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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

#271

Post by bell-cot »

melvinmelih wrote: post #134
ahi wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> They frequently lead to large capital investments that then have uncovered operational costs The problem is not the high amounts, but most donations can only be used for a specific purpose, so even though the endowments are high, the actual working capital will be a lot lower.

Plausible. OTOH, a institution can Just Say No to somebody who insists that their donation be used for something which is un-needed. Or will be an ongoing maintenance money pit. Or that sounds plausible...but the complexity of the strings attached to the cash is not worth having to keep track of in perpetuity.

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

#272

Post by lo_zamoyski »

"'[Legacy] has never been a primary or ‘plus’ factor in Pitt admissions of undergraduates.' [...] Pitt declined to say how many legacies are part of its entering classes."

So this may not have been a radical move anyway, at least at Pitt. Call me when Harvard decides to do this.

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

#273

Post by philwelch »

ARandumGuy wrote: post #141
ahi wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most universities have really messy financials. A lot of money gets spent on projects and programs that don't directly benefit the education students receive, or the research output of the university. Things like sports investments, ballooning administration staff, or flashy construction projects. At the same time, TAs, grad students, adjunct professors, and other staff are frequently underpaid and overworked. There'…

> sports investments, ballooning administration staff, or flashy construction projects

Construction projects are typically the result of specific earmarked donations and sports investments often create lots of income. NCAA Division I programs should be thought of as a side business that generates revenue for the university.

Administrative staff is the major problem here. It’s also where most organizations tend to dump their excess revenue, and since the US has been aggressively subsidizing demand for universities for decades, they’ve had a ton of excess revenue to dump into administrative staff.

> TAs, grad students, adjunct professors

Most academic fields produce significantly more Ph.D.’s than there are tenure track positions or other full time professional careers. As a result, the grad student or Ph.D. exists in a competitive-verging-on-exploitative labor market. The typical grad student or adjunct is in the same position as the aspiring actor who has a day job in LA waiting tables. People always claim that this is because there aren’t enough tenure track positions, but I think that’s backwards. Why would you open up a tenure track position when you have a plethora of Ph.D’s who are apparently willing to work as adjuncts? If the universities didn’t produce as many Ph.D’s in the first place, the labor market would be more competitive and they would need to offer tenure track positions.

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

#274

Post by dirtyid »

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…

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

About 30 points higher than non-legacy students whose average is brought down by affirmative action. VS Asian Americans who need to score 50-100+ points higher for comparable consideration, they're underperforming based on SAT merit.

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

#275

Post by cyberlurker »

dublinben wrote: post #249
ethbr0 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US federal government should do the same thing to public universities (US definition) that they did to insurance companies via the ACA -- cap administrative overhead. For every dollar in tuition, >Y% must be spent on qualifying direct educational expenses. E.g. teaching faculty salary, etc. If a college fails to meet that threshold, and spends too much on non-qualifying costs, they are required to rebate the diff…

The colleges will just respond in the same way that the insurance companies did, by jacking up prices. Raising the amount they're charging for premiums / tuition allows them to still maintain or grow their total overhead amount, even at a lower rate.

One would hope consumer choice would come into play and students would start shopping around for the best deal.

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

#276

Post by vhold »

banana_feather wrote: post #36
CSMastermind wrote: post #16

Don'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.

>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...

    "Prior to controlling for wealth, however, the results indicate that schools with legacy preference policies indeed have much higher alumni giving. These combined results suggest that higher alumni giving at top institutions that employ legacy preferences is not a result of the preference policy exerting influence on alumni giving behavior, but rather that the policy allows elite schools to over-select from their own wealthy alumni. In other words, the preference policy effectively allows elite schools essentially to discriminate based on socioeconomic status by accepting their own wealthy alumni families rather than basing admissions on merit alone."
So it's likely that if fewer people from wealthy families become alumni then alumni giving will go down.

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

#278

Post by dublinben »

underlipton wrote: post #149

It's funny to me how cynical and skeptical HN is about diversity-related admissions, but how quickly everyone jumps to point out the positives of legacy admissions. These aren't people who are being objective. We are now mask-off with regard to how this is simply an emotional matter centered around what is most advantageous to whatever group. The least we could do is be open about the role of self-interest here.

Don't you think there's just as much self-interest behind the the primary argument of relying exclusively on "merit"? This is likely being promulgated by a demographic who over-indexes on this dimension and is lacking in any other that may be included in a holistic admissions process.

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

#279

Post by pc86 »

w0m wrote: post #188
LegitShady wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a little bit ridiculous. There is no connection between alumni donations and capital investments except decisions that university leadership chooses to make. The issue isn't the donations, its the university leadership thats choosing to make large capital expenditures. The donations could go to other things and do go to other things. Any blame you're putting on the donations actually belongs to the people run…

> There is no connection between alumni donations and capital investments except decisions that university leadership chooses to make. Not (always) true. Direct example with Carnegie Mellon - David Tepper was upset the business school (his alma mater) was appearing to fall behind in recruiting, so he donated ~100m but tied it to the business school getting a new building/quad. Total cost to the university was well no…

What risk in there in pissing off the donor if the donor's gifts all cost you at least that much? If someone offers me $100 million but conditions it on me spending $101 million, it doesn't really matter how upset they get with me because I was never going to come out ahead in that deal anyway.

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

#280

Post by bumby »

Infinitesimus wrote: post #251
bumby wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is at least one interesting study that tried to test this. They took students who were admitted to prestigious universities. They tracked those who attended as well as those who attended "lesser" schools instead. They found no real difference in success later in life, so it may be confusing cause and effect. People get into prestigious universities because they know how to be "successful" and are not necessaril…

Can you link to the study? I'd be curious about how success is defined here. Career is a pretty narrow lens to define it by so I'd hope for something more expansive. Many of the benefits of having friends in high places are outside of traditional career ladder. The expedited (insert annoying process here), the vacation you're invited on, the unintentional influence you have on some big thing because you happen to be…

There's been a few studies. [1] is one framed in economics, so it measures earnings. You're right, though, that earnings is probably an overly blunt measure of success at best. I think the difficulty in measuring quality of life statistics is that much of it is difficult to quantify, so studies fall back to easily quantifiable metrics.

Edit: [2] expands the measures to include educational attainment and family outcomes. Reference [3] relates to socio-economic class, while [1] relates to race/ethnicity. [3] was the one I had in mind during my original comment.

[1] Krueger, A., 2012. Estimating the Effects of College Characteristics over the Career Using Administrative Earnings Data Stacy Dale Mathematica Policy Research.

[2] Ge, S., Isaac, E. and Miller, A., 2022. Elite schools and opting in: Effects of college selectivity on career and family outcomes. Journal of Labor Economics, 40(S1), pp.S383-S427.

[3] Dale, S.B. and Krueger, A.B., 2002. Estimating the payoff to attending a more selective college: An application of selection on observables and unobservables. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 117(4), pp.1491-1527

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