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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)

#91

Post by akira2501 »

User23 wrote: post #53
rungood wrote: post #10

> The study also found that roughly 75 percent of the white students admitted from those four categories, labeled 'ALDCs' in the study, “would have been rejected if they had been treated as white non-ALDCs,” the study said.

What it basically means is working class White middle Americans need not apply. Which is unfortunate, because there is a lot of potential talent there.

That's the apparent implication; however, we actually have no data on _who_ might have replaced those 75% otherwise. Given the population metrics of the United States, it's highly likely that a different group of mostly White People would have taken their place.

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

#93

Post by danans »

el_nahual wrote: post #82

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." (noti…

> "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).

> 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 relationship between a cardiologist and their child is fundamentally different than that between an educational institution, their alumnus, and the alumnus's child.

The former is a nuclear familial relationship and the treatment is comparable to feeding one's own child.

The latter is an institutional relationship that gives preferred access to a rarified privilege (attending an Ivy league university), not a basic need like medical treatment.

Therefore you can't use the example of the parent/child doctor/patient relationship to justify legacy admissions.

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

#94

Post by Symbiote »

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

They have "college attended" for each parent on the first page of the PDF application form.

Removing that would be easy.

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

#95

Post by renewiltord »

kinghajj wrote: post #48
renewiltord wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they should be allowed to use whatever method they desire but that they should pay taxes like any other organization.

They're a nonprofit organization, though.

Oh, in that case, I think the government should have a right to control how they administer benefits to the people.

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

#96

Post by tchaffee »

leetcrew wrote: post #88
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.

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…

So these schools have goals to increase diversity but they want to preserve their culture? Those are competing goals. Eliminating legacy admissions would be a lasting increase in diversity.

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

#97

Post by [deleted] »

simonster wrote: post #76
User23 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One reason that Harvard and the other ivies like legacy students is that they’re who grow up to be big donors. Edit: I’m willing to assume that Harvard’s admissions and development offices know what they’re doing, considering that they’ve been wildly successful for centuries.

If this is true ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_preferences#Economic_im... suggests it's disputed), the effect is probably marginal, and in any case, Harvard has the largest academic endowment in the world. It seems unlikely that it needs legacy admissions to stay afloat.

[deleted]

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

#98

Post by kemayo »

unyttigfjelltol wrote: post #85
e1g wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Article doesn't, but the study it's based on does. Recruited athletes are less-diverse than the general applicant pool:

> For example, recruited athletes, legacies, and dean’s interest list applicants are all over 68% white, yet the share of non-ALDC applicants who are white is less than 41%. All other racial groups see higher representation among non-ALDC applicants and admits than in any of the corresponding ALDC applicant and admit categories.

- https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26316/w263... page 16

My anecdotal understanding is that "recruited athlete" often functions as a way for rich people to get their kids in. Get your kid on an expensive-and-niche sports team in high school -- lacrosse, water polo, etc -- and that puts them into a much-smaller pool of students that can be "recruited" by the college team.

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

#99

Post by hgsgm »

pknomad wrote: post #84
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…

There's not what's happening. What's happening is (made up numbers, relative proportion a true)

1000 ALDC students qualify. 200 admit.

1000 non-ALDC students qualify, with equivalent resumes. 50 admit.

Thus it's easier to get in at ALDC, all else equal, and les qualified ALDC displace "overqualified" non-ALDC, or if you believe their qualifications are truly equal and those 2000 students can't be compared to each other, ALDC get loaded dice for the random selection.

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

#100

Post by giraffe_lady »

germandiago wrote: post #80
pessimizer wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the right comparison. You compare white people to another ethnicity, not to a program. 100% of white legacies that got in because they were legacies got in because they were legacies. That represents 75% of the people who are white legacies, and 31% of white Harvard students. So the comparison is between e.g. black Harvard students and white Harvard students - would more than 69% of black Harvard students…

I am the only one who thinks doing identity policies is harmful? For every person that you do not base stuff exclusively in their performance someone is out.

Obviously not, the clear majority here is anti affirmative action so don't make it out like it's a controversial marginalized position in this context.

Anyway though what performance? We're talking about college students they don't do anything yet. But how about for example the fact that black people are more likely to be misdiagnosed and undertreated unless the doctor is black. If you care primarily about harm, with that in mind, getting the percentage of black doctors higher than 5% is something you'd be concerned with, I would think.

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