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What did SFFA vs. Harvard reveal about admissions?
- gscott 3mo agoIt feels like with fewer foreign students college's will have to open more slots to those who can be reasonable ready to be successful and also pay full rate.
- rayiner 3mo agoIt would have been helpful to model the effect of legacy status while accounting for academic indices.
- StrageMusik 3mo agoconflates a couple of things: the legacy tip itself and the fact that legacies tend to have stronger academic profiles to begin with (they come from advantaged households). A skeptic can fairly say "of course legacy admits do well, they're better applicants"
- rayiner 3mo ago> they come from advantaged households They also tend to be smarter because smarter people have smarter kids.
- steveBK123 3mo agoSure, but not at the admittance rate that legacies get. There's been stats & studies showing for example some Ivys with ~3% admit rates having something closer to ~12% for legacy applicants. Most people applying to an Ivy are already self-selecting as pretty exceptional applicants (putting aside the delusional) and the legacy admits had same/worse SATs, etc. edit: just looked it up, Harvard is at ~34% legacy admit rate versus regular 6% admit rate..
- rayiner 3mo agoA study of a top 25 school showed that legacy admitted students had identical scores than non-legacy: https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-why-elite-colleges-cant-give-up-legacy-admissions/ https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-why-elite-colleges-... “Among the admitted legacies, grades and test scores were indistinguishable from non-legacy students. Both groups had an average SAT score that surpassed 1430.” At Harvard, my understanding is that the legacy admits have slightly higher test scores than non-legacy admits.
- steveBK123 3mo agoLegacy SATs were about 30pts lower per Harvard Crimson in 2023 https://features.thecrimson.com/2023/freshman-survey/academics-narrative/ https://features.thecrimson.com/2023/freshman-survey/academi...
- dastbe 3mo ago"The average SAT score among legacy students was 1543, while it was 1515 for non-legacy students."
- steveBK123 3mo agoThanks my reading comprehension was low last night it would appear
- pc86 3mo ago> legacies tend to have stronger academic profiles Maybe for Harvard, but I'm not sure a legacy for some random private liberal arts school nobody has ever heard of (or $STATE University) will be any more academically gifted than someone whose parents both went to college anyway. Maybe we need to differentiate between "legacy of a school" and "legacy of a school with a historically high academic quality"
- avs733 3mo agoLooking at this without consideration for two factors (number of applicants and the number of applications per applicant) is borderline malpractice. I can’t pull older numbers on my phone at the moment but in the last 12 years the number of applications to colleges (applicants*applications) has risen 50%. So correct for the reality that… 1) that immediately skews your denominator and changes your percentages. 2) the upper middle class students are the most likely to apply to the most schools (because they can and don’t have the other paths) 3) more and more marginal students who previously would not have gone to college are getting encouraged to apply. And their model is just breaking.
- avs733 3mo agoSo with some searching… In the UK you can apply to upto five colleges. In the US the recommendation seems to be between 5-8
- chasd00 3mo agoThe price portion of this hits hard. My oldest starts college in 2 year and then his younger brother follows 2 years later. We make enough to not qualify for need based aid but not enough to just write a check, merit based aid + a meager 529 and our savings is their only hope besides debt. Further, both are male, hetero, only 1/4 hispanic, and my wife and I are not drug addicts or alcoholics so they'll get nothing from the "whole student" review. There's a huge swath of the population in this boat. The middle/upper-middle class pays for everyone else as always.
- blackoil 3mo ago> my wife and I are not drug addicts or alcoholics Yet, you still have two years.
- chasd00 3mo agono.freaking.kidding
- rationalist 3mo ago> only 1/4 hispanic If you mean only one grandparent is born in a Latin American country, then according to the U.S. Census Bureau, you are Hispanic.
- steveBK123 3mo agoExactly. All this stuff is self identifying too, so there are far more dishonest applicants than someone with a single LatAm grandparent marking themselves hispanic.
- StrageMusik 3mo agoThats why its called price discrimination: you are trying to get as much money as possible from each buyer without regard to fairness. Heroin dealers at least set a fixed $/oz because they know that word getting around that someone gets it cheaper would get them shot.
- NoahZuniga 3mo ago
- baking 3mo ago"The published cost of attendance is a fiction almost no one pays." "Net effect: a $175k household with a house and a 401(k) is judged "full pay," pays near-sticker from already-taxed income, and receives essentially nothing." I never know how to resolve these two statements. In our case, my daughter happened to choose a good public university. Maybe that is what they mean.
- pc86 3mo agoWhat do either of those quoted statements have to do with public universities specifically?
- baking 3mo agoAt high-end private universities, "The published cost of attendance is a fiction almost no one pays." Yet, most upper-middle-income students are considered "full-pay." Therefore, most upper-middle-income students now attend public universities. Or at least that is the conclusion I drew from the two statements I quoted.
- postflopclarity 3mo agoit's easily resolvable. the first statement is a lie: MANY students pay the full, published cost of attendance.
- cliglot 3mo agoI gave up with a dreams of returning to school when I realized in my early 20s, despite paying my own rent, bills, taxes, etc, the financial aid system considered me a dependent of my father still and lumped his income in with the calculations done to determine what I get/don’t get.
- az226 3mo agoPretty much the whole thing in a nutshell is the one chart showing the same student as Asian, 25%, White, 36%, Hispanic 77%, and Black 95%. This is institutionalized racism. Perhaps Affirmative Action was needed in the past to kickstart the disproportionate enrollment demographics, but it was past due to get rid of it. The most interesting part following SCOTUS' ruling is that Harvard said it wouldn't change their ways, and nobody enforced the ruling.
- robrenaud 3mo agoDo consider the incentives of those developing the model that made those predictions. Afaict, it was not selected for purpose other than testimony.
- orsorna 3mo agoIf you treat prestige acceptance rates as a derivative of the progression of racial policy, it absolutely makes sense why affirmative action is in place given the history of racial justice in America. Can you really claim that the trend won't reverse if purely meritocratic admissions are reinstated (disregarding legacy admits...although very unfair to disregard since their racial makeup heavily tracks with asian/white/etc) It's simply a single lever to change the racial makeup of the upper class. And certainly it goes both ways, but to simply remove it with no solution implies a regression to the former system, which was all but equal, much less equitable.
- sobellian 3mo agoWhy are we treating it as a derivative, and what's the slope? Do we have proof it's not zero? Let's say Johnny and Kareem both study poli-sci at Harvard. When Johnny graduates with his gentlemanly C's, his dad puts in a word with his golf buddy and it's off to Wall Street. Kareem shoots his resume off through online portals but no one bites. He goes to law school and takes on even more debt. Johnny's sister, Sally, passes the bar on her third try and is hired by a white-shoe law firm. Et cetera.
- dahart 3mo ago> This is institutionalized racism. Perhaps Affirmative Action was needed in the past Affirmative Action is institutionalized discrimination, at least when used to promote some groups over others. (Though it didn’t start that way; it started as a call to be purely race-blind in hiring.) I wouldn’t call it racism though, because it’s not based on any belief that races have different capability, it is purely intended to correct systemic bias based on the belief that races are equally capable. > it was past due to get rid of it This might be true, but there are still achievement and pay gaps in the US. There are lots of debates about why, and I don’t want to start one. I’m just curious how else to solve systemic biases if they’re still here. The whole problem with cultural bias is it’s sticky and difficult and people don’t believe they have biases. Today’s politics has done a lot to convince me that we haven’t solved it yet, but at the same time I’ll be the first to point out that we’ve come a long way even in my lifetime. The last little bit might take longer to fix than suffrage did just because of how subtle the issues are. If we take any preferential treatment off the table, preferential treatment that tries to artificially force equal opportunity, the question is what’s the alternative? We might have momentum, and do nothing might work, but what if it doesn’t? Wouldn’t that also be a form of institutionalized discrimination, effectively, like it was before Affirmative Action existed?
- amazingamazing 3mo agoHow likely is it to be a certain demographic given certain stats? Pretty much says it all. The race factor is irrelevant in practice. Even more so when you look at literature indicating that your success is actually more predictive from high school success than college attendance. In other words, if you get into Stanford you will likely succeed even if you don’t go.
- ordx 3mo agoIt puzzles me why US colleges are allowed to consider anything other than standardized test scores.
- drivebyhooting 3mo agoBecause the SAT is too easy and gets saturated.
- ordx 3mo agoso make it harder? Seems like a solvable problem.
- drivebyhooting 3mo agoThey’ve made it easier. Seems like the will to solve it didn’t exist.
- kxyvr 3mo agoThere's a wonderful exchange in the movie Interstellar that speaks to this: Cooper: You're ruling my son out for college now? The kid's fifteen. Principal: Tom's score simply isn't high enough. Cooper: What's your waistline? 32? With, what, a 33 inseam? Principal: I'm not sure I see what you're getting at. Cooper: You're telling me it takes two numbers to measure your own ass but only one to measure my son's future? The point being is that a person, and their future, should not be distilled into a single number like an SAT score because people are far more complex than a single number. I would also contend that splitting them into a few numbers, such as by subject area, doesn't help either.
- triceratops 3mo agoThe SAT has 2 components with separate scores. The SAT score is usually the sum of both, but there's no reason colleges can't weight one section more than the other. If you really care about multiple dimensions, add more types of standardized tests - general science (or specialized - separate physics, chem and bio sections), history, geography, whatever. Or tell students to take the standardized tests that most closely map to their preferred major.
- zerobees 3mo agoFor all these completely anonymous, AI-generated investigative pieces that are hitting the front page of HN every week, I'd love to see the prompts. Because I suspect they say more about what the proprietor of the site is trying to achieve than the article itself.
- sobellian 3mo agoWhen you combine the fraction of "hooked" admits with the number of seats affected by affirmative action, you get something between 35%-43% (depending on if you discount hooked admits that were extremely qualified anyway). I think this is an interesting way to frame it. Left to its own devices, Harvard would only devote around 60% of its undergraduate program to simply educating very very bright students. The other 40% is/was for les vieux riches, athletes, generally connected kids, and racial diversity. While I'm sure it varies by school, I suspect you will find a similar dynamic at many other elite private schools. The undergraduate program is going to be much less important to a top-tier research university, and consequently the admissions board can go nuts with other priorities. When even the runners-up (on a merit basis) are quite strong you can go quite far indeed before anyone would notice a slip in standards.
- daft_pink 3mo agoReally enjoyed your article. Some random chart feedback. I found the use of red for elite colleges and then the use of red to mean white applicants to make the article slightly harder to read and understand. Recommend changing using completely different colors from that chart to he next one, because they are completely unrealted axis and
- mhb 3mo agoWhat do "hooked" and "unhooked" mean here?
- DangitBobby 3mo ago"Hooked" is any foot in the door aside from merit such as sports recruitment, child of staff, child of alumnus, or international student. Unhooked is everyone who has to get in on merit alone.
- samlinnfer 3mo agoClaude slopped html page.
- exogeny 3mo agoAlright, I’m going to try to weigh in on this subject in good faith. Wish me luck! I grew up in suburban Pittsburgh and attended a very good public school. I had friends who lived only ten or fifteen minutes away but attended schools that were substantially worse by nearly every measurable standard. How should a university compare our applications on an apples-to-apples basis? Some people would say, “Just use standardized test scores.” And sure, those can be part of the equation. But I attended a better school, benefited from years of stronger teaching, had access to better preparation materials, and had supportive parents with disposable income to invest in my education. The list goes on. How exactly should those advantages be measured? Is it a university’s job to account for them? Others may disagree, but if I were on a university admissions team, I would say that it is...at least to some extent. I wouldn’t want a completely homogeneous student body. I would want every admitted student to clear a reasonable academic floor, but beyond that, I would value diversity in backgrounds, opinions, interests, intended majors, and life experiences. In my opinion, the issue is much more complicated than people often make it out to be, and I don’t personally believe there is some vast liberal boogeyman behind it. I don’t think the process is perfectly fair to everyone, nor do I think perfect fairness is possible in the first place. But I also don’t automatically agree that it is wrong for universities to try -- however imperfectly or ham-fistedly they might do it -- to understand the broader context in which an application was submitted.
- DangitBobby 3mo agoUnfortunately as much as we love the idea of rewarding merit, it isn't actually "fair" in the truest sense of the word. Because everyone is born into different conditions, no one ever has the same opportunities, so you may be more capable than someone else through no fault of your own. Choosing the worse educated out of identically scoring students is one of the few times we decide to tip the scales. Unfortunately again good employment opportunities feel like a zero sum game right now.
- foobarian 3mo ago> but if I were on a university admissions team OK but what would your goal there be? What do you think an existing admissions team's goal is in various different universities? What if some desire to build an elite club but can't say it on record? And is that such a bad thing?
- cleandreams 3mo agoI was listening to a podcast where the host and the guest were both Black and both had been to Harvard. This was before the Supreme Court ruling. They joked that it was well known that the Black students at Harvard who were descendants of American slaves were about 10% of the Black student body at Harvard. There were a lot of children of Nigerians and 3rd world tycoons and such. I think there is a good argument for a help up for people whose communities are still impacted by the history of American slavery (and all its ills) but giving these slots to children of the wealthy and often immigrants does not feel right.
- blagie 3mo agoThis is not an accident. If you talk to admissions officers, over drinks, they'll tell you that poor black students from marginalized US communities have abysmal performance at elite schools. The decision to admit rich black students is very deliberate. There are many reasons why. Schools in the US are locally-funded, and a marginalized community might have 25% of the per-student spending of a rich community (actual, typical figures). Until inequities like that are addressed, there is little elite education can do to help, even if it wanted, which it doesn't. The point of an exclusive university is to be, well, maximally exclusive. That's the literal opposite of inclusive.
- Georgelemental 3mo agoIn my state, the poor Black inner city schools have the highest per-student spending in the state (and some of the highest in the country), as the state government funds them heavily. Performance remains abysmal
- blagie 3mo agoI'm curious: Which state? However, there are *many* such effects. Whack one, and I can point to a dozen others. Until and unless they're systematically addressed, it's actually very hard to either make progress or even draw good conclusions. What's needed is a project to address *all* of the obvious ones, comprehensively, ideally on a national scale, but initially, at least on a pilot scale.
- StrageMusik 3mo agoThis post got removed from the front page after reaching #7. Unclear what happened.
- codedokode 3mo agoWhat's the point of giving preferences to athletes at places like computer science department? Would not it make more sense to create an athletic department and accept all athletes there so they do not have to struggle with math? Also, they could make a separate department for the riches where there also is no math.
- s1artibartfast 3mo agoPresumably the athletes want it and they have leverage.
- mrguyorama 3mo agoThe entire premise of the NCAA for the longest time was "They aren't employees, they are getting a good education for free and playing sports in their off hours!" This has long been a farce though. They would be put in made up classes with no actual work and given fake grades.