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43% of white Harvard students are legacy, athlete, or donor/staff related (2019)
- mackie342red 3y agoDid the Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action deem legacy admissions unconstitutional?
- nradov 3y agoNo
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- workOrNah 3y agoI'm sure Edward Blum will turn his focus on this issue next
- peepeepoopoo14 3y ago[flagged]
- pbj1968 3y agoIs Harvard not allowed to admit the students they want? It’s the same situation in my local prestige college… very disproportionately slanted towards local kids that have been attending summer programs and the children of staff and faculty. So what?
- micromacrofoot 3y agoHarvard can admit who they want, but people can also complain about it
- clipsy 3y agoHarvard cannot admit who they want, in case you’ve somehow missed the recent supreme court ruling.
- mdorazio 3y agoUniversities like Harvard typically like to market themselves as being the height of meritocracy, going so far as to proudly declare their miniscule acceptance rates. It's hard to square that with a very obvious preference for students from a specific background regardless of merit.
- asdf6677 3y ago> market themselves as being the height of meritocracy This is how they market themselves to the general public, but everyone knows that Harvard and its admission policies were designed by and for the ruling class to educate their children and build connections. A Harvard degree would have no value if it selected based on merit alone. A meritocracy would turn a school like Harvard into a factory for upper middle class people like doctors and lawyers and defeat its purpose. Harvard wants to educate presidents and CEOs.
- 111111IIIIIII 3y agoWould you please explain the logic for the dishonesty as you explained the logic for diverging from meritocracy? Surely there is a good reason for such an allegedly respectable institution misleading the public that pays its bills, yes?
- deely3 3y agoWhy downvotes? Its an interesting question, and I'm curious too to hear the answer or opinion from parent commenter.
- User23 3y agoOne reason that Harvard and the other ivies like legacy students is that they’re who grow up to be big donors. Edit: I’m willing to assume that Harvard’s admissions and development offices know what they’re doing, considering that they’ve been wildly successful for centuries.
- simonster 3y ago
- zug_zug 3y agoThey are allowed to, but I think it's great to get this news out there. The prestige of Harvard mostly comes from the selectivity, but understanding what traits they are selecting for may change the perceived value of such a degree (i.e. is this because you know somebody who works there, or because you are in the top .01% of academics)
- petre 3y agoI wonder how Obama got in, but I can see why. He's a skilled peson and I can't fault his presidency too much. So they probably select the right people? Maybd ALCDs are just generaly better prepared specifically for Harvard?
- dogmatism 3y agoGonna disagree here. I know a bunch of Harvard grad ALCD's. One is a great person, and a good doctor, smart, but not outstandingly so (was a football player). Another very nice person, athlete and legacy, is a school librarian. Another (athlete) works at a competing university in the development office. Another is a school teacher. I'm struggling to come up with an ALCD I know who is outstanding in their field. The best I can do is an athlete who is now a successful politician, though I wouldn't describe her as an intellectual giant The smartest Harvard grad I know is now a professor at a different Ivy, but he was more like the Good Will Hunting kid (but writing rather than math)
- TeeMassive 3y agoNot when they receive federal money and special statutes and privileges.
- stcroixx 3y agoWell, they pretend to care a great deal for certain groups of people, but numbers like this show who they actually care for. It’s the duplicity that bothers me personally. If they’d just be honest I’d have more respect for them.
- kbenson 3y agoI'd be more interested in what the numbers look like after they've accounted for admissions I would call "extra-academic". If they want to reserve 50% of their admissions for specific reasons, I'm fine with that. If the other 50% don't appear to be inline with their stated goals, then to me that's cause for concern. Expecting Harvard to forego legacy and faculty admissions and scholarships to students that maybe wouldn't get in otherwise is expecting Harvard to not be Harvard, which may be expecting too much.
- ok123456 3y agoThey were using racial quotas on general admission to try to correct for the fact their legacy admits were overwhelmingly not representative and not based on merit. Their stated goals of diversity and inclusion are a fiction meant to preserve a classist institution.
- __blockcipher__ 3y agoThis isn’t quite true because their racial admission bias was far stronger than that needed to make up for all the nepotism (legacy donor athlete etc) admitees.
- ok123456 3y agoMaybe a strategic over-correction so they can downplay uncomfortable criticisms.
- User23 3y agoI would expect the children of Harvard students to perform above the general average academically and the children of faculty even moreso. Educational attainment is very much an heritable trait. On any practicable merit based admissions system there are still going to be considerably more applicants than open spots. Harvard also doesn’t want to become a school exclusively for the children of successful Chinese immigrants which is what it would be if it went strictly by test scores and GPA. And for what it’s worth, those Chinese parents don’t want it to be either. As others have noted one of if not the main advantage of attending an ivy is networking with the kind of people whose families can ensure them a spot at Harvard and beyond.
- ok123456 3y agoYou're saying it shouldn't matter because legacy admits have a 'heritable trait' of educational attainment in one breath, then saying there's no way to compete with Chinese students in the next. Which one is it? Maybe it's not so heritable.
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- AbrahamParangi 3y agoIf they want to be a tax-free hedge fund they're going to play by society's rules.
- Barrin92 3y ago> So what? they're funnels for the political and judicial elite. Eight out of nine of the current supreme court judges graduated from Harvard or Yale. A country being run by nepo babies rather than the most capable is kind of concerning
- kbenson 3y agoI'm not sure you've identified a cause instead of a symptom. If Harvard stopped accepting legacy admissions and donors and elites as much, would that mean that the other people would get those political and judicial appointments, or would Harvard just lose status as an important institution? Another way to look at it is whether those Harvard attendees are being appointed because of Harvard, or because of the connections they made with sufficiently powerful people also destined for similar positions at that time? Of you reduce those people, eventually you may reduce the effectiveness of going there, not increase the ability of non rich people that go there getting those positions, as Harvard itself maybe isn't the most important factor. Personally, I think it's mostly just nepotism, whether Harvard or Yale or whatever, and reducing the effectiveness of nepotism from going to Harvard will just cause people that would benefit from it to shift to a different institution that does the same. If you want to combat nepotism, stopping g people from meeting at one specific place may be the hardest and least effective way of doing so. If your goal is to promote non legacy people to positions of power, maybe just encourage more of those people at Harvard while also keeping the legacy people, and make nepotism work in your favor.
- deely3 3y agoOk, so, "nepotism in Harvard is good, because without nepotism Harvard will not be Harvard and nepotism will emerge in another institution, and in the end it will be the same." Do I understand you correctly?
- kbenson 3y agoNot quite. My position is that nepotism is bad but I think while we can reduce it I think it's impossible to eliminate based on human nature, but maybe we can use that to the benefit of society. Rather than make ineffective one of the many pipelines that elites use to meet each other and form connections which they use in their nepotism to enhance themselves and their friends, perhaps we can use it to promote a more representative set of elites through that nepotism.
- ethanbond 3y agoBecause despite being privately owned, universities enjoy many benefits due to their role as public institutions. An obvious one is their tax-free status.
- renewiltord 3y agoI think they should be allowed to use whatever method they desire but that they should pay taxes like any other organization.
- User23 3y agoYeah, what have universities ever done for society?
- kinghajj 3y agoThey're a nonprofit organization, though.
- renewiltord 3y agoOh, in that case, I think the government should have a right to control how they administer benefits to the people.
- jrflowers 3y ago> Is Harvard not allowed to admit the students they want? They are. The numbers are of the students that they chose to admit.
- vikramkr 3y agoThey get nonprofit tax status and huge amounts of federal research funding. They're also a feeder for folks who end up in powerful leadership positions in society, and if they get the right to shape society, society also obviously reserves the right to shape them back.
- lisasays 3y agoSo what? Aside from being egregiously hypocritical and unfair -- the practice promotes foundational rot and moral cretinism among the nation's most powerful and influential, at the expense of society at large. By providing fake credentials to boost the careers of e.g. this person: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Kushner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Kushner See in particular: https://www.propublica.org/article/the-story-behind-jared-kushners-curious-acceptance-into-harvard https://www.propublica.org/article/the-story-behind-jared-ku... Is Harvard not allowed to admit the students they want? Not if they want tax-exempt status and federal subsidy.
- rodgerd 3y ago> Is Harvard not allowed to admit the students they want? As of last week's US Supreme Court ruling, no.
- pessimizer 3y ago> Is Harvard not allowed to admit the students they want? No, they are not allowed to use racial preferences to make up for historical (and experiential) racism, even through they would prefer to. Clarence Thomas seemed to be making the argument that the reason they are not allowed is because a racial categorization is just racism, but also seemed to indicate that considering the actual harms of slavery and Jim Crow wouldn't be racism. That would indicate that he would uphold legacy admissions if they had to decide it, because they're specific, instead of racist. But that would be about the descendants of slaves, not "minorities" or "people of color."
- marshray 3y agoAside from the question of whether Harvard _can_ admit who they want, we get to express opinions on how they _should_ conduct admissions.
- leed25d 3y ago[flagged]
- jasmer 3y ago[dead]
- lametrol 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dontlaugh 3y agoLiberalism is just the ideology of capitalism. US conservatives and “liberals” are both liberals in the philosophical sense, with mostly cultural differences. It shouldn’t be a surprise both factions seek their material interests.
- micromacrofoot 3y agoliberal in the harvard sense is often more like rich moderate conservative
- ryan93 3y agothere is basically no overlap between the people on admissions committees and conservatives. Look up on linkedin who does admissions at ivy league schools. Hint its not stuffy old white guys.
- micromacrofoot 3y agoi’m the US most democrats have more overlap with republicans than liberals
- losteric 3y ago> staff self-declares 98% liberal Citation? That'll be interesting, asking 10 Americans to define "liberal" will probably result in 12 definitions... If you want to have a meaningful discussion, what do academic staff say about this selection criteria specifically, and/or affirmative action?
- lametrol 3y ago[flagged]
- catiopatio 3y agoSo I guess non-legacy white applicants were at an even greater disadvantage for their skin color then we might have assumed. Want to git rid of legacy preference? Great. Let’s be honest, though — this is just whataboutism.
- rileymat2 3y agoI don't think the intent is "whataboutism" it is about outlining the structural inequality in the system that affirmative action and race based systems are supposed to attempt to mitigate. We can argue about discriminatory criteria on effectiveness, fairness or legality, but it certainly is an important date point in that discussion.
- catiopatio 3y agoThe only reason it’s being brought up now is the Supreme Court ruling, and it demonstrates the opposite of what people seem to think it does. Non-legacy applicants were extremely disadvantaged if they were white.
- losteric 3y ago> Let’s be honest, though — this is just whataboutism. This is classism. Shockingly, institutions can have both classist and racist discrimination - let's be honest, they're both bad and need to go.
- catiopatio 3y agoIf that’s your take, great. I agree. I don’t believe that’s why legacy admissions are being brought up now, though. I think people are trying to make the case that legacy admissions are another form of affirmative action that largely benefits white americans. They’d be wrong, of course. Legacy admissions are classist, not racist. Being white inferred no advantage under their legacy admissions policy — in fact, the opposite, because combined with race-based affirmative action, it left even fewer slots available for non-legacy white applicants.
- rungood 3y ago> The study also found that roughly 75 percent of the white students admitted from those four categories, labeled 'ALDCs' in the study, “would have been rejected if they had been treated as white non-ALDCs,” the study said.
- xienze 3y agoAnd 100% of affirmative action students would have been rejected otherwise. So this cohort is doing a little better by that standard.
- ZeroGravitas 3y agoWhat are you basing this conclusion on?
- seizethecheese 3y agoI’m not the above commenter, but it seems obviously true? They’re not saying minority students, but affirmative action ones.
- pessimizer 3y agoThat's not the right comparison. You compare white people to another ethnicity, not to a program. 100% of white legacies that got in because they were legacies got in because they were legacies. That represents 75% of the people who are white legacies, and 31% of white Harvard students. So the comparison is between e.g. black Harvard students and white Harvard students - would more than 69% of black Harvard students have gotten in even without racial preferences? Maybe, maybe not, but I guarantee you don't know. You're just using Affirmative Action as a euphemism for black, like a racist would. And in addition, racial preferences have been struck down by the Supreme Court, I hope you know, so that means that 31% advantage now stands out there alone, rewarded because one fell out of status quo genitals.
- germandiago 3y agoI am the only one who thinks doing identity policies is harmful? For every person that you do not base stuff exclusively in their performance someone is out.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- asdf6677 3y ago[flagged]
- raincom 3y agoThis news is from 2019. Here is the published paper: http://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/legacyathlete.pdf http://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/legacyathlete.pdf
- contingencies 3y agoCheers. Updated title.
- TeeMassive 3y agoThis was the main criticism of AA. The minorities admitted because of AA were usually neither poor or from the working class. Example of that: the Obamas. AA was the only reason why the legacy entry system was still allowed to continue.
- ethanbond 3y ago> AA was the only reason why the legacy entry system was still allowed to continue. How so? Legacy admissions will continue.
- TeeMassive 3y agoHow long will this continue to be politically viable tho?
- ethanbond 3y agoPresumably for as long as the rich and powerful are cool with doing things that benefit the rich and powerful, right?
- d_sem 3y agoAs discussed in oral arguments in the "STUDENTS FOR FAIR ADMISSIONS, INC. v. PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE" supreme court case, the 14th amendment does not protect against legacy as an admission criteria unless it can be proven to be a proxy for race.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- WheelsAtLarge 3y agoAny legacy students here? How was your application experience? What/Who was your get in free card? What are your thoughts in terms of fairness?
- synergy20 3y ago43% of ALDC, 30% real academia talents to keep the school ranking high and yes this group is what really matters in the end as far as USNews' ranking for academia 'excellence' goes, the rest left for diversity. recipe for nearly all prestigious universities I feel, not sure how the recent AA court decision will impact these combinations.
- hgdfhgfdhgdf 3y agoThe article doesn't mention the grades and test scores of legacy students are as strong as non-legacy admitted students. "Among the admitted legacies, grades and test scores were indistinguishable from non-legacy students. Both groups had an average SAT score that surpassed 1430. Once on campus, legacy students tended to have slightly higher college grades, but their involvement in campus activities, merit awards, academic recognition and on-time graduation rates were indistinguishable from non-legacy students. In sum, legacy students, on average, were about as academically strong as non-legacy students, neither superior nor inferior." https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-why-elite-colleges-cant-give-up-legacy-admissions/ https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-why-elite-colleges-...
- tchaffee 3y agoSounds like a good reason to eliminate legacy admissions if the claim is that these students can compete without the crutch.
- atleastoptimal 3y ago"legacy admissions" don't exist as an official thing, it's not like any school explicitly states how many legacy students it will admit. It's a term to address the phenomenon of those related to alumni being more frequently admitted
- detaro 3y agoPlaces like Harvard do have explicit policies to give such students advantages, so no, it's very much an official thing.
- Symbiote 3y agoThey have "college attended" for each parent on the first page of the PDF application form. Removing that would be easy.
- tnecniv 3y agoIt totally is an official thing or was when I applied. Statistics on legacy vs non-legacy admission rates and how legacy status was factored (the nature of the advantage you got varied by school) in were readily available when I was applying to schools.
- NoRelToEmber 3y agoLet's further break-up the white student category, if any interesting correlations come up. For undergraduates specifically: Ivy League US Ratio Mean nationwide SAT score [1] Jewish 17.2% 2.4% 7.16 n/a Asian 19.6% 5.3% 3.71 1216 White (incl. Jewish) 50.3% 61.5% 0.82 1148 Hispanic 11.4% 17.6% 0.65 1043 Black 7.8% 12.7% 0.61 966 White (non-Jewish) 33.1% 59.1% 0.56 ~1141 (lower bound estimate assuming a generous 1284 mean Jewish SAT) SAT score seems to offer no benefit, up until the magic cutoff somewhere between 1142 and 1216. The numbers don't sum to 100% because multi-ethnic students, a few minor ethnicities (American-Indian, Pacific Islander..), and students categorized as "unknown" or "other" by the universities were excluded from analysis. Data on university undergraduate demographics was taken from the universities own diversity reports. Jewish representation was gathered from http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/ http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/, https://forward.com/jewish-college-guide/ https://forward.com/jewish-college-guide/, and https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduates/ https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduat..., taking the lowest estimate when sources conflicted. ejewishphilanthropy.com (eJP) points out flaws in Hillel's data gathering (e.g. showing Harvard as 30% Jewish, when eJP found it only 16%) Hillel seems to have since fixed these flaws, as the estimates they now give are in-line with those of eJP. No correction has been made to look at only the college-age population of the US, or only at the Northeastern US where all the Ivy League universities are located, so that may be a source of some bias. It's also hard to get consistent demographics from the universities, as they all report them in slightly different ways. Corrections welcome. [1] https://www.ednc.org/eraceing-inequities-the-influence-of-race-on-sat-scores/ https://www.ednc.org/eraceing-inequities-the-influence-of-ra...
- ec109685 3y agoWhy is being Jewish singled out but not any other religion?
- peepeepoopoo14 3y ago[flagged]
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- dang 3y agoUsers are flagging your comments—correctly, because you're posting unsubstantive flamebait. That's not what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- lametrol 3y ago[flagged]
- el_nahual 3y agoLegacy status is different from race. I propose the following thought experiment as comparison. "I need to see a cardiologist, but there's a long waiting list. Fortunately, my dad is a cardiologist so he saw me immediately." Few people would think that this action should be illegal. Compared with: "I need to see a cardiologist, but there's a long waiting list. Fortunately, I'm White, so he saw me immediately." (notice how it's still distasteful even if we replace White with Black, Asian, or whatever). Notice as well how the situation is different if we're talking about a public hospital--in that case we wouldn't accept the nepotism case. So there's real reasons why we would allow a private institution to have legacy admissions but not race-based admissions (and...come on. Only in the USA would that sentence be controversial!). The rub is that in the USA many (most? all?) private institutions--yes, even Harvard--receive government support, participate in government programs, and so constitute a sort of shadow arm of the government. The real answer, unpalatable though it may be to most, is that if private universities have legacy admissions, they should receive no govt support
- danans 3y ago> "I need to see a cardiologist, but there's a long waiting list. Fortunately, my dad is a cardiologist so he saw me immediately." > Few people would think that this action should be illegal. > Compared with: > "I need to see a cardiologist, but there's a long waiting list. Fortunately, I'm White, so he saw me immediately." > (notice how it's still distasteful even if we replace White with Black, Asian, or whatever). > So there's real reasons why we would allow a private institution to have legacy admissions but not race-based admissions (and...come on. Only in the USA would that sentence be controversial!). The relationship between a cardiologist and their child is fundamentally different than that between an educational institution, their alumnus, and the alumnus's child. The former is a nuclear familial relationship and the treatment is comparable to feeding one's own child. The latter is an institutional relationship that gives preferred access to a rarified privilege (attending an Ivy league university), not a basic need like medical treatment. Therefore you can't use the example of the parent/child doctor/patient relationship to justify legacy admissions.
- finnthehuman 3y agoWhy tunnel vision on particularities of one private institution when the presumed reason for caring in the first place is fairness in access to higher education? Harvard enrolls 1,200 pupils/year. That's a rounding error. Yeah, yeah, yeah, obviously they shouldn't fly completely under the radar on egregious shit (e.g. racial discrimination), but too much public attention on it reinforces the lie that admission to Harvard has any importance to society. They want to be a 43% legacy/athlete/family school? Cool. When I hire applicants fresh out of school, I already operate with the understanding that most applicants managed to skate by in their studies. And after 5 years of experience, I couldn't give less of a shit about formal education.
- rektide 3y agoI don't know the term but you can also basically varyingly-indirectly pay to get in to most Ivys & other schools. I wonder what those admissions numbers look like. I don't have a ton of info, but I've been at two different parties with people for whom this was semi-directly their job, to help facilitate extremly wealthy foreign students buying their way into top tier American schools.
- bassman9000 3y agoAssuming all those different groups thrown in together by nbc where white people, they would still be underrepresented, given the 2020 US Census data.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- activiation 3y agoLoL Harvard flagged this post