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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

#621

Post by dbish »

JoshTko wrote: post #576
dbish wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the Iveys. They have very large scholarships if your family can’t afford it and you get in.

I'm referring to admission. Athletic achievement, high impact volunteer work, high impact internships, high SAT score, number of AP, essay writing, all of these require $$$ to be compete at the top level. A poor kid that has to work summers and part time during the school year cannot compete.

That’s why you base it on SAT and the like, and drop the other stuff. Studying for the SAT doesn’t have a huge impact

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

#622

Post by meetingthrower »

spullara wrote: post #370
tekla wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily true. The more prestigious schools have more budget to hire better professors, but more importantly, can fund top class research that costs ALOT of money. Your random college probably can't afford a research nuclear reactor, but MIT sure as hell can if they want. Getting a position as a undergrad on those research projects is incredibly competitive.

MIT is different though as they don't have legacy or athletic admissions.

False. They do have slots for athletes.

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

#623

Post by underlipton »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #484
janalsncm wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are 18 year olds today significantly less smart than 18 year olds 50 years ago? No. So why is tuition so much more expensive? In 1970 tuition at University of California schools was about $1000, inflation adjusted. You could easily make that at a summer job. So what has changed? States have stopped funding for schools. A lot of tuition used to be covered by tax money, which spreads out the cost to everyone and over m…

> So what has changed? States have stopped funding for schools. Yes - but more importantly, schools got more expensive, because people had more access to debt.

That's not an issue particular to university funding, though. Access to - and use of - debt has gone up across the board, for any and all big-ticket items, both for private and public purchases. There's a problem far larger than expansion of credit access, and it has to do with attitudes at the uppermost reaches of the planning of our economy as to how to distribute wealth - not just by geography or interest, but even by temporally. Decisions made 40-50 years ago to put the cost burden on future generations are literally paying interest today.

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

#624

Post by wpietri »

boplicity wrote: post #474
dionidium wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With the end of affirmative action, legacy status in admissions becomes much harder to justify. I just don't see this. In our society we believe it to be illegitimate to discriminate on the basis of race. We believe that to be a special kind of uniquely harmful prejudice, one that fractures the deepest structures of society, and that it therefore clears the very high bar required for limiting freedom of association…

> we believe it to be illegitimate to discriminate on the basis of race. If there is significant and lasting harm done on the basis of race, should there be significant and lasting action taken to correct that harm? What if such harm continues today, as it does in our society?

It is both wild to me and totally predictable that a reasonable question like this would get downvoted on HN.

If people are interested in this particular phenomenon, I really recommend Mills's "The Racial Contract". [1] A contractarian philosopher, Mills wrote about how the literal centuries of social contract philosophy somehow never got around to mentioning race. His well-supported conclusion is that there was always a second implicit social contract, which he calls the racial contract. But it has an epistemological dimension where one of the rules is that we avoid discussing, avoid even seeing the racial contract.

This sort of downvoting of even basic questions, let alone answers, is exactly part of that epistemological erasure that he talked about.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Racial-Contract-Charles-W-Mills/dp/08...

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

#625

Post by digging »

belorn wrote: post #529
digging wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think racial discrimination is the right term for discriminating based on things that happen to correlate with race. Fortunately for people of color, it is. You don't have to say you're discriminating based on race in order to be doing so, and the law acknowledges this. That is how gerrymandered district maps can get struck down on the basis of racial discrimination. We do actually get to look at reality wh…

gerrymandered district maps can get struck down on the basis of intention of racial discrimination. Correlation and intent are two very different concepts, and it is very dangerous to assume that everything that correlates do so by intent.

> it is very dangerous to assume that everything that correlates do so by intent.

Yes but it is much more dangerous to assume that correlation can't imply intent. Because sometimes it does.

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

#626

Post by bradleyjg »

xp84 wrote: post #606
bradleyjg wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like your model here is that we eliminate alumni preferences at Harvard, rich kids stop getting in but that has no impact on their future elite status. The smart kids miss out on connecting with them and end up the only real losers in the change. I think you should consider another possibility—-that things like getting into Harvard is how rich kids end up being elite. Take those things away from them and man…

> wealthy but they won’t be elite. They’ll be the guy working a mid level job (or none at all) I think a super rich kid who can't quite get into say, Harvard, but instead goes to some other school, is not going to be unemployed or pushing paper in middle management, they're still going to work for the family firm, start a business with family money, or cross-pollinate among the other elite families. Furthermore, if t…

But I think there's no way this will result in reshaping of class in our society to where the elites are usurped by a bunch of smart, diverse (merit-admitted) kids from the wrong side of the tracks.

I don’t see why not. America has a long track record of up from nothing elites.

> Lloyd Craig Blankfein was born in The Bronx borough of New York City to a low-income, Jewish family on September 20, 1954. His father, Seymour Blankfein, was a clerk with the U.S. Postal Service branch in Manhattan and his mother was a receptionist. He was raised in the Linden Houses, a housing project in the East New York section of Brooklyn.

> Sotomayor was born in the Bronx, New York City, to Puerto Rican-born parents. Her father died when she was nine, and she was subsequently raised by her mother, who worked long hours as a nurse to support the family.

> Andrew Carnegie was born to Margaret Morrison Carnegie and William Carnegie in Dunfermline, Scotland, in a typical weaver's cottage with only one main room, consisting of half the ground floor, which was shared with the neighboring weaver's family. The main room served as a living room, dining room and bedroom.

> Lincoln was born into poverty in a log cabin in Kentucky and was raised on the frontier, primarily in Indiana.

> Feynman was born on May 11, 1918, in Queens, New York City, to Lucille (née Phillips; 1895–1981), a homemaker, and Melville Arthur Feynman (1890–1946), a sales manager.

> [Tom] Cruise was born on July 3, 1962, in Syracuse, New York, to electrical engineer Thomas Cruise Mapother III (1934–1984) and special education teacher Mary Lee (née Pfeiffer; 1936–2017). His parents were both from Louisville, Kentucky, and had English, German, and Irish ancestry. Cruise grew up in near poverty and had a Catholic upbringing.

On the other side of the coin there are plenty of second and third generation people running medium or occasionally large companies, Hollywood famously has a nepobaby problem, and there are other bastions of inherited privilege. But we are by no means dominated by certain families the way some other countries are. We have a chance to become even less dominated by breaking the remaining pipelines, including legacy admissions (inheritable dual class stock is another one to look at.)

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

#627

Post by wpietri »

sokoloff wrote: post #448
dionidium wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever you think in theory, in practice we have an actual legacy of the extraction, relocation, and enslavement of a particular group of people on the basis of race. We fought a civil war about it and it remains the most enduringly contentious and difficult conflict -- the defining conflict, in many ways -- in our nation's history (right up through today). It will always be a topic deserving of special dispensation…

> It will always be a topic deserving of special dispensation. I completely disagree. Still after another 50 years? Another 150 years? Still 1000 years from now? 10,000? At some point, it has to be eliminated as a special dispensation topic. When exactly that is, and whether that is in the past or the future can reasonably be debated, but to conclude that it should be permanent is well beyond reason, IMO.

It's possible, but based on current progress, I don't think it has to be eliminated. Certainly, 150 years after Reconstruction we are still struggling with many of the same issues. Or reading MLK 50 years later, his writing still seems very fresh: https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....

Further, humans are social primates. As books like DeWaal's Chimpanzee Politics demonstrate, power hierarchies that seem very familiar predate humanity itself. It's perfectly possible that violently enforced group hierarchies are a natural outcome that can be based on any sort of visible difference. Since race is such a visible and obvious difference, it's plausible that for the rest of our history, we'll have to educate people out of racial bias and put everybody on guard against the emergence of the sort of racial animosity and racial dominance that persists to this day.

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

#628

Post by wpietri »

kelnos wrote: post #568
xdennis wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite revealing when you say that "fairness" (scare quotes) is not important. But that's not the only/main reason. The proponents of affirmative action are guilty of the very thing they say they're against: racism. When individuals are victims there's a system to deal with that. But you can't have "justice" for people based on birth, skin color, &c. You would have to have the same baseless criteria for discrimin…

[flagged]

Exactly. To me racism, like capitalism, is a societal system. As a white person in the US, people can be biased against me, but I don't think they can be racist to me. Except perhaps when they call me a "race traitor" for talking honestly about these topics.

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

#629

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

residentraspber wrote: post #301
ARandumGuy wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

The waste is unreal. When I was in Uni, I used to sit outside and work in a little side-of-a-building park area where, every spring, I'd watch the grounds crew pull up perfectly good looking flowers and plant slightly better looking ones in the days before a "parents weekend" or a big admissions event. They would just toss the "old" flowers in the dumpster

Corporations do the exact same thing before shareholder’s meetings.

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

#630

Post by wpietri »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #490
intimidated wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might not agree with the spirit of this an endeavor, but I have a yes/no question for you: If you were to wear your most clever, most creative writing cap, could you make a convincing case entirely contrary to your beliefs? I'm not asking whether you could write a convincing case against racial affirmative action, because I know you could handle that just fine. Instead, could write a convincing case that the grou…

I used to be a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. Their entire case is "it's not fair" in the absolute sense. That because some white folks descend from people who didn't have anything to do with slavery that all should be absolved from participating and benefitting from systemic racism. It's not an intellectual argument. It's an argument from performative and wanton ignorance.

For sure. My ancestors mostly came to the US well after slavery. The only one that I know didn't fought on the Union side in the civil war. But that doesn't matter, because in my life I've received the benefits of being white in America. And I think a lot of that performative and wanton ignorance is basically refusal to admit that sort of privilege born of luck.
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