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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)

#101

Post by hgsgm »

MilnerRoute wrote: post #78
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.

The A stands for "athletic recruits". It's weird that it's grouped together with the other three categories. (Relatives of alumni/major donors, and the children of faculty.) But I Googled how much of Harvard's funding comes from donations by alumni, and it's 26%.[1] So maybe the real problem is the admissions office is almost certainly, at some point, making a calculation about how likely a prospective student is to…

Perhaps a better way would be to be upfront about pricing, and honestly sell seats at auction prices to qualified applicants, plus discounts for some students to hit economic and demographics diversity targets.

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

#102

Post by ec109685 »

NoRelToEmber wrote: post #60

Let's further break-up the white student category, if any interesting correlations come up. For undergraduates specifically: Ivy League US Ratio Mean nationwide SAT score [1] Jewish 17.2% 2.4% 7.16 n/a Asian 19.6% 5.3% 3.71 1216 White (incl. Jewish) 50.3% 61.5% 0.82 1148 Hispanic 11.4% 17.6% 0.65 1043 Black 7.8% 12.7% 0.61 966 White (non-Jewish) 33.1% 59.1% 0.56 ~1141 (lower bound estimate assuming a generous 1284 me…

Why is being Jewish singled out but not any other religion?

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

#103

Post by ethanbond »

TeeMassive wrote: post #44
ethanbond wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AA was the only reason why the legacy entry system was still allowed to continue. How so? Legacy admissions will continue.

How long will this continue to be politically viable tho?

Presumably for as long as the rich and powerful are cool with doing things that benefit the rich and powerful, right?

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

#104

Post by leetcrew »

tchaffee wrote: post #96
leetcrew wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't see those two as mutually exclusive, prima facie, unless you see "culture" as a euphemism for "perpetuating white supremacy". it certainly can be, but it can also be things like haverford's honor code, which only works when a critical mass of students find it meaningful. or it can be totally innocuous traditions like u chicago's annual scavenger hunt. elite schools can accept being each other's close competitors, but they can't accept being indistinguishable substitutes for their +/- 1 peers on the us news leaderboard.

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

#105

Post by peepeepoopoo14 »

ec109685 wrote: post #102
NoRelToEmber wrote: post #60

Let's further break-up the white student category, if any interesting correlations come up. For undergraduates specifically: Ivy League US Ratio Mean nationwide SAT score [1] Jewish 17.2% 2.4% 7.16 n/a Asian 19.6% 5.3% 3.71 1216 White (incl. Jewish) 50.3% 61.5% 0.82 1148 Hispanic 11.4% 17.6% 0.65 1043 Black 7.8% 12.7% 0.61 966 White (non-Jewish) 33.1% 59.1% 0.56 ~1141 (lower bound estimate assuming a generous 1284 me…

Why is being Jewish singled out but not any other religion?

[flagged]

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

#106

Post by hgsgm »

NoRelToEmber wrote: post #60

Let's further break-up the white student category, if any interesting correlations come up. For undergraduates specifically: Ivy League US Ratio Mean nationwide SAT score [1] Jewish 17.2% 2.4% 7.16 n/a Asian 19.6% 5.3% 3.71 1216 White (incl. Jewish) 50.3% 61.5% 0.82 1148 Hispanic 11.4% 17.6% 0.65 1043 Black 7.8% 12.7% 0.61 966 White (non-Jewish) 33.1% 59.1% 0.56 ~1141 (lower bound estimate assuming a generous 1284 me…

Nationwide mean SAT scores aren't useful for analyzing Ivy League schools, where the mean is 200points hight.

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

#107

Post by NoRelToEmber »

ec109685 wrote: post #102
NoRelToEmber wrote: post #60

Let's further break-up the white student category, if any interesting correlations come up. For undergraduates specifically: Ivy League US Ratio Mean nationwide SAT score [1] Jewish 17.2% 2.4% 7.16 n/a Asian 19.6% 5.3% 3.71 1216 White (incl. Jewish) 50.3% 61.5% 0.82 1148 Hispanic 11.4% 17.6% 0.65 1043 Black 7.8% 12.7% 0.61 966 White (non-Jewish) 33.1% 59.1% 0.56 ~1141 (lower bound estimate assuming a generous 1284 me…

Why is being Jewish singled out but not any other religion?

It seems to have the highest predictive power regarding chance of admittance (a randomly chosen White is 11.2x more likely to be admitted if they're Jewish vs. if they're not).

Though for the record, those polls considered anyone that identifies as Jewish as.. Jewish, regardless of religion. You can read more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_atheism

In any case, if you can find the data, you're welcome to do the analysis for other religions/ethno-religious groups too.

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

#108

Post by NoRelToEmber »

hgsgm wrote: post #106
NoRelToEmber wrote: post #60

Let's further break-up the white student category, if any interesting correlations come up. For undergraduates specifically: Ivy League US Ratio Mean nationwide SAT score [1] Jewish 17.2% 2.4% 7.16 n/a Asian 19.6% 5.3% 3.71 1216 White (incl. Jewish) 50.3% 61.5% 0.82 1148 Hispanic 11.4% 17.6% 0.65 1043 Black 7.8% 12.7% 0.61 966 White (non-Jewish) 33.1% 59.1% 0.56 ~1141 (lower bound estimate assuming a generous 1284 me…

Nationwide mean SAT scores aren't useful for analyzing Ivy League schools, where the mean is 200points hight.

They are useful for comparing the ratio of Ivy League vs. nationwide populations. E.g. if a group had SAT scores 300 points higher than the national average, we would expect to see them overrepresented in prestigious academic positions.

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

#109

Post by ok123456 »

User23 wrote: post #74
ok123456 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were using racial quotas on general admission to try to correct for the fact their legacy admits were overwhelmingly not representative and not based on merit. Their stated goals of diversity and inclusion are a fiction meant to preserve a classist institution.

I would expect the children of Harvard students to perform above the general average academically and the children of faculty even moreso. Educational attainment is very much an heritable trait. On any practicable merit based admissions system there are still going to be considerably more applicants than open spots. Harvard also doesn’t want to become a school exclusively for the children of successful Chinese immigr…

You're saying it shouldn't matter because legacy admits have a 'heritable trait' of educational attainment in one breath, then saying there's no way to compete with Chinese students in the next.

Which one is it? Maybe it's not so heritable.

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

#110

Post by finnthehuman »

Why tunnel vision on particularities of one private institution when the presumed reason for caring in the first place is fairness in access to higher education? Harvard enrolls 1,200 pupils/year. That's a rounding error.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, obviously they shouldn't fly completely under the radar on egregious shit (e.g. racial discrimination), but too much public attention on it reinforces the lie that admission to Harvard has any importance to society.

They want to be a 43% legacy/athlete/family school? Cool. When I hire applicants fresh out of school, I already operate with the understanding that most applicants managed to skate by in their studies. And after 5 years of experience, I couldn't give less of a shit about formal education.

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