69 ms·

Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt

603 points by Geekette 3y ago

thexumaker 3y ago
Good get rid of Affirmative Action, get rid of Legacy status. Athlete's are fine. Having to go to a college with a bad football team always sucked personally so let's keep that pipeline up.
LarsDu88 3y ago
It's glad to hear that children will no longer have an admissions edge at these schools. I thought it was absolutely ridiculous how they were letting 8 year olds into college campuses.
bluepod4 3y ago
“Merit-based” means many different things. Explain yourselves.
colpabar 3y ago
[flagged]
- fastball 3y ago
  That's not how that works at all.
  - colpabar 3y ago
    I live there, yes it does
causi 3y ago
I'm amazed it was ever legal in the first place. It's open nepotism.
- pitaj 3y ago
  Nepotism has never been illegal.
  - reaperducer 3y ago
    In the private sector. In many governments, it is quite illegal.
    - pessimizer 3y ago
      Making a distinction about the "private sector," but being vague for some reason about the country we're discussing?
      - clnq 3y ago
        The US. There is no other country.
      - reaperducer 3y ago
        Making a distinction about the "private sector," but being vague for some reason about the country we're discussing? I wrote "many governments" because I am not fully versed in the policies and laws of every nation on the planet. Perhaps you can fill us in?
    - laiejtli 3y ago
      Not sure how to phrase this. It's illegal in the US government, but it still exists all over unofficially and it's openly acknowledged standard practice in many NGOs. It's very difficult to get a job at NASA. I forget the exact number, but something like 75% of people who "work for NASA" are contractors and only a small minority are actual government employees. In order to get a full-time job, it helps to have previous experience usually in the form of a graduate fellowship. In order to get a fellowship, it helps to have undergrad summer experience. In order to get undergraduate experience, it's very helpful to have high school summer program experience. In order to get high school experience, you'll need to live in the area and probably have some connections which means parents or family who work at the NASA facility in question. In my experience, national labs were similar but to a much lesser extreme, often just because they're remote and sometimes antiquated and children of lab employees often can't wait to get away. When I worked at at the UN, (NGO, not formal government) coworkers were genuinely confused about how I got a job there with no family connections in higher places. I had the same conversation with several bewildered coworkers who plainly told me about their parent or uncle who got them their job. I was told that nepotism is much, much more common and openly acknowledged in Europe than in the US.
nancyhn 3y ago
The end of both legacy admissions and race-based admissions makes me feel hopeful that we're finally pivoting to a productive, merit-based approach.
- jacobsenscott 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - legolas2412 3y ago
    History also definitely shows that nepotistic or race-centered systems really did not work out fine. In fact the malinged systems made by rich white people were nepotistic and race-centered. What history does show us is that systems that reward effort, and not just someone's heritage are the ones that have led to best outcomes.
  - ahtihn 3y ago
    Does history show things working out better when other groups make rules?
    - JKCalhoun 3y ago
      I don't think that was the point of the person you are resounding to. I think the point was that no single group should make all the rules.
  - nancyhn 3y ago
    Racism is bad and you should feel bad that you judge people based on their skin color.
- ubermonkey 3y ago
  Only one of these is a good thing.
  - loeg 3y ago
    I don’t think discrimination against asians was a good thing!
fritzo 3y ago
> “I do think there was a time when perhaps legacies needed a boost” -Dean Emeritus of Admission Mike Steidel Is there any way of charitably interpreting Mike Steidel's words? I have a tough time reading anything here but classist bigotry preserving the status quo :-/
- mlyle 3y ago
  Yes, there are charitable ways. You make an institution stronger (in fundraising, in love for the institution, in traditions, etc) by creating multigenerational relationships. When you're asked for money, it may be "eh, whatever it was my college" or it could be "Yes-- it's where my grandpa, pop, and I all went." But there's a lot of negative consequences, too.
- its_ethan 3y ago
  I mean he's speaking about the past - so he's saying perhaps sometime in the past it was maybe needed, but he's saying that it's not needed anymore. It's just a way to not have to specifically say something negative about the college, even if it's about the college's past. He's not preserving bigotry, he's just trying to not tarnish the brand.
- unethical_ban 3y ago
  Status quo, maybe, not not explicitly bigoted. Building a culture through generations, a sense of loyalty to an institution and a lifelong interest in seeing that institution flourish (and be funded) is a reasonable goal of a University.
- DominikPeters 3y ago
  His comments more broadly make no sense to me. “Over time, the quality of the applicant pool increased to the point where we really didn’t have [give legacies a boost]” - how does that work? If the applicant pool gets better, then if anything privileged groups need a stronger boost. "Steidel said the tipping point came perhaps three or four years ago as standardized testing became optional at many institutions, including Carnegie Mellon" - is this supposed to mean that they can now boost preferred groups more easily because they don't have to overcome the testing differential, so they actually might have stronger legacy preferences than before, but better hidden?
boeingUH60 3y ago
Very good decision. Let’s see if them Ivy Leagues with enormous endowments would follow…likely not because that’ll cause a big drop in gifts and donations.
- kypro 3y ago
  > likely not because that’ll cause a big drop in gifts and donations. This is a topic that I haven't had much interest in so sorry if I'm being dumb here, but I struggle to see how this could be a good thing? I guess the way I'm seeing this is that if you're too not smart enough to get into these universities but are lucky enough to have parents with lots of money, you can basically bribe your way in. While this seems unfair on the surface, and I suppose it is from certain lenses, it is surely also in effect acting as a "stupid rich person" tax for higher education? I mean to your point here, if Ivy League universities receive a big drop in donations wouldn't that practically guarantee they'll either need to charge higher tuition fees to those less fortunate who get in on merit, or they'll need to lower the quality of their education? Could someone help me out here? I'm aware I'm saying something stupid. I don't see how this could possibly be a good thing for those less well off who get in on merit? Are they not in favour of their education costs being partly offset by large donation from wealthy people?
  - _cenw 3y ago
    or we could just… tax the rich instead? the not stupid ones too?
    - kypro 3y ago
      Pragmatically speaking "tax the rich" isn't going to happen and these kind of de facto "wealth taxes" are far easier to implement. Here in the UK we have a problem with public health care funding and I have no idea why we don't simply offer priority service for rich people who are willing to pay stupid amounts of money for priority service. In doing we could redirect that extra funding to those who need it most but can't afford private health care. I guess exploiting the stupidity and vanity of rich people seems like a much more pragmatic (and arguably fairer) solution than trying to implement wealth taxes or 70% income taxes.
CSMastermind 3y ago
Don't legacy admissions often mean that their parents have donated significantly to the University? In a sense wouldn't that just mean that those students are essentially paying a very high premium to attend there and subsidizing the education of all the other students? I'm not against abolishing them but I do wonder if this will have any impact on alumni donations.
- noobermin 3y ago
  Honestly, relying on donations doesn't seem tenable without discrimination. The only way out is to treat it as a public good and fund it as one.
  - pirate787 3y ago
    Carnegie Mellon is a private university, and obviously there's already a strong public commitment to college education through subsidizing the student directly.
    - underlipton 3y ago
      It's a private university founded with the intent to be a public good. It exists ostensibly to be a counterweight to the ills brought about by the concentration of wealth and power under its founders, in recognition of their outsize influence on society.
  - lisper 3y ago
    So... get rid of private universities entirely? I'm sympathetic to your position, but that doesn't quite seem like the wisest course of action to me.
  - mason55 3y ago
    I think the question is whether the donations create more resources than what is used up by a legacy admission. For example, imagine I donate $1B to the university, with two stipulations. First, they admit my child to the CS program. Second, they use the money to perpetually expand the size of every incoming CS class by 10 students. In that respect, the legacy admission is a net good. Yes, for four years there's a spot that's used up by my kid, but even during those four years there are 10 additional people got into the program who wouldn't have otherwise. I realize it's not that easy, it doesn't work like that, and the size of classes at places like Harvard are not limited by the how much money Harvard has. But it seems like there could be ways to keep some kind of legacy admission program which also create a net good. Maybe every legacy admission should be required to fund a perpetual scholarship for one financially disadvantaged student? That's both expensive enough to be rare and beneficial enough to be hard to argue with.
laiejtli 3y ago
I went to a second-tier public school that never had legacy admissions. Is it really a big deal? Or is this largely symbolic? Do you see kids in your classes who are rich and visibly a level below everyone else intellectually or emotionally? (I did meet a few students who were born rich and enrolled in my second-tier university after failing out of first-tier universities, so that might be my exposure to the practice)
- ghaff 3y ago
  >Is it really a big deal? Probably not in general. At least outside of a relatively small number of schools. IMO, what you're seeing is a bunch of schools that really don't take legacies much into account (if at all) all coming out of the woodwork to put themselves on the side of the angels without having to actually change any of their policies.
- laidoffamazon 3y ago
  This is exactly what bothers me. This talk about Legacies and even AA for top schools is downright insulting to people like me that worked hard at second-tier institutions and are just ignored afterward as a result. We make up the vast majority of college graduates, why don't we get even a fraction of the support or attention?
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  > Do you see kids in your classes who are rich and visibly a level below everyone else intellectually or emotionally? Not at all. The purpose of legacy admissions is predominantly to get students who could go to plenty of universities at your tier to go to your university, based on the fact that their parents are alumni. You do end up with a minority-within-a-minority population of rich students who are only there because they share a last name with a building, but frankly those students are also valuable to the rest of the student body from a networking perspective. I'm opposed to the change. The value in a university education is not just from "going to school". You have the prestige of the university (helped by attracting noteworthy alumni), networking opportunity (helped by having current students with connections through their parents), academic quality of the student body (having the rich kids subsidize merit-based scholarships boosts this, too). On the whole, legacy admissions (and preferential admission of rich kids in general) benefits the student body as a whole. It's the raison d'etre of private schools, and eliminating it maybe lets in another say ~1-5% of your student body's worth of students who wouldn't have gotten in otherwise, in exchange for lowering the value of getting in for everybody.
philip1209 3y ago
Next step: Ending use of athletic ability in admissions.
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  Sports programs at university pay for themselves. They pay for themselves because people buy tickets to games, which they do to see exceptional athletes.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Maybe at schools with big football/basketball programs. At a school like MIT which was being discussed yesterday, sports certainly do not directly pay for themselves.
  - ZoomerCretin 3y ago
    Do legacy admissions not pay for themselves?
    - OkayPhysicist 3y ago
      I didn't say anything about legacy admissions. In fact, I'm all in on not-exclusively-academic-merit based admissions for private universities. I will happily trade a few bottom-of-the-rung merit-based admissions in exchange for students that either benefit me in some way (by subsidizing my education and/or providing good networking opportunities) or try and make up for the mistreatment of disadvantaged groups.
  - paxys 3y ago
    Sports programs at the top ~20 universities pay for themselves (and that too just the top sports). The rest are a money sink.
  - jcranmer 3y ago
    Football and (men's) basketball pay for themselves. The other sports do not. At many smaller universities, not even football and basketball can achieve net revenue for sports. Source: look at databases like https://www.sportico.com/business/commerce/2021/college-sports-finances-database-intercollegiate-1234646029/ https://www.sportico.com/business/commerce/2021/college-spor...
mupuff1234 3y ago
Wesleyan as well: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/19/us/wesleyan-university-ends-legacy-admissions.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/19/us/wesleyan-university-en... I'm guessing ivy leagues won't let go that easily.
AlbertCory 3y ago
They WERE, essentially, letting people buy their kid's admission. Maybe not directly, but if you're a rich alumnus, you have to suspect that your donation history will figure into your kid's admission or not. Even if the school says it doesn't, they could be lying.
kyleblarson 3y ago
Yeah right. Just as schools are already working around affirmative action rulings to continue to effect actual institutional racism, they will find a way to continue to give legacies a leg up in the admissions process. With the size of endowments of top schools these days they effectively operate as for-profit hedge funds that happen to have educational institutions attached. Does anyone seriously think a school would say "thanks for that library you donated but your grand kid only has a 3.8 gpa so maybe look at state schools."
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  They didn't say they're eliminating open "donations for admissions" systems. They said they're eliminating legacy admissions, i.e. "Your parents went here so you can get in, too". It effects multi-generation middle class families more than the really rich ones.
numbers_guy 3y ago
I was just watching a podcast interview in which a British-German professor employed at an Ivy League university in the US, was talking about the elite universities in the US, and how there is no equivalent in Germany. [1] The interview is in German, but what he is basically saying is that the American attitude is to very openly and purposefully create and maintain this system of elitism and everyone is openly in competition with each other. All of this is alien to us here in Germany. At first glance it seems like we got the better deal. But then you think more about it more. All the German elite send their kids to study in the US instead of studying in Germany, because there they get to network with the elite kids from all over the world. But this is not a very good thing for Germany. First of all, we have less say in how he next generation of elite in our country think. Secondly all the smart and talented people in Germany who cannot afford to emigrate get no chance to mingle with these elite kids. So if we had a system of elite unis here in Germany it might on some level be better. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4Y9SomH9Nc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4Y9SomH9Nc
- Apocryphon 3y ago
  Elites all around the world send their kids to schools to study in the U.S., or places like Oxford. Presumably more countries besides the U.S. or the U.K. have systems of elite universities. Even if Germany had such schools, you think your elites would be content with them? The problem isn't with educational egalitarianism, it's with global hegemony and your country's elites trying to sidle up with the facilities of the hegemon. Don't get rid of your egalitarianism to cater to the fickle whims of your elites.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  A buddy of mine at Stanford invited me to one of their CS/Eng Grad Student Socials a couple years ago. There was a pretty large clique of Germans there. Over drinks, I came to find out all those Germans attended the same university (TU Munich), and more specifically, attended the same handful of elite private Gymnasiums. Even though they all attended a public university which doesn't have legacy admissions, these children of the elite still networked and knew each other since grade school. The same thing happens in the UK (did you attend an independent or comprehensive school?) as well, and even Canada to a certain extent though a lot of this was also driven by housing prices. The US is probably going to revert to this kind of elite signaling. P.S. all those Germans were blonde and blue eyed except for one Turkish German who was clearly uncomfortable and was chatting with us Americans and Asians instead.
draw_down 3y ago
[dead]
dsiegel2275 3y ago
It is a bit surreal to see this headline hit the top of HN, as I sit in a CMU owned office building, looking out the window at Univ of Pittsburgh buildings.
lacrimacida 3y ago
Legacy admissions can be gamed too with modest donations just enough to make the system gameable. With large donors it’s a different story though, those do help the universities and the number of students who enter this way is a pretty low ratio.
Racing0461 3y ago
Did they also end discrimination against asian and white men?
qwertyuiop_ 3y ago
Does this mean they won’t take a call from well connected politicians and billionaires ?
gizmo 3y ago
I recently came across a somewhat provocative defense of legacy admissions. The argument is that the iveys are great because they bring together the children of the rich and powerful (legacy admissions with connections) with really smart and hungry students (children of the middle class, mostly). It's arguably a good deal for both. Smart kids get access to wealth and power and they get to learn how the world works. This is the one thing they can't get anywhere else. And the legacy students get the prestige and credibility of having gone to a top school, as well as access to hungry students who are eager to take advantage of the opportunities that come their way. When Harvard becomes an institution of merit will it still be worth the price of admission? I'm not so sure.
- curiousllama 3y ago
  > will it still be worth the price of admission? Definitely. Will it still be the same value you're getting? Perhaps not. Notably, some schools like MIT already don't consider legacy, and are still worth the price.
  - ars 3y ago
    Because MIT is more of a technically school, not a networking school. Networking schools are more likely to be business schools.
- ecshafer 3y ago
  I doubt that the mixture of rich and smart kids actually happens that much. I didn’t go to an ivy, so I can only speculate. But I imagine the rich kids hang out with each other and the poor smart kids hang out with each other.
  - hot_gril 3y ago
    Not an Ivy, but at Stanford, they seem to mix.
- pop12121 3y ago
  I think the argument is worth considering. At the same time, it seems easier in the age of internet for kids of merit to attract sources of funding, and I expect funding will still find their way towards massive untapped concentrations of merit.
tayo42 3y ago
Im kind of surprised how much media attention and outrage admissions to schools generates. one year of out school, the whole thing just is so irrelevant. Idk who really cares what these small subset of schools does. There are so many public schools that offer education and opportunities and even those are blown of proportion.
underlipton 3y ago
It's funny to me how cynical and skeptical HN is about diversity-related admissions, but how quickly everyone jumps to point out the positives of legacy admissions. These aren't people who are being objective. We are now mask-off with regard to how this is simply an emotional matter centered around what is most advantageous to whatever group. The least we could do is be open about the role of self-interest here.
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  Or people are less emotional about wealth. (Or people are wealthy.)
- dublinben 3y ago
  Don't you think there's just as much self-interest behind the the primary argument of relying exclusively on "merit"? This is likely being promulgated by a demographic who over-indexes on this dimension and is lacking in any other that may be included in a holistic admissions process.
  - underlipton 3y ago
    >Don't you think there's just as much self-interest behind the the primary argument of relying exclusively on "merit"? Oh, absolutely.
- az226 3y ago
  If they were admitting legacy students who were hundreds of points lower on the SATs and bad grades, then yeah, it’d be as bad as affirmative action. But in practice it’s only ever used to break ties. If affirmative action was implemented the same way legacy admissions is, I doubt the lawsuit against Harvard would ever exist, and opposition essentially non-existent.
  - underlipton 3y ago
    >If they were admitting legacy students who were hundreds of points lower on the SATs and bad grades They are.
low_tech_punk 3y ago
Can we end education resource scarcity please. More open courses by schools and less credentialism by employers could make these debates irrelevant.
- Apocryphon 3y ago
  Underrated point. Weird to see how in HN, the bastion of self-taught hackers, autodidact polymaths, and people who think secondary education is a waste of time and money, try to argue in favor of the entrenched credentialist power of universities.
- rank0 3y ago
  There’s not a scarcity of education. Anyone is free to attend community college with guaranteed transfer to a larger state university provided they meet their GPA requirements. EDIT: I do agree with you about employers overvaluing credentials though. Ultimately that’s not something you can unilaterally remove in a free society.
dehrmann 3y ago
I'm amazed at how schools with legacy and donation-based admissions can maintain high rankings when you never know if someone with a degree from there just got it because their parents donated $5M. Before someone says "the student still has to graduate," Harvard has a 97% graduation rate.
- collinc777 3y ago
  The ranking systems are likely flawed and measure things outside of merit, or measure merit in a non-holistic way.
- dbish 3y ago
  See also the massive grade inflation at these schools
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  The rankings effectively measure prestige. Someone with $5 million to give to a university will very likely have a prestigious career, even if they're completely incompetent.
- strikelaserclaw 3y ago
  I mean it is just like the YC model, 1% of the companies will give outsized rewards which will more than justify investing in the 99%. Same way, Harvard is probably propped up by the 1% of kids who it takes in who do great things and the rest can just enjoy the privilege of being alumni of such a "great institution". These top institutions take in not only unworthy rich kids but also the cream of the crop in science, leadership etc...
screye 3y ago
Legacy admissions should not be legal in public universities. Massive public schools like UMass, Mich, StonyBrook, GATech, Minnesota, Penn State still take legacy admissions. It's nice to see CMU follow in the footsteps of other top private tech schools like MIT & Caltech that claim to not use legacy status. It's no surprise that Ivies, Stanford and most private colleges all heavily favor legacy. Afterall, a large part of a prestige university's job is lend an appearance of competence to the not-as-competent kids of the elite. source I used - https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/colleges-that-consider-legacy-status https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/colleges-that-c...
- rank0 3y ago
  I have a hard time defining my own stance on this point. For example, my alma mater GAtech allows for automatic admissions of my immediate relatives provided they reach some bar like 3.5 gpa + 1400 SAT (math+reading). Do you think this should be illegal? It’s quite clearly an attempt to create an enduring GT community. It’s also clearly not the same as racially discriminatory admissions. I do see the argument that it’s unfair…but should it be full blown illegal? “Non-legacy” isn’t a protected class in America unlike race,sex,religion, etc.
  - dbish 3y ago
    Yes, that should not be allowed. The best should get in, not a relative.
    - rank0 3y ago
      I concede that maybe it’s not the way “things ought to be” But what’s your legal argument for why this practice should be prohibited?
      - YeBanKo 3y ago
        What is your argument for why this practice should be allowed? It’s a public school, why should your family has an advantage because you went there? Is the goal of public school to maintain a club or provide access to education? If the latter, I don’t see how any kind of exclusivity other than merit makes sense.
julienchastang 3y ago
Good. With the end of affirmative action, legacy status in admissions becomes much harder to justify. [0] The number of kids entering elite universities via non-meritocratic avenues is incredible. > "[The researchers] examined four kinds of nonracial preferences—for recruited athletes, and for children of Harvard graduates, financial donors and members of faculty and staff. The researchers found that more than 43% of white applicants admitted to Harvard between 2014-19 fell into one or more of these categories. Nearly three quarters of them would have been rejected if they had been subjected to the same standards as other white applicants." [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/end-college-legacy-preferences-harvard-sffa-racce-affirmative-action-13e90e30 https://www.wsj.com/articles/end-college-legacy-preferences-...
- twoodfin 3y ago
  Opens a ton of slots for race-neutral preferences that can, say, pull in the top performing students from otherwise underperforming urban and rural districts.
- xkcd-sucks 3y ago
  It's kind of begging the question to assume multigenerational family ties to a university are "not merit" when a big part of a university's value proposition is social networking: One doesn't go to Harvard just to take courses; one goes to Harvard to bump shoulders with the scions of dictators / diplomats / "captains of industry" etc. Personally I didn't understand that at the time, would have rejected the notion on principle, and still don't really like it, but is definitely worth consideration
  - yannyu 3y ago
    Then we might as well admit that "merit" is heavily influenced by starting conditions instead of pretending that everyone has "equal opportunity". How many times have I heard from people that the USA is about "equality of opportunity" and not "equality of outcome"? Legacy admissions is directly contrary to equality of opportunity, and undermines the idea of meritocracy in university admissions that people have been crowing about in anti-affirmative-action rhetoric.
ellisv 3y ago
This is good, although I probably benefited from it because one of my recommendation letters was from an alumnus.
say_it_as_it_is 3y ago
I hope this continues. Then, we will see legislation pass to re-classify endowment funds as hedge funds. CMU has $3 Billion of assets in its endowment portfolio. Endowments have been getting a free ride in terms of tax treatment, disclosure, and other activities that are regulated for hedge funds. Now that they're upsetting the elite class, the class will respond by re-classifying endowments as hedge funds. Affirmative action isn't the only racist policy that universities have been practicing. They've also been racially discriminating tuition subsidization. With re-classification of endowments as hedge funds, their activities will become transparent. Scrutiny over subsidized tuition will become possible. Black students receiving a disproportionate amount of subsidy, for instance, will be an act of racial discrimination, and financially regulated entities like hedge funds cannot racially discriminate.
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  Endowments let institutions weather out political mood swings and changes in enrollment. Any institution that serves a purpose besides "being a branch of the government" needs a war chest of some kind, and if they can use the proceeds to make student lives better, why not have a large endowment?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
psychphysic 3y ago
It's weird to me that "stop being racist" some how has led to universities considering giving up legacies, "prestige"/donation based admissions and even athletic admissions. If it's the case that affirmative action was being used to mask other unfair practices that will be utterly ghastly.
- nkjnlknlk 3y ago
  > If it's the case that affirmative action was being used to mask other unfair practices that will be utterly ghastly. That has actually been the case and stance many leftists took on AA. I think it was, at one point, recognized as a bandaid on a deep, bleeding wound. Neither a correct nor sufficient solution but it was the only one that could get through the door.
- az226 3y ago
  It’s all about woke optics.
  - hotdogscout 3y ago
    [flagged]
reso 3y ago
Hard to believe legacy admissions are legal anywhere. An obvious injustice--and efficiency drain--on society.
lo_zamoyski 3y ago
"'[Legacy] has never been a primary or ‘plus’ factor in Pitt admissions of undergraduates.' [...] Pitt declined to say how many legacies are part of its entering classes." So this may not have been a radical move anyway, at least at Pitt. Call me when Harvard decides to do this.
kweingar 3y ago
Ultimately the existence of elite universities is the root of the problem. Most colleges take a huge majority of the students who apply, so neither legacy students nor affirmative action make too much a difference for them. Universities should be more like this and less like incubators for the ruling class. All of the drama recently revolves around wealthy students being denied their rubber stamps or underprivileged students being denied their golden ticket. It’s bad that college performs these functions, so let’s work to fix that.
- twixfel 3y ago
  Exactly, the universities are extremely wealthy and could in principle choose to use that money to increase intake, but then it dilutes their status as a luxury brand, so they don't do it. But what business is it of the university to be a luxury brand anyway? They should be simply maximising the public good, and that means taking way more students with the huge endowments they have.
- rank0 3y ago
  Is your argument that we should not have elite universities in the US? Seriously?
  - kweingar 3y ago
    Yes
dang 3y ago
Recent and related: We Don’t Do Legacy (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36774369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36774369 - July 2023 (106 comments)
AnnikaL 3y ago
The title on HN (currently "Children, alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt") is a little confusing; children and other relatives of alumni don't have an admissions edge. This isn't about some sort of early college program!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
balderdash 3y ago
This is not going to have the effect people think. My experience is that legacy admissions are more or less a tie breaker. Legacy candidates that gain admission due to their legacy status are well qualified candidates (+ you often get the added benefit of a higher yield). HOWEVER, where less than qualified candidates do gain admission is when there is a significant donor involved (there is often a meaningful overlap with alumni for obvious reasons, but not necessarily). Getting rid of legacy admissions will not change this dynamic. So really the only people that are going to lose out are legacies that are “on the bubble” from a resume standpoint whose parents aren’t rich…
chmod600 3y ago
I’d like to see more numbers for context. How many students were favored by legacy status, and approximately how much favoritism? They often mix legacy numbers with athletes for some reason… I guess to make the numbers more dramatic? Or maybe because insecure intellectuals look down on athletes in general?
- code_runner 3y ago
  What difference do the numbers make if the policy is better? If it changes 1 or 100 outcomes, in my mind this is absolutely the correct call. Numbers would be great and they should definitely produce them, but I don’t think they would change my thinking they legacy admissions is negative.
  - chmod600 3y ago
    The news likes to stoke outrage and context (especially numerical context) helps moderate it. Also, small problems often have different solutions than large problems. Solutions that don’t scale are fine if the numbers are small.
    - code_runner 3y ago
      My point is that this is just an objectively good thing because it’s the “right” way to handle things. Even if the “wrong” way has minimal impact.
bsder 3y ago
> Good. With the end of affirmative action, legacy status in admissions becomes much harder to justify. Placing University of Pittsburgh, a public university which has almost a 67% acceptance rate, in the same conversation with private universities that have acceptance rates in or near the single digit percentages borders on journalistic fraud. I would also say that Pitt, unlike a lot (most) of universities mentioned, had many programs attempting to help those from more humble backgrounds get into the university. It used to have a very strong night school. It also had many programs in the summer for students who were "on the edge" of getting in but needed to learn some extra skills (like how to study, how to use libraries, extra classwork learning how to write, etc.). I don't know what kind of programs Pitt still has, though. So my information could be outdated.
gumby 3y ago
Curious how many selective schools don't have legacy admissions. Most schools will take anyone regardless. I tried downloading the "common data set" mentioned in the article but for some reason their site only lets you download the submission form, not the database itself. I couldn't have benefited personally as my parents' institutions were in different countries from the US and my university is a non-legacy one anyway.
efficax 3y ago
Admission for the children of faculty and staff (esp. if tuition is waived) is such an incredible benefit for the people that work at these institutions that I hope that is not also being abandoned. Legacies/big donors/alums sure, I don't care, but I'd hate to see university workers lose one of the best benefits they get.
- stainablesteel 3y ago
  i'm ok with this seeing as professors don't exactly make a lot of money, or if they do its because they dedicate 120% of their time doing so
  - efficax 3y ago
    Right? my wife is tenured at a big college and I make more than double her salary as an SWE. we're not going to have children so the benefit doesn't apply to us but i've seen it used to, for example, get a janitors kids into a college they would normally never afford (jesuit colleges offer this for staff across a network of other jesuit colleges, so for example you could be at loyola and your kids could go to fordham so long as they meet some academic requirements)
- dbish 3y ago
  They should get free tuition for their kids but that shouldn’t guarantee them a spot and take away a spot from someone more aligned to the school’s selectivity.
gnicholas 3y ago
Admissions rates for legacy students are much higher than for the general applicant pool, sometimes by an order of magnitude. But that raw comparison doesn’t shed much light on how much the legacy status actually helps, as opposed to the differences among legacy applicants and the general applicant pool. Is there any data that shows how these students compare to other students who are comparable in terms of family income, high school type, GPA, SAT? I would assume that all of these variables could be significantly different for children of alumni (especially of elite institutions, where admissions is most competitive), so it would be helpful to know what these numbers look like after removing some obvious confounders.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  I've seen it before and IIRC the SAT for athletes is terrible and the SAT for legacy is not that worse than average white admission. Can't find that source right now, but here is another one showing identical SAT between legacy and non-legacy. [0] I am biased to this hypothesis probably as a legacy who also had higher test scores than the average admit, went to a shitty public school, etc. Another underdiscussed motivation for legacy admissions is that schools view it as a signal that you are more likely to attend so if they admit you they can keep their admission percentages lower. [0]: https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-why-elite-colleges-cant-give-up-legacy-admissions/ https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-why-elite-colleges-...
JoeAltmaier 3y ago
Gonna hurt alumni contributions. Which matters more to schools with smaller endowments.
hotdogscout 3y ago
[flagged]
LatteLazy 3y ago
At university (UK, nowhere amazing) I was admitted on merit as a straight A student. My tutor had been forced to be the admissions officer for the school of Physics that year against his will. So he decided to have some fun and admitted everyone. I was scandalised when he told us this, I'd worked like a dog to EARN my place. But he simply said "Anyone who can pass year 1 should get to do year 2, the same for year 2 and year 3. And anyone who passes all of them should get their degree." and I found this logic hard to argue with. The result was that we had admitted 10 people with no maths qualification to a Physics degree. 8 failed, transferred subject or otherwise left. But 2 passed and got their degrees. 2 People got a life changing experience, I was no worse off and neither was the university. And this taught me an important lesson about opportunity. Ever since, when I am applying a standard/requirement to deny someone an opportunity (say a job interview, a date, or anything else) I stop and think hard about whether it's really necessary or if I am just being prejudiced.
JoshTko 3y ago
Private colleges fundamentally drive inequality. Access to elite university is essentially pay to play because all admission criteria advantage the wealthy.
- dbish 3y ago
  Not the Iveys. They have very large scholarships if your family can’t afford it and you get in.
  - JoshTko 3y ago
    I'm referring to admission. Athletic achievement, high impact volunteer work, high impact internships, high SAT score, number of AP, essay writing, all of these require $$$ to be compete at the top level. A poor kid that has to work summers and part time during the school year cannot compete.
    - dbish 3y ago
      That’s why you base it on SAT and the like, and drop the other stuff. Studying for the SAT doesn’t have a huge impact
      - JoshTko 3y ago
        That would be great. And given that Ivys use a wide range of other criteria, mostly subjective, means that the wealthy kids have a massive advantage. SATs are probably the least differentiating criteria for Ivys as everyone is already at 1450+.
letrowekwel 3y ago
Admissions are easy to do right. Just give anyone with a valid educational background (like college/high school completed) a chance to participate in a strictly observed live exam, which is then graded anonymously. 100% fair, leaves no place for discrimination. This is how many countries do it in Europe and it just works. But what about economically disadvantaged minority groups? That's easy to fix too. Just give schools in poorer areas lots of extra funding and resources, and their skills should improve, so that they do well in exams without any ridiculous "positive discrimination" based on skin color or ethnicity. As a bonus you also help poor people who may not belong to a disadvantaged ethnic minority, but still suffer from same lack of opportunities. Of course all this requires money, which the 1% isn't willing to give. But from anyone else's perspective it's plain stupid that the system first fails to give people of poorer background proper education, and then tries to fix this by discriminating based on ethnicity, which only partially correlates with poverty and bad schooling.
- elteto 3y ago
  We will never have this because neither side wants it: Schools do not want it because they lose total control over who they accept. Harvard wants to accept the children of the current ruling class knowing that they will become the next one, and in doing so keeping alive the mythos of Harvard as ruling class incubator. The other side, which we can call the affirmative action supporters, don't want it either because they see it as a racist by proxy system. And also because it turns out that Asians and Indians (and others too) would do exceedingly well with this system.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  What do you put on the exam? Harvard isn't just looking for academic success. They're looking for the next generation of leaders. How do you test for that?
  - knelmatek 3y ago
    IQ is a pretty good proxy for that. In France, admission to the best higher education institutions, like Ecole Polytechnique, is done through an anonymously-marked written exam with questions about math, physics, etc. Admission is entirely based on how you scored on that exam, with the top N scores guaranteed admission (and the ones below that have to expect some people above to decline for whatever reason, which in the case of Polytechnique is rare, unless they got into something equally prestigious like Ecole Normale Superieure). This system has produced three Nobel recipients (Becquerel in physics, Tirole and Allais in economics), many famous mathematicians and physicists (Carnot, Cholesky, Chasles, Coriolis, Fresnel, Mandelbrot, Navier, Poisson, Poincare, Thevenin, Lagrange, etc.), three French Presidents (Giscard d'Estaing most recently), many military leaders, astronauts, CEOs, etc. and indeed also Hacker News posterboy Fabrice Bellard (and that's just for one school, Ecole Polytechnique). It works.
bdastous 3y ago
I wonder whether this applies to actual donors.
diamondfist25 3y ago
Who needs these ivy leagues when u can get superhuman knowledge for $20 bucks!
firebirdn99 3y ago
The games been rigged for far too long.
r_singh 3y ago
Surprised that it's effectively the opposite in India. IITs (and other institutes in India) have reservations for schedule castes and tribes and I hope in the coming decades they will change this to reservations for lower income groups. Preference is even given to women with the same score/profile. Does the US have something similar? Why/Why not?
grogenaut 3y ago
Carnagie is the worst. We beat them at football and others sports most of the time. They're not even cool enough to have the first nuclear pile like UoC even if chicago can barely field a team. Tho chicago does have a mean scavenger hunt.
anonu 3y ago
All this assumes that admissions is a formulaic process. The application probably still asks where your parents went to school. Admissions are still made of humans that may be subject to biases. Faced with two equivalent candidates, one legacy and one not, it should be a 50/50 decision on which to pick. But in reality some cognitive bias will tilt the process in favor of one. My guess is it would be the legacy candidate.
gyudin 3y ago
It’s kinda funny how Americans want to be praised for NOT doing some fucked up things again and again /facepalm
aryehof 3y ago
In my day, all high school students in my State in Australia took the same exams to determine eligibility for entrance into tertiary institution courses. These scores were the only thing known about the student and the only thing considered. This was regardless of whether you went to an expensive private school, public school or any other factor. Why is merit alone not the criteria everywhere? Is membership of some group as criteria to entry not discriminatory to others?
pfannkuchen 3y ago
I think the main (only?) reason universities do this is because it drives donations from alumni with children, which is probably a large percent of donating alumni. Has anyone done the analysis on how this is expected to impact overall university funding if it becomes widespread? No skin in this game, just curious.
sparrowInHand 3y ago
Very good. Meritocracy for the win. Not skin, not sobstory, skill and talent. Some worries though: Reproducing learning is way over-evaluated, as it can be reliably tested. Its the most worthless skill though, ever since the internet was invented. The ability to recombine approaches and create novel solutions to novel problems, that adhere to engineering approaches and principles, thats were the money is. Hard to test for that and i guess the tiger-mum kids will have to learn TRIZ inside out. Also i find the cohort timing pressure detrimental. In my opinion, the option to study (because you are bored and dissatisfied with your station in life) should be open to anyone at any time. Even if it does not work out, it creates the ability to move and propels the person on. Finally, i would detach the political and not society survival relevant pieces of university from the other parts. Sports, sociology, arts go into one university, physics, math, machine building, biology, chemistry and agriculture go into another. Keep the whole bipartisanship from the science.
jeegsy 3y ago
It would have been great if the article made clear to what extent these "legacies" would not have otherwise qualified to be admitted to the university

603 points by Geekette 3y ago

Good get rid of Affirmative Action, get rid of Legacy status. Athlete's are fine. Having to go to a college with a bad football team always sucked personally so let's keep that pipeline up.

LarsDu88 3y ago

It's glad to hear that children will no longer have an admissions edge at these schools. I thought it was absolutely ridiculous how they were letting 8 year olds into college campuses.

bluepod4 3y ago

“Merit-based” means many different things. Explain yourselves.

colpabar 3y ago

[flagged]

fastball 3y ago
That's not how that works at all.
- colpabar 3y ago
  I live there, yes it does

causi 3y ago

I'm amazed it was ever legal in the first place. It's open nepotism.

pitaj 3y ago
Nepotism has never been illegal.
- reaperducer 3y ago
  In the private sector. In many governments, it is quite illegal.
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    Making a distinction about the "private sector," but being vague for some reason about the country we're discussing?
    - clnq 3y ago
      The US. There is no other country.
    - reaperducer 3y ago
      Making a distinction about the "private sector," but being vague for some reason about the country we're discussing? I wrote "many governments" because I am not fully versed in the policies and laws of every nation on the planet. Perhaps you can fill us in?
  - laiejtli 3y ago
    Not sure how to phrase this. It's illegal in the US government, but it still exists all over unofficially and it's openly acknowledged standard practice in many NGOs. It's very difficult to get a job at NASA. I forget the exact number, but something like 75% of people who "work for NASA" are contractors and only a small minority are actual government employees. In order to get a full-time job, it helps to have previous experience usually in the form of a graduate fellowship. In order to get a fellowship, it helps to have undergrad summer experience. In order to get undergraduate experience, it's very helpful to have high school summer program experience. In order to get high school experience, you'll need to live in the area and probably have some connections which means parents or family who work at the NASA facility in question. In my experience, national labs were similar but to a much lesser extreme, often just because they're remote and sometimes antiquated and children of lab employees often can't wait to get away. When I worked at at the UN, (NGO, not formal government) coworkers were genuinely confused about how I got a job there with no family connections in higher places. I had the same conversation with several bewildered coworkers who plainly told me about their parent or uncle who got them their job. I was told that nepotism is much, much more common and openly acknowledged in Europe than in the US.

nancyhn 3y ago

The end of both legacy admissions and race-based admissions makes me feel hopeful that we're finally pivoting to a productive, merit-based approach.

jacobsenscott 3y ago
[flagged]
- legolas2412 3y ago
  History also definitely shows that nepotistic or race-centered systems really did not work out fine. In fact the malinged systems made by rich white people were nepotistic and race-centered. What history does show us is that systems that reward effort, and not just someone's heritage are the ones that have led to best outcomes.
- ahtihn 3y ago
  Does history show things working out better when other groups make rules?
  - JKCalhoun 3y ago
    I don't think that was the point of the person you are resounding to. I think the point was that no single group should make all the rules.
- nancyhn 3y ago
  Racism is bad and you should feel bad that you judge people based on their skin color.
ubermonkey 3y ago
Only one of these is a good thing.
- loeg 3y ago
  I don’t think discrimination against asians was a good thing!

fritzo 3y ago

> “I do think there was a time when perhaps legacies needed a boost” -Dean Emeritus of Admission Mike Steidel Is there any way of charitably interpreting Mike Steidel's words? I have a tough time reading anything here but classist bigotry preserving the status quo :-/

mlyle 3y ago
Yes, there are charitable ways. You make an institution stronger (in fundraising, in love for the institution, in traditions, etc) by creating multigenerational relationships. When you're asked for money, it may be "eh, whatever it was my college" or it could be "Yes-- it's where my grandpa, pop, and I all went." But there's a lot of negative consequences, too.
its_ethan 3y ago
I mean he's speaking about the past - so he's saying perhaps sometime in the past it was maybe needed, but he's saying that it's not needed anymore. It's just a way to not have to specifically say something negative about the college, even if it's about the college's past. He's not preserving bigotry, he's just trying to not tarnish the brand.
unethical_ban 3y ago
Status quo, maybe, not not explicitly bigoted. Building a culture through generations, a sense of loyalty to an institution and a lifelong interest in seeing that institution flourish (and be funded) is a reasonable goal of a University.
DominikPeters 3y ago
His comments more broadly make no sense to me. “Over time, the quality of the applicant pool increased to the point where we really didn’t have [give legacies a boost]” - how does that work? If the applicant pool gets better, then if anything privileged groups need a stronger boost. "Steidel said the tipping point came perhaps three or four years ago as standardized testing became optional at many institutions, including Carnegie Mellon" - is this supposed to mean that they can now boost preferred groups more easily because they don't have to overcome the testing differential, so they actually might have stronger legacy preferences than before, but better hidden?

boeingUH60 3y ago

Very good decision. Let’s see if them Ivy Leagues with enormous endowments would follow…likely not because that’ll cause a big drop in gifts and donations.

kypro 3y ago
> likely not because that’ll cause a big drop in gifts and donations. This is a topic that I haven't had much interest in so sorry if I'm being dumb here, but I struggle to see how this could be a good thing? I guess the way I'm seeing this is that if you're too not smart enough to get into these universities but are lucky enough to have parents with lots of money, you can basically bribe your way in. While this seems unfair on the surface, and I suppose it is from certain lenses, it is surely also in effect acting as a "stupid rich person" tax for higher education? I mean to your point here, if Ivy League universities receive a big drop in donations wouldn't that practically guarantee they'll either need to charge higher tuition fees to those less fortunate who get in on merit, or they'll need to lower the quality of their education? Could someone help me out here? I'm aware I'm saying something stupid. I don't see how this could possibly be a good thing for those less well off who get in on merit? Are they not in favour of their education costs being partly offset by large donation from wealthy people?
- _cenw 3y ago
  or we could just… tax the rich instead? the not stupid ones too?
  - kypro 3y ago
    Pragmatically speaking "tax the rich" isn't going to happen and these kind of de facto "wealth taxes" are far easier to implement. Here in the UK we have a problem with public health care funding and I have no idea why we don't simply offer priority service for rich people who are willing to pay stupid amounts of money for priority service. In doing we could redirect that extra funding to those who need it most but can't afford private health care. I guess exploiting the stupidity and vanity of rich people seems like a much more pragmatic (and arguably fairer) solution than trying to implement wealth taxes or 70% income taxes.

CSMastermind 3y ago

Don't legacy admissions often mean that their parents have donated significantly to the University? In a sense wouldn't that just mean that those students are essentially paying a very high premium to attend there and subsidizing the education of all the other students? I'm not against abolishing them but I do wonder if this will have any impact on alumni donations.

noobermin 3y ago
Honestly, relying on donations doesn't seem tenable without discrimination. The only way out is to treat it as a public good and fund it as one.
- pirate787 3y ago
  Carnegie Mellon is a private university, and obviously there's already a strong public commitment to college education through subsidizing the student directly.
  - underlipton 3y ago
    It's a private university founded with the intent to be a public good. It exists ostensibly to be a counterweight to the ills brought about by the concentration of wealth and power under its founders, in recognition of their outsize influence on society.
- lisper 3y ago
  So... get rid of private universities entirely? I'm sympathetic to your position, but that doesn't quite seem like the wisest course of action to me.
- mason55 3y ago
  I think the question is whether the donations create more resources than what is used up by a legacy admission. For example, imagine I donate $1B to the university, with two stipulations. First, they admit my child to the CS program. Second, they use the money to perpetually expand the size of every incoming CS class by 10 students. In that respect, the legacy admission is a net good. Yes, for four years there's a spot that's used up by my kid, but even during those four years there are 10 additional people got into the program who wouldn't have otherwise. I realize it's not that easy, it doesn't work like that, and the size of classes at places like Harvard are not limited by the how much money Harvard has. But it seems like there could be ways to keep some kind of legacy admission program which also create a net good. Maybe every legacy admission should be required to fund a perpetual scholarship for one financially disadvantaged student? That's both expensive enough to be rare and beneficial enough to be hard to argue with.

laiejtli 3y ago

I went to a second-tier public school that never had legacy admissions. Is it really a big deal? Or is this largely symbolic? Do you see kids in your classes who are rich and visibly a level below everyone else intellectually or emotionally? (I did meet a few students who were born rich and enrolled in my second-tier university after failing out of first-tier universities, so that might be my exposure to the practice)

ghaff 3y ago
>Is it really a big deal? Probably not in general. At least outside of a relatively small number of schools. IMO, what you're seeing is a bunch of schools that really don't take legacies much into account (if at all) all coming out of the woodwork to put themselves on the side of the angels without having to actually change any of their policies.
laidoffamazon 3y ago
This is exactly what bothers me. This talk about Legacies and even AA for top schools is downright insulting to people like me that worked hard at second-tier institutions and are just ignored afterward as a result. We make up the vast majority of college graduates, why don't we get even a fraction of the support or attention?
OkayPhysicist 3y ago
> Do you see kids in your classes who are rich and visibly a level below everyone else intellectually or emotionally? Not at all. The purpose of legacy admissions is predominantly to get students who could go to plenty of universities at your tier to go to your university, based on the fact that their parents are alumni. You do end up with a minority-within-a-minority population of rich students who are only there because they share a last name with a building, but frankly those students are also valuable to the rest of the student body from a networking perspective. I'm opposed to the change. The value in a university education is not just from "going to school". You have the prestige of the university (helped by attracting noteworthy alumni), networking opportunity (helped by having current students with connections through their parents), academic quality of the student body (having the rich kids subsidize merit-based scholarships boosts this, too). On the whole, legacy admissions (and preferential admission of rich kids in general) benefits the student body as a whole. It's the raison d'etre of private schools, and eliminating it maybe lets in another say ~1-5% of your student body's worth of students who wouldn't have gotten in otherwise, in exchange for lowering the value of getting in for everybody.

philip1209 3y ago

Next step: Ending use of athletic ability in admissions.

OkayPhysicist 3y ago
Sports programs at university pay for themselves. They pay for themselves because people buy tickets to games, which they do to see exceptional athletes.
- ghaff 3y ago
  Maybe at schools with big football/basketball programs. At a school like MIT which was being discussed yesterday, sports certainly do not directly pay for themselves.
- ZoomerCretin 3y ago
  Do legacy admissions not pay for themselves?
  - OkayPhysicist 3y ago
    I didn't say anything about legacy admissions. In fact, I'm all in on not-exclusively-academic-merit based admissions for private universities. I will happily trade a few bottom-of-the-rung merit-based admissions in exchange for students that either benefit me in some way (by subsidizing my education and/or providing good networking opportunities) or try and make up for the mistreatment of disadvantaged groups.
- paxys 3y ago
  Sports programs at the top ~20 universities pay for themselves (and that too just the top sports). The rest are a money sink.
- jcranmer 3y ago
  Football and (men's) basketball pay for themselves. The other sports do not. At many smaller universities, not even football and basketball can achieve net revenue for sports. Source: look at databases like https://www.sportico.com/business/commerce/2021/college-sports-finances-database-intercollegiate-1234646029/ https://www.sportico.com/business/commerce/2021/college-spor...

mupuff1234 3y ago

Wesleyan as well: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/19/us/wesleyan-university-ends-legacy-admissions.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/19/us/wesleyan-university-en... I'm guessing ivy leagues won't let go that easily.

AlbertCory 3y ago

They WERE, essentially, letting people buy their kid's admission. Maybe not directly, but if you're a rich alumnus, you have to suspect that your donation history will figure into your kid's admission or not. Even if the school says it doesn't, they could be lying.

kyleblarson 3y ago

Yeah right. Just as schools are already working around affirmative action rulings to continue to effect actual institutional racism, they will find a way to continue to give legacies a leg up in the admissions process. With the size of endowments of top schools these days they effectively operate as for-profit hedge funds that happen to have educational institutions attached. Does anyone seriously think a school would say "thanks for that library you donated but your grand kid only has a 3.8 gpa so maybe look at state schools."

OkayPhysicist 3y ago
They didn't say they're eliminating open "donations for admissions" systems. They said they're eliminating legacy admissions, i.e. "Your parents went here so you can get in, too". It effects multi-generation middle class families more than the really rich ones.

numbers_guy 3y ago

I was just watching a podcast interview in which a British-German professor employed at an Ivy League university in the US, was talking about the elite universities in the US, and how there is no equivalent in Germany. [1] The interview is in German, but what he is basically saying is that the American attitude is to very openly and purposefully create and maintain this system of elitism and everyone is openly in competition with each other. All of this is alien to us here in Germany. At first glance it seems like we got the better deal. But then you think more about it more. All the German elite send their kids to study in the US instead of studying in Germany, because there they get to network with the elite kids from all over the world. But this is not a very good thing for Germany. First of all, we have less say in how he next generation of elite in our country think. Secondly all the smart and talented people in Germany who cannot afford to emigrate get no chance to mingle with these elite kids. So if we had a system of elite unis here in Germany it might on some level be better. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4Y9SomH9Nc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4Y9SomH9Nc

Apocryphon 3y ago
Elites all around the world send their kids to schools to study in the U.S., or places like Oxford. Presumably more countries besides the U.S. or the U.K. have systems of elite universities. Even if Germany had such schools, you think your elites would be content with them? The problem isn't with educational egalitarianism, it's with global hegemony and your country's elites trying to sidle up with the facilities of the hegemon. Don't get rid of your egalitarianism to cater to the fickle whims of your elites.
alephnerd 3y ago
A buddy of mine at Stanford invited me to one of their CS/Eng Grad Student Socials a couple years ago. There was a pretty large clique of Germans there. Over drinks, I came to find out all those Germans attended the same university (TU Munich), and more specifically, attended the same handful of elite private Gymnasiums. Even though they all attended a public university which doesn't have legacy admissions, these children of the elite still networked and knew each other since grade school. The same thing happens in the UK (did you attend an independent or comprehensive school?) as well, and even Canada to a certain extent though a lot of this was also driven by housing prices. The US is probably going to revert to this kind of elite signaling. P.S. all those Germans were blonde and blue eyed except for one Turkish German who was clearly uncomfortable and was chatting with us Americans and Asians instead.

draw_down 3y ago

[dead]

dsiegel2275 3y ago

It is a bit surreal to see this headline hit the top of HN, as I sit in a CMU owned office building, looking out the window at Univ of Pittsburgh buildings.

lacrimacida 3y ago

Legacy admissions can be gamed too with modest donations just enough to make the system gameable. With large donors it’s a different story though, those do help the universities and the number of students who enter this way is a pretty low ratio.

Racing0461 3y ago

Did they also end discrimination against asian and white men?

qwertyuiop_ 3y ago

Does this mean they won’t take a call from well connected politicians and billionaires ?

gizmo 3y ago

I recently came across a somewhat provocative defense of legacy admissions. The argument is that the iveys are great because they bring together the children of the rich and powerful (legacy admissions with connections) with really smart and hungry students (children of the middle class, mostly). It's arguably a good deal for both. Smart kids get access to wealth and power and they get to learn how the world works. This is the one thing they can't get anywhere else. And the legacy students get the prestige and credibility of having gone to a top school, as well as access to hungry students who are eager to take advantage of the opportunities that come their way. When Harvard becomes an institution of merit will it still be worth the price of admission? I'm not so sure.

curiousllama 3y ago
> will it still be worth the price of admission? Definitely. Will it still be the same value you're getting? Perhaps not. Notably, some schools like MIT already don't consider legacy, and are still worth the price.
- ars 3y ago
  Because MIT is more of a technically school, not a networking school. Networking schools are more likely to be business schools.
ecshafer 3y ago
I doubt that the mixture of rich and smart kids actually happens that much. I didn’t go to an ivy, so I can only speculate. But I imagine the rich kids hang out with each other and the poor smart kids hang out with each other.
- hot_gril 3y ago
  Not an Ivy, but at Stanford, they seem to mix.
pop12121 3y ago
I think the argument is worth considering. At the same time, it seems easier in the age of internet for kids of merit to attract sources of funding, and I expect funding will still find their way towards massive untapped concentrations of merit.

tayo42 3y ago

Im kind of surprised how much media attention and outrage admissions to schools generates. one year of out school, the whole thing just is so irrelevant. Idk who really cares what these small subset of schools does. There are so many public schools that offer education and opportunities and even those are blown of proportion.

underlipton 3y ago

It's funny to me how cynical and skeptical HN is about diversity-related admissions, but how quickly everyone jumps to point out the positives of legacy admissions. These aren't people who are being objective. We are now mask-off with regard to how this is simply an emotional matter centered around what is most advantageous to whatever group. The least we could do is be open about the role of self-interest here.

JKCalhoun 3y ago
Or people are less emotional about wealth. (Or people are wealthy.)
dublinben 3y ago
Don't you think there's just as much self-interest behind the the primary argument of relying exclusively on "merit"? This is likely being promulgated by a demographic who over-indexes on this dimension and is lacking in any other that may be included in a holistic admissions process.
- underlipton 3y ago
  >Don't you think there's just as much self-interest behind the the primary argument of relying exclusively on "merit"? Oh, absolutely.
az226 3y ago
If they were admitting legacy students who were hundreds of points lower on the SATs and bad grades, then yeah, it’d be as bad as affirmative action. But in practice it’s only ever used to break ties. If affirmative action was implemented the same way legacy admissions is, I doubt the lawsuit against Harvard would ever exist, and opposition essentially non-existent.
- underlipton 3y ago
  >If they were admitting legacy students who were hundreds of points lower on the SATs and bad grades They are.

low_tech_punk 3y ago

Can we end education resource scarcity please. More open courses by schools and less credentialism by employers could make these debates irrelevant.

Apocryphon 3y ago
Underrated point. Weird to see how in HN, the bastion of self-taught hackers, autodidact polymaths, and people who think secondary education is a waste of time and money, try to argue in favor of the entrenched credentialist power of universities.
rank0 3y ago
There’s not a scarcity of education. Anyone is free to attend community college with guaranteed transfer to a larger state university provided they meet their GPA requirements. EDIT: I do agree with you about employers overvaluing credentials though. Ultimately that’s not something you can unilaterally remove in a free society.

dehrmann 3y ago

I'm amazed at how schools with legacy and donation-based admissions can maintain high rankings when you never know if someone with a degree from there just got it because their parents donated $5M. Before someone says "the student still has to graduate," Harvard has a 97% graduation rate.

collinc777 3y ago
The ranking systems are likely flawed and measure things outside of merit, or measure merit in a non-holistic way.
dbish 3y ago
See also the massive grade inflation at these schools
HDThoreaun 3y ago
The rankings effectively measure prestige. Someone with $5 million to give to a university will very likely have a prestigious career, even if they're completely incompetent.
strikelaserclaw 3y ago
I mean it is just like the YC model, 1% of the companies will give outsized rewards which will more than justify investing in the 99%. Same way, Harvard is probably propped up by the 1% of kids who it takes in who do great things and the rest can just enjoy the privilege of being alumni of such a "great institution". These top institutions take in not only unworthy rich kids but also the cream of the crop in science, leadership etc...

screye 3y ago

Legacy admissions should not be legal in public universities. Massive public schools like UMass, Mich, StonyBrook, GATech, Minnesota, Penn State still take legacy admissions. It's nice to see CMU follow in the footsteps of other top private tech schools like MIT & Caltech that claim to not use legacy status. It's no surprise that Ivies, Stanford and most private colleges all heavily favor legacy. Afterall, a large part of a prestige university's job is lend an appearance of competence to the not-as-competent kids of the elite. source I used - https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/colleges-that-consider-legacy-status https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/colleges-that-c...

rank0 3y ago
I have a hard time defining my own stance on this point. For example, my alma mater GAtech allows for automatic admissions of my immediate relatives provided they reach some bar like 3.5 gpa + 1400 SAT (math+reading). Do you think this should be illegal? It’s quite clearly an attempt to create an enduring GT community. It’s also clearly not the same as racially discriminatory admissions. I do see the argument that it’s unfair…but should it be full blown illegal? “Non-legacy” isn’t a protected class in America unlike race,sex,religion, etc.
- dbish 3y ago
  Yes, that should not be allowed. The best should get in, not a relative.
  - rank0 3y ago
    I concede that maybe it’s not the way “things ought to be” But what’s your legal argument for why this practice should be prohibited?
    - YeBanKo 3y ago
      What is your argument for why this practice should be allowed? It’s a public school, why should your family has an advantage because you went there? Is the goal of public school to maintain a club or provide access to education? If the latter, I don’t see how any kind of exclusivity other than merit makes sense.

julienchastang 3y ago

Good. With the end of affirmative action, legacy status in admissions becomes much harder to justify. [0] The number of kids entering elite universities via non-meritocratic avenues is incredible. > "[The researchers] examined four kinds of nonracial preferences—for recruited athletes, and for children of Harvard graduates, financial donors and members of faculty and staff. The researchers found that more than 43% of white applicants admitted to Harvard between 2014-19 fell into one or more of these categories. Nearly three quarters of them would have been rejected if they had been subjected to the same standards as other white applicants." [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/end-college-legacy-preferences-harvard-sffa-racce-affirmative-action-13e90e30 https://www.wsj.com/articles/end-college-legacy-preferences-...

twoodfin 3y ago
Opens a ton of slots for race-neutral preferences that can, say, pull in the top performing students from otherwise underperforming urban and rural districts.
xkcd-sucks 3y ago
It's kind of begging the question to assume multigenerational family ties to a university are "not merit" when a big part of a university's value proposition is social networking: One doesn't go to Harvard just to take courses; one goes to Harvard to bump shoulders with the scions of dictators / diplomats / "captains of industry" etc. Personally I didn't understand that at the time, would have rejected the notion on principle, and still don't really like it, but is definitely worth consideration
- yannyu 3y ago
  Then we might as well admit that "merit" is heavily influenced by starting conditions instead of pretending that everyone has "equal opportunity". How many times have I heard from people that the USA is about "equality of opportunity" and not "equality of outcome"? Legacy admissions is directly contrary to equality of opportunity, and undermines the idea of meritocracy in university admissions that people have been crowing about in anti-affirmative-action rhetoric.

ellisv 3y ago

This is good, although I probably benefited from it because one of my recommendation letters was from an alumnus.

say_it_as_it_is 3y ago

I hope this continues. Then, we will see legislation pass to re-classify endowment funds as hedge funds. CMU has $3 Billion of assets in its endowment portfolio. Endowments have been getting a free ride in terms of tax treatment, disclosure, and other activities that are regulated for hedge funds. Now that they're upsetting the elite class, the class will respond by re-classifying endowments as hedge funds. Affirmative action isn't the only racist policy that universities have been practicing. They've also been racially discriminating tuition subsidization. With re-classification of endowments as hedge funds, their activities will become transparent. Scrutiny over subsidized tuition will become possible. Black students receiving a disproportionate amount of subsidy, for instance, will be an act of racial discrimination, and financially regulated entities like hedge funds cannot racially discriminate.

OkayPhysicist 3y ago
Endowments let institutions weather out political mood swings and changes in enrollment. Any institution that serves a purpose besides "being a branch of the government" needs a war chest of some kind, and if they can use the proceeds to make student lives better, why not have a large endowment?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

psychphysic 3y ago

It's weird to me that "stop being racist" some how has led to universities considering giving up legacies, "prestige"/donation based admissions and even athletic admissions. If it's the case that affirmative action was being used to mask other unfair practices that will be utterly ghastly.

nkjnlknlk 3y ago
> If it's the case that affirmative action was being used to mask other unfair practices that will be utterly ghastly. That has actually been the case and stance many leftists took on AA. I think it was, at one point, recognized as a bandaid on a deep, bleeding wound. Neither a correct nor sufficient solution but it was the only one that could get through the door.
az226 3y ago
It’s all about woke optics.
- hotdogscout 3y ago
  [flagged]

reso 3y ago

Hard to believe legacy admissions are legal anywhere. An obvious injustice--and efficiency drain--on society.

lo_zamoyski 3y ago

"'[Legacy] has never been a primary or ‘plus’ factor in Pitt admissions of undergraduates.' [...] Pitt declined to say how many legacies are part of its entering classes." So this may not have been a radical move anyway, at least at Pitt. Call me when Harvard decides to do this.

kweingar 3y ago

Ultimately the existence of elite universities is the root of the problem. Most colleges take a huge majority of the students who apply, so neither legacy students nor affirmative action make too much a difference for them. Universities should be more like this and less like incubators for the ruling class. All of the drama recently revolves around wealthy students being denied their rubber stamps or underprivileged students being denied their golden ticket. It’s bad that college performs these functions, so let’s work to fix that.

twixfel 3y ago
Exactly, the universities are extremely wealthy and could in principle choose to use that money to increase intake, but then it dilutes their status as a luxury brand, so they don't do it. But what business is it of the university to be a luxury brand anyway? They should be simply maximising the public good, and that means taking way more students with the huge endowments they have.
rank0 3y ago
Is your argument that we should not have elite universities in the US? Seriously?
- kweingar 3y ago
  Yes

dang 3y ago

Recent and related: We Don’t Do Legacy (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36774369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36774369 - July 2023 (106 comments)

AnnikaL 3y ago

The title on HN (currently "Children, alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt") is a little confusing; children and other relatives of alumni don't have an admissions edge. This isn't about some sort of early college program!

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

balderdash 3y ago

This is not going to have the effect people think. My experience is that legacy admissions are more or less a tie breaker. Legacy candidates that gain admission due to their legacy status are well qualified candidates (+ you often get the added benefit of a higher yield). HOWEVER, where less than qualified candidates do gain admission is when there is a significant donor involved (there is often a meaningful overlap with alumni for obvious reasons, but not necessarily). Getting rid of legacy admissions will not change this dynamic. So really the only people that are going to lose out are legacies that are “on the bubble” from a resume standpoint whose parents aren’t rich…

chmod600 3y ago

I’d like to see more numbers for context. How many students were favored by legacy status, and approximately how much favoritism? They often mix legacy numbers with athletes for some reason… I guess to make the numbers more dramatic? Or maybe because insecure intellectuals look down on athletes in general?

code_runner 3y ago
What difference do the numbers make if the policy is better? If it changes 1 or 100 outcomes, in my mind this is absolutely the correct call. Numbers would be great and they should definitely produce them, but I don’t think they would change my thinking they legacy admissions is negative.
- chmod600 3y ago
  The news likes to stoke outrage and context (especially numerical context) helps moderate it. Also, small problems often have different solutions than large problems. Solutions that don’t scale are fine if the numbers are small.
  - code_runner 3y ago
    My point is that this is just an objectively good thing because it’s the “right” way to handle things. Even if the “wrong” way has minimal impact.

bsder 3y ago

> Good. With the end of affirmative action, legacy status in admissions becomes much harder to justify. Placing University of Pittsburgh, a public university which has almost a 67% acceptance rate, in the same conversation with private universities that have acceptance rates in or near the single digit percentages borders on journalistic fraud. I would also say that Pitt, unlike a lot (most) of universities mentioned, had many programs attempting to help those from more humble backgrounds get into the university. It used to have a very strong night school. It also had many programs in the summer for students who were "on the edge" of getting in but needed to learn some extra skills (like how to study, how to use libraries, extra classwork learning how to write, etc.). I don't know what kind of programs Pitt still has, though. So my information could be outdated.

gumby 3y ago

Curious how many selective schools don't have legacy admissions. Most schools will take anyone regardless. I tried downloading the "common data set" mentioned in the article but for some reason their site only lets you download the submission form, not the database itself. I couldn't have benefited personally as my parents' institutions were in different countries from the US and my university is a non-legacy one anyway.

efficax 3y ago

Admission for the children of faculty and staff (esp. if tuition is waived) is such an incredible benefit for the people that work at these institutions that I hope that is not also being abandoned. Legacies/big donors/alums sure, I don't care, but I'd hate to see university workers lose one of the best benefits they get.

stainablesteel 3y ago
i'm ok with this seeing as professors don't exactly make a lot of money, or if they do its because they dedicate 120% of their time doing so
- efficax 3y ago
  Right? my wife is tenured at a big college and I make more than double her salary as an SWE. we're not going to have children so the benefit doesn't apply to us but i've seen it used to, for example, get a janitors kids into a college they would normally never afford (jesuit colleges offer this for staff across a network of other jesuit colleges, so for example you could be at loyola and your kids could go to fordham so long as they meet some academic requirements)
dbish 3y ago
They should get free tuition for their kids but that shouldn’t guarantee them a spot and take away a spot from someone more aligned to the school’s selectivity.

gnicholas 3y ago

Admissions rates for legacy students are much higher than for the general applicant pool, sometimes by an order of magnitude. But that raw comparison doesn’t shed much light on how much the legacy status actually helps, as opposed to the differences among legacy applicants and the general applicant pool. Is there any data that shows how these students compare to other students who are comparable in terms of family income, high school type, GPA, SAT? I would assume that all of these variables could be significantly different for children of alumni (especially of elite institutions, where admissions is most competitive), so it would be helpful to know what these numbers look like after removing some obvious confounders.

whimsicalism 3y ago
I've seen it before and IIRC the SAT for athletes is terrible and the SAT for legacy is not that worse than average white admission. Can't find that source right now, but here is another one showing identical SAT between legacy and non-legacy. [0] I am biased to this hypothesis probably as a legacy who also had higher test scores than the average admit, went to a shitty public school, etc. Another underdiscussed motivation for legacy admissions is that schools view it as a signal that you are more likely to attend so if they admit you they can keep their admission percentages lower. [0]: https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-why-elite-colleges-cant-give-up-legacy-admissions/ https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-why-elite-colleges-...

JoeAltmaier 3y ago

Gonna hurt alumni contributions. Which matters more to schools with smaller endowments.

hotdogscout 3y ago

[flagged]

LatteLazy 3y ago

At university (UK, nowhere amazing) I was admitted on merit as a straight A student. My tutor had been forced to be the admissions officer for the school of Physics that year against his will. So he decided to have some fun and admitted everyone. I was scandalised when he told us this, I'd worked like a dog to EARN my place. But he simply said "Anyone who can pass year 1 should get to do year 2, the same for year 2 and year 3. And anyone who passes all of them should get their degree." and I found this logic hard to argue with. The result was that we had admitted 10 people with no maths qualification to a Physics degree. 8 failed, transferred subject or otherwise left. But 2 passed and got their degrees. 2 People got a life changing experience, I was no worse off and neither was the university. And this taught me an important lesson about opportunity. Ever since, when I am applying a standard/requirement to deny someone an opportunity (say a job interview, a date, or anything else) I stop and think hard about whether it's really necessary or if I am just being prejudiced.

JoshTko 3y ago

Private colleges fundamentally drive inequality. Access to elite university is essentially pay to play because all admission criteria advantage the wealthy.

dbish 3y ago
Not the Iveys. They have very large scholarships if your family can’t afford it and you get in.
- JoshTko 3y ago
  I'm referring to admission. Athletic achievement, high impact volunteer work, high impact internships, high SAT score, number of AP, essay writing, all of these require $$$ to be compete at the top level. A poor kid that has to work summers and part time during the school year cannot compete.
  - dbish 3y ago
    That’s why you base it on SAT and the like, and drop the other stuff. Studying for the SAT doesn’t have a huge impact
    - JoshTko 3y ago
      That would be great. And given that Ivys use a wide range of other criteria, mostly subjective, means that the wealthy kids have a massive advantage. SATs are probably the least differentiating criteria for Ivys as everyone is already at 1450+.

letrowekwel 3y ago

Admissions are easy to do right. Just give anyone with a valid educational background (like college/high school completed) a chance to participate in a strictly observed live exam, which is then graded anonymously. 100% fair, leaves no place for discrimination. This is how many countries do it in Europe and it just works. But what about economically disadvantaged minority groups? That's easy to fix too. Just give schools in poorer areas lots of extra funding and resources, and their skills should improve, so that they do well in exams without any ridiculous "positive discrimination" based on skin color or ethnicity. As a bonus you also help poor people who may not belong to a disadvantaged ethnic minority, but still suffer from same lack of opportunities. Of course all this requires money, which the 1% isn't willing to give. But from anyone else's perspective it's plain stupid that the system first fails to give people of poorer background proper education, and then tries to fix this by discriminating based on ethnicity, which only partially correlates with poverty and bad schooling.

elteto 3y ago
We will never have this because neither side wants it: Schools do not want it because they lose total control over who they accept. Harvard wants to accept the children of the current ruling class knowing that they will become the next one, and in doing so keeping alive the mythos of Harvard as ruling class incubator. The other side, which we can call the affirmative action supporters, don't want it either because they see it as a racist by proxy system. And also because it turns out that Asians and Indians (and others too) would do exceedingly well with this system.
HDThoreaun 3y ago
What do you put on the exam? Harvard isn't just looking for academic success. They're looking for the next generation of leaders. How do you test for that?
- knelmatek 3y ago
  IQ is a pretty good proxy for that. In France, admission to the best higher education institutions, like Ecole Polytechnique, is done through an anonymously-marked written exam with questions about math, physics, etc. Admission is entirely based on how you scored on that exam, with the top N scores guaranteed admission (and the ones below that have to expect some people above to decline for whatever reason, which in the case of Polytechnique is rare, unless they got into something equally prestigious like Ecole Normale Superieure). This system has produced three Nobel recipients (Becquerel in physics, Tirole and Allais in economics), many famous mathematicians and physicists (Carnot, Cholesky, Chasles, Coriolis, Fresnel, Mandelbrot, Navier, Poisson, Poincare, Thevenin, Lagrange, etc.), three French Presidents (Giscard d'Estaing most recently), many military leaders, astronauts, CEOs, etc. and indeed also Hacker News posterboy Fabrice Bellard (and that's just for one school, Ecole Polytechnique). It works.

bdastous 3y ago

I wonder whether this applies to actual donors.

diamondfist25 3y ago

Who needs these ivy leagues when u can get superhuman knowledge for $20 bucks!

firebirdn99 3y ago

The games been rigged for far too long.

r_singh 3y ago

Surprised that it's effectively the opposite in India. IITs (and other institutes in India) have reservations for schedule castes and tribes and I hope in the coming decades they will change this to reservations for lower income groups. Preference is even given to women with the same score/profile. Does the US have something similar? Why/Why not?

grogenaut 3y ago

Carnagie is the worst. We beat them at football and others sports most of the time. They're not even cool enough to have the first nuclear pile like UoC even if chicago can barely field a team. Tho chicago does have a mean scavenger hunt.

anonu 3y ago

All this assumes that admissions is a formulaic process. The application probably still asks where your parents went to school. Admissions are still made of humans that may be subject to biases. Faced with two equivalent candidates, one legacy and one not, it should be a 50/50 decision on which to pick. But in reality some cognitive bias will tilt the process in favor of one. My guess is it would be the legacy candidate.

gyudin 3y ago

It’s kinda funny how Americans want to be praised for NOT doing some fucked up things again and again /facepalm

aryehof 3y ago

In my day, all high school students in my State in Australia took the same exams to determine eligibility for entrance into tertiary institution courses. These scores were the only thing known about the student and the only thing considered. This was regardless of whether you went to an expensive private school, public school or any other factor. Why is merit alone not the criteria everywhere? Is membership of some group as criteria to entry not discriminatory to others?

pfannkuchen 3y ago

I think the main (only?) reason universities do this is because it drives donations from alumni with children, which is probably a large percent of donating alumni. Has anyone done the analysis on how this is expected to impact overall university funding if it becomes widespread? No skin in this game, just curious.

sparrowInHand 3y ago

Very good. Meritocracy for the win. Not skin, not sobstory, skill and talent. Some worries though: Reproducing learning is way over-evaluated, as it can be reliably tested. Its the most worthless skill though, ever since the internet was invented. The ability to recombine approaches and create novel solutions to novel problems, that adhere to engineering approaches and principles, thats were the money is. Hard to test for that and i guess the tiger-mum kids will have to learn TRIZ inside out. Also i find the cohort timing pressure detrimental. In my opinion, the option to study (because you are bored and dissatisfied with your station in life) should be open to anyone at any time. Even if it does not work out, it creates the ability to move and propels the person on. Finally, i would detach the political and not society survival relevant pieces of university from the other parts. Sports, sociology, arts go into one university, physics, math, machine building, biology, chemistry and agriculture go into another. Keep the whole bipartisanship from the science.

jeegsy 3y ago

It would have been great if the article made clear to what extent these "legacies" would not have otherwise qualified to be admitted to the university