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I'm still unclear about your point. MIT has claimed for as long as I can remember that they don't accept legacy admissions. Assuming that MIT is telling the tru

I'm still unclear about your point. MIT has claimed for as long as I can remember that they don't accept legacy admissions. Assuming that MIT is telling the truth on this matter, your reasoning seems to imply then that MIT has no purpose at all! As to whether legacy students would have helped me rise higher on any ladders, I can't say, since I climbed whatever ladders I did via some combination of merit, having a good education, having a prestigious education, and "white male American privilege". I have no idea how things would have turned out if some rich kid had been my roommate. I have gotten jobs due to connections, though, and more and better connections might have allowed me to get better jobs. Though I pretty much got the jobs that I wanted anyway, so it's not clear if better connections would have made much of a difference. Personally, my guess would be that legacy admissions exist mostly for a university to increase its stream of loyal donations from the well-to-do.

tathougies 7y ago
Again, non germane response. My original response was aimed at schools that admit legacies and merit students. Its sole purpose was to counter the claim that legacies help merit students via networking. If MIT doesn't do legacy then none of my criticism applies to it. Nowhere did I diminish the value of college connections. I did diminish the value of connections between intelligent students and the well to do as being unnecessary to the success of those students. Your experience at MIT supports my claim because MIT graduates do very well despite having no legacy admissions. Thus we can dismiss the idea that legacy admissions are necessary to help merit students. Please don't try to derail the discussion
- nessus42 7y ago
  Your argument was based on research claiming that I would have made just as much money in my career if I hadn't gone to MIT. So what was the point of my MIT education? According to your argument, apparently nothing! The conclusion that your reasoning leads us to here is clearly germane because it is absurd. Consequently, I can't accept your argument as presented.
  - nessus42 7y ago
    Whoever downvoted my above response should look up "reductio ad absurdum". See, my MIT education was useful for something. I knows fancy logic things. To elaborate a bit more on why I think that equating income with educational value is a non-starter, using a direct argument rather than a reductio ad absurdum argument: my MIT education instilled me with values, passions, and interests that could very well be in opposition to maximising my income. I.e., if I'd gone to a lesser school, I might very well make more money because my values, passions, and interests would be different. I.e., not necessarily for the better, but perhaps oriented more towards increased income. E.g., without certain passions and interests that MIT instilled me with, there would have been a lot more jobs–some of them high-paying–that would have been appealing to me. But with the passions and interests I ended up with, these jobs were not appealing to me. E.g., I could have gotten a very high paying job right out of college programming in Cobol. But that certainly was not for me after groking the beauty of Scheme. Consequently, a study showing that I would have statistically made as much money if I had received my education at a less prestigious school, is utterly irrelevent to how I value my MIT education.
    - tathougies 7y ago
      > reductio ad absurdum Wow. Nice misapplication of a logical fallacy. My claim was that forging connections between legacy students and merit students was not particularly beneficial to merit students. You then claimed that this would lead to the supposedly absurd conclusion that your MIT education is valueless. You cannot apply reductio ad absurdum here, because you cannot conclude 'an MIT education is valueless' from my claim that 'merit students do not need to be friends with legacy students to succeed'. Since MIT does not have legacy admissions, my claim does not apply to it. You cannot conclude anything about MIT from my claim. Nowhere have I claimed anything about college friends / connections in general, only those between legacy and merit students, which, again, do not exist at MIT. Moreover, you have committed the fallacy of petitio principii (popularly known as 'begging the question' -- you don't need to go to MIT to have an understanding of grade school logic). You have already concluded that your MIT education is worthwhile (and perhaps it is, I don't know; you certain have not proven it), and have used that to mistakenly conclude that you could apply reductio ad absurdum to my claim which -- again -- does not apply to MIT in any way whatsoever. So, we see that you've (1) misapplied a logical fallacy, (2) attempted to argue against a strawmanned version of my claim, and (3) used petitio principii in an attempt to persuade everyone of the value of an MIT education. I did not downvote you, but I am unsurprised that you were downvoted.

tathougies 7y ago

Again, non germane response. My original response was aimed at schools that admit legacies and merit students. Its sole purpose was to counter the claim that legacies help merit students via networking. If MIT doesn't do legacy then none of my criticism applies to it. Nowhere did I diminish the value of college connections. I did diminish the value of connections between intelligent students and the well to do as being unnecessary to the success of those students. Your experience at MIT supports my claim because MIT graduates do very well despite having no legacy admissions. Thus we can dismiss the idea that legacy admissions are necessary to help merit students. Please don't try to derail the discussion

nessus42 7y ago
Your argument was based on research claiming that I would have made just as much money in my career if I hadn't gone to MIT. So what was the point of my MIT education? According to your argument, apparently nothing! The conclusion that your reasoning leads us to here is clearly germane because it is absurd. Consequently, I can't accept your argument as presented.
- nessus42 7y ago
  Whoever downvoted my above response should look up "reductio ad absurdum". See, my MIT education was useful for something. I knows fancy logic things. To elaborate a bit more on why I think that equating income with educational value is a non-starter, using a direct argument rather than a reductio ad absurdum argument: my MIT education instilled me with values, passions, and interests that could very well be in opposition to maximising my income. I.e., if I'd gone to a lesser school, I might very well make more money because my values, passions, and interests would be different. I.e., not necessarily for the better, but perhaps oriented more towards increased income. E.g., without certain passions and interests that MIT instilled me with, there would have been a lot more jobs–some of them high-paying–that would have been appealing to me. But with the passions and interests I ended up with, these jobs were not appealing to me. E.g., I could have gotten a very high paying job right out of college programming in Cobol. But that certainly was not for me after groking the beauty of Scheme. Consequently, a study showing that I would have statistically made as much money if I had received my education at a less prestigious school, is utterly irrelevent to how I value my MIT education.
  - tathougies 7y ago
    > reductio ad absurdum Wow. Nice misapplication of a logical fallacy. My claim was that forging connections between legacy students and merit students was not particularly beneficial to merit students. You then claimed that this would lead to the supposedly absurd conclusion that your MIT education is valueless. You cannot apply reductio ad absurdum here, because you cannot conclude 'an MIT education is valueless' from my claim that 'merit students do not need to be friends with legacy students to succeed'. Since MIT does not have legacy admissions, my claim does not apply to it. You cannot conclude anything about MIT from my claim. Nowhere have I claimed anything about college friends / connections in general, only those between legacy and merit students, which, again, do not exist at MIT. Moreover, you have committed the fallacy of petitio principii (popularly known as 'begging the question' -- you don't need to go to MIT to have an understanding of grade school logic). You have already concluded that your MIT education is worthwhile (and perhaps it is, I don't know; you certain have not proven it), and have used that to mistakenly conclude that you could apply reductio ad absurdum to my claim which -- again -- does not apply to MIT in any way whatsoever. So, we see that you've (1) misapplied a logical fallacy, (2) attempted to argue against a strawmanned version of my claim, and (3) used petitio principii in an attempt to persuade everyone of the value of an MIT education. I did not downvote you, but I am unsurprised that you were downvoted.