6 ms·

Harvard Discriminates Against Middle-Class Kids

58 points by Bostonian 3y ago

Bostonian 3y ago
https://archive.is/mvJgf https://archive.is/mvJgf
api 3y ago
My personal opinion is that the problem is the elite university system itself. It doesn’t matter how Harvard does admissions. It will always be elitist and can never be fair because the number of people who can go to Harvard (and other elite schools) will forever be vastly fewer than the number who could succeed at those schools. Giving a tiny subset of able and hard working people a magic cookie that opens doors for them is inherently unfair to all the equally able people who don’t get that cookie. It doesn’t matter how you pick the lucky few. It’s not fair and can never be fair. The only fair thing to do is to get rid of this system and stop treating these degrees as somehow superior to those of other good schools because of Ivy League branding. Of course the elite social networks around these schools are the other reason they are special, and as we have seen in other contexts network effects are remarkably hard to disrupt.
- iLoveOncall 3y ago
  You're right, but good luck getting rid of that, even in animals there is a ruling class, it's ingrained in our nature. Force it out of Ivy League schools, it will go somehwere else.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  > The only fair thing to do is to get rid of this system and stop treating these degrees as somehow superior to those of other good schools because of Ivy League branding. Is it the responsibility of elite educational institutions to break up elite social networks? If it is, why wasn't it the responsibility of educational institutions to fix racism or to "celebrate diversity"? How is it "only fair" to force (or convince?) people to think more of degrees they think less of? Should I be forced to buy tickets to movies in genres I don't like because people worked just as hard on them as the movies in genres I do like? Does the state have any interest in the children of PMCs being able to attend the colleges of royalty?
- sdwr 3y ago
  That first paragraph hits the nail on the head for me, perfect definition of elitism.
- drdec 3y ago
  > The only fair thing to do is to get rid of this system Another approach would be to expand the size of the elite institutions to serve all who belong.
  - prmph 3y ago
    In which case it ceases to be "elite". This is the system working as intended. If you lift up masses of people, how will the class structure be preserved?
  - api 3y ago
    They’d probably need to be hundreds of times larger. It’d be a lot easier to stop pretending people from other schools can’t be just as good, or even autodidacts from no school. Of course that undermines the price premium these places charge.
Spooky23 3y ago
Middle class people always get the shaft with these sorts of things. There’s too many of them not to! My sister was the high school valedictorian and had a 99.97 high school average. She didn’t get into Harvard - there’s 5000 valedictorians every year. She went to a great school and life went on well. Personally, I don’t really care that there’s a magical club for rich kids. If it wasn’t Harvard, it would be something else. I do think it would be better to just have different admissions slots and just have an auditable lottery. That way as a society we can move in from tiger moms forcing their kids into Cello, squash, or whatever the hot credential is this year.
- dbish 3y ago
  Did she have a near perfect SAT? Highschool grades and val/sal matter a lot less then ranking in a more standard way against everyone (speaking as someone who was waitlisted at 2 ivies). Personaly, I think SAT score makes a ton of sense to rank on, and we should do away with the other non-measurable aspects or stop blocking people from getting in because you're saving spots for legacies or kids of donors (or mediocre kids of presidents/VPs as we've seen).
  - lightbendover 3y ago
    Yeah, a standardized test that can be prepared for in short order via expensive tutors is absolutely a great way to rank applicants, you’re right on the money, which is great because money money money.
    - willcipriano 3y ago
      Compared to the old way[0 - but reversed] it's the best we have. [0]https://tenor.com/view/family-guy-racist-racism-funny-gif-9901625 https://tenor.com/view/family-guy-racist-racism-funny-gif-99...
    - charlieyu1 3y ago
      Compared to hiring a coach who builds the perfect portfolio of extracurricular activities for the kid, for $10k+/year per year of high school. At least poor people actually have some chance when it comes to standardized testing.
amateuring 3y ago
what else is new?
- teekert 3y ago
  I live in the Netherlands, and even here, everybody knows: Harvard is for the Rich. I know it's comedy, but it's typical: Louis in suits referring to anything non-Harvard as "worse than sludge".
  - gumby 3y ago
    > Louis in suits referring to anything non-Harvard as "worse than sludge". Poor Louis doesn’t realize that some people get offered admission to Harvard and turn it down. He’s optimizing for the wrong thing (of course his character is a parody).
  - tnecniv 3y ago
    Well in Suits they explicitly only hire Harvard Law grads, which is a big plot point and they note multiple times that this is a dumb policy they have for traditional and marketing reasons
renewiltord 3y ago
The interesting thing to me is why we don't have more universities starting in the short term. We'd expect there to be a bunch of polytechnics or technical unis. Harvard should obviously conform to fully uniform visibly non-discriminatory if it wants tax privilege and funding through the state. Perhaps the thing is that student loans make price competition impossible.
- lordnacho 3y ago
  Yeah this is an interesting question. A fair few universities were founded during the previous gilded age by guys like Vanderbilt, Carnegie, and Stanford. If you had $10B+ wouldn't it be somewhat tempting to instead of donating to an existing university, just make your own? Buy some site, hire some profs, make it clear you are after the top kids, give a free ride to all of them, you're guaranteed to get plenty of applicants. You'll have your own Stanford in a few years. I went to school with a guy who had all the top credentials (absolute top math guy), got into the top schools, ended up taking a free ride scholarship instead. You're simply bound to win some of those if you pay for it.
  - blitzar 3y ago
    > If you had $10B+ wouldn't it be somewhat tempting to instead of donating to an existing university, just make your own? Like Trump University?
    - slt2021 3y ago
      YCombinator might be closer to our modern age Harvard. Admits on merit, provides brand name & money & networking. Produces great results overall
    - lordnacho 3y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_University https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_University Not an accredited university. Also named after perhaps the least intellectual person possible, I think it might be hard to establish an elite academic reputation.
pessimizer 3y ago
The middle-class aren't a protected class (or even a real category in the US because the children of multimillionaires claim to be as middle class as their servants claim to be.) Middle-class kids wouldn't even want to go to Harvard if it were full of middle-class kids. They could go to Florida State for that. People keep trying to All Lives Matter Jim Crow.
- prepend 3y ago
  The point isn’t that it’s illegal. The point is that it’s wrong and that Harvard’s admissions process is not a good way to attract the best students. I think the goal isn’t to fill Harvard with a particular class, but to fill it with amazing students.
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    > The point is that it’s wrong To who? Nobody deserves to go to Harvard any more than somebody deserves to come to my board game night. Harvard isn't a natural right, it's an organization. > Harvard’s admissions process is not a good way to attract the best students. Harvard's admissions process isn't intended to attract whatever your measure of "the best students" is. Harvard thinks the best students are a mix of children from alums, extremely high achieving normies, and a particular racial mix that makes them seem visibly cosmopolitan. They were told the the third class was illegal because it was racist. Other than that Harvard hasn't been restricted; who Harvard admits is who Harvard intended to admit. > I think the goal isn’t to fill Harvard with a particular class, but to fill it with amazing students. Who's goal? Harvard's goal is clear. What's not clear is why it should change its standards to ones that "middle-class" kids have better access to. imo, it's the same energy as the fight against Affirmative Action; middle-class white people demanding that the standards exclude things that they can't be good at (like being black, or having fancy parents), and include things that they can do, like doing well at their mediocre high school and taking tests. This is cloaked in pseudo left-wing rhetoric of fairness and inclusiveness, but a kind of fairness that doesn't consider the difficulty of black lives in a country that enslaved them, and is deeply worried about the access of children who never missed a meal to Harvard. The only real case against legacies is that it is also racist, but it is a difficult case. Even to make that case would rest on Jim Crow, because your angle would be that their legacy admissions have been tainted by past racist policy, and are carrying that policy into the present. It still wouldn't be about middle-class wish fulfillment.
lordnacho 3y ago
What is interesting is how Harvard's reputation remains lofty despite these admission practices. If everyone knows that a large proportion of each class is either legacy or racially selected, why do people still think it's a top institution? > Harvard could afford to provide nearly full scholarships for every student with 1% of the annual return on its $50.9 billion endowment. Many other elite colleges could easily afford it too. They don’t, because they want to maintain an aura of exclusivity. To me it would be more exclusive and prestigious if they gave everyone a free ride but it was entirely on merit. Like much of Europe, and how the UK used to be (tuition in the UK is still more reasonable than Harvard though).
- asperous 3y ago
  Seems like it would be a waste of money as many students can afford it, Stanford's model of generous, guaranteed scholarships makes more sense to me.
- missedthecue 3y ago
  Harvard continues to have a great reputation because they continually produce so many notable alumni. You ought not to think of it as a rigerous academic forging fire for the meritocratically selected brightest minds, but rather as a finishing school for America's elite. So long as they keep producing presidents, diplomats, CEOs, senators, and so forth, they will continue to have a great reputation.
  - psychphysic 3y ago
    It is however a vicious cycle and as the article points out exclusivity is key.
    - pessimizer 3y ago
      Why vicious and not virtuous?
      - pixelatedindex 3y ago
kepler1 3y ago
As the article says, I agree, let Harvard put its money where its mouth is, if racial and other kinds of diversity are as important as its faculty and admissions officers believe. Let them make the choice about the money or the diversity. I think you'll find that the factions of people running the university (which by the way is a many, many-headed beast) would rather keep the money than act according to the principles they profess. I think you find that's true for a lot of liberal principles. (and conservative ones equally) Harvard is free to experiment with social tinkering. Just not with my tax money.
psychphysic 3y ago
This was always obvious, it's just always the case. The middle class is governments tax cash cow. Expanding it by bringing up the poorest is great, but once you see it's just to make that cash cow juicier it can leave you very cynical.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  Why does it make you cynical? If you can bring up the poor (especially the poorest) to make them middle class, their incremental tax rate at that point is still much less than 100%. They're still far better off. Am I supposed to be bothered that the government gets more money when they succeed at doing this? No, I will not be bothered by that. I only wish they could have 10 times the success that they have had. If that gives them 10 times the extra money, that's fine. I'll take that state of affairs, gladly.
  - landoftheice 3y ago
    [dead]
  - psychphysic 3y ago
    The cynicism is that it's designed to keep the elites on top while the poor and middle class go round and round on a hamster wheel.
Footnote7341 3y ago
One of the explicit dynamics to 'diversity as a target' is exposing talented rich kids to poor minorities that are more likely to fail (non-meritorious selection) and then allow them to network with rich influential families (legacy admissions). This is part of the reason why ivy leagues can produce greats. Or do you really think the professors are just that much better at teaching the same material that every other college has? some ivy's post their lectures for free online. There's a reason that doesn't produce greats either.
mmcgaha 3y ago
When my daughter applied to Harvard, they had her interview with a local alum. I assume that there is a huge network of local alum all over the country screening applicants before the school even gives them any consideration. That will certainly give the well connected in a community an advantage.
mensetmanusman 3y ago
Steel man: Anything not based on random number generators is discrimination. Do you want kids that can read? Write code? Volunteered in Mexico? Perfect SAT? Each decision is discrimination along some vector. Maybe Harvard plays a role in political stability of the US (oldest democracy in the world) and helping the poor, and they are fine leaving the middle class to tread water. If you don't want them to discriminate on A, then explain why discriminating against B is better. Schools filled with the top test takers would be quite dull.
- resolutebat 3y ago
  Obligatory: https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Bergeron_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Berge...
- lordnacho 3y ago
  > Schools filled with the top test takers would be quite dull. Just like sports teams with the best players? In Europe there's a bunch of universities with the top test takers, and there's no reason to call them dull places.
onetimeusename 3y ago
The article did not mention that legacy students have higher SAT scores than non-legacy https://features.thecrimson.com/2021/freshman-survey/academics-narrative/ https://features.thecrimson.com/2021/freshman-survey/academi... It also did not mention that people identifying as white are the only ethnic group that is underrepresented relative to the population in the US. It's odd that there is not a clear definition of what an optimal percentage of different ethnic backgrounds should be. I think Harvard discriminates against talented people who do not have parents who aggressively push them from a young age to get into an elite school like Harvard. White students are the least likely of any ethnic group to take test prep https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/03/the-sat-test-prep-income-and-race.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/03/th... Test prep has been shown to boost SAT scores so if there are disparate rates of taking test prep, the test would bias in favor of people who have parents that put their children into it. I think that's unfortunate for talented people who don't have parents that prioritize that for them. Harvard may well have attempted to compensate for this.
MovingCAsoon 3y ago
[flagged]
MovingCAsoonJ 3y ago
[flagged]
MovingsoonCA 3y ago
[flagged]
JaanneeFive 3y ago
[flagged]
JannneeeB 3y ago
[flagged]
schoubey 3y ago
Everybody discriminates against the middle class, the rich have bailouts, the poor have handouts, the middle class pays the taxes to help the other 2.

58 points by Bostonian 3y ago

https://archive.is/mvJgf https://archive.is/mvJgf

api 3y ago

My personal opinion is that the problem is the elite university system itself. It doesn’t matter how Harvard does admissions. It will always be elitist and can never be fair because the number of people who can go to Harvard (and other elite schools) will forever be vastly fewer than the number who could succeed at those schools. Giving a tiny subset of able and hard working people a magic cookie that opens doors for them is inherently unfair to all the equally able people who don’t get that cookie. It doesn’t matter how you pick the lucky few. It’s not fair and can never be fair. The only fair thing to do is to get rid of this system and stop treating these degrees as somehow superior to those of other good schools because of Ivy League branding. Of course the elite social networks around these schools are the other reason they are special, and as we have seen in other contexts network effects are remarkably hard to disrupt.

iLoveOncall 3y ago
You're right, but good luck getting rid of that, even in animals there is a ruling class, it's ingrained in our nature. Force it out of Ivy League schools, it will go somehwere else.
pessimizer 3y ago
> The only fair thing to do is to get rid of this system and stop treating these degrees as somehow superior to those of other good schools because of Ivy League branding. Is it the responsibility of elite educational institutions to break up elite social networks? If it is, why wasn't it the responsibility of educational institutions to fix racism or to "celebrate diversity"? How is it "only fair" to force (or convince?) people to think more of degrees they think less of? Should I be forced to buy tickets to movies in genres I don't like because people worked just as hard on them as the movies in genres I do like? Does the state have any interest in the children of PMCs being able to attend the colleges of royalty?
sdwr 3y ago
That first paragraph hits the nail on the head for me, perfect definition of elitism.
drdec 3y ago
> The only fair thing to do is to get rid of this system Another approach would be to expand the size of the elite institutions to serve all who belong.
- prmph 3y ago
  In which case it ceases to be "elite". This is the system working as intended. If you lift up masses of people, how will the class structure be preserved?
- api 3y ago
  They’d probably need to be hundreds of times larger. It’d be a lot easier to stop pretending people from other schools can’t be just as good, or even autodidacts from no school. Of course that undermines the price premium these places charge.

Spooky23 3y ago

Middle class people always get the shaft with these sorts of things. There’s too many of them not to! My sister was the high school valedictorian and had a 99.97 high school average. She didn’t get into Harvard - there’s 5000 valedictorians every year. She went to a great school and life went on well. Personally, I don’t really care that there’s a magical club for rich kids. If it wasn’t Harvard, it would be something else. I do think it would be better to just have different admissions slots and just have an auditable lottery. That way as a society we can move in from tiger moms forcing their kids into Cello, squash, or whatever the hot credential is this year.

dbish 3y ago
Did she have a near perfect SAT? Highschool grades and val/sal matter a lot less then ranking in a more standard way against everyone (speaking as someone who was waitlisted at 2 ivies). Personaly, I think SAT score makes a ton of sense to rank on, and we should do away with the other non-measurable aspects or stop blocking people from getting in because you're saving spots for legacies or kids of donors (or mediocre kids of presidents/VPs as we've seen).
- lightbendover 3y ago
  Yeah, a standardized test that can be prepared for in short order via expensive tutors is absolutely a great way to rank applicants, you’re right on the money, which is great because money money money.
  - willcipriano 3y ago
    Compared to the old way[0 - but reversed] it's the best we have. [0]https://tenor.com/view/family-guy-racist-racism-funny-gif-9901625 https://tenor.com/view/family-guy-racist-racism-funny-gif-99...
  - charlieyu1 3y ago
    Compared to hiring a coach who builds the perfect portfolio of extracurricular activities for the kid, for $10k+/year per year of high school. At least poor people actually have some chance when it comes to standardized testing.

amateuring 3y ago

what else is new?

teekert 3y ago
I live in the Netherlands, and even here, everybody knows: Harvard is for the Rich. I know it's comedy, but it's typical: Louis in suits referring to anything non-Harvard as "worse than sludge".
- gumby 3y ago
  > Louis in suits referring to anything non-Harvard as "worse than sludge". Poor Louis doesn’t realize that some people get offered admission to Harvard and turn it down. He’s optimizing for the wrong thing (of course his character is a parody).
- tnecniv 3y ago
  Well in Suits they explicitly only hire Harvard Law grads, which is a big plot point and they note multiple times that this is a dumb policy they have for traditional and marketing reasons

renewiltord 3y ago

The interesting thing to me is why we don't have more universities starting in the short term. We'd expect there to be a bunch of polytechnics or technical unis. Harvard should obviously conform to fully uniform visibly non-discriminatory if it wants tax privilege and funding through the state. Perhaps the thing is that student loans make price competition impossible.

lordnacho 3y ago
Yeah this is an interesting question. A fair few universities were founded during the previous gilded age by guys like Vanderbilt, Carnegie, and Stanford. If you had $10B+ wouldn't it be somewhat tempting to instead of donating to an existing university, just make your own? Buy some site, hire some profs, make it clear you are after the top kids, give a free ride to all of them, you're guaranteed to get plenty of applicants. You'll have your own Stanford in a few years. I went to school with a guy who had all the top credentials (absolute top math guy), got into the top schools, ended up taking a free ride scholarship instead. You're simply bound to win some of those if you pay for it.
- blitzar 3y ago
  > If you had $10B+ wouldn't it be somewhat tempting to instead of donating to an existing university, just make your own? Like Trump University?
  - slt2021 3y ago
    YCombinator might be closer to our modern age Harvard. Admits on merit, provides brand name & money & networking. Produces great results overall
  - lordnacho 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_University https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_University Not an accredited university. Also named after perhaps the least intellectual person possible, I think it might be hard to establish an elite academic reputation.

pessimizer 3y ago

The middle-class aren't a protected class (or even a real category in the US because the children of multimillionaires claim to be as middle class as their servants claim to be.) Middle-class kids wouldn't even want to go to Harvard if it were full of middle-class kids. They could go to Florida State for that. People keep trying to All Lives Matter Jim Crow.

prepend 3y ago
The point isn’t that it’s illegal. The point is that it’s wrong and that Harvard’s admissions process is not a good way to attract the best students. I think the goal isn’t to fill Harvard with a particular class, but to fill it with amazing students.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  > The point is that it’s wrong To who? Nobody deserves to go to Harvard any more than somebody deserves to come to my board game night. Harvard isn't a natural right, it's an organization. > Harvard’s admissions process is not a good way to attract the best students. Harvard's admissions process isn't intended to attract whatever your measure of "the best students" is. Harvard thinks the best students are a mix of children from alums, extremely high achieving normies, and a particular racial mix that makes them seem visibly cosmopolitan. They were told the the third class was illegal because it was racist. Other than that Harvard hasn't been restricted; who Harvard admits is who Harvard intended to admit. > I think the goal isn’t to fill Harvard with a particular class, but to fill it with amazing students. Who's goal? Harvard's goal is clear. What's not clear is why it should change its standards to ones that "middle-class" kids have better access to. imo, it's the same energy as the fight against Affirmative Action; middle-class white people demanding that the standards exclude things that they can't be good at (like being black, or having fancy parents), and include things that they can do, like doing well at their mediocre high school and taking tests. This is cloaked in pseudo left-wing rhetoric of fairness and inclusiveness, but a kind of fairness that doesn't consider the difficulty of black lives in a country that enslaved them, and is deeply worried about the access of children who never missed a meal to Harvard. The only real case against legacies is that it is also racist, but it is a difficult case. Even to make that case would rest on Jim Crow, because your angle would be that their legacy admissions have been tainted by past racist policy, and are carrying that policy into the present. It still wouldn't be about middle-class wish fulfillment.

lordnacho 3y ago

What is interesting is how Harvard's reputation remains lofty despite these admission practices. If everyone knows that a large proportion of each class is either legacy or racially selected, why do people still think it's a top institution? > Harvard could afford to provide nearly full scholarships for every student with 1% of the annual return on its $50.9 billion endowment. Many other elite colleges could easily afford it too. They don’t, because they want to maintain an aura of exclusivity. To me it would be more exclusive and prestigious if they gave everyone a free ride but it was entirely on merit. Like much of Europe, and how the UK used to be (tuition in the UK is still more reasonable than Harvard though).

asperous 3y ago
Seems like it would be a waste of money as many students can afford it, Stanford's model of generous, guaranteed scholarships makes more sense to me.
missedthecue 3y ago
Harvard continues to have a great reputation because they continually produce so many notable alumni. You ought not to think of it as a rigerous academic forging fire for the meritocratically selected brightest minds, but rather as a finishing school for America's elite. So long as they keep producing presidents, diplomats, CEOs, senators, and so forth, they will continue to have a great reputation.
- psychphysic 3y ago
  It is however a vicious cycle and as the article points out exclusivity is key.
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    Why vicious and not virtuous?
    - pixelatedindex 3y ago

kepler1 3y ago

As the article says, I agree, let Harvard put its money where its mouth is, if racial and other kinds of diversity are as important as its faculty and admissions officers believe. Let them make the choice about the money or the diversity. I think you'll find that the factions of people running the university (which by the way is a many, many-headed beast) would rather keep the money than act according to the principles they profess. I think you find that's true for a lot of liberal principles. (and conservative ones equally) Harvard is free to experiment with social tinkering. Just not with my tax money.

psychphysic 3y ago

This was always obvious, it's just always the case. The middle class is governments tax cash cow. Expanding it by bringing up the poorest is great, but once you see it's just to make that cash cow juicier it can leave you very cynical.

AnimalMuppet 3y ago
Why does it make you cynical? If you can bring up the poor (especially the poorest) to make them middle class, their incremental tax rate at that point is still much less than 100%. They're still far better off. Am I supposed to be bothered that the government gets more money when they succeed at doing this? No, I will not be bothered by that. I only wish they could have 10 times the success that they have had. If that gives them 10 times the extra money, that's fine. I'll take that state of affairs, gladly.
- landoftheice 3y ago
  [dead]
- psychphysic 3y ago
  The cynicism is that it's designed to keep the elites on top while the poor and middle class go round and round on a hamster wheel.

Footnote7341 3y ago

One of the explicit dynamics to 'diversity as a target' is exposing talented rich kids to poor minorities that are more likely to fail (non-meritorious selection) and then allow them to network with rich influential families (legacy admissions). This is part of the reason why ivy leagues can produce greats. Or do you really think the professors are just that much better at teaching the same material that every other college has? some ivy's post their lectures for free online. There's a reason that doesn't produce greats either.

mmcgaha 3y ago

When my daughter applied to Harvard, they had her interview with a local alum. I assume that there is a huge network of local alum all over the country screening applicants before the school even gives them any consideration. That will certainly give the well connected in a community an advantage.

mensetmanusman 3y ago

Steel man: Anything not based on random number generators is discrimination. Do you want kids that can read? Write code? Volunteered in Mexico? Perfect SAT? Each decision is discrimination along some vector. Maybe Harvard plays a role in political stability of the US (oldest democracy in the world) and helping the poor, and they are fine leaving the middle class to tread water. If you don't want them to discriminate on A, then explain why discriminating against B is better. Schools filled with the top test takers would be quite dull.

resolutebat 3y ago
Obligatory: https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Bergeron_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Berge...
lordnacho 3y ago
> Schools filled with the top test takers would be quite dull. Just like sports teams with the best players? In Europe there's a bunch of universities with the top test takers, and there's no reason to call them dull places.

onetimeusename 3y ago

The article did not mention that legacy students have higher SAT scores than non-legacy https://features.thecrimson.com/2021/freshman-survey/academics-narrative/ https://features.thecrimson.com/2021/freshman-survey/academi... It also did not mention that people identifying as white are the only ethnic group that is underrepresented relative to the population in the US. It's odd that there is not a clear definition of what an optimal percentage of different ethnic backgrounds should be. I think Harvard discriminates against talented people who do not have parents who aggressively push them from a young age to get into an elite school like Harvard. White students are the least likely of any ethnic group to take test prep https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/03/the-sat-test-prep-income-and-race.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/03/th... Test prep has been shown to boost SAT scores so if there are disparate rates of taking test prep, the test would bias in favor of people who have parents that put their children into it. I think that's unfortunate for talented people who don't have parents that prioritize that for them. Harvard may well have attempted to compensate for this.

MovingCAsoon 3y ago

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MovingCAsoonJ 3y ago

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MovingsoonCA 3y ago

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JaanneeFive 3y ago

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JannneeeB 3y ago

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schoubey 3y ago

Everybody discriminates against the middle class, the rich have bailouts, the poor have handouts, the middle class pays the taxes to help the other 2.