9 ms·

We Don’t Do Legacy (2012)

48 points by hhs 3y ago

ComputerGuru 3y ago
I’m not sure why this was submitted, but (@dang) perhaps the linked full write up on the matter would be a better link to share: https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/just-to-be-clear-we-dont-do-legacy/ https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/just-to-be-clear-we-do...
- dang 3y ago
  Ok, we changed to that from https://mitadmissions.org/help/faq/legacy/ https://mitadmissions.org/help/faq/legacy/. Thanks!
david927 3y ago
God bless them for that. Legacy should never be taken into account and has no place in the 21st Century. But I also feel that sports achievement is given far too much weight as well, in general.
- bluepod4 3y ago
  Do you mean in general? Or do you mean that MIT gives far too much weight to sports achievement? Because I don’t think they do.
  - efdee 3y ago
    Why give any weight at all to sports achievement in a university? What's one thing got to do with the other?
    - tekla 3y ago
      Athletics has always been a part of the curriculum of a full liberal arts education. I do think SOLELY athletics may be a bit much, but its impossible to ignore that athletics and education have been intertwined ever since the idea of a liberal arts education existed.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      You can certainly argue that some schools overweight it but schools take into account lots of things that aren't strictly academic.
    - aetimmes 3y ago
      Maybe not MIT, but there are many universities whose bottom lines are significantly impacted by the success of their sports programs and the television deals that come with them.
    - idopmstuff 3y ago
      I think intelligent, non-sporting people tend to have too strong of a bias against sports being factored into admissions. Universities look at lots of things that indicate someone is an intelligent, ambitious, hard-working person. That includes success at a high level in all kinds of things - if you're a top-level musician or dancer, they look favorably on that. If you've started a successful business, they look favorably upon that. If you started a charitable organization that contributed meaningfully to people's lives, they look favorably upon that. I think in general, we'd all agree that those are good - they show that those people are driven and able to achieve something significant. So does being an elite football player. You have to be up at the crack of dawn for practice. You need to work well with other people. You need to memorize playbooks. It's a lot of work and commitment. Why shouldn't a university look upon that favorably?
      - david927 3y ago
        I think the difference is in how it's approached. Admissions never say, "We need 20 bassoon players every year," but they absolutely look for 20 football players every year. And it's a known way to game admissions. How many people do you know who row or fence? Because top schools are looking for a set number of people who are good at those sports each year and wealthy parents can get their kids top coaching for such boutique sports, knowing that.
        ghaff 3y ago
        Rowing is actually a fairly popular activity from what I see. (Caveat that I have some availability bias living outside of Boston.) It's also quite popular at the high school level, especially in the sort of private schools we have around here.
        bluepod4 3y ago
        You can also join the rowing team at certain “elite” colleges without having any prior experience (besides knowing how to swim).
    - squokko 3y ago
      Robust health is positively correlated with pretty much every metric of life success. Success in athletics is not only a sign of positive health but also another data point on work ethic. There are some people who can get a 1600 on their SATs without ever studying and there are some people who can run a 5:30 mile without ever really training, but very few people who can do both.
    - no_wizard 3y ago
      Sports is a huge money driver for some universities. Its a big revenue driver[0]. Performance of the team(s) also drives bigger contributions[1][2] by alumni when it comes to donations [0]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/analysis-who-is-winning-in-the-high-revenue-world-of-college-sports https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/analysis-who-is-winning... [1]: https://gceps.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/162rosen.pdf https://gceps.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/162ro... [2]: https://digital.sandiego.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1917&context=dissertations https://digital.sandiego.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=191...
    - userabchn 3y ago
      It demonstrates the ability to dedicate yourself to something and achieve success.
  - david927 3y ago
    In general. I modified my comment to clarify. Thanks.
- jewayne 3y ago
  If you're trying to be MIT or CalTech, that's absolutely true. If you're trying to be the Ivy League...maybe not. I recently heard an explanation saying that legacies/"special admissions" are not the customer in this situation. They are part of the product. At Harvard, some percentage of your undergrad class were literally born into more money than you will ever make in your hypersuccessful career. The chance for making connections with such people is why many hypersuccessful/hypermotivated people choose the Ivy League over more meritocratic institutions. I'm not 100% sure I buy it, but it's an interesting perspective.
  - Paul-Craft 3y ago
    You're right, but probably not for the reason you think you are. Harvard is not your typical university. It's more of a hedge fund with a school attached to it. So is the rest of the Ivy League. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universities_in_the_United_States_by_endowment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universit...
  - KerrAvon 3y ago
    Making connections is maybe the single most important thing you will do at college. The faculty, the other students, and the alumni network, are part of those connections. However, this sounds a little like a post hoc rationalization from a legacy person, tbh.
  - reducesuffering 3y ago
    This is actually what's going on. Ivy's are an intelligence signal laundering operation. Attract 80% super smarts, throw in 20% rich upper class, now people think your average rich upper class kids are "super smart," for their later career. It's why there's such a skewed financial aid. And it's why there's no prestigious rich-kid-only school, because it's obvious the academics aren't very good and that's not what is desired to be seen like.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - 3y ago
- umvi 3y ago
  > But I also feel that sports achievement is given far too much weight as well, in general. Probably because if you have good athletes, it can bring in a lot of money to your institution via football/basketball ticket sales (a lot more than tuition). It's a question of funding in most cases.
- jkestner 3y ago
  Good that you edited to add in general. I've seen the MIT diving team, who in fairness may have been testing air resistance of various falling bodies.
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  Athletes keep the lights on
- LeonardoTolstoy 3y ago
  I know you said on general but I think it is worth pointing out that MIT doesn't specifically mark any athletes for admission like most schools can and do. At least when I applied. I knew a varsity crew and varsity sailing athlete and despite both being nationally notable in their sports my understanding was the coaches could do nothing to "recruit" them. It of course helps in admission as much as playing a music instrument at a high level or being a published author might. If you have that plus elite academic achievements then you probably have a decent chance at admission to a school of your choosing.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  You know most elite schools aren't just trying to accept the most academically successful students right? MIT and caltech are the exceptions, but all the other ones are optimizing for career success and donations. Having rich, successful parents makes you more likely to be rich and successful, so they accept legacies. Being one of the best in the world at a sport is a good signal that you will succeed at other things, like your career, so these schools accept athletes with worse academic success. When you remember that the goal of admissions is career success all the decisions make sense.
maniflames 3y ago
Good on them, if you want a spot at a top uni/college you need to deserve it
- tialaramex 3y ago
  It varies by discipline, but IIRC for most degrees there was no significant correlation between the previous achievements of the student and their eventual degree grade, suggesting that actually it doesn't really matter for most degrees. Or at least that if it matters it's outweighed by other factors you're not mesuring via prior attainment. So in that case within reason the output is independent of input, and the decision of who to admit to limited places is a matter of larger societal policy. Admittance on "merit" in this case would actually be bullshit in effect. My employer is also the institution where I got my degree many years ago (I like this city and after coming here I never left) when they taught me, the requirement for Computer Science was 24 points, with Maths. Today the requirement is at least 3 As, one in Maths (which is approximately 30 points by the old system). Do they need better students? No. They need fewer students, they are over-subscribed, and higher requirements deter applicants and some will miss the higher requirement, meaning they teach maybe 500 students (in my day it'd be maybe 80). They still can't find big enough lecture theatres, next year's course will require overflow video relays. As I said, there's no correlation, but the goal isn't to find "the best" it's to reduce the sheer numbers without expensive in-person interviews of every candidate. The result isn't better graduates, it's about the same, because you could teach (within reason) anyone. Some populations might lead to more pastoral problems†, but the degree to which excellent pastoral care is delivered is independent of actual teaching. † Somebody's dog dies, they're distraught, don't go to class for a few weeks because they're so upset, next thing they know it's exams and they don't know anything. It doesn't have to be their dog dying, it can be mum got cancer, the family home burned down, their home country has a civil war, or even just the guy next door plays loud music 24/7 and they can't sleep properly. Non-academic stuff happens, you can wipe out somebody's potential by not addressing it.
tekla 3y ago
Good, should set an example for everyone else. YOU got into MIT, not the color of your skin, nor whose parents you had. I have a half dozen 1st generation friends who worked their asses off in inner city schools to get full ride scholarships to get into top schools, and are now part of the professional class in a single generation.
- sanitycheck 3y ago
  Eh. It's mostly genetics that determine academic ability (and everything else), so reaching an end goal of "total equality" would in fact make admissions all about who your parents are.
  - abirch 3y ago
    I think it's 60-70% of academic achievement can be explained by genes. If you know kids from a big family, their academic success can vary significantly although they have the same parents.
    - sanitycheck 3y ago
      Sure, and they may not all have the same colour eyes - variation is expected. But still, we have nature (genes, 60-70%) and nurture (hey, parents again). What else is there?
      - jncfhnb 3y ago
        Luck (excluding controllable factors by wealthy parents)
      - abirch 3y ago
        I'd say opportunities. When there are fewer kids matriculating into college it's easier to get into a better school (see Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers) Professors and Teachers, the variability of them is huge. Friends can have a huge impact as well. Is the norm to skip classes to go work on a startup or focusing on getting good grades? Resources such as the Numberblocks which make math more visual and accessible. My pre-K kid was doing multiplication because of that show.
iudqnolq 3y ago
There are many pathways to do this without explicit policy. If MIT wanted to show this explicitly they could release a dataset with admission outcomes and parent/relative donation history.
- gumby 3y ago
  How would they link them? It's been decades since I applied to MIT but I noted that they were the only application that didn't ask if you had any relatives who'd attended.
- squokko 3y ago
  Does the application have a spot to mention your relatives who attended MIT? And if not, how would they have such a dataset?
  - technothrasher 3y ago
    My alma mater (University of Rochester) doesn't have an explicit legacy admittance policy, but they do have a "legacy scholarship" where you can potentially get $5K-$10K if you check off that your legacy on your application. I have always assumed this was code for "we do have a legacy admittance policy, be we don't want to say we do". Irrelevant for me, apparently though, because my kid has said there's no way he's going to go to the school I went to <shrug>.
    - squokko 3y ago
      I don't mean this as any insult to the University of Rochester but I don't think that any of this national conversation around legacy admissions and privilege is relevant to them.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    - andyinfrance 3y ago
      Hi Technothrasher, sorry to jump this thread, was reading about a thread 46 days ago where you have made ecu replacements for 308’s I presume that’s with the Bosch K-Jetronic and Magneti Marelli 801/802a ecu’s? Can you contact me about these I’m interested, thanks
mensetmanusman 3y ago
Legacy doesn’t help when you have objective metrics of performance in stem. This gets harder for art.
mitko 3y ago
Good to know, but when I applied in 2005/6 iirc they did have as a part of the application a question about anyone in my family being from MIT. But I didn’t meet many students whose parents were also MIT grads there, which suggests that they don’t give it a benefit.
- stephencanon 3y ago
  Yeah, they certainly asked in 1997 when I applied. Curious when they stopped asking.
deleted 3y ago
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pbui 3y ago
Maybe this is true now, but when I applied to MIT for undergrad in 2002, I had to meet with an alumnus at their house near me for an interview. Being from California and first generation American and the first of my family to go away for college, I had no idea how admissions worked nor did I know much about MIT. Because of that, I basically bombed that interview as I was unprepared (didn't know what to expect and didn't have the cultural knowledge to converse properly). I was subsequently rejected from MIT despite having pristine credentials for the time (however, I was accepted at other schools such as Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford, and my eventual choice Notre Dame). Moreover, a classmate of mine from a wealthier family and who was on the football team was admitted to MIT, despite having worse grades and a lower SAT score (he was smart and deserving, I'm just pointing out that my numbers were better). So while it is nice that MIT claims to not use legacy now, the process I experienced 20 years ago suggests that alumni still had influence then and even athletics mattered too. To be clear, I'm not necessarily against legacy admissions or athletic preferences. I just wish schools were upfront about it and things were explained clearly to applicants.
- squokko 3y ago
  Yes, there are ways to use social class to your advantage, even if just the ease to walk into a mansion and converse fluidly with the owner rather than feeling at unease. There are no ways to fully eliminate the effects of this, but MIT is at least not explicitly doing so. And there is a lot more to admissions than numbers. Athletics do and should matter - robust health is positively correlated with future success. And essays, recommendations, etc. also matter. And I would think that MIT is not ashamed to say so.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    When I knew the MIT admissions director many years ago, he said they had an X-Y chart with academics on one axis and other achievements/soft factors on the other. There was basically a minimum academic cutoff and above that cutoff you could basically tradeoff academics for other criteria.
- isopede 3y ago
  So while it is nice that MIT claims to not use legacy now, the process I experienced 20 years ago suggests that alumni still had influence then and even athletics mattered too. Not to discount your experience, but I don't believe what you experienced would fall under "legacy" or "alumni relations." For those, you would either need to have had parents/family that attended MIT, or a close relation to an alumni. It doesn't appear either of those applied to your situation.
prepend 3y ago
I would like to see the impact of this policy. What percent of admissions have a legacy who attended MIT? MIT is likely the only organization that can do (or sponsor) this analysis while protecting privacy. It looks like their application form doesn’t ask for legacy info [1] so they’d have to track this in some systematic way during onboarding or something. [1] https://mitadmissions.org/apply/firstyear/biographical-information/ https://mitadmissions.org/apply/firstyear/biographical-infor...
- amluto 3y ago
  MIT, as an institution that is historically highly competent at using computers and designing computer systems, can surely figure out with decent accuracy who all the applicants’ parents are and can cross-reference with their historical registration records. Just kidding. MIT, until quite recently, was remarkably backwards in their own administrative systems. Class registration was done by filling out a triplicate form, getting the appropriate signatures, and taking it to the gym to be stamped, with two copies going in a shoebox and one copy being kept by the student to use as evidence for when whoever entered the data into a computer eventually got it wrong. And this is the same MIT that sold half of its /8 without successfully notifying all the users of said addresses. And also the same MIT that created and still actively maintains Kerberos but, for some reason, outsourced authentication for its own systems to Duo. So I would believe any level of competence in the quality of MIT’s development, registration and admissions databases.
Joker_vD 3y ago
The Admiralty version of this British method (old pattern) was different only in its more restricted scope. The Board of Admirals were unimpressed by titled relatives as such. What they sought to establish was a service connection. The ideal candidate would reply to the second question, “Yes, Admiral Parker is my uncle. My father is Captain Foley, my grandfather Commodore Foley. My mother’s father was Admiral Hardy. Commander Hardy is my uncle. My eldest brother is a Lieutenant in the Royal Marines, my next brother is a cadet at Dartmouth and my younger brother wears a sailor suit.” “Ah!” the senior Admiral would say. “And what made you think of joining the Navy?” The answer to this question, however, would scarcely matter, the clerk present having already noted the candidate as acceptable. Given a choice between two candidates, both equally acceptable by birth, a member of the Board would ask suddenly, “What was the number of the taxi you came in?” The candidate who said “I came by bus” was then thrown out. The candidate who said, truthfully, “I don’t know,” was rejected, and the candidate who said “Number 2351” (lying) was promptly admitted to the service as a boy with initiative. This method often produced excellent results.
- blast 3y ago
  https://www.geocities.ws/films4/parkinsonselection.htm https://www.geocities.ws/films4/parkinsonselection.htm
chmod600 3y ago
Did the recent Affirmative Action decision say how public/private factor in? At the extreme, if it’s a private club, I imagine they could use any criteria (fair or not, including race) but I suppose private universities aren’t the same as private clubs?
deleted 3y ago
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chmod600 3y ago
If I were not concerned about fairness at all, I’d say that universities are a place to collect together a combination of people that are likely to succeed. Maybe that’s a combination of intellectuals and engineers and scientists and rich people and connected people and business people. “Legacy” is a good proxy for “connected”. Donors are rich. Test scores find the engineers and scientists. Essays try to identify intellectuals. Etc. But that’s not fair, because you can’t make yourself rich or connected before you turn 18. Athletics doesn’t fit into that formula, and quite frankly a lot of academic departments don’t, either. But it’s a form of excellence so I don’t see why it shouldn’t count. A lot of intellectuals seem to think it’s unfair to treat sports excellence on the same plane as intellectual excellence, but that’s a self-serving position to take.
- david927 3y ago
  I don't think it's a matter of that it shouldn't count but more a matter of how aggressively it's pursued. Universities don't vie for the top 100 bassoonists each year and are willing to look past poorer tests results for top bassoon achievers.
  - LeonardoTolstoy 3y ago
    Seems a tad bit disingenuous, only because the Ivy leagues are probably not competing for the top 100 QBs or top 100 point guards or top 100 pitchers either. To me being the best quarterback at your school and playing varsity football for four years should basically be considered the same way, as you point out, being the top bassoonist would. And my guess is that for the vast vast majority of cases extracurricular activities are pretty much all created equal unless you do it to a degree that makes it notable (like being an all-state athlete, or playing with you regional symphony or something)
    - chmod600 3y ago
      Why should all talents be treated equally? Surely a university might care more about some talents than others, and I don’t think that’s necessarily a problem. Money in sports distorts things, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean that everyone must treat football and bassoon talents equally.
gowld 3y ago
> MIT doesn’t consider legacy or alumni relations in our admissions process. If you’d like to read more about this policy, check out the blog Just to Be Clear: We Don’t Do Legacy. blog. Links to https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/just-to-be-clear-we-dont-do-legacy/ https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/just-to-be-clear-we-do... which reads: > anatomy of a WTF in the WSJ WTF > Mollie blogged about it back in 2006. blogged. > Our institutional research website says, quite specifically, that “alumni relations” are “not considered.” Nope, it's a dead link. ----- MIT, the original source of authority, trying to dispel a harmful myth, can't even be bothered to publish a legitimate, maintained document to use as a reliable, authoritative source for admissions policies. All they offer is gossip from random employees. Why would they expect random journos to do what they themselves can't do?
- ghaff 3y ago
  Yeah, someone from MIT really needs to scrub their FAQ. There's content there which is obviously current but this could honestly be handled with a current authoritative paragraph rather than linking back to a decade-old blog post.
dang 3y ago
Related: We Don’t Do Legacy (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14016231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14016231 - April 2017 (78 comments)
musicale 3y ago
> But one of the things that makes MIT special is the fact that it is meritocratic to its cultural core. "The word [meritocracy] was adopted into the English language with none of the negative connotations that Young intended it to have and was embraced by supporters of the philosophy." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy
- draw_down 3y ago
  [dead]

48 points by hhs 3y ago

I’m not sure why this was submitted, but (@dang) perhaps the linked full write up on the matter would be a better link to share: https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/just-to-be-clear-we-dont-do-legacy/ https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/just-to-be-clear-we-do...

dang 3y ago
Ok, we changed to that from https://mitadmissions.org/help/faq/legacy/ https://mitadmissions.org/help/faq/legacy/. Thanks!

david927 3y ago

God bless them for that. Legacy should never be taken into account and has no place in the 21st Century. But I also feel that sports achievement is given far too much weight as well, in general.

bluepod4 3y ago
Do you mean in general? Or do you mean that MIT gives far too much weight to sports achievement? Because I don’t think they do.
- efdee 3y ago
  Why give any weight at all to sports achievement in a university? What's one thing got to do with the other?
  - tekla 3y ago
    Athletics has always been a part of the curriculum of a full liberal arts education. I do think SOLELY athletics may be a bit much, but its impossible to ignore that athletics and education have been intertwined ever since the idea of a liberal arts education existed.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    You can certainly argue that some schools overweight it but schools take into account lots of things that aren't strictly academic.
  - aetimmes 3y ago
    Maybe not MIT, but there are many universities whose bottom lines are significantly impacted by the success of their sports programs and the television deals that come with them.
  - idopmstuff 3y ago
    I think intelligent, non-sporting people tend to have too strong of a bias against sports being factored into admissions. Universities look at lots of things that indicate someone is an intelligent, ambitious, hard-working person. That includes success at a high level in all kinds of things - if you're a top-level musician or dancer, they look favorably on that. If you've started a successful business, they look favorably upon that. If you started a charitable organization that contributed meaningfully to people's lives, they look favorably upon that. I think in general, we'd all agree that those are good - they show that those people are driven and able to achieve something significant. So does being an elite football player. You have to be up at the crack of dawn for practice. You need to work well with other people. You need to memorize playbooks. It's a lot of work and commitment. Why shouldn't a university look upon that favorably?
    - david927 3y ago
      I think the difference is in how it's approached. Admissions never say, "We need 20 bassoon players every year," but they absolutely look for 20 football players every year. And it's a known way to game admissions. How many people do you know who row or fence? Because top schools are looking for a set number of people who are good at those sports each year and wealthy parents can get their kids top coaching for such boutique sports, knowing that.
      - ghaff 3y ago
        Rowing is actually a fairly popular activity from what I see. (Caveat that I have some availability bias living outside of Boston.) It's also quite popular at the high school level, especially in the sort of private schools we have around here.
        bluepod4 3y ago
        You can also join the rowing team at certain “elite” colleges without having any prior experience (besides knowing how to swim).
  - squokko 3y ago
    Robust health is positively correlated with pretty much every metric of life success. Success in athletics is not only a sign of positive health but also another data point on work ethic. There are some people who can get a 1600 on their SATs without ever studying and there are some people who can run a 5:30 mile without ever really training, but very few people who can do both.
  - no_wizard 3y ago
    Sports is a huge money driver for some universities. Its a big revenue driver[0]. Performance of the team(s) also drives bigger contributions[1][2] by alumni when it comes to donations [0]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/analysis-who-is-winning-in-the-high-revenue-world-of-college-sports https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/analysis-who-is-winning... [1]: https://gceps.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/162rosen.pdf https://gceps.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/162ro... [2]: https://digital.sandiego.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1917&context=dissertations https://digital.sandiego.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=191...
  - userabchn 3y ago
    It demonstrates the ability to dedicate yourself to something and achieve success.
- david927 3y ago
  In general. I modified my comment to clarify. Thanks.
jewayne 3y ago
If you're trying to be MIT or CalTech, that's absolutely true. If you're trying to be the Ivy League...maybe not. I recently heard an explanation saying that legacies/"special admissions" are not the customer in this situation. They are part of the product. At Harvard, some percentage of your undergrad class were literally born into more money than you will ever make in your hypersuccessful career. The chance for making connections with such people is why many hypersuccessful/hypermotivated people choose the Ivy League over more meritocratic institutions. I'm not 100% sure I buy it, but it's an interesting perspective.
- Paul-Craft 3y ago
  You're right, but probably not for the reason you think you are. Harvard is not your typical university. It's more of a hedge fund with a school attached to it. So is the rest of the Ivy League. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universities_in_the_United_States_by_endowment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universit...
- KerrAvon 3y ago
  Making connections is maybe the single most important thing you will do at college. The faculty, the other students, and the alumni network, are part of those connections. However, this sounds a little like a post hoc rationalization from a legacy person, tbh.
- reducesuffering 3y ago
  This is actually what's going on. Ivy's are an intelligence signal laundering operation. Attract 80% super smarts, throw in 20% rich upper class, now people think your average rich upper class kids are "super smart," for their later career. It's why there's such a skewed financial aid. And it's why there's no prestigious rich-kid-only school, because it's obvious the academics aren't very good and that's not what is desired to be seen like.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - 3y ago
umvi 3y ago
> But I also feel that sports achievement is given far too much weight as well, in general. Probably because if you have good athletes, it can bring in a lot of money to your institution via football/basketball ticket sales (a lot more than tuition). It's a question of funding in most cases.
jkestner 3y ago
Good that you edited to add in general. I've seen the MIT diving team, who in fairness may have been testing air resistance of various falling bodies.
jncfhnb 3y ago
Athletes keep the lights on
LeonardoTolstoy 3y ago
I know you said on general but I think it is worth pointing out that MIT doesn't specifically mark any athletes for admission like most schools can and do. At least when I applied. I knew a varsity crew and varsity sailing athlete and despite both being nationally notable in their sports my understanding was the coaches could do nothing to "recruit" them. It of course helps in admission as much as playing a music instrument at a high level or being a published author might. If you have that plus elite academic achievements then you probably have a decent chance at admission to a school of your choosing.
HDThoreaun 3y ago
You know most elite schools aren't just trying to accept the most academically successful students right? MIT and caltech are the exceptions, but all the other ones are optimizing for career success and donations. Having rich, successful parents makes you more likely to be rich and successful, so they accept legacies. Being one of the best in the world at a sport is a good signal that you will succeed at other things, like your career, so these schools accept athletes with worse academic success. When you remember that the goal of admissions is career success all the decisions make sense.

maniflames 3y ago

Good on them, if you want a spot at a top uni/college you need to deserve it

tialaramex 3y ago
It varies by discipline, but IIRC for most degrees there was no significant correlation between the previous achievements of the student and their eventual degree grade, suggesting that actually it doesn't really matter for most degrees. Or at least that if it matters it's outweighed by other factors you're not mesuring via prior attainment. So in that case within reason the output is independent of input, and the decision of who to admit to limited places is a matter of larger societal policy. Admittance on "merit" in this case would actually be bullshit in effect. My employer is also the institution where I got my degree many years ago (I like this city and after coming here I never left) when they taught me, the requirement for Computer Science was 24 points, with Maths. Today the requirement is at least 3 As, one in Maths (which is approximately 30 points by the old system). Do they need better students? No. They need fewer students, they are over-subscribed, and higher requirements deter applicants and some will miss the higher requirement, meaning they teach maybe 500 students (in my day it'd be maybe 80). They still can't find big enough lecture theatres, next year's course will require overflow video relays. As I said, there's no correlation, but the goal isn't to find "the best" it's to reduce the sheer numbers without expensive in-person interviews of every candidate. The result isn't better graduates, it's about the same, because you could teach (within reason) anyone. Some populations might lead to more pastoral problems†, but the degree to which excellent pastoral care is delivered is independent of actual teaching. † Somebody's dog dies, they're distraught, don't go to class for a few weeks because they're so upset, next thing they know it's exams and they don't know anything. It doesn't have to be their dog dying, it can be mum got cancer, the family home burned down, their home country has a civil war, or even just the guy next door plays loud music 24/7 and they can't sleep properly. Non-academic stuff happens, you can wipe out somebody's potential by not addressing it.

tekla 3y ago

Good, should set an example for everyone else. YOU got into MIT, not the color of your skin, nor whose parents you had. I have a half dozen 1st generation friends who worked their asses off in inner city schools to get full ride scholarships to get into top schools, and are now part of the professional class in a single generation.

sanitycheck 3y ago
Eh. It's mostly genetics that determine academic ability (and everything else), so reaching an end goal of "total equality" would in fact make admissions all about who your parents are.
- abirch 3y ago
  I think it's 60-70% of academic achievement can be explained by genes. If you know kids from a big family, their academic success can vary significantly although they have the same parents.
  - sanitycheck 3y ago
    Sure, and they may not all have the same colour eyes - variation is expected. But still, we have nature (genes, 60-70%) and nurture (hey, parents again). What else is there?
    - jncfhnb 3y ago
      Luck (excluding controllable factors by wealthy parents)
    - abirch 3y ago
      I'd say opportunities. When there are fewer kids matriculating into college it's easier to get into a better school (see Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers) Professors and Teachers, the variability of them is huge. Friends can have a huge impact as well. Is the norm to skip classes to go work on a startup or focusing on getting good grades? Resources such as the Numberblocks which make math more visual and accessible. My pre-K kid was doing multiplication because of that show.

iudqnolq 3y ago

There are many pathways to do this without explicit policy. If MIT wanted to show this explicitly they could release a dataset with admission outcomes and parent/relative donation history.

gumby 3y ago
How would they link them? It's been decades since I applied to MIT but I noted that they were the only application that didn't ask if you had any relatives who'd attended.
squokko 3y ago
Does the application have a spot to mention your relatives who attended MIT? And if not, how would they have such a dataset?
- technothrasher 3y ago
  My alma mater (University of Rochester) doesn't have an explicit legacy admittance policy, but they do have a "legacy scholarship" where you can potentially get $5K-$10K if you check off that your legacy on your application. I have always assumed this was code for "we do have a legacy admittance policy, be we don't want to say we do". Irrelevant for me, apparently though, because my kid has said there's no way he's going to go to the school I went to <shrug>.
  - squokko 3y ago
    I don't mean this as any insult to the University of Rochester but I don't think that any of this national conversation around legacy admissions and privilege is relevant to them.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - andyinfrance 3y ago
    Hi Technothrasher, sorry to jump this thread, was reading about a thread 46 days ago where you have made ecu replacements for 308’s I presume that’s with the Bosch K-Jetronic and Magneti Marelli 801/802a ecu’s? Can you contact me about these I’m interested, thanks

mensetmanusman 3y ago

Legacy doesn’t help when you have objective metrics of performance in stem. This gets harder for art.

mitko 3y ago

Good to know, but when I applied in 2005/6 iirc they did have as a part of the application a question about anyone in my family being from MIT. But I didn’t meet many students whose parents were also MIT grads there, which suggests that they don’t give it a benefit.

stephencanon 3y ago
Yeah, they certainly asked in 1997 when I applied. Curious when they stopped asking.

deleted 3y ago

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pbui 3y ago

Maybe this is true now, but when I applied to MIT for undergrad in 2002, I had to meet with an alumnus at their house near me for an interview. Being from California and first generation American and the first of my family to go away for college, I had no idea how admissions worked nor did I know much about MIT. Because of that, I basically bombed that interview as I was unprepared (didn't know what to expect and didn't have the cultural knowledge to converse properly). I was subsequently rejected from MIT despite having pristine credentials for the time (however, I was accepted at other schools such as Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford, and my eventual choice Notre Dame). Moreover, a classmate of mine from a wealthier family and who was on the football team was admitted to MIT, despite having worse grades and a lower SAT score (he was smart and deserving, I'm just pointing out that my numbers were better). So while it is nice that MIT claims to not use legacy now, the process I experienced 20 years ago suggests that alumni still had influence then and even athletics mattered too. To be clear, I'm not necessarily against legacy admissions or athletic preferences. I just wish schools were upfront about it and things were explained clearly to applicants.

squokko 3y ago
Yes, there are ways to use social class to your advantage, even if just the ease to walk into a mansion and converse fluidly with the owner rather than feeling at unease. There are no ways to fully eliminate the effects of this, but MIT is at least not explicitly doing so. And there is a lot more to admissions than numbers. Athletics do and should matter - robust health is positively correlated with future success. And essays, recommendations, etc. also matter. And I would think that MIT is not ashamed to say so.
- ghaff 3y ago
  When I knew the MIT admissions director many years ago, he said they had an X-Y chart with academics on one axis and other achievements/soft factors on the other. There was basically a minimum academic cutoff and above that cutoff you could basically tradeoff academics for other criteria.
isopede 3y ago
So while it is nice that MIT claims to not use legacy now, the process I experienced 20 years ago suggests that alumni still had influence then and even athletics mattered too. Not to discount your experience, but I don't believe what you experienced would fall under "legacy" or "alumni relations." For those, you would either need to have had parents/family that attended MIT, or a close relation to an alumni. It doesn't appear either of those applied to your situation.

prepend 3y ago

I would like to see the impact of this policy. What percent of admissions have a legacy who attended MIT? MIT is likely the only organization that can do (or sponsor) this analysis while protecting privacy. It looks like their application form doesn’t ask for legacy info [1] so they’d have to track this in some systematic way during onboarding or something. [1] https://mitadmissions.org/apply/firstyear/biographical-information/ https://mitadmissions.org/apply/firstyear/biographical-infor...

amluto 3y ago
MIT, as an institution that is historically highly competent at using computers and designing computer systems, can surely figure out with decent accuracy who all the applicants’ parents are and can cross-reference with their historical registration records. Just kidding. MIT, until quite recently, was remarkably backwards in their own administrative systems. Class registration was done by filling out a triplicate form, getting the appropriate signatures, and taking it to the gym to be stamped, with two copies going in a shoebox and one copy being kept by the student to use as evidence for when whoever entered the data into a computer eventually got it wrong. And this is the same MIT that sold half of its /8 without successfully notifying all the users of said addresses. And also the same MIT that created and still actively maintains Kerberos but, for some reason, outsourced authentication for its own systems to Duo. So I would believe any level of competence in the quality of MIT’s development, registration and admissions databases.

Joker_vD 3y ago

The Admiralty version of this British method (old pattern) was different only in its more restricted scope. The Board of Admirals were unimpressed by titled relatives as such. What they sought to establish was a service connection. The ideal candidate would reply to the second question, “Yes, Admiral Parker is my uncle. My father is Captain Foley, my grandfather Commodore Foley. My mother’s father was Admiral Hardy. Commander Hardy is my uncle. My eldest brother is a Lieutenant in the Royal Marines, my next brother is a cadet at Dartmouth and my younger brother wears a sailor suit.” “Ah!” the senior Admiral would say. “And what made you think of joining the Navy?” The answer to this question, however, would scarcely matter, the clerk present having already noted the candidate as acceptable. Given a choice between two candidates, both equally acceptable by birth, a member of the Board would ask suddenly, “What was the number of the taxi you came in?” The candidate who said “I came by bus” was then thrown out. The candidate who said, truthfully, “I don’t know,” was rejected, and the candidate who said “Number 2351” (lying) was promptly admitted to the service as a boy with initiative. This method often produced excellent results.

blast 3y ago
https://www.geocities.ws/films4/parkinsonselection.htm https://www.geocities.ws/films4/parkinsonselection.htm

chmod600 3y ago

Did the recent Affirmative Action decision say how public/private factor in? At the extreme, if it’s a private club, I imagine they could use any criteria (fair or not, including race) but I suppose private universities aren’t the same as private clubs?

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chmod600 3y ago

If I were not concerned about fairness at all, I’d say that universities are a place to collect together a combination of people that are likely to succeed. Maybe that’s a combination of intellectuals and engineers and scientists and rich people and connected people and business people. “Legacy” is a good proxy for “connected”. Donors are rich. Test scores find the engineers and scientists. Essays try to identify intellectuals. Etc. But that’s not fair, because you can’t make yourself rich or connected before you turn 18. Athletics doesn’t fit into that formula, and quite frankly a lot of academic departments don’t, either. But it’s a form of excellence so I don’t see why it shouldn’t count. A lot of intellectuals seem to think it’s unfair to treat sports excellence on the same plane as intellectual excellence, but that’s a self-serving position to take.

david927 3y ago
I don't think it's a matter of that it shouldn't count but more a matter of how aggressively it's pursued. Universities don't vie for the top 100 bassoonists each year and are willing to look past poorer tests results for top bassoon achievers.
- LeonardoTolstoy 3y ago
  Seems a tad bit disingenuous, only because the Ivy leagues are probably not competing for the top 100 QBs or top 100 point guards or top 100 pitchers either. To me being the best quarterback at your school and playing varsity football for four years should basically be considered the same way, as you point out, being the top bassoonist would. And my guess is that for the vast vast majority of cases extracurricular activities are pretty much all created equal unless you do it to a degree that makes it notable (like being an all-state athlete, or playing with you regional symphony or something)
  - chmod600 3y ago
    Why should all talents be treated equally? Surely a university might care more about some talents than others, and I don’t think that’s necessarily a problem. Money in sports distorts things, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean that everyone must treat football and bassoon talents equally.

gowld 3y ago

> MIT doesn’t consider legacy or alumni relations in our admissions process. If you’d like to read more about this policy, check out the blog Just to Be Clear: We Don’t Do Legacy. blog. Links to https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/just-to-be-clear-we-dont-do-legacy/ https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/just-to-be-clear-we-do... which reads: > anatomy of a WTF in the WSJ WTF > Mollie blogged about it back in 2006. blogged. > Our institutional research website says, quite specifically, that “alumni relations” are “not considered.” Nope, it's a dead link. ----- MIT, the original source of authority, trying to dispel a harmful myth, can't even be bothered to publish a legitimate, maintained document to use as a reliable, authoritative source for admissions policies. All they offer is gossip from random employees. Why would they expect random journos to do what they themselves can't do?

ghaff 3y ago
Yeah, someone from MIT really needs to scrub their FAQ. There's content there which is obviously current but this could honestly be handled with a current authoritative paragraph rather than linking back to a decade-old blog post.

dang 3y ago

Related: We Don’t Do Legacy (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14016231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14016231 - April 2017 (78 comments)

musicale 3y ago

> But one of the things that makes MIT special is the fact that it is meritocratic to its cultural core. "The word [meritocracy] was adopted into the English language with none of the negative connotations that Young intended it to have and was embraced by supporters of the philosophy." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy

draw_down 3y ago
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