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Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt

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Re: Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt

#201

Post by OkayPhysicist »

laiejtli wrote: post #17

I went to a second-tier public school that never had legacy admissions. Is it really a big deal? Or is this largely symbolic? Do you see kids in your classes who are rich and visibly a level below everyone else intellectually or emotionally? (I did meet a few students who were born rich and enrolled in my second-tier university after failing out of first-tier universities, so that might be my exposure to the practice…

> Do you see kids in your classes who are rich and visibly a level below everyone else intellectually or emotionally?

Not at all. The purpose of legacy admissions is predominantly to get students who could go to plenty of universities at your tier to go to your university, based on the fact that their parents are alumni. You do end up with a minority-within-a-minority population of rich students who are only there because they share a last name with a building, but frankly those students are also valuable to the rest of the student body from a networking perspective.

I'm opposed to the change. The value in a university education is not just from "going to school". You have the prestige of the university (helped by attracting noteworthy alumni), networking opportunity (helped by having current students with connections through their parents), academic quality of the student body (having the rich kids subsidize merit-based scholarships boosts this, too).

On the whole, legacy admissions (and preferential admission of rich kids in general) benefits the student body as a whole. It's the raison d'etre of private schools, and eliminating it maybe lets in another say ~1-5% of your student body's worth of students who wouldn't have gotten in otherwise, in exchange for lowering the value of getting in for everybody.

Re: Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt

#202

Post by bumby »

savanaly wrote: post #63
banana_feather wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I do wonder if this will have any impact on alumni donations. Wonder not. "[T]here is no statistically significant evidence that legacy preferences impact total alumni giving." https://production-tcf.imgix.net/app/uploads/2016/03/0820191...

That doesn't answer the question though, does it? https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence...

The article clearly says there's no evidence of a "casual relationship between legacy preference policies and total alumni giving."

Can you explain your point further? Maybe you are aware of better data than what was used in the cited study?

Re: Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt

#204

Post by twoodfin »

julienchastang wrote: post #187

Good. With the end of affirmative action, legacy status in admissions becomes much harder to justify. [0] The number of kids entering elite universities via non-meritocratic avenues is incredible. > "[The researchers] examined four kinds of nonracial preferences—for recruited athletes, and for children of Harvard graduates, financial donors and members of faculty and staff. The researchers found that more than 43% of…

Opens a ton of slots for race-neutral preferences that can, say, pull in the top performing students from otherwise underperforming urban and rural districts.

Re: Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt

#205

Post by say_it_as_it_is »

I hope this continues. Then, we will see legislation pass to re-classify endowment funds as hedge funds. CMU has $3 Billion of assets in its endowment portfolio.

Endowments have been getting a free ride in terms of tax treatment, disclosure, and other activities that are regulated for hedge funds. Now that they're upsetting the elite class, the class will respond by re-classifying endowments as hedge funds.

Affirmative action isn't the only racist policy that universities have been practicing. They've also been racially discriminating tuition subsidization. With re-classification of endowments as hedge funds, their activities will become transparent. Scrutiny over subsidized tuition will become possible. Black students receiving a disproportionate amount of subsidy, for instance, will be an act of racial discrimination, and financially regulated entities like hedge funds cannot racially discriminate.

Re: Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt

#206

Post by Apocryphon »

thebradbain wrote: post #171
ecshafer wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to get rid of letters of recommendation as well. I would personally like to go off of only a single nationwide standardized test.

I personally could not think of a more boring way to curate a student body, but even more so than that, I think that’s completely unfair to the many, many way-more interesting people who make up top schools’ student bodies: why does Jimmy Also-Ran with the perfect score on a single test and nothing else get to go to college while track-star Olympiad with a 4.0 doesn’t?

Aren’t plenty of PISA high-ranking nations from the East Asian countries to Germany highly reliant upon placement examinations in student educational destinations? It might not feel very American, but it’s widely practiced.

Re: Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt

#207

Post by pop12121 »

gizmo wrote: post #109

I recently came across a somewhat provocative defense of legacy admissions. The argument is that the iveys are great because they bring together the children of the rich and powerful (legacy admissions with connections) with really smart and hungry students (children of the middle class, mostly). It's arguably a good deal for both. Smart kids get access to wealth and power and they get to learn how the world works. T…

I think the argument is worth considering. At the same time, it seems easier in the age of internet for kids of merit to attract sources of funding, and I expect funding will still find their way towards massive untapped concentrations of merit.

Re: Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt

#208

Post by hot_gril »

gizmo wrote: post #109

I recently came across a somewhat provocative defense of legacy admissions. The argument is that the iveys are great because they bring together the children of the rich and powerful (legacy admissions with connections) with really smart and hungry students (children of the middle class, mostly). It's arguably a good deal for both. Smart kids get access to wealth and power and they get to learn how the world works. T…

I agree with that assessment and have always considered the criticism of donor/legacy admissions as simple jealousy. Nothing wrong with taking some donors who are going to open up opportunity for regular students, even though I personally wouldn't want to be one of those kids with rich donor parents.

The bigger flaws with Ivies and Stanford (but imo not MIT or CMU) are in how they don't really pick the regular students based on merit either. I went to a top high school and saw many classmates go to those; most of them were about average but managed to pad their resumes or play some diversity card, while most of the real gems went elsewhere. I really thrived going to UC Berkeley and think that had to do with the genuinely good students around me. Still, it was obvious how the neighboring Stanford uni had way more money and connections floating around for the number of students, meaning less need to fight over resources (on the flip side, Cal taught me how to fight when needed, which was more important for me).

Re: Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt

#209

Post by ceejayoz »

onetimeusename wrote: post #54
nancyhn wrote: post #4

The end of both legacy admissions and race-based admissions makes me feel hopeful that we're finally pivoting to a productive, merit-based approach.

We're not, we're heading towards tribalism. The concern about legacy admissions is more that the legacies may be disproportionately white more so than anything else. With limited data on other schools, Harvard recently reported that legacies actually had higher SAT scores than non-legacy admits.[1] That didn't stop people who wanted an alleged merit based admissions policy from continuing to call it a racist backdoor…

> Harvard recently reported that legacies actually had higher SAT scores than non-legacy admits.

This likely indicates wealthy people can afford SAT preparation tutors.

Re: Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt

#210

Post by OkayPhysicist »

kyleblarson wrote: post #56

Yeah right. Just as schools are already working around affirmative action rulings to continue to effect actual institutional racism, they will find a way to continue to give legacies a leg up in the admissions process. With the size of endowments of top schools these days they effectively operate as for-profit hedge funds that happen to have educational institutions attached. Does anyone seriously think a school woul…

They didn't say they're eliminating open "donations for admissions" systems. They said they're eliminating legacy admissions, i.e. "Your parents went here so you can get in, too". It effects multi-generation middle class families more than the really rich ones.
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