I'm amazed it was ever legal in the first place. It's open nepotism.
There's no need to be antisemitic, but I get what you're saying.
Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt
71–80 of 815 posts
Re: Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt
#72I'm amazed it was ever legal in the first place. It's open nepotism.
Nepotism is how groups function everywhere. The race-based admissions was a weird new thing, from a hyper-focused conspiracy that appears to be losing its grip.
Race-based admissions was a pretend way to remediate slavery and Jim Crow without spending any money or focusing on the harms done to the descendants of slaves. Almost everybody who thinks that the racism of Affirmative Action was a terrible thing also thinks compensating the descendants of slaves for the unpaid work and legal segregation that their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents (and so on, 10-20 times) endured would be 100x worse.
The reason for AA was because you couldn't get anything that specifically calculated and addressed the harms of slavery and Jim Crow past the advocates of "meritocracy." Was the literal pricing of slaves not the ultimate capitalist proof of merit?
Re: Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt
#73Don't legacy admissions often mean that their parents have donated significantly to the University? In a sense wouldn't that just mean that those students are essentially paying a very high premium to attend there and subsidizing the education of all the other students? I'm not against abolishing them but I do wonder if this will have any impact on alumni donations.
Large alumni donations can and often do increase the cost of education of all the other students. They frequently lead to large capital investments that then have uncovered operational costs. I used to work for one of the wealthiest universities with 100s of millions in capital improvements annually that couldn't provide functional HVAC and a fresh coat of paint to the buildings it had.
Re: Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt
#74The end of both legacy admissions and race-based admissions makes me feel hopeful that we're finally pivoting to a productive, merit-based approach.
The problem with merit is that it's impossible to determine because the circumstances of people around the world are so vastly different. If you have, say, 1500 spots for a new class, it's going to be impossible to select the best 1500 students. Some elite universities you may even have more than 1500 valedictorians. So what to do? I say you just set a qualifying point to be considered and publicize it (as standardized as you can get, i.e SAT score or similar) and then put every qualifier in a hat and select at random until you fill your spots. Nothing else should matter.
Of course this assumes that merit is actually the only thing universities care about, and I'd say that it's not.
Re: Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt
#75Re: Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hate to burst your bubble but unfortunately this just kicks the can down the road. How do you measure merit? Because [EDIT] many measures of "merit" (was: standardized testing) can be (and often are) biased by race, cultural background, and economic status. For example: Student 1 has built a fully automated chip manufacturing line in his basement. Student 2 has build a robot that solves a maze in fifteen minutes (a…
It’s as if you’re trying to make perfect the enemy of good. Standardized tests aren’t perfect but they give less privileged kids the best choice at attending a good college. The kids of the upper class and the rich will always have an upper hand compared to the poor. However, standardized tests limit how wide the upper hand is. An upper class kid still has to study and pass the test, and the poor kid can also do that…
I think you are underestimating the extent to which standardized tests can be (and have been) biased.
https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/racis...
Re: Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt
#77Legacy admissions can be gamed too with modest donations just enough to make the system gameable. With large donors it’s a different story though, those do help the universities and the number of students who enter this way is a pretty low ratio.
Re: Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt
#78The end of both legacy admissions and race-based admissions makes me feel hopeful that we're finally pivoting to a productive, merit-based approach.
this decision is not motivated by merit, it's entirely motivated by race.
and they have no intentions of using a merit based approach for applicants because that would result in an even more white and asian dominant student pool.
without the legacy pool they now have more wiggle room to juice their "merit-based" approach so that they can admit more blacks without getting busted for illegal affirmative action.
Re: Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nepotism has never been illegal.
In the private sector. In many governments, it is quite illegal.
Not sure how to phrase this. It's illegal in the US government, but it still exists all over unofficially and it's openly acknowledged standard practice in many NGOs.
It's very difficult to get a job at NASA. I forget the exact number, but something like 75% of people who "work for NASA" are contractors and only a small minority are actual government employees. In order to get a full-time job, it helps to have previous experience usually in the form of a graduate fellowship. In order to get a fellowship, it helps to have undergrad summer experience. In order to get undergraduate experience, it's very helpful to have high school summer program experience. In order to get high school experience, you'll need to live in the area and probably have some connections which means parents or family who work at the NASA facility in question.
In my experience, national labs were similar but to a much lesser extreme, often just because they're remote and sometimes antiquated and children of lab employees often can't wait to get away.
When I worked at at the UN, (NGO, not formal government) coworkers were genuinely confused about how I got a job there with no family connections in higher places. I had the same conversation with several bewildered coworkers who plainly told me about their parent or uncle who got them their job. I was told that nepotism is much, much more common and openly acknowledged in Europe than in the US.
Re: Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt
#80Next step: Ending use of athletic ability in admissions.
Sports programs at university pay for themselves. They pay for themselves because people buy tickets to games, which they do to see exceptional athletes.
Sports programs at the top ~20 universities pay for themselves (and that too just the top sports). The rest are a money sink.