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Is 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

• micromacrofoot 3y ago
  Harvard can admit who they want, but people can also complain about it
  • clipsy 3y ago
    Harvard cannot admit who they want, in case you’ve somehow missed the recent supreme court ruling.
• mdorazio 3y ago
  Universities 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 ago
      Would 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 ago
        Why downvotes? Its an interesting question, and I'm curious too to hear the answer or opinion from parent commenter.
  • User23 3y ago
    One 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
      If this is true (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_preferences#Economic_impact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_preferences#Economic_im... suggests it's disputed), the effect is probably marginal, and in any case, Harvard has the largest academic endowment in the world. It seems unlikely that it needs legacy admissions to stay afloat.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • tnecniv 3y ago
        They don’t. Most major private institutions don’t. However why tap into your endowment when people will give you money?
    • tnecniv 3y ago
      The other big thing is that these schools want to admit people they know will matriculate (they don’t want to over enroll or under enroll). Presumably, legacy applicants are statistically more likely to matriculate and hence there is a preference. When I was applying to schools, I remember reading that the policy UPenn used for legacies was that only those who applied early decision got any sort of statistical advantage over other candidates. If you weren’t ready to commit via early decision, your odds were the same as the general population.
  • maximinus_thrax 3y ago
    > Universities like Harvard typically like to market themselves as being the height of meritocracy Perhaps their marketing sucks because as an external observer, I've never associated Ivy League schools with meritocracy.
• zug_zug 3y ago
  They 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 ago
    I 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 ago
      Gonna 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 ago
  Not when they receive federal money and special statutes and privileges.
• stcroixx 3y ago
  Well, 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 ago
    I'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 ago
  They 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 ago
    This 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 ago
      Maybe a strategic over-correction so they can downplay uncomfortable criticisms.
  • User23 3y ago
    I 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 ago
      You'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.
      • 3y ago
• AbrahamParangi 3y ago
  If 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 ago
    I'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 ago
      Ok, 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 ago
        Not 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 ago
  Because 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 ago
  I think they should be allowed to use whatever method they desire but that they should pay taxes like any other organization.
  • User23 3y ago
    Yeah, what have universities ever done for society?
  • kinghajj 3y ago
    They're a nonprofit organization, though.
    • renewiltord 3y ago
      Oh, 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 ago
  They 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 ago
  So 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 ago
  Aside from the question of whether Harvard _can_ admit who they want, we get to express opinions on how they _should_ conduct admissions.