores up on average. Having better performance regular ties into wealth and upbringing. No surprise then that the dominant economic group will hold an advantage is such tests. The damned intertwined nature of all these issues is what makes it hard to set up an actual objective measure. Which then brings us back to subjective decision making.

pcstl 8y ago

"The school says releasing the information could put it at a competitive disadvantage" Likely because people might find their policies unethical, which would stop them from making choices that maximize the perceived value of a Harvard degree?

eganist 8y ago
> Likely because people might find their policies unethical, which would stop them to making choices that maximize the perceived value of a Harvard degree? Which assumptions are you relying on which result in one begetting the other?
- pcstl 8y ago
  If they reveal their policies, those are highly publicized and enough moral outrage is generated, they'll have to commit to changing their policies or risk having their reputation permanently stained. Of course, being Harvard University, they would probably wouldn't take too hard a blow, but it would still devalue them.
  - eganist 8y ago
    I guess I'm missing a point. Why would it devalue them with their target audience?
    - llampx 8y ago
      Currently, Harvard, Yale and the other Ivy Leagues are perceived as the best education money can buy. If it turns out that it's not actually that hard to get into Harvard if you have money or are legacy (and that the education itself is middling), it may lead to a hit in reputation. It may not make a difference to the Cruella DeVille types directly, but public perception is a thing. If enough of the public perceives a Harvard degree as ill-gotten, the value of that degree goes down. Ergo, they start losing applicants to the other Ivys.
      - 8y ago

lordnacho 8y ago

If the emperor were ever naked, this would be it. Contrast this "trade secret" to a chat with an Oxford don, and you'll find the don is quite straightforward in admitting they are fallible. Some admits are duds, and some are hits. Decisions are made based on a small amount of information, but only the dons decide what happens. They try hard to let in disadvantaged kids, but it's a crap shoot deciding who has potential and who doesn't. They rarely care about anything other than academics. (I'm not sure how they recruit the rowers.) It's just laughable that an admissions process is a trade secret, and unless there's a compelling explanation given, I would assume they claim this because they are being sued by Asians about bias, and giving places to legacies, which is just as bad for a place that sells itself on excellence.

vowelless 8y ago
> It's just laughable that an admissions process is a trade secret More and more, I view these Ivy league colleges (and a few others like MIT, Stanford, etc) as private clubs not too dissimilar from country clubs. Beyond the anti Asian bias, I think something more revealing will be the number of legacy admits. Education is getting more decentralized and so the only real value of these institutions is brand recognition and network. If that is indeed a good analogy, then it makes sense Harvards admission criteria is a trade secret.
- tdumitrescu 8y ago
  I don't think the (high rate) of legacy acceptances has ever been considered a secret at the top ivies? "Harvard's incoming class of 2021 is made up of over 29 percent legacy students, reports The Harvard Crimson." https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/06/harvards-incoming-class-is-one-third-legacy.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/06/harvards-incoming-class-is-o... At the school I went to, even before I applied I knew that their admissions process funneled legacy applications into an entirely separate pool from normal applications.
- rjzzleep 8y ago
  Was there ever a doubt in that? I wish I had known that University is for networking and making connections. Maybe my life would have been easier. My ex's internship at Harvard was as simple as her dad knowing a prof that is friends with a harvard one. No prep, no interview, no nothing. It opened a lot of doors and that's great, but the interesting thing was that when things are so easy to attain, I had to do a lot of convincing to actually get her to attend it. And when I contrast it to the amount of stones that were thrown in my way, I can't help but be a little bit jealous

DeadReckoning 8y ago

I support affirmative action but not people lying that they're unbiased.

tomcam 8y ago

I cannot wait for the legal discovery process commences. It’s going to be a bloodbath, because Harvard has discriminated against Asians far more subtly and systematically than they did with Jews.

sonnyblarney 8y ago
Discrimination against Jews was far more than systematic, it was institutional and not really a secret. Moreover, an overall overrepresentation of Asians are admitted, which us completely a different kind of 'bias' than simply not admitting them at all. Though I'd disagree with the whole if it, if they went 'strictly SAT' or something, and suppose 50% of every class was Asian-American, whereupon Asian-Americans only make up 5% of the overall population of the US thereby meaning a 10x overrepresentation ... well - that's a problem by any social measure. So it's far more complicated than simply 'they don't like some people and don't want them there'.
- llampx 8y ago
  > Though I'd disagree with the whole if it, if they went 'strictly SAT' or something, and suppose 50% of every class was Asian-American, whereupon Asian-Americans only make up 5% of the overall population of the US thereby meaning a 10x overrepresentation ... well - that's a problem by any social measure. The "I don't see colors" part of me is cringing at what this implies. Aren't Asian-Americans supposed to be more than their race?
  - sonnyblarney 8y ago
    Yes, definitely, but people are also 'much more than their SAT scores'.
- YorkshireSeason 8y ago
  a problem by any social measure. Why is this a problem at all? Elite universities should admit the best students. Science / truth is and should be epistocratic, rather than democratic, fair or equal. If other ethnies cannot educate their children up to Asian standards, then that's a failure of the other ethnies. Punishing Asians for consistently raising better children is victim blaming. All the more, so since it's very easy to raise successful children: study hard & consistently, value education and do lots of maths. We should celebrate the Asian focus of intellectual excellence rather than punish them.

arethuza 8y ago

Based upon my experiences in business, quite a lot of the time when someone says they don't want to share the details of a "soft" process (rather than engineering or scientific methods) its because they don't actually have anything like a documented repeatable process and they are just using "judgement" to make the decision - which for something like recruitment or admissions is likely to be influenced by personal and organisational biases.

cncrnd 8y ago

I used to be anti affirmative action. Then, I met a lot of students at a similar tier school who were basically shoved there by their parents. Little original thought or unique qualities, just sent to an expensive private school and drilled on the SAT like monkeys. So now I am in support of affirmative action, maybe out of disappointment in my traditional upbringing classmates.

hyperfallible 8y ago
SAT training leads to modest gains of around 20-30 points on average. Also I don't see how racial background is a unique quality.
- cncrnd 8y ago
  If that were actually true, no one would train for the SAT. It's a simple test easily trained for, not some ideal measure of aptitude. It's not about race. You want people with diverse upbringings because they will do different things, and because they had the chance to go to a good school maybe they can do those different things better.
  - hyperfallible 8y ago
    that's what the evidence tell us.
  - bobcostas55 8y ago
    It's absolutely true. Take a look at these papers, they have data on how much test prep increases scores: * http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/Briggs_Theeffectofadmissionstestpreparation.pdf http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/Briggs_Theeffectofadmissionst... * https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/89/2/435/2235270 https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/89/2/435/223527... There is very little room for training in the SAT.
    - cncrnd 8y ago
      Again, results depend on the person and effort exerted.

kapauldo 8y ago

It's a private institution. So long as it doesn't accept public money or break any discrimination laws, it should be allowed to keep its admission process private. Does anyone honestly think George bush was admitted because of his grades? Let's find something meaningful to be outraged about. We are never going to win this one and it's not worth fighting.

SenseiMaster 8y ago
Many private institution receive hundreds of millions to billions of dollars from the government.
BigChiefSmokem 8y ago
Financial aid (FAFSA) is a federal program (meaning public tax dollars are used to keep it running) that channels a lot of money to all schools, including the Ivy League. I'd argue in a court of law that assistance to their student body should be cut immediately if they don't open up their record and policy books. We can proceed from there.
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mathattack 8y ago

Glad that the mention athletics. I used to be surprised that Sports matter so much. I recall interviewing a not so bright Princeton grad. I was surprised, given the high esteem I held the school. When he mentioned playing lacrosse, I asked how much that helped in admissions. He said, “About as much as Football at Ohio State.” At least he was honest!

spiritcat 8y ago
Not sure what you're getting at, but our Buckeye student athletes are held to rigorous standards dammit!
jdhn 8y ago
Lacrosse is huge in the Ivy League world. Yes, they have football, but lacrosse is the big hitter.

RickJWagner 8y ago

One of the greatest minds of our times, Thomas Sowell, words it this way: "When Jonas Salk applied to selective Townsend Harris High School in New York, and later to the then-selective City College of New York (CCNY), there might well have been some other student, not quite as academically qualified, who could have been admitted instead, on the basis of having overcome greater handicaps than Jonas Salk had. But the relevant question is: Would that other student have been equally likely to create a vaccine that would banish the scourge of polio?"

StanislavPetrov 8y ago
>But the relevant question is: Would that other student have been equally likely to create a vaccine that would banish the scourge of polio?" We'll never know, because that other student was racially profiled and denied an opportunity on that basis.
- berbec 8y ago
  True. The horrible truth is that affirmative action cuts both ways; it can give advantages to under-represented groups, but only at the expense of the majority. Admissions is a zero-sum game. Every student admitted is a spot not available to someone else. It a horrible system, but so is every other system. What you can say for affirmative action is that it tries to game the system towards those who generally get screwed over otherwise.
  - StanislavPetrov 8y ago
    >What you can say for affirmative action is that it tries to game the system towards those who generally get screwed over otherwise. Judging people on their immutable characteristics is always ignorant, counterproductive, and polarizing by definition. There are a myriad of ways for us to help people who have been generally screwed by society that don't involve judging them based on their race or other physical traits. A color blind, class-based affirmative action system would be far, far preferable to anything that Harvard or other proponents of race-based affirmative action are doing. Give an automatic bonus to people who went to school in a poverty stricken area. Give an automatic bonus to those whose parents didn't graduate from college. There are tens of millions of poor, white Americans whose families have lived generations in poverty who rightfully seethe while they sit in their sweltering, air-condioner-free trailers and listen to rich, entitled people talk about the "historic privilege" of whites.

fatjokes 8y ago

Harvard wouldn't be in this mess if they just give up the bullshit myth that it is at all a meritocracy. They should just have a fixed admissions ratios: - X% of seats for children of wealthy alumni, to maintain their alumni and donor network. - Y% of seats based on academic or artistic merit: to maintain their brand. Sure, throw sports in there if you insist. - Z% of seats by pure lottery. This helps Harvard mitigate any population skew introduced by X% and Y%. They can tell anybody who doesn't like it to go fuck themselves. No more pretending to be fair and all that bullshit.

djhartman 8y ago
Is this something you could know for any university? I imagine most private ones anyway would be pretty secretive about how many positions they reserve for so-called "legacy" students.
kornish 8y ago
Without the perception of meritocracy, I think the brand does slip significantly and Harvard has created a bigger problem for itself. As soon as you formally acknowledge that you're letting some people in due to legacy or lottery, the value of the reputation diminishes because any given person may have been accepted on lottery. People know who's legacy and who's not, but the university can't acknowledge it publicly for that reason.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  It's more simple than that. They will never fully open the black box, because people will optimize for its contents. There is an UNBELIEVABLE amount of entitlement thinking and out and out attempts to cheat that go on at places like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford. If no one knows what admissions is looking for other than straight A's, then you just get straight A's and do the extras that YOU think are important. (Which as it turns out, is what they really want to determine.)
  - AboutTheWhisles 8y ago
    If they haven't opened the black box, then how do you know what they really want to determine?

imgabe 8y ago

Should trade secrets even apply to an organization that is supposed to be a non-profit? What are they even competing against?

fjsolwmv 8y ago
Why not? Nonprofit just means no one is a capital shareholder taking profit. It means nothing about the mission, values, or economic rights of the organization. The NFL is a nonprofit.

guard0g 8y ago

I'd venture to say that this is just the start of the coming race wars. As the American demographic increasingly turns brown, there could be significant social upheaval versus the "status quo."

chickenfries 8y ago
> the coming race wars Well, that's not something I'm used to hearing, besides from people like Richard Spencer or other white nationalists. Care to elaborate on why you think race wars are imminent? Somehow I don't see them happening over Harvard admissions...
- turtlecloud 8y ago
  Harvard admissions is just the tip of the iceberg. Balkanization of the USA is evident. Which multi ethnic societies in history have done well? Is this a globalist agenda pushed by elite ruling class? Can they disintegrate our tribal tendencies and replace them with global values?

rjkennedy98 8y ago

Whatever the issues with trying to admit a diverse class, the fact that American universities still give privileges to legacy students is an outrage.

bitwize 8y ago

I bet some nastythings would be exposed if their admissions policy were revealed. Like you'd still lose points for being Jewish or a visible minority.

wishart_washy 8y ago

This topic is so endlessly fascinating because it encapsulates debates on meritocracy, privilege, wealth, and recruiting that have a ripple effect across a lifetime. I attended an Ivy and a lot of the stereotypes are true. The varsity athletes are sharper than you would expect. Because the Ivy League agreed to not give scholarships to athletes (unlike Stanford), teams have a gentleman's agreement with admissions to keep a specific average GPA and SAT/ACT score. So for every gifted athlete that's a dull crayon from Groton you also got a high-achieving student-athlete. I was a TA, and the varsity athletes were the only ones who showed up consistently. They had limited time and needed to be efficient with their schoolwork. The club athletes are the rich parents + boarding school crowd. I briefly played club lacrosse - these kids were a caricature of what you would expect. The network effect is real btw. A running joke at Stanford is that the athletes go to Stanford Community College. The briefs in Fisher vs. UT are a great legal primer on the state of university admissions these days. https://www.oyez.org/cases/2015/14-981 https://www.oyez.org/cases/2015/14-981

duxup 8y ago
Not to say they're not sharp.... but I belive at most of those schools there is a system of automatic scholarships based on income. So while you don't get a sports scholarship, athletes are still not paying either way. Not to knock their academics or anything, but the no sports scholarship is just no 'sports' scholarship. On another aside, at a lot of schools athlete attendance is recorded by other students and reported to the coaches, at times even a non mandatory attendance class is mandatory as far as the coaches see it so at those schools they show up ;) They might not be as sharp, but they know they have to show up.

kevintb 8y ago

It’s fascinating how many of those who defend Harvard eventually make some comment along the lines of “unimaginative, robotic Asians”. Underneath their arguments is a racist belief they simply can’t shake.

pimmen 8y ago

This is just such a weird world for me as a Swede. Here, the universities are under the same transparency rules like government agencies, meaning that you can even ask to go through your professor's inbox if you want (if they work on classified stuff, they need to keep that stuff separate). Also, we have laws mandating how you can portion admission policies: 33% from high school grades, 33% from our version of the SAT and the rest they can negotiate with the government about what they want to use but it has to be transparent. You can also freely check the government's website and see, for every year, on what basis people were admitted for every university program in the country.

andromeduck 8y ago
how are the emails anonymized?
- pimmen 8y ago
  A program and year maps to an entry in a database. There you will see how the groups were partitioned, what the lowest GPA was in the group for grades, what the lowest score on the scholastic aptitude test was in the second group and some information about the other third, depending on the program in question. You will also see how many were not immediately accepted but put on the reserve list instead and you can also see the same statistik but for people without a Swedish national identification number and for women or men. It's all available in a simple search engine, here's the link (in Swedish): https://statistik.uhr.se/ https://statistik.uhr.se/
- pimmen 8y ago
  Sorry, the emails you said. Correspondence with students of personal matters is classified, they aren’t allowed to hand that out. Everything else is just up for grabs!