4 ms·

It's pretty amazing to me that we, as a society, are willing to accept legacy admissions. We spend so much time and energy and money trying to make sure that o

by s17n 7y ago

It's pretty amazing to me that we, as a society, are willing to accept legacy admissions. We spend so much time and energy and money trying to make sure that our educational system gives everybody equal opportunity when this one thing matters so much more than eg universal pre-k.

toasterlovin 7y ago
What we, as a society, are willing to accept isn't really relevant to Harvard, which is a private institution.
- Analemma_ 7y ago
  As tharne mentioned in another comment, this isn't really true. Harvard (like all private universities) gets tons of government funding: directly via grants and indirectly via the federal loans that a lot of its students get. Society therefore arguably gets to have some say in how Harvard does business; if Harvard doesn't like that, it can stop taking federal grant money.
  - jlawson 7y ago
    Add on to that the massive tax break they get on they endowment's huge investment earnings. Harvard is a hedge fund with a school attached. They should be taxed like one.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- NeoBasilisk 7y ago
  Private institutions are bound by laws that we (society) create.
GordonS 7y ago
As a non-American, I'm unsure about some of the terminology being used here - what are "legacy admissions"?
- eropple 7y ago
  Children of alumni.
- spats1990 7y ago
  The descendants of alumni: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_preferences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_preferences
  - GordonS 7y ago
    Wow, it boggles my mind that would be accepted nowadays?!
- mtnGoat 7y ago
  Students admitted to a university that one of their parents went attended. Having parents(or grand parents) as alumni can help you get into many schools in the US. In some cases, their parents having gone to the school is the only reason they got in. A lot of schools athletics programs are in similar situations as well.
topkai22 7y ago
Because it really doesn't. The total incoming undergrad class is ~1650. Across the entire Ivy League it's around 17000. If 20% of admissiosn are affected by legacy/faculty/donors, then that's like 3400 people who wanted to go to the Ivy League who couldn't (I suspect this is a high number, but ignore that). To include all the other higher tier schools ehre this might matter, let's just call it 10,000 people affected. There are 4.3M 18 year olds in the US. This means that roughly 0.2% of people in an academic cohort will have to accept going to a slightly lower tier school then they would have otherwise due to legacy admissions. BTW- There are a fair number of studies out there suggesting that students who are admitted to top-tier schools but don't go have no effect on longer term outcomes than those who do, so other than short term disappointment it might be a null effect. Meanwhile, universal pre-k enables families (ane espicially mothers) the ability to return to their own work/careers faster and has been shown to improve long term academic success (although their is some question to scalability). So between the two, universial pre-k seems like a far more important issue...
- s17n 7y ago
  The issue with elite university admissions is that they are gatekeepers to power, so the composition of their student bodies affects us all. That said I guess you're right that pre k is more important when it comes down to it.
akvadrako 7y ago
It's not about allowing it – we should allow institutions to choose their own members. The problem is that we are giving them money just so they can educate rich kids. We should eliminate government support for Harvard like tax breaks, subsidized loans and grants.
- s17n 7y ago
  The problem is that institutions like Harvard are gatekeepers to power (eg, every sitting supreme court justice went to Harvard or Yale). So when you allow these institutions to use legacy admissions, you are establishing a hereditary power structure in the country. Which, given that our founding myth is the rejection of aristocracy, I wouldn't think people would be OK with.
notmainacct 7y ago
Legacy admissions make sense to me even if it's unfair. Half of the experience of a university is the student body. I think it's completely acceptable for a university to allocate a certain percentage of the student body to legacies or children of wealthy donors because they can provide networking opportunities to other students. I think this is no different from what Harvard has been accused of with their race-conscious admissions where it seems harder for Asian students to get in than White, Black and Latino students. While practices of admittance that include anything other than merit are unfair for the individual student, this makes sense for the university to build its own image for prospective students, and its image for employers looking to recruit college grads. Students don't want to go to schools that don't have diversity and employers are looking for diversity. University is not just about the academic lessons taught inside the classroom, or building a qualification for a career. Some of the most important lessons are taught between and outside the classroom like the social skills required to build study groups or the management skills to be in the leadership of a club. There are also meta-social learning in the abilities to socialize with people from different backgrounds in various levels of formality. Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul's School by Shamus Rahman Khan talks about how in prestigious college prep schools, students learn similar social traits from an environment that shapes them into what is received as a successful elite student. As far as the educational system goes, I could care less about how the most elite schools go about admissions because it effects such a small amount of the population, and degrees only affect the first job of your career except if you are trying to get into med school or law school. What's more important to me is the failure of the public educational system to provide literacy when teachers are taught to use methods that harm the ability to learn phonics. https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/02/12/582465905/the-gap-between-the-science-on-kids-and-reading-and-how-it-is-taught https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/02/12/582465905/the-gap... What is also important to me is the impact of one bad teacher to ruin a child's belief that they can learn math or a learn a new language or music or just their own self esteem. One of the biggest problems in American schooling is that when a teacher fails accreditation to teach high school or middle school, they generally are able to teach elementary school. Teachers that do not know how to teach a given subject should not be put in front of students at more formative years where damage to an academic self-image can be more significant and impactful. Ideally a college education would not be required for most of the workforce. Sadly our standards for a k-12 education have fallen due to a lack of care to find how to best teach students and a working environment for teachers that does not attract teaching talent or understanding of how to teach, and allows for mediocrity. There are great teachers in the system, but many of them are burning out due to long hours of teaching, grading, and re-accreditation and low pay.

by s17n 7y ago

toasterlovin 7y ago

What we, as a society, are willing to accept isn't really relevant to Harvard, which is a private institution.

Analemma_ 7y ago
As tharne mentioned in another comment, this isn't really true. Harvard (like all private universities) gets tons of government funding: directly via grants and indirectly via the federal loans that a lot of its students get. Society therefore arguably gets to have some say in how Harvard does business; if Harvard doesn't like that, it can stop taking federal grant money.
- jlawson 7y ago
  Add on to that the massive tax break they get on they endowment's huge investment earnings. Harvard is a hedge fund with a school attached. They should be taxed like one.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
NeoBasilisk 7y ago
Private institutions are bound by laws that we (society) create.

GordonS 7y ago

As a non-American, I'm unsure about some of the terminology being used here - what are "legacy admissions"?

eropple 7y ago
Children of alumni.
spats1990 7y ago
The descendants of alumni: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_preferences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_preferences
- GordonS 7y ago
  Wow, it boggles my mind that would be accepted nowadays?!
mtnGoat 7y ago
Students admitted to a university that one of their parents went attended. Having parents(or grand parents) as alumni can help you get into many schools in the US. In some cases, their parents having gone to the school is the only reason they got in. A lot of schools athletics programs are in similar situations as well.

topkai22 7y ago

Because it really doesn't. The total incoming undergrad class is ~1650. Across the entire Ivy League it's around 17000. If 20% of admissiosn are affected by legacy/faculty/donors, then that's like 3400 people who wanted to go to the Ivy League who couldn't (I suspect this is a high number, but ignore that). To include all the other higher tier schools ehre this might matter, let's just call it 10,000 people affected. There are 4.3M 18 year olds in the US. This means that roughly 0.2% of people in an academic cohort will have to accept going to a slightly lower tier school then they would have otherwise due to legacy admissions. BTW- There are a fair number of studies out there suggesting that students who are admitted to top-tier schools but don't go have no effect on longer term outcomes than those who do, so other than short term disappointment it might be a null effect. Meanwhile, universal pre-k enables families (ane espicially mothers) the ability to return to their own work/careers faster and has been shown to improve long term academic success (although their is some question to scalability). So between the two, universial pre-k seems like a far more important issue...

s17n 7y ago
The issue with elite university admissions is that they are gatekeepers to power, so the composition of their student bodies affects us all. That said I guess you're right that pre k is more important when it comes down to it.

akvadrako 7y ago

It's not about allowing it – we should allow institutions to choose their own members. The problem is that we are giving them money just so they can educate rich kids. We should eliminate government support for Harvard like tax breaks, subsidized loans and grants.

s17n 7y ago
The problem is that institutions like Harvard are gatekeepers to power (eg, every sitting supreme court justice went to Harvard or Yale). So when you allow these institutions to use legacy admissions, you are establishing a hereditary power structure in the country. Which, given that our founding myth is the rejection of aristocracy, I wouldn't think people would be OK with.

notmainacct 7y ago

Legacy admissions make sense to me even if it's unfair. Half of the experience of a university is the student body. I think it's completely acceptable for a university to allocate a certain percentage of the student body to legacies or children of wealthy donors because they can provide networking opportunities to other students. I think this is no different from what Harvard has been accused of with their race-conscious admissions where it seems harder for Asian students to get in than White, Black and Latino students. While practices of admittance that include anything other than merit are unfair for the individual student, this makes sense for the university to build its own image for prospective students, and its image for employers looking to recruit college grads. Students don't want to go to schools that don't have diversity and employers are looking for diversity. University is not just about the academic lessons taught inside the classroom, or building a qualification for a career. Some of the most important lessons are taught between and outside the classroom like the social skills required to build study groups or the management skills to be in the leadership of a club. There are also meta-social learning in the abilities to socialize with people from different backgrounds in various levels of formality. Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul's School by Shamus Rahman Khan talks about how in prestigious college prep schools, students learn similar social traits from an environment that shapes them into what is received as a successful elite student. As far as the educational system goes, I could care less about how the most elite schools go about admissions because it effects such a small amount of the population, and degrees only affect the first job of your career except if you are trying to get into med school or law school. What's more important to me is the failure of the public educational system to provide literacy when teachers are taught to use methods that harm the ability to learn phonics. https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/02/12/582465905/the-gap-between-the-science-on-kids-and-reading-and-how-it-is-taught https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/02/12/582465905/the-gap... What is also important to me is the impact of one bad teacher to ruin a child's belief that they can learn math or a learn a new language or music or just their own self esteem. One of the biggest problems in American schooling is that when a teacher fails accreditation to teach high school or middle school, they generally are able to teach elementary school. Teachers that do not know how to teach a given subject should not be put in front of students at more formative years where damage to an academic self-image can be more significant and impactful. Ideally a college education would not be required for most of the workforce. Sadly our standards for a k-12 education have fallen due to a lack of care to find how to best teach students and a working environment for teachers that does not attract teaching talent or understanding of how to teach, and allows for mediocrity. There are great teachers in the system, but many of them are burning out due to long hours of teaching, grading, and re-accreditation and low pay.