3 ms·
Academic standards are kind of irrelevant when it comes to Harvard undergraduate admissions. Harvard is a tiny university at the absolute top of the prestige h
by jltsiren 1y ago
Academic standards are kind of irrelevant when it comes to Harvard undergraduate admissions.
Harvard is a tiny university at the absolute top of the prestige hierarchy. As far as they are concerned, every serious (non-legacy/donor) applicant is a truly exceptional student. At least to the extent it can be determined from the admission materials and a short interview. They could choose randomly from all good enough applicants with no noticeable impact on academic standards.
But Harvard is not in the business of educating the most deserving. Instead, they want to educate the ones who will be successful and influential in the future, and to give them the best networking opportunities possible. The standard joke is that if the admissions officer knew that the applicant would become a tenured professor at Harvard, they would reject the applicant for the lack of success. Most Harvard graduates fail to reach that standard, but it's better to choose a likely failure (and an unlikely unicorn) over a certain failure.
PhD admissions are another story. At that stage, Harvard starts caring a lot more about academic potential. They don't want to restrict their recruitment to the US, because Americans are only a small fraction of the people with access to good education. Especially because Americans are reluctant to do a PhD due to the low pay effectively mandated by public research funders.
- rayiner 1y ago[flagged]
- pen2l 1y agoI understand it's cool to slam Harvard these days but it is nonetheless a behemoth when it comes to research output. https://www.harvard.edu/about/history/nobel-laureates/ https://www.harvard.edu/about/history/nobel-laureates/ https://www.nature.com/nature-index/research-leaders/2024/institution/academic/all/global https://www.nature.com/nature-index/research-leaders/2024/in... https://hms.harvard.edu/about-hms/history-hms/timeline-discovery https://hms.harvard.edu/about-hms/history-hms/timeline-disco... https://www.harvard.edu/in-focus/innovation/ https://www.harvard.edu/in-focus/innovation/ Roughly a third of the 50-something of Harvard's Nobel laureates were immigrants by the way.
- rayiner 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- nebula8804 1y agoSlam Harvard? Trump is slamming them because they are a known name that is resisting him. Nobodies on Twitter are just that, nobodies that accomplished nothing in their lives. They have nothing better to do than slam a university that they have no chance of getting even close to yet they feel entitled to dictate how it should run. Who else is slamming them? I'd imagine techies are humble enough to understand that the school is not some hillbilly institution in the middle of nowhere.
- rayiner 1y ago> Who else is slamming them Many of Trump’s supporters and conservatives generally. Harvard is the beating heart of liberal theology, and going to the Supreme Court to defend racialism has earned it plenty of enemies.
- nebula8804 1y agoAgain like I said: >Nobodies on Twitter are just that, nobodies that accomplished nothing in their lives. They have nothing better to do than slam a university that they have no chance of getting even close to yet they feel entitled to dictate how it should run. Most of the people granted "free speech" on post-Musk twitter are still the same losers. Thats why they have so much time to complain about something that they think they have a say in. There is nothing more important going on in their lives/communities. Conservatives are the defacto minorities in a modern western country. They don't set the culture: ex: people visiting the US go to NYC & LA not Nebraska and Alabama, movies are dictates by the new ideas coming out of liberal circles, all conservative movies need to be subsidized. They don't develop the innovations that keep the country ahead: ex: Texas, no matter how hard they try, is still second fiddle to SF and all these big companies they love to brag about (Tesla) started in CA. They can hem and haw how much they hate that institutions like Harvard drag the country forward but in the end these whiners don't really have any long term lasting power because they are looking backwards, not forward. Lets talk about a hypothetical: They actually manage to destroy Harvard. They are destroying the thing that gives them any say on the world stage. They may feel like they won but they will sink. The US is only 5% of the world population the rest of the world as much as they even care anymore about the US only look to their progressive institutions...not their backwater losers. Why would they?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bko 1y ago> As far as they are concerned, every serious (non-legacy/donor) applicant is a truly exceptional student. I know it's fun to dunk on legacy admissions but legacy students are actually more qualified by objective measures than non legacy. It makes sense that some genetics that predisposes children to an academic environment gets passed on. Not to mention the fact that their parents value education. This holds up even when you compare them against their non legacy peers in the same parental income bracket. https://mleverything.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-legacy-admissions-to https://mleverything.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-legacy-adm...
- ckemere 1y agoI think in context “legacy” refers to the affirmative action boost given to children of (donating) alumni over better qualified unconnected peers.