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43% of white Harvard students are legacy, athlete, or donor/staff related (2019)

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Re: 43% of white Harvard students are legacy, athlete, or donor/staff related (2019)

#81

Post by atleastoptimal »

tchaffee wrote: post #65
hgdfhgfdhgdf wrote: post #56

The article doesn't mention the grades and test scores of legacy students are as strong as non-legacy admitted students. "Among the admitted legacies, grades and test scores were indistinguishable from non-legacy students. Both groups had an average SAT score that surpassed 1430. Once on campus, legacy students tended to have slightly higher college grades, but their involvement in campus activities, merit awards, ac…

Sounds like a good reason to eliminate legacy admissions if the claim is that these students can compete without the crutch.

"legacy admissions" don't exist as an official thing, it's not like any school explicitly states how many legacy students it will admit. It's a term to address the phenomenon of those related to alumni being more frequently admitted

Re: 43% of white Harvard students are legacy, athlete, or donor/staff related (2019)

#82

Post by el_nahual »

Legacy status is different from race. I propose the following thought experiment as comparison.

"I need to see a cardiologist, but there's a long waiting list. Fortunately, my dad is a cardiologist so he saw me immediately."

Few people would think that this action should be illegal.

Compared with:

"I need to see a cardiologist, but there's a long waiting list. Fortunately, I'm White, so he saw me immediately."

(notice how it's still distasteful even if we replace White with Black, Asian, or whatever).

Notice as well how the situation is different if we're talking about a public hospital--in that case we wouldn't accept the nepotism case.

So there's real reasons why we would allow a private institution to have legacy admissions but not race-based admissions (and...come on. Only in the USA would that sentence be controversial!).

The rub is that in the USA many (most? all?) private institutions--yes, even Harvard--receive government support, participate in government programs, and so constitute a sort of shadow arm of the government.

The real answer, unpalatable though it may be to most, is that if private universities have legacy admissions, they should receive no govt support

Re: 43% of white Harvard students are legacy, athlete, or donor/staff related (2019)

#84

Post by pknomad »

hgdfhgfdhgdf wrote: post #56

The article doesn't mention the grades and test scores of legacy students are as strong as non-legacy admitted students. "Among the admitted legacies, grades and test scores were indistinguishable from non-legacy students. Both groups had an average SAT score that surpassed 1430. Once on campus, legacy students tended to have slightly higher college grades, but their involvement in campus activities, merit awards, ac…

I don't feel like that's too surprising. There is that saying "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree." It reminds me of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kqi_6v2RGB0

Essentially a high school student (now a college student @ MIT) solved a conjecture on distribution of Carmichael numbers. The parents of the high school student also happens to be first rate mathematicians.

I went to a southern ivy and many of the legacy students that I've met were children of doctors, lawyers, business executives, etc and grew up in a very fostering environment where they were exposed to how to behave in such an environment. I don't think it's too surprising that children would also excel like their parents.

Re: 43% of white Harvard students are legacy, athlete, or donor/staff related (2019)

#85

Post by unyttigfjelltol »

e1g wrote: post #72
hgdfhgfdhgdf wrote: post #56

The article doesn't mention the grades and test scores of legacy students are as strong as non-legacy admitted students. "Among the admitted legacies, grades and test scores were indistinguishable from non-legacy students. Both groups had an average SAT score that surpassed 1430. Once on campus, legacy students tended to have slightly higher college grades, but their involvement in campus activities, merit awards, ac…

The original study does address whether ALDC applicants are "as good" as typical applicants - > Overall, our results show that only one-quarter of white ALDC admits would have been admitted if they had been treated as a typical applicant. And on athletes - > Being a recruited athlete essentially guarantees admission even for the least-qualified applicants. An athlete who has an 86% probability of admission—the averag…

But the article doesn't deal with whether recruited athletes as a category are diverse. Probably, they are diverse and these statistics mean something remarkably different from the knee-jerk narrative in the article and many comments here.

Re: 43% of white Harvard students are legacy, athlete, or donor/staff related (2019)

#86

Post by detaro »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #81
tchaffee wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a good reason to eliminate legacy admissions if the claim is that these students can compete without the crutch.

"legacy admissions" don't exist as an official thing, it's not like any school explicitly states how many legacy students it will admit. It's a term to address the phenomenon of those related to alumni being more frequently admitted

Places like Harvard do have explicit policies to give such students advantages, so no, it's very much an official thing.

Re: 43% of white Harvard students are legacy, athlete, or donor/staff related (2019)

#87

Post by catiopatio »

losteric wrote: post #36
catiopatio wrote: post #7

So I guess non-legacy white applicants were at an even greater disadvantage for their skin color then we might have assumed. Want to git rid of legacy preference? Great. Let’s be honest, though — this is just whataboutism.

> Let’s be honest, though — this is just whataboutism. This is classism. Shockingly, institutions can have both classist and racist discrimination - let's be honest, they're both bad and need to go.

If that’s your take, great. I agree. I don’t believe that’s why legacy admissions are being brought up now, though.

I think people are trying to make the case that legacy admissions are another form of affirmative action that largely benefits white americans.

They’d be wrong, of course. Legacy admissions are classist, not racist. Being white inferred no advantage under their legacy admissions policy — in fact, the opposite, because combined with race-based affirmative action, it left even fewer slots available for non-legacy white applicants.

Re: 43% of white Harvard students are legacy, athlete, or donor/staff related (2019)

#88

Post by leetcrew »

tchaffee wrote: post #65
hgdfhgfdhgdf wrote: post #56

The article doesn't mention the grades and test scores of legacy students are as strong as non-legacy admitted students. "Among the admitted legacies, grades and test scores were indistinguishable from non-legacy students. Both groups had an average SAT score that surpassed 1430. Once on campus, legacy students tended to have slightly higher college grades, but their involvement in campus activities, merit awards, ac…

Sounds like a good reason to eliminate legacy admissions if the claim is that these students can compete without the crutch.

I think the argument is the opposite... they start with one or more orders of magnitude of qualified applicants in excess of capacity. and to meet DEI goals, only X% of those accepted can be white anyway. how they actually pick from the qualified applicant pool is fairly arbitrary to begin with. so as long as whatever on-campus KPIs they track for the legacy-admit population are the same, why does it really matter?

I was not personally a legacy admit to my college (so no skin in the game really), but fwiw I don't think it's an entirely illegitimate thing to select for. most schools have their own distinct culture and consider that an important thing to preserve. I imagine families that try to send their children to a specific school over multiple generations probably feel a stronger connection to that school than the typical graduate, so putting a thumb on the scale to help them seems like an approach that could work.

if anything, I'm more upset about how recruiting for college sports works.

Re: 43% of white Harvard students are legacy, athlete, or donor/staff related (2019)

#89

Post by maximinus_thrax »

mdorazio wrote: post #12
pbj1968 wrote: post #4

Is Harvard not allowed to admit the students they want? It’s the same situation in my local prestige college… very disproportionately slanted towards local kids that have been attending summer programs and the children of staff and faculty. So what?

Universities like Harvard typically like to market themselves as being the height of meritocracy, going so far as to proudly declare their miniscule acceptance rates. It's hard to square that with a very obvious preference for students from a specific background regardless of merit.

> Universities like Harvard typically like to market themselves as being the height of meritocracy

Perhaps their marketing sucks because as an external observer, I've never associated Ivy League schools with meritocracy.

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