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To the people complaining about this: this is actually a very positive development that I welcome and you should too. This entire time, elite U.S. colleges have

• remote_phone 4y ago
  I agree but I’m always wondering how admissions departments and those who are in charge benefit from donations. I understand bribery, but this is a bit different. If the money goes to universities for a donation, do people somehow get rewarded for this?
  • HarryHirsch 4y ago
    It's all about access - donate money, get your children into a place where they can have access to political and professional networks. That's the University of Southern California admissions scandal. More money gets you a voice in hiring committees where you can set the tone of the department and shape political discourse. The Koch brothers (those people again) did that very successfully with George Mason University when they transformed what was a commuter college into a megaphone for libertarian ideas.
    • Kon-Peki 4y ago
      > It's all about access - donate money, get your children into a place There is also a flip side to this coin, which is why universities usually call this the “development” office. If you are going to give money away, you are very likely to give it to an organization to which you have some sort of affinity to. Universities are actively trying to cultivate that affinity so they can capture some or all of your charitable spending. And they really, really don’t want any donor to know how much they’ve been manipulated. Many people really believe that their child earned their admission letter based on merit.
  • at_a_remove 4y ago
    Used to work in a university, pretty close to the data. The Alumni & Donations people played things very close to the chest, to the point of near irrational paranoia (wait, you want us to give alumni access to this stuff but ... not let us know who the alumni are?), so I think the fight for this kind of information is going to be quite intense.
  • 1123581321 4y ago
    The charitable read is that large donations and perennial benefactors are good for the school, and admissions considers the welfare of the school in addition to other factors.
• vagabund 4y ago
  > U.S. colleges have been carefully steering conversations about admissions in the direction of racial quotas, to avoid talking about how by far the largest driver of unfairness in the admissions process is legacy admissions and donation quid pro quo arrangements. A lesson that generalizes well. Remember Occupy Wall Street, Piketty's tome, the Bernie primaries? It all feels like distant history now.
  • latency-guy2 4y ago
    Only if you have been led to believe any of those things were popular. Occupy Wall Street had participants that counted at most 30,000 cumulatively across demonstrations in NY and surrounding areas. Impressive number? Not in my opinion. Admittedly, I have no idea what the hell 'Piketty's tome' is, so I won't talk about it, seems like its related to a few books that sold 1.5m copies, pretty successful, that's it from me for now though. Bernie in 2016 received ~43% of the vote in democratic primaries, in 2020 he slipped down to ~26%, neither times was he close. Hillary received ~55% in 2016, Joe received ~51% in 2020. Opinion polls consistently put Hillary far above Bernie throughout the entire election season. In 2020, Joe also had the highest approval rating amongst candidates in DNC, only dropping for a few weeks where admittedly Bernie had higher approval, but then dropped it when it really mattered. So you'll have to point to me where exactly these people are popular, maybe within their own world? Maybe by spending? That only works for Bernie, not for Occupy Wall Street which was a very minor event by all measures. Can't speak to Picketty, so I will leave that undecided on my end, and let you define it's success. Note, I am far from a Democrat or a Socialist, in fact I'm Republican through and through.
    • leereeves 4y ago
      43% of the vote in democratic primaries is quite popular. And Bernie is a great example because identity politics was specifically used against him; his supporters were derided as mostly white male "Bernie Bros". Sounds like exactly what GP was talking about: steering conversations to race and sex to avoid talking about economic inequality.
      • deleted 4y ago
• AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  And this will be very very good popcorn-munching drama. I mean, I do think that students getting in because daddy gives a couple million isn't the end of the world. The college I went to 20 years ago went away from need-blind admissions, which basically meant if you can pay you get some preference. Now THAT was bad, because it affected the general student population. If instead you have a reserved number of "bribe" students and that means pure-merit admissions can be done with the rest of the students, well, ok. I love how admissions of athletes to play sports gets a total pass. Probably because it putatively is a good means for minorities to get into schools, even if they are separated off into purely sports training tracks and joke academics. The real issue is the MBAs running the colleges as a profit industry. Except there's no profits, so they pay... themselves.
  • busterarm 4y ago
    > I love how admissions of athletes to play sports gets a total pass. Probably because it putatively is a good means for minorities to get into schools, even if they are separated off into purely sports training tracks and joke academics. And sadly, even if they succeed on this track into the world of professional sports, the joke academics and lack of financial training (if you had a financial education you would never play college sports anyway...) mean that they're set up to go broke and fail in life as soon as the injuries add up or their athletic ability is no longer exceptional to their peer group.
  • rtpg 4y ago
    I don’t understand how being bought in with your parents money is ok yet an athelete actually doing a thing themselves with their own bodies shouldn’t “get a pass”. Especially given that they still have to, you know, pass classes! Let’s not pretend all those legacies are showing up to class and working hard.
    • Ekaros 4y ago
      Because sports have absolutely zero to do with education. Or even they should be considered negative thing. Taking time away from studying.
    • 4y ago
• zumu 4y ago
  > the largest driver of unfairness in the admissions process is legacy admissions and donation quid pro quo arrangements From my personal experiences, I suspect the restriction of financial aid based on arbitrary cutoffs affects more people. I know several people who got into ivys, but didn't go because they didn't qualify for financial aid and chose not to take on large amounts of debt, coming from frugal lower/middle class families.
• Telemakhos 4y ago
  Imagine what would happen if colleges fired their admissions departments, set aside all considerations of wealth and race, and had a database admit students with a single query on a result of standardized test results ordered from highest score to lowest, accepting students in that order until the year's class was filled.
  • graphe 4y ago
    Then we'd have heavy cramming, less fun, suicides and pressure like china south Korea or Japan. For better or worst.
  • rfrey 4y ago
    Then you would have universities exclusively populated by people who are good at taking whatever type of standardized test you're administering.
    • Telemakhos 4y ago
      Are you suggesting that having people capable of scoring well on exams of common necessities for college education, like mathematics and language skills, is not desirable? The SAT is not a trivia test: a student who can pass a test on math up through precalculus is going to get more value out of college than one who does not understand algebra and has to spend time in remediation. I would much prefer to have a university exclusively populated by people good at solving math problems and comprehending readings than by people selected for their "good vibes" and to fit a diversity quota.
      • jonnybgood 4y ago
        You didn’t address the comment you’re responding to. You won’t have students who are good at math and language skills. You’ll have students who are good at taking math and language skills standardized tests. Being good at math and being good at taking a math standardized test is two different things. A student can excel at math but be terrible at taking tests for many reasons. You’ll have bright students falling through the cracks if this was the only consideration for admission.
• _liym 4y ago
  You are spot on. I'm a middle-class student who played the game to get into one of the six schools mentioned in this article. It was immediately obvious that the "diversity" of my school came from a large number of dual citizens living a life of luxury and privilege. Racial quotas were a red carpet for the international elite who spoke the same language and shared the same life experiences regardless of their race, whether they came from anti-Democratic countries or upstate New York. These same individuals got special platforms to talk about adversity while I went to bed hungry. I am grateful for the financial aid that was given to me, and I will always appreciate the large endowment that supported this, but I hope the admissions system gets exposed for what it is.
  • kaitai 4y ago
    This is a phenomenon known as "elite capture" (and the book of that title is insightful).
  • el-salvador 4y ago
    > Quotas were a red carpet for the international This reminded me of something back when I was in high school in my Latin American country. There used to be this locally known international university-application-consultant and one of the things he mentioned for the "satisfaction guaranteed" of his services was being familiar on which Universities needed to increase their Latin American demographics and how to use that in the applicant's favor to increase the chances of a successful college and scholarship application. This was mostly targeted to students at bilingual or international schools whose families were already wealthier than average. > shared the same life experiences regardless of their race Where I grew up bilingual/international school students live in an isolated bubble separate from the rest of students. So they grow up with the study plans, standardized tests, music, tv shows and pop culture from their international school's country. So probably that's why their life experience might have been more similar to those in the U.S. This is only a small fraction of the students though. For example a high school student from American School of my country might know about the SAT test prep, Ivy applications, college application essay writing, and be familiar with US issues. All of those which would be mostly unknown by students outside that circle. Making others less likely to successfully apply.
• rayiner 4y ago
  The degree to which the elite institutions have managed to co-opt the left by playing identity progressives against economic progressives is both brilliant and scary. They've managed to paint adding some privileged, Ivy League educated minorities to corporate boards as progressive victories on behalf of minority groups who mostly don't even attend college. Meanwhile there has been zero progress on adding workers to corporate boards, which would do far more to advance the material and social interests of those same minority groups.
  • tptacek 4y ago
    On the other hand, Elizabeth Warren, the apotheosis of the elite institutional left you're talking about, ran for president on a platform of getting workers onto boards, and got absolutely crushed. It's possible that race simply has more charge than class does, regardless of the axiomatic arguments people have for why it should be the other way around.
    • rayiner 4y ago
      That assumes people read platforms, which I think is incorrect. Warren got maneuvered by the media and activists into a "woke white lady with a plan" lane that just turned out to be a total loser. If she had campaigned on the worker stuff and didn't call people "Latinix" I think she would've done far better.
      • tptacek 4y ago
        Ok, but they didn't have to read about it? She talked about it a bunch. It didn't seem to light anybody up.
        • rayiner 4y ago
          If you had to reduce each candidate to three bullet points, "workers" wouldn't have made the list for Warren, but trying to stab the leader of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party in the back with a cheap accusation of sexism certainly would have made the list. Clearly there is a large constituency for class-oriented progressivism. Sanders wouldn't have been able to win California, Nevada, and Colorado, and hold his own in Texas, otherwise. What Warren proves is that adding identity politics to the mix is a losing proposition, even in the Democratic Party.
• theGnuMe 4y ago
  I think there is an easy fix. If you accept Federal funds at all then you have to have a fair and open admissions process.