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> 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

> 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 ago
How 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.
  - matthewdgreen 1y ago
    I’m not a boomer. I have kids who are in high school. Racial discrimination is very much within my living memory, obviously affected other parents in my cohort, and still exists all over the city I live in.
    - telotortium 1y ago
      > Racial discrimination is very much within my living memory, obviously affected other parents in my cohort, and still exists all over the city I live in. If we’re talking about Asians, I agree with you, as far as non-Bob Jones universities are concerned.
    - adastra22 1y ago
      The word used was segregation, not discrimination.
      - matthewdgreen 1y ago
        Come visit Baltimore and I’ll take you for a drive around the city. You can tell me if it isn’t de facto racially segregated. And then you can visit the actual South where racial segregation was “law”, and you can explain to me how actual patterns established under segregation haven’t been locked into amber.
        adastra22 1y ago
        Are schools still segregated? That’s the topic.
ghaff 1y ago
As I mentioned in another comment, the objective of elite schools is not to just admit 1600 SAT (or whatever the metric is these days). It's to admit "good" students and then to look at other factors. You have successful parents that went to the school isn't the only other factor but it's not a terrible one for both financial and other reasons. Neither is admitting students who didn't completely ace the SATs but also have other notable accomplishments.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- charlieyu1 1y ago
  SAT is a very very low bar to pass, especially Mathematics, it is ridiculously easy to get 800. Oxford and Cambridge basically have their own entrance exams that even the best students (eg IMO medalists) won't score full marks.
bachmeier 1y ago
> The way admissions works in the US now it has basically become a lottery for qualified students. That's not the way I would phrase it. A lottery would mean the outcome is random. There is nothing random about it. They consider essays, extracurriculars, and income, and look for evidence of hardship, diversity, athletic ability, and leadership. 100% subjective, sure, but not random.
- brewdad 1y ago
  For any student who meets the qualifications, it is essentially random. There is a process that seeks to find the best students but it is flawed in the same way the job interview process is. Plenty of exceptional applicants get rejected and more than a few accepted students don’t succeed at the level one would expect.
  - bachmeier 1y ago
    But that doesn't make it a "lottery" as claimed in the post I responded to. Every application gets a score and then the ones with the highest scores get offered admission. If it was a lottery, they'd do a binary classification of "qualified" and "not qualified", and then they'd randomly choose who gets in. IMO that would be an improvement on the current system. Powerball and other big lotteries don't pay out on subjective criteria, each ticket gives you the same chance of winning, with no other information being used.
    - beisner 1y ago
      The randomness is whether the committee reading your essays read them before or after lunch, or if something you wrote reminded them of their first romance, etc. etc. etc. The scores may not be "random" in the truest sense of the word, but the latent state that determine them is unknowable a priori and therefore the scoring ends up being highly stochastic.
- MengerSponge 1y ago
  But at institutions with sub 10% admit rates, it is random. It's not a uniform distribution because you can do things to help your odds, but unless your family has a building on campus or you're an olympian or something... admission isn't guaranteed.
tyre 1y ago
> 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 This is known to be false. Development cases, where donor’s buy admission, are real. They’re limited, but universities do them regularly. If you look at Jared Kushner’s case, for example, his parents weren’t even legacies! If they keep this number small, like five per year, would it really dilute Harvard’s brand? I doubt it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_case
- onetimeusename 1y ago
  I am talking about now. In the past, there was even a Jewish Quota. (Side Note: According to Bill Buckley there was also an Irish Catholic Quota). I am talking about right now in a post SFFA and post Varsity Blues era. I can't really comment on whether development cases exist or how many there are. Today, admissions are scrutinized not only to comply with law but various pressure groups and law firms. Development cases and legacy admissions are often conflated. I am making a case that goes against the stereotype of what a legacy admit is. I think that stereotype of a unqualified child of rich alums is not accurate anymore. The Harvard data suggested legacy admits were above the average admitted student. I think that is more likely the case today. Also, to give an example, since an 18 year old was born in 2007, those legacy admits could be children of tech startup founders and Stanford has a strong interest in cultivating tech ties. But the more salient point I am making is that the assumption legacy admits are unqualified I believe not to be true. No one has actually made that case. They argued instead along racial grounds.
  - doctorpangloss 1y ago
    > the assumption legacy admits are unqualified I believe not to be true. > some analysis of data > stereotype of a unqualified child of rich alums is not accurate anymore Yeah. What data might that be? Gini coefficient has been rising since 1980, and student achievement / quality of US university freshman classes has declined since at least 1993. So what you're saying couldn't be possible, in fact, you're 200% wrong. It would be completely improbable to observe these trends and for you to also be right. So I think you read a real report about Varsity Blues or whatever, and I think you are using this report to make believe that you are doing something other than first principles thinking. But the first principles thinking, "more students and greater selectivity, therefore, overall class at Harvard has gotten better," is wrong! It's not knowable from first principles what the quality of Ivy League classes are. The people who have measured see declines everywhere, and there's absolutely no reason to believe that those declines should be smaller among the top students - if anything, top students have far further to fall! How's that for first principles? Clearly a bankrupt approach.

cma 1y ago

How 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.
- matthewdgreen 1y ago
  I’m not a boomer. I have kids who are in high school. Racial discrimination is very much within my living memory, obviously affected other parents in my cohort, and still exists all over the city I live in.
  - telotortium 1y ago
    > Racial discrimination is very much within my living memory, obviously affected other parents in my cohort, and still exists all over the city I live in. If we’re talking about Asians, I agree with you, as far as non-Bob Jones universities are concerned.
  - adastra22 1y ago
    The word used was segregation, not discrimination.
    - matthewdgreen 1y ago
      Come visit Baltimore and I’ll take you for a drive around the city. You can tell me if it isn’t de facto racially segregated. And then you can visit the actual South where racial segregation was “law”, and you can explain to me how actual patterns established under segregation haven’t been locked into amber.
      - adastra22 1y ago
        Are schools still segregated? That’s the topic.

ghaff 1y ago

As I mentioned in another comment, the objective of elite schools is not to just admit 1600 SAT (or whatever the metric is these days). It's to admit "good" students and then to look at other factors. You have successful parents that went to the school isn't the only other factor but it's not a terrible one for both financial and other reasons. Neither is admitting students who didn't completely ace the SATs but also have other notable accomplishments.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
charlieyu1 1y ago
SAT is a very very low bar to pass, especially Mathematics, it is ridiculously easy to get 800. Oxford and Cambridge basically have their own entrance exams that even the best students (eg IMO medalists) won't score full marks.

bachmeier 1y ago

> The way admissions works in the US now it has basically become a lottery for qualified students. That's not the way I would phrase it. A lottery would mean the outcome is random. There is nothing random about it. They consider essays, extracurriculars, and income, and look for evidence of hardship, diversity, athletic ability, and leadership. 100% subjective, sure, but not random.

brewdad 1y ago
For any student who meets the qualifications, it is essentially random. There is a process that seeks to find the best students but it is flawed in the same way the job interview process is. Plenty of exceptional applicants get rejected and more than a few accepted students don’t succeed at the level one would expect.
- bachmeier 1y ago
  But that doesn't make it a "lottery" as claimed in the post I responded to. Every application gets a score and then the ones with the highest scores get offered admission. If it was a lottery, they'd do a binary classification of "qualified" and "not qualified", and then they'd randomly choose who gets in. IMO that would be an improvement on the current system. Powerball and other big lotteries don't pay out on subjective criteria, each ticket gives you the same chance of winning, with no other information being used.
  - beisner 1y ago
    The randomness is whether the committee reading your essays read them before or after lunch, or if something you wrote reminded them of their first romance, etc. etc. etc. The scores may not be "random" in the truest sense of the word, but the latent state that determine them is unknowable a priori and therefore the scoring ends up being highly stochastic.
MengerSponge 1y ago
But at institutions with sub 10% admit rates, it is random. It's not a uniform distribution because you can do things to help your odds, but unless your family has a building on campus or you're an olympian or something... admission isn't guaranteed.

tyre 1y ago

> 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 This is known to be false. Development cases, where donor’s buy admission, are real. They’re limited, but universities do them regularly. If you look at Jared Kushner’s case, for example, his parents weren’t even legacies! If they keep this number small, like five per year, would it really dilute Harvard’s brand? I doubt it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_case

onetimeusename 1y ago
I am talking about now. In the past, there was even a Jewish Quota. (Side Note: According to Bill Buckley there was also an Irish Catholic Quota). I am talking about right now in a post SFFA and post Varsity Blues era. I can't really comment on whether development cases exist or how many there are. Today, admissions are scrutinized not only to comply with law but various pressure groups and law firms. Development cases and legacy admissions are often conflated. I am making a case that goes against the stereotype of what a legacy admit is. I think that stereotype of a unqualified child of rich alums is not accurate anymore. The Harvard data suggested legacy admits were above the average admitted student. I think that is more likely the case today. Also, to give an example, since an 18 year old was born in 2007, those legacy admits could be children of tech startup founders and Stanford has a strong interest in cultivating tech ties. But the more salient point I am making is that the assumption legacy admits are unqualified I believe not to be true. No one has actually made that case. They argued instead along racial grounds.
- doctorpangloss 1y ago
  > the assumption legacy admits are unqualified I believe not to be true. > some analysis of data > stereotype of a unqualified child of rich alums is not accurate anymore Yeah. What data might that be? Gini coefficient has been rising since 1980, and student achievement / quality of US university freshman classes has declined since at least 1993. So what you're saying couldn't be possible, in fact, you're 200% wrong. It would be completely improbable to observe these trends and for you to also be right. So I think you read a real report about Varsity Blues or whatever, and I think you are using this report to make believe that you are doing something other than first principles thinking. But the first principles thinking, "more students and greater selectivity, therefore, overall class at Harvard has gotten better," is wrong! It's not knowable from first principles what the quality of Ivy League classes are. The people who have measured see declines everywhere, and there's absolutely no reason to believe that those declines should be smaller among the top students - if anything, top students have far further to fall! How's that for first principles? Clearly a bankrupt approach.