Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We Don’t Do Legacy (2012)

mitadmissions.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 87 posts

Re: We Don’t Do Legacy (2012)

#31

Post by Spooky23 »

_m8fo wrote: post #10

This is the reality: 1. High schools that tend to send high numbers of people to schools with acceptance rates less than 20% tend to be dis-proportionally represented. [1] 2. High schools that send kids to good college are more expensive (either inherently, or because they're in an expensive area). Combine these two and you see the perpetual unfairness of education. Not to mention that MIT and other 'elite schools' b…

Here's the reality. My uncle taught at Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn in the 90s. He had a class section with 90 students, which sounds crazy except that he met 30 and regularly saw 9.

One kid was selling crack. Another held him at knifepoint over a Twinkie. The rest were either there for lunch or just trying to scrape by, living in terror.

Those kids sent going to function at MIT.

Re: We Don’t Do Legacy (2012)

#32

Post by zeroer »

chayesfss wrote: post #20
zeroer wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MIT and other 'elite schools' barely teach well anyways. This is true, but there's a lot of value in being surrounded by peers who are at your level or a little better who push you to become better than you would otherwise.

Value for who, the people paying or the people attending?

Everybody involved, I would think: the students themselves, their parents (who presumably care about their kids), and any taxpayers who benefit from having a minority be more productive members of society.

Re: We Don’t Do Legacy (2012)

#33

Post by thex10 »

_m8fo wrote: post #10

This is the reality: 1. High schools that tend to send high numbers of people to schools with acceptance rates less than 20% tend to be dis-proportionally represented. [1] 2. High schools that send kids to good college are more expensive (either inherently, or because they're in an expensive area). Combine these two and you see the perpetual unfairness of education. Not to mention that MIT and other 'elite schools' b…

> High schools that tend to send high numbers of people to schools with acceptance rates less than 20% tend to be dis-proportionally represented.

It goes further back than that. I went to one of those high schools - certain middle schools are disproportionately represented because those middle schools can prepare students better for the exams. (I didn't attend one of those middle schools, so I can't comment on the presence of feeder elementary schools and feeder preschools, but one can imagine...).

Re: We Don’t Do Legacy (2012)

#34

Post by seanmcdirmid »

_m8fo wrote: post #7
joelg wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, it's probably true that the admit rate for MIT legacy applicants is also higher than the overall admit rate. It's just that the MIT admissions committee doesn't consider legacy status in admissions. It's hard to separate correlation from causation in the admit rates.

Really? Seems pretty easy to analyze. Just take legacy applicants and their non-legacy equivalents and see the admittance rates.

Difficult to do if you aren't even tracking what applications are legacy in the first place, they'd at least have to ask a sample of admitted and rejected students post facto.

Re: We Don’t Do Legacy (2012)

#35

Post by seanmcdirmid »

peteretep wrote: post #22
_m8fo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Seems pretty easy to analyze. Just take legacy applicants and their non-legacy equivalents and see the admittance rates.

If ability has a strong genetic component, one would expect a higher acceptance of legacy students.

Even if ability has a strong nurture component, one would expect the same.

Re: We Don’t Do Legacy (2012)

#36

Post by ChicagoBoy11 »

_m8fo wrote: post #10

This is the reality: 1. High schools that tend to send high numbers of people to schools with acceptance rates less than 20% tend to be dis-proportionally represented. [1] 2. High schools that send kids to good college are more expensive (either inherently, or because they're in an expensive area). Combine these two and you see the perpetual unfairness of education. Not to mention that MIT and other 'elite schools' b…

I worked at a private K-12 school overseas for a few years which was brutally competitive. We would very excitedly publish our excellent college admissions results and would always be featured prominently in lists ranking private schools in the city and the country.

The dirty little secret is that only about 70% of kids who enrolled in the first-year of the HS would actually graduate from the school. I do think the teachers we had were excellent and did a phenomenal job, but the school was designed to be impossibly difficult. The thing is, with the high reputation, the spots made available by these kids were easily filled by families wanting to send their kids in. It created a nice self-fulfilling prophecy. Anyone who has looked at school (K-12 or universities) carefully and is being honest with themselves, this sort of selection -- in all the many forms it takes -- is the real driving force behind the difference in outcomes observed in student's life-paths post-graduation.

Re: We Don’t Do Legacy (2012)

#37

Post by _m8fo »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #34
_m8fo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Seems pretty easy to analyze. Just take legacy applicants and their non-legacy equivalents and see the admittance rates.

Difficult to do if you aren't even tracking what applications are legacy in the first place, they'd at least have to ask a sample of admitted and rejected students post facto.

Ah. I assumed in this scenario we had some mechanism to determine who is a legacy applicant (or not). You make a good point.

Re: We Don’t Do Legacy (2012)

#38

Post by griffinmmahon »

Spooky23 wrote: post #31
_m8fo wrote: post #10

This is the reality: 1. High schools that tend to send high numbers of people to schools with acceptance rates less than 20% tend to be dis-proportionally represented. [1] 2. High schools that send kids to good college are more expensive (either inherently, or because they're in an expensive area). Combine these two and you see the perpetual unfairness of education. Not to mention that MIT and other 'elite schools' b…

Here's the reality. My uncle taught at Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn in the 90s. He had a class section with 90 students, which sounds crazy except that he met 30 and regularly saw 9. One kid was selling crack. Another held him at knifepoint over a Twinkie. The rest were either there for lunch or just trying to scrape by, living in terror. Those kids sent going to function at MIT.

Anecdotal and unrelated.

Re: We Don’t Do Legacy (2012)

#39

Post by PaulHoule »

Legacy admissions have become a problem for the Ivies lately because they undermine their brand.

Back in the 1980s you could count on a graduate of Harvard, Cornell, or some other Ivy to be pretty bright, but as legacy admissions accelerated in the 1990s, you started seeing graduates who were average at best. By the 2000s it was clear to the schools themselves that this was a problem because as much as the schools want the money, their brand is their most valuable asset.

Re: We Don’t Do Legacy (2012)

#40

Post by kwhitefoot »

Viewing this from the other side of the pond. Legacy admissions sounds like a strange idea and one that would surely raise eyebrows if it could be shown that a child of an alumnus (or alumna of course) was favoured over another applicant who was obviously better qualified.
Post reply on HN