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Stanford to continue legacy admissions and withdraw from Cal Grants
- simianwords 1y agoIt’s interesting to see that merit best admissions is pushed from both sides of political spectrum - legacy admissions and DEI.
- mc32 1y agoI think legacy admissions is only supported by the elites —be they leftists or rightists. Normal leftists and normal rightists don’t support legacy admissions (pay to play). I think the vast majority of people would support fair admissions (GPA + something else that signals academic aptitude). Most people would detest the extracurricular noise that some institutions use because often only people with money can afford their kids doing those things and two they are bullshit things. By most people I mean potential students such as those that in great numbers end up in state schools or community colleges.
- NewJazz 1y agoHow do you compare GPA across different schools?
- mc32 1y agoI think you can gauge that from the historical performance of students from those sources. Of course, there is a lag as schools either improve or dilute grades.
- NewJazz 1y agoHmm. Yeah it is a hard problem to solve. It is basically a mass interviewing system.
- acomjean 1y agoIsn’t that why standardized tests like the SAT/ACT… exist?
- simianwords 1y agoI agree with you but I meant both democrats and republicans are pushing merit based admissions. Gavin Newsom against legacy and Trump against DEI. On the point people vastly prefer GPA - I don’t agree because people on the left prefer DEI and affirmative action.
- rayiner 1y agoI think even most democrats oppose it: https://manhattan.institute/article/study-finds-most-democrats-oppose-affirmative-action-in-higher-education https://manhattan.institute/article/study-finds-most-democra.... Though unfortunately, it appears that what swings democrats from support to non-support is learning that it hurts asians, not just white people. :-/
- impossiblefork 1y agoYou can't be a leftist and support legacy admissions. You can be a right-liberal and support legacy admissions, but even the mildest mild-mild leftism would reject that kind of thing.
- kbelder 1y agoAnd yet they don't.
- impossiblefork 1y agoLiberals are not leftists. They are not egalitarians and they are not really for social equality. Allowing universities legacy admissions is a position so far to the right that I don't think any political party anywhere outside of the US propagates for it. There isn't a social democrat in Denmark or something who has vaguely leftist view but who also believes that universities should admit people based on their parents having gone there.
- philwelch 1y agoIf anyone really favored social equality they would support abolishing the elite universities entirely. Anything short of that still produces an identifiable class of people who attended these institutions, and it’s the existence of that class in the first place rather than its partly hereditary nature that runs counter to social equality.
- impossiblefork 1y agoHarvard-style elite universities, absolutely, and actual leftists do support abolishing them. CMU-style, or ETH-style or Independent University of Moscow-style elite universities are however probably an efficient use of resources.
- philwelch 1y agoIf you look at the political tendencies of the elite universities that themselves practice legacy admissions, those tendencies are overwhelmingly to the left of the American political center. I know it’s popular to make a “no true Scotsman” argument against anyone to the right of Mao Zedong but it’s silly.
- DragonStrength 1y agoYou’re close. The issue is we can’t discuss class, so they look for all sorts of other analogs which they can get the wealthy folks on board with. DEI is acceptable to the wealthy because they ultimately see less of a threat there than from a person of the same race from the South or Midwest. In the workplace, the female Stanford legacy can still be underprivileged then thanks to gender versus the white male from a poor state with a land grant degree.
- simianwords 1y agoboth DEI and legacy are going away so it works in your favour.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoNo surprise. C'mon, they host the Hoover Institution and celebrities and rich people pay coaches to get their kids in. It's a power funnel racket. PS: I'm an ex-Stanford FTE.
- georgeburdell 1y agoPeople went to jail for those bribes. It’s not a legal tactic to begin with
- lotsofpulp 1y agoJust because the bribes were too small. If they were large enough to help build a building, then they become legal again.
- energy123 1y agoIt was because the bribes benefited a small number of administrators instead of being equitably distributed across administrators
- rahimnathwani 1y agoNo, it's because the money went to individual employees directly, rather than being received by the institution.
- lotsofpulp 1y agoWhile I was being glib, that is an insignificant detail in the context of this post about legacy admissions. The point is you can gain admission via some nebulous definition of merit, some combination of merit and knowing someone who gained admission before, or paying for admission. Also, while the “institution” receives the money, I guarantee some people (the highest admins and their friends - fund managers, construction contractors, etc) gain more than most others (e.g. adjunct teachers and students).
- 1y ago
- alecco 1y agoStanford became Harvard.
- jen20 1y agoWas there a point in recent memory where it wasn’t? As a non-American I’d always considered them to be the Oxford and Cambridge (respectively) of the US.
- JKCalhoun 1y agoThey're West coast. "Elite" schools in the U.S. are typically East coast (old monied).
- chasd00 1y agoJust want to point out that “old money” in the USA is a different thing than “old money” in Europe. The whole USA is only around 350 years old.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- EFreethought 1y agoSome of the American old money came from European old money.
- adastra22 1y agoVery, very few. Those were mostly loyalists and left in 1776.
- andrewl 1y agoSome would say Harvard and Yale are the Oxford and Cambridge of the US. But we’re a big country, and we have a lot of schools. Many lists of top schools include these, alphabetically ordered: Columbia University, Cornell University, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, Rice University, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, Yale University But this discussion of rankings reminds me of a quote from John Allen Paulos: In fact, trying to convert a partial ordering into a total one is, I think, at the root of many problems. Reducing intelligence to a linear ordering—a number on an IQ scale—does violence to the complexity and incomparabilities of people’s gifts.
- rr808 1y agoLegacy is better than people think. The undergrad academics at T10 universities really aren't anything special. People want to go because of the connections with wealthy & well-connected students, but then complain when wealthy well-connected students get a easier ride. You fill Harvard of Stanford with only people with 1600 SATs will turn them into places you dont really want to go to.
- ethan_smith 1y agoResearch from Opportunity Insights shows legacy preferences reduce social mobility while multiple studies find no evidence legacy admits enhance campus culture or alumni giving beyond what could be achieved through need-blind admissions.
- yieldcrv 1y agoTop universities don’t exist for social mobility, that is merely happenstance that the people that want to pay have gatekept access to the purse by having attended university.
- WillPostForFood 1y agoThe same Opportunity Insights found that legacies were more qualified than typical applicants.
- kappi 1y agoStanford has become legacy + LGBTQ only for undergrads. Even their math departments are filled with only them!
- yieldcrv 1y agoExactly, that Austrian woman that tried to get rid of all her wealth found out that its impossible because even if she’s at £0 she knows too many people that will support her ideas, drive too much publicity to her causes, and food, shelter, board seats, academia, and everything else is always accessible. The path doesn’t have to be forged. Universities were always finishing schools for the elite, for like 1,000 years its been that way, and the best ones in the US are here for that since before the country was incorporated, here since almost half a millennia ago! The last 80 odd years of dealing with the lower class and proletariat at all is a footnote and will be an experiment of folly deep in a university archive for the next 1,000 years as they merely revert to the mean. Every problem that universities have go away when they go back to their roots. Its the corporate and public sector that tied access to having a degree from these places, that’s not the university’s problem. And to your point, correct, if the proletariat were only surrounded by themselves they would not want to be there.
- Cornbilly 1y agoDEI for rich mid-wits is fine for anyone else it’s Communism.
- lo_zamoyski 1y agoHere's another perspective. Let's say Harvard's admission were to become largely based on social status rather than merit. You could say "so be it", but let it be known that that is what Harvard is. Being one thing while advertising another is lying and the greatest offense. A positive side effect is that perhaps we won't fetishize Harvard as much and keep insisting that one must get into Harvard. You don't. Harvard's brand depends on you thinking you do, of course. The current model of academia in the US and elsewhere is wretched. Obscene tuition is one thing. The failure to educate is another. Universities got out of the education business a while ago. Universities are focused on jobs, that's the advertising pitch, which is not the historical and proper mission of the university. So you end up with institutions that are bad at both. So if these "elite" schools lead to a disenchantment with merit, I see a silver lining. It could provide the needed impetus and motivation to distribute education more widely in smaller colleges with a greater clarity and focus on their proper mission (e.g., Thomas Aquinas College [0]) while creating a robust culture of trade schools. The majority of people do not need a college education! And frankly, it's not what they're looking for. Germany does something like this. Fewer people go to university there, and they have a well-developed system of trade schools. Furthermore, you could offer programs that allow students at colleges to take classes in these trade schools. Let's stop trying to sustain a broken model. The time is ripe for educational reform. [0] https://www.thomasaquinas.edu/ https://www.thomasaquinas.edu/
- PeterStuer 1y agoIf as you hypothesise universities are focussed on jobs, how do you explain the countless utterly useless degrees they keep pumping out en mass?
- BrenBarn 1y agoThis would sort of work except that Harvard already built an endowment of $50 billion based on all that lying. Unless you're going to claw back that money, you're just letting them pull the ladder up behind them.
- TrackerFF 1y agoI always found it wildly fascinating how US schools have things like legacy admissions, athletic scholarships, standardized admission test, admission letter, letters of recommendation, extracurricular activities, and what have you. Such a contrast to other systems where for example your HS grades will count 100% - and similar "ungameable" systems.
- huevosabio 1y agoStandardized tests are the least gameable. HS grades are pretty poor proxy given the wide range of quality in HS.
- morpheos137 1y agoOther countries probably have a more centralized, standardized schooling system. In the USA schooling is at the local and state level.
- throw0101d 1y ago> Other countries probably have a more centralized, standardized schooling system. Which is basically what the SATs are: * https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/sat https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/sat * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT
- DiogenesKynikos 1y agoThis is what Baccalaureates, Abitur, Gaokao, etc. are: much more standardized high-school final exams, used as a metric for university admissions.
- WalterBright 1y agoThese days, people game them by claiming a disability so they get extra time.
- sokoloff 1y ago
- dlcarrier 1y agoI'm okay with academia being an institution of the elite, as long as we stop pretending that their BS (or BA) will make everyone successful. We can't all be elite; that's not how that works. Rich people are going to waste their time and money no matter what, but I didn't want them also wasting yours and mine. The man-hours and percent of the GDP (often paid for with taxes) we put into conflating cause and effect is absurd. We dodn't need merit-base academia, we need merit-based employment that disregards elite and academic status.
- wnc3141 1y agoI agree that participation in the middle class shouldn't depend on borrowing six figures as a teenager. I dream of the day where any worker has economic security
- JKCalhoun 1y agoHow likely is it we'll have the one when we don't even have the other? We'll have neither, of course. The wealthy will always be able to pay for what they want — merit be damned.
- musicale 1y ago"It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy
- SoftTalker 1y agoWhen a Bachelor's degree became a proxy for "can show up and complete assigned work" for employers that was the start of its decline as an academic credential.
- qingcharles 1y agoRight. It's like "this person likely has a student loan they need to repay so they will probably come to work."
- rayiner 1y agoProps to California for doing this. Stanford showing its true colors here.
- renewiltord 1y agoYes, perfectly reasonable to pull state funding for private enrichment. Now, all we have to do is get rid of the racism in “holistic admission” and use a demonstrably fair system like performance on standardized tests.
- MPSFounder 1y ago[flagged]
- tzs 1y agoWhat about schools where standardized tests are insufficient? At Caltech and MIT for example they have way more people with very high SAT score than they have openings for. Most admitted students at both have math scores of 790 or 800, and reading/writing averages around 750. The SAT is not reproducible enough to say that someone who scored say a 790 is better than someone who scored a 780. If both retook the test they would likely get different scores and would have a good chance of finishing in a different order. Same for other standardized test. The result then is that after you filter by standardized tests you still end up with a more people than you can admit that have high tests scores that give you no information about who would do well and who would not. There are plenty of people who can get those high scores but would not be able to handle the class work at Caltech, and from what I've heard the same applies to MIT. To figure out who can actually handle the work they have to look beyond standardized tests.
- renewiltord 1y agoThe inability for a test to have sensitivity at the top end isn’t some fixed property of the universe. It’s just a property of the SAT. Harder tests are possible. The only thing that matters is that candidates know that it’s not at the whim of some human who has decided that 25% Jews is enough or 33% Asians is enough or whatever and that it’s by a fixed scoring rubric. And then some large number of high scoring candidates will miss out until we have a sufficient number of universities. Irrespective of the mechanism, it is incredibly racist to use one’s race as a scoring mechanism perhaps by definition.
- genghisjahn 1y agoPick up a copy of Palo Alto and read thru that. Lots of interesting Stanford history there.
- breadwinner 1y agoThis seems reasonable. California doesn't want to subsidize the education of the privileged few who qualify as "legacy admission". And Stanford doesn't want to give up the financial support from alumnus.
- musicale 1y agoStanford undoubtedly did the math and determined they would lose money overall (gifts are 7% of Stanford's income, tuition and fees 13%). Boo-hoo, rich university loses money. Like the 21% Trump tax on endowment income, etc. Maybe they'll have to fire some useless, non-teaching administrators and build fewer country club dorms and luxury amenities, right? But... Stanford would probably argue that admitting a single less-qualified donor child can cover the financial aid expenses of dozens of qualified students whose parents simply have less money. (Financial aid is 5% of Stanford's budget.) If this is true, California's goal of banning legacy and (especially) donor admits could have an unintended consequence of reducing the number of qualified but non-rich students who will be admitted. But... many gifts are restricted, you say! Buildings. Endowed faculty chairs. Particular research centers and programs. Specialized scholarships. Etc. Nonetheless, Stanford has to balance its budget, and even restricted gifts save money and allow them to shift dollars from one place to another. (Note debt service is 4% of the budget as well.)
- ghaff 1y agoUniversities definitely favor unrestricted gifts. But, to the degree that you make a restricted gift, you can be sure that there's often money shuffling in the background to the degree the gift is substantial.
- corimaith 1y agoIf rich people stopped going to Stanford, Stanford will loose its reputation in a few generations.
- g8oz 1y agoI think it works in the opposite direction. Rich parents basically buy admission for their mediocre offspring at a university made prestigious by the abundance of very intelligent but less wealthy students.
- SilverElfin 1y agoLegacy admissions and holistic (discriminatory) admissions should be disallowed as long as these universities receive public fundings directly or indirectly.
- malfist 1y agoSeems reasonably. You and to discriminate? That's disappointing, but nobody is going to stop you, but the public tax dollars sure as hell shouldn't support your discrimination
- corimaith 1y agoThe entire notion of "elite" universities is discriminatory. If going to your average state university with high admissions was okay then there wouldn't nearly be as much drama. If the elite colleges are not comprised of the rich and well connected it beats the entire point of an elite college.
- wsgeorge 1y ago> If the elite colleges are not comprised of the rich and well connected it beats the entire point of an elite college. Depends on how you define "elite", and I assume you mean some sort of hereditary or economic-class-based definition. But elite colleges could (and should) still work if they run on competency-based merit. I believe elite talent in as many fields of endeavour should absolutely be catered to. > The entire notion of "elite" universities is discriminatory. Well, when you put it that way, many things are discriminatory, for better or worse.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> If the elite colleges are not comprised of the rich and well connected it beats the entire point of an elite college The functional purpose of a meritocratic elite is to concentrate the smartest and most ambitious in your nation (in each generation) so they can cross leverage each other. This dates back to feudal societies switching to a civil exam system during Enlightenment. (Also in imperial China.) That’s a productive form of discrimination.
- flappyeagle 1y agoThe best way to do this has always been to accept a ton of students and weed out a big percent of them in intro courses. Have the basic grades and test scores? Ok welcome to CS1 where 2/3 of you will not make it thanks for playing
- Gimpei 1y agoA compromise would be to double the undergrad class size while limiting legacy to something less than or equal to what it is today in absolute terms. Many more deserving students would get and Stanford would get to keep its cash cow. But of course that would entail Palo Alto to let it expand, which it very much wants to do. And good luck with that.
- ndgold 1y agoI mean this means that the alumni are worth more money than the state awards, right?
- thelock85 1y agoIf you reduce the choice to public funding vs wealthy alumni stewardship, and there seems to be no meaningful pathway to circumventing the current assault on public funding, then why should you alienate your wealthy alumni? Obviously the situation is much more complex and nuanced, but this framing (amongst others I’m sure) seems appropriate if you are thinking on a 25,50,100 year time scale in terms of impact of your decision. The country is littered with public and private universities who made poor moral choices across the 19th and 20th centuries but I’m not aware of any institutions suffering long-term reputational harm (or threat of insolvency) as a result of those choices. (Then again, maybe it’s because the harm was swift and final at the time)
- downrightmike 1y agoThe poor choices started in the early 90's when the SCOTUS decided that MIT didn't have to pay taxes as long as they gave enough charity discounts to students. Everyone else jumped on it and abused the student loan system by jacking up tuition and then applying charity grants to basically all students. Leading to our current Student Loan crisis.
- blackguardx 1y agoThis is the first time I've seen this framing. Typically folks blame bloated admin and fancy dorms. Where can I learn more about this take on the student loan crisis.
- adastra22 1y agoThose are not incompatible statements.
- lotsofpulp 1y agoThe loan (and hence tuition) crisis is because US taxpayers provide blank checks to students with no underwriting.
- runako 1y agoAs I understand matters, it started in the 70s and 80s as states pulled back from funding public institutions. This funding was the mechanism which allowed public institutions to be affordable to families such that a person could pay for a year of public college by working in a grocery store over the summer. MIT + the more expensive private colleges are effectively a rounding error in terms of number of students matriculating, but they do play in the same market and will price accordingly. But the big driver of what they can get away with is that a college like University of Tennessee is $35,000 annually, for a total ticket likely north of $150k. (Not picking on them, just chose a state at random.) Worth noting that this is a deliberate political choice. At any time, a state could choose to return to subsidizing in-state college at its public institutions, perhaps in exchange for working in the state after graduation.
- onetimeusename 1y ago> Stanford has considered alumni and donor status for academically qualified students in the past I have an argument to make in favor of allowing legacy status for admissions. I am basing this on personal experience and some analysis of data done at similar schools when they were forced to release it due to lawsuits. The way admissions works in the US now it has basically become a lottery for qualified students. We have more qualified students than we have seats at the top schools. The idea that there are some unqualified students who make it in only because their parents are alumni, at least at Stanford I have never seen. The top schools are all so competitive that they are all pretty similar and they would not do things to jeopardize their reputation or standing. So I think it's just not the case that there are unqualified legacy admits. At Harvard for example the legacy admits had higher SAT scores than the average admitted student which makes sense when you think about it. Children of alumni are probably better prepared for admissions. So when choosing, Stanford might have to make a choice between two students with the same GPA, the same SAT score, the same interests, etc. and legacy status could decide it and I am ok with that. Building a campus network of people is a huge competitive advantage a school can have. You would be surprised how many people who are non legacy admits have pretty well known parents anyway or have parents who went to an extremely similar school. Singling out legacy admissions is not extremely meaningful and I don't think it's used to let in unqualified students at all.
- cma 1y agoHow about for schools that had racial segregation within living memory? Can't be an old legacy there if you are the wrong race. Even without formal segregation there was discrimination of some amount. Can argue it went both ways at different points with affirmative action programs but most schools with AA weighted legacy just as high. I think it is best to do away with legacy admits especially because of racial history but also because it is a kind of nobility system, but that will make schools rely on government more right now which seems to be as bad for academic freedom and freedom to not fund genocide as the donor model.
- telotortium 1y ago> How about for schools that had racial segregation within living memory? Maybe if you’re a Boomer, although even by the time they were going to university, racial discrimination was rapidly being replaced by affirmative action. This is the 2020s - even though some problems from that era still haven’t been solved, brute forcing the solutions from back then won’t make them any better and has already produced a major backlash.
- analog31 1y agoI think a century from now, we'll look back on privatized higher education the way we look back on privatized health care: Something that evolved by a series of compromises, that society depends on, but that is perpetuating inequality while also gouging us and not making us healthier. Ironically, the appeal of an "elite" university depends on the public image of the student body. The university has to manage that image through its admissions process. Any open criteria for "merit" will quickly turn the student body into a monocultural freak show. This would in turn diminish the public image of the university -- the exact thing that the students were hoping to benefit from.
- decimalenough 1y ago> Any open criteria for "merit" will quickly turn the student body into a monocultural freak show. So just to spell the quiet part out loud, what you're saying is that admissions based purely on merit would mean the student body would become entirely Asian, and this would be a "freak show" that's bad for the university's image?
- zmgsabst 1y agoThe same group in society has been lamenting “too many Jews” in higher education for generations — and has several Supreme Court cases against their discrimination. Quotas to DIE have all been ruled to, in practice, amount to illegal discrimination on the basis of race, but some people truly believe Harvard and UNC were right to discriminate against Asians.
- tyre 1y agoI think if you look at polling, people’s feelings on admissions is heavily influenced by whether the criteria helps/hurts them. Especially when it comes to students and parents. Which makes sense. If it came to your kid, would you give up their spot at an Ivy for the “common good” (assuming you saw it that way)? Or would your definition of what’s right/wrong change to fit the practicals of the circumstances?
- wombatpm 1y agoThe GI Bill fundamentally changed college. The Vietnam draft with College deferments broke colleges and universities. Now every white collar job requires a degree - because every boomer overseeing those roles thinks it’s necessary.
- throwawaymaths 1y agoi wouldn't be opposed to legacy admits if they were required to pay full tuition and judged to a higher standard: the legacy admit must have both a higher gpa, and sat score than the inbound class average.
- hulahoof 1y agoI’m not from the US so apologies if I miss something that seems obvious, but why should they have a higher standard instead of the same standard?
- adastra22 1y agoYou didn’t miss anything. That was a bizarre statement.
- throwawaymaths 1y agoas a legacy you could choose to apply as non-legacy. but your odds would be lower (you're competing with more people)
- tines 1y agoSo being legacy puts you at a disadvantage with no advantage?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- throwawaymaths 1y agoyou'd be in a different pool for consideration, less competitors, higher odds.
- adastra22 1y agoThen you are against legacy admits as your policy would actively discriminate against them.
- 1y ago
- sashank_1509 1y agoLet me try to make a defense of Legacy Admissions (highly unpopular I know). I come from a country with a purely meritocratic examination based college admissions system. I even cracked the hard examination and attended a top college. But the fact is the exam world is the exam world and the real world is the real world. The real world doesn’t run on examinations and IQ tests. Real impact means connections, wealth, and then maybe intelligence if considering technology. If you remove the people born into privilege, from attending your college, all you succeed is in making your college irrelevant, not those people irrelevant. It’s better if rather than being a fully closed circle, they also interact with the smartest, most charismatic, most talented people in a country etc. Of course it would be ideal if those born into privilege also could clear the SAT etc, but then it would also be great if we were ruled by a benevolent philosopher king, that’s not the real world, in the real world concessions have to be made.
- MostlyStable 1y agoTo whatever extent this is true (I'm not convinced it is, schools that aren't prestige aren't "irrelevant"), it is an indictment on the schools. This argument is a capitulation to the signaling hypothesis of higher ed. I believe at the least a weak version of the hypothesis, but I absolutely do not believe we should just roll over and say "well, that's the way it is". It may be the way things work, but this is a very important is/ought distinction. I think we should be fighting _very_ hard for the "ought" version.
- sashank_1509 1y agoYeah in my view, the primary value of undergrad in college, is the social connections you make and the status it grants you. If this was not the primary value of college what else can it be. What should it ought be. It certainly is not knowledge nor can it be knowledge. You learn far more in a single year on the job than in your four year college degree (and I say this as an engineer). In fact I think a STEM degree is mostly superfluous except for the connections you make in college which is very important.
- 1y ago
- w10-1 1y agoConnections matter most in the oncoming era of dwindling opportunities (because each one is more valuable and leverages more resources). Legacy enables alumni to meet each other. The question is whether universities can still play a role in establishing groundwork values for how people are treated. If they're not participating in public education initiatives, they have no incentive, and efficiency+competition will squish that out.
- everybodyknows 1y ago> admit the relatives of their alumni or big donors Conflates two utterly different cases. Big donor admissions amount to a subsidy of the education costs of all the other, non-donor admissions. Legacy admissions OTOH are just an old boy's club.
- Slava_Propanei 1y ago[dead]
- toofy 1y agosome people in my circle are reacting to this kind of thing exactly how i expected. the people who go on and on about meritocracy and despise diversity, etc… love this. they have loudly cried for years about meritocracy but despise any program that takes away clear and obvious advantages to certain people. it’s similar to the carrot and stick argument. they claim certain classes of people need more money to work while claiming that other class needs less money so they feel the fear. in certain people’s minds, executives will only work for the 100s of millions in carrots while conveniently that other class will only work appropriately if they get the stick.
- BrenBarn 1y agoDespicable.
- s1artibartfast 1y agoPhrased differently, "California stops offering cal grants to qualified low-income students accepted into Stanford" Who exactly is being punished here? Stanford has no shortage of applicants.
- semiinfinitely 1y agothe rich people win again!
- RainyDayTmrw 1y agoI think legacy admissions are bad and wrong. But I also don't think that removing legacy admissions will make a dent, not on the state of college admissions, and especially not on any broader socioeconomic context. Prestige schools doing bad things only highlights that it's a mistake to let prestige schools exist in the first place.
- dddgghhbbfblk 1y agoI think I'm not understanding your comment correctly--are you saying that you think Stanford should be shut down?
- RainyDayTmrw 1y agoNo, I'm saying that prestige schools are a symptom of a broader socioeconomic failing - something about how power is obtained and maintained, which I struggle to articulate properly. Shutting down prestige schools does nothing for the broader failing in broader society; at best, it papers over a visible sign of the failing.
- impossiblefork 1y agoI think it might. I think it might weaken the connection between 'elite' status and the particular university, to the point where the university actually becomes something academic, almost technical, again.
- laidoffamazon 1y agoSeems fair. Stanford isn't in the business of conferring education. It's in the business of conferring status. Public funds shouldn't pay any tuition costs for anybody that attends Stanford as an undergraduate. I'll admit for PhD programs the benefit is typically via publicly funded research so I think that can stay. But it's absurd that a California taxpayer would fund elites that consider everyone else beneath them.
- anovikov 1y agoIt's a dangerous precedent. Ending legacy and donor admissions and other forms of preference to elites' kids will inevitably lead to loss of value of higher education on one side, and elites being uneducated and Trump-style dumb, on the other. Because elites will still remain the elites no matter what, unless society plunges into bloodbath, physically killing or exiling all of them, French revolution-style - but at least now they can be educated.
- ushtaritk421 1y agoI think there’s a couple justifiable reasons to have legacy admissions. One, help the poor, smart kids meet the rich kids. Together, they can get more done than separately. Second, I think the legacy folks see their relationship with the university as multigenerational and therefore they donate more. These donations benefit more than just themselves.
- p1dda 1y agoSpeaking as a curious European, just how much in 'donations' is required to get your kid into a place like Stanford?
- dudeinjapan 1y agoMoving to a pure merit-based system would be a great idea IF universities were primarily designed to educate people. They are not—anyone with half a brain can get a world-class education from ChatGPT, Wikipedia, Khan Academy, and library books. Paying a university "for the education" is like paying $100,000 for tap water because it’s served in a fancy glass with a Latin motto printed on it. Universities are cartels of prestige and access.
- overfeed 1y agoFor those who want to compare the HN comments here against the SCOTUS ruling that ended Affirmative Action, read and be amazed (or not) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36520658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36520658