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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)

#131

Post by dirtyid »

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…

>indistinguishable from non-legacy students.

If you break down non-legacy cohorts where Asian applicants have to score 50-100 points higher, then academic performance of both legacy and non-legacy (average dragged down by AA) is artificially low.

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

#132

Post by dogmatism »

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.

Nah, I'm not working class and neither is my wife. We're professional children of professionals, but neither went to an Ivy. Both good athletes, but DIII not DI. Neither of my 2 kids, both with honestly ridiculously good grades (one had perfect ACT too) and what I thought were decent extracurriculars (all-state bands, scholastic divisional all-stars) got into even what I once considered second rate schools (Tufts, Bowdoin, Carnegie-Mellon, etc) Now, we didn't do any of the paid college admissions stuff, first because I still can't believe a valedictorian with a perfect ACT should need anything more to get into Brown, let alone BU, and secondly because I'm philosophically opposed to the whole "top college" thing anyway

Let's be honest, they're kicking ass at the schools they got into, and to paraphrase an old expression, they already started life on second base, they'll be fine regardless

I just wish we didn't live in world that sees which college you attend as some innate measure of your quality as a student or your potential, because they is demonstrably untrue, yet the myth persists

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

#133

Post by dogmatism »

petre wrote: post #79
zug_zug wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are allowed to, but I think it's great to get this news out there. The prestige of Harvard mostly comes from the selectivity, but understanding what traits they are selecting for may change the perceived value of such a degree (i.e. is this because you know somebody who works there, or because you are in the top .01% of academics)

I wonder how Obama got in, but I can see why. He's a skilled peson and I can't fault his presidency too much. So they probably select the right people? Maybd ALCDs are just generaly better prepared specifically for Harvard?

Gonna disagree here. I know a bunch of Harvard grad ALCD's. One is a great person, and a good doctor, smart, but not outstandingly so (was a football player). Another very nice person, athlete and legacy, is a school librarian. Another (athlete) works at a competing university in the development office. Another is a school teacher.

I'm struggling to come up with an ALCD I know who is outstanding in their field. The best I can do is an athlete who is now a successful politician, though I wouldn't describe her as an intellectual giant

The smartest Harvard grad I know is now a professor at a different Ivy, but he was more like the Good Will Hunting kid (but writing rather than math)

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

#134

Post by kbenson »

deely3 wrote: post #118
kbenson wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure you've identified a cause instead of a symptom. If Harvard stopped accepting legacy admissions and donors and elites as much, would that mean that the other people would get those political and judicial appointments, or would Harvard just lose status as an important institution? Another way to look at it is whether those Harvard attendees are being appointed because of Harvard, or because of the connecti…

Ok, so, "nepotism in Harvard is good, because without nepotism Harvard will not be Harvard and nepotism will emerge in another institution, and in the end it will be the same." Do I understand you correctly?

Not quite. My position is that nepotism is bad but I think while we can reduce it I think it's impossible to eliminate based on human nature, but maybe we can use that to the benefit of society.

Rather than make ineffective one of the many pipelines that elites use to meet each other and form connections which they use in their nepotism to enhance themselves and their friends, perhaps we can use it to promote a more representative set of elites through that nepotism.

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

#135

Post by snapplebobapple »

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…

Whats the distribution look like though? I can generate you two datasets that have the same average but different distributions to the point that a small minority of one dataset would qualify for admission if they were combined.

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

#137

Post by tchaffee »

leetcrew wrote: post #104
tchaffee wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 competit…

Legacy admissions have a close to zero chance of increasing diversity. The entire point is that people who are just like former students get preference. By definition it's the opposite of a program to seek out those who have a different life experience than the status quo.

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

#138

Post by kemayo »

thrill wrote: post #113
kemayo wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

"For example, recruited athletes, legacies, and dean’s interest list applicants are all over 68% white" 75% of the US population is white, so it sounds like that group is underrepresented in athletic admissions. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045222

You're looking at a misleading data point on two levels.

First, note that the 75.5% figure in that table includes Hispanic/Latino people, which not all sources will -- importantly the study I was quoting doesn't include these under "white", so we can't compare those numbers. There's a different row in your table that excludes those to get 58.9% white. This alone gets us back to the ALDC group being disproportionately white.

Second, it doesn't matter if 75% of the US population is white, but rather what percentage of the college-admission aged US population is white. (Not that people outside of the 17-23ish bracket don't apply to Harvard's undergraduate program, but I suspect that they do so in insignificant numbers.)

Here's a source that breaks out US racial demographics by age: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_101.20.a...

It says that in 2021 amongst 18-24 year olds, 52.8% were white. Thus the ALDC group is even more disproportionately white than the whole-population number would make you think.

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

#139

Post by runsWphotons »

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.

No, it won't. Plenty of legacy admits are "diverse" now. And with increase of standards from banning affirmative action, legacy status will be the best chance of many from "diverse" backgrounds.

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

#140

Post by tchaffee »

runsWphotons wrote: post #139
tchaffee wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, it won't. Plenty of legacy admits are "diverse" now. And with increase of standards from banning affirmative action, legacy status will be the best chance of many from "diverse" backgrounds.

Why are you putting diverse in quotes?

Do you have data supporting your claim that "plenty of legacy admits are diverse"? By definition the legacy admissions are very similar to previous attendees. You need to explain how that would increase diversity.

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