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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

#631

Post by sib »

purpleblue wrote: post #376
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…

This is an easy thing to quantify. MIT does not have legacy admissions, so you can do a comparison between Harvard and MIT to see the effects of legacy admissions on career growth.

There are a lot more Fortune 100 CEOs and Supreme Court justices from Harvard than MIT, so it's an interesting opportunity to look at a correlation / causation question ;)

(Am personally an MIT alum...)

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

#632

Post by jimmydddd »

kulahan wrote: post #451
s17n wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that legacy admissions have always been an egregious injustice. One effect of affirmative action was to (partially and imperfectly) ameliorate the admissions situation. Now that's gone. As far as the freedom of association goes, that's not an argument in favor of legacy admissions but it is possibly an argument that the government should stay out of it. Given the central role that universities play in ou…

I never really understood the complaint. Rich people spend massive amounts of money to send their kid to a school. That massive, completely unnecessary investment is then reinvested across the students attending the school, who come from all different backgrounds. This is, in effect, one of the most common ways wealth is redistributed in the US. Why is it so bad? Maybe we should limit it, but the actual practice itse…

I think "legacy kid" is different from "kid of rich donor." They'll just be fewer kids of middle class alums and more kids of Middle Eastern and Asian upper classes.

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

#633

Post by r0m4n0 »

ahi wrote: post #73
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.

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.

This might be partially true but I think the bigger implication is that the donations do lead to overall more investment overall which leads to better universities. This is true with literally donations to anything…

I battle our elected officials with similar arguments. We want some safety improvements to our neighborhood roads. We ask them to work on a fix. They say there isn’t money for them. We show them there are federal grants to pay for them. They say they need staff to “manage” the grant money. End of the day, now nothing happens and we still have unsafe roads.

You can’t argue no money is better than some money. It takes a little more to see change but you go much further

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

#634

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

rank0 wrote: post #607
alex_young wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's worth pointing out that income inequality is much worse in the US; the Wikipedia page you referenced reflects this somewhat: "2020 average wage in the United States was $53,383, while the 2020 median wage was $34,612." If you define 'better economic conditions' as meaning more wealth in total, sure, the US is at or near the top. But however, if you're interested in knowing how most people are doing, the…

Median (not average) PPP income is highest in the US. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income While it’s true our income inequality is larger, the fact still remains that the median American makes more money than the median European (or any other comparable region). Ask yourself: Is it better for everyone to be richer and have high inequality? Or is it better for everyone to be poorer but more equal? EDIT:…

Comparing absolute numbers for income is a bit of a fool's errands, even when you use PPP.

The philosopher John Rawls has a famous thought experiment of choosing a form of social and economic organization without knowing where you personally might end up on whatever heirarchy it generates or contains. Rawls' point was that in such circumstances, most even semi-rational people will choose the one that makes it the most likely that they will not end up in a non-disadvantaged position, which is the fundamental concept behind an egalitarian to oppurtunity and inequality.

Given that, faced with a choice between:

1) a society that carries out substantive income/wealth redistribution so that few people (if anyone) has issues with a broad set of "basic" needs

2) a society that offers limited substantive income/wealth redistribution in the name of "high rewards for high achievement" or something similar

most people in Rawls thought experiment will choose the former.

You only choose (2) when you have reason to believe you will be a high achiever, which in a truly meritocratic society, you cannot know in advance.

So, the US is a society in which median (PPP) income is highest, but low income redistribution ensures that large numbers of people struggle to enjoy the things that US society considers "normal". By contrast, social democratic societies in Europe have lower median (PPP) income, but higher income redistribution means that far fewer people face such struggles.

Rawls would maintain that a rational person with a belief in justice would always pick (1), and that only irrationality or some (unfounded) conviction of one's own certainty of outsize success would lead someone to pick (2).

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

#635

Post by synetic »

kulahan wrote: post #451
s17n wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that legacy admissions have always been an egregious injustice. One effect of affirmative action was to (partially and imperfectly) ameliorate the admissions situation. Now that's gone. As far as the freedom of association goes, that's not an argument in favor of legacy admissions but it is possibly an argument that the government should stay out of it. Given the central role that universities play in ou…

I never really understood the complaint. Rich people spend massive amounts of money to send their kid to a school. That massive, completely unnecessary investment is then reinvested across the students attending the school, who come from all different backgrounds. This is, in effect, one of the most common ways wealth is redistributed in the US. Why is it so bad? Maybe we should limit it, but the actual practice itse…

It’s bad because government is much more efficient at this using taxation than relying on the benevolence of rich people. Harvard educated far fewer students than U.C. Berkeley and Berkeley has 1/5 the endowment. The budgets are probably more or less in line with each other but that excess endowment amount speaks to a major inefficiency in terms of allocation of resources.

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

#636

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

rank0 wrote: post #611
lmm wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> counting Iceland/Luxembourg for obvious reasons Obviously you wouldn't want to count any cases that contradict your claims.

Lol. The US is hundreds of times larger than those countries. It does t even have to be about the US… Do you really think it’s reasonable to compare Luxembourg with its 600k population to a country like Germany which has 84M citizens?

This sort of rationale would seem to suggest that you also cannot take examples of bits and pieces of the USA and compare them with the country as a whole.

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

#637

Post by kevinventullo »

onetimeusename wrote: post #581
kevinventullo wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You claim “the facts are thrown out” but then don’t cite a single hard fact which remotely suggest anyone wants legacy status to count against. Instead you are extrapolating that removal of legacy from positive consideration will eventually lead to re-adding legacy for negative consideration, but no one is actually suggesting this. You are completely making it up. The California law you cite only applies to universit…

but then don’t cite a single hard fact which remotely suggest anyone wants legacy status to count against. Accusing it of being affirmative action for white people or for "the rich" pretty clearly means people want it to count against. I think you are deliberately ignoring that the SFFA lawsuit said this, politicians said this, and even people ITT said this and clearly these things reflect poorly on the university. T…

Harvard likewise

To be clear, you are claiming that Harvard explicitly does not consider legacy status when deciding on admissions?

So, when a student is considered being cut in the final stage of the admissions process, i.e. on the “lop list”, and decision makers are provided with only four pieces of information: legacy status, athlete status, financial aid eligibility, and race; you are claiming that legacy status is included for… what, to satisfy the curiosity of admissions committee members? Give me a break. Also, you’re moving the goalposts from “legacy-based admissions are okay” to “actually, legacy-based admissions don’t exist.”

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf

For the record, I don’t believe that legacy admissions are intended to be “affirmative action for white people”, but I do think the outcome is similar.

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

#638

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

randyrand wrote: post #437
elil17 wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But favoring legacy status in admissions is a form of racial discrimination because non-white people are much, much less likely to have legacy at elite institutions.

I don't think racial discrimination is the right term for discriminating based on things that happen to correlate with race. Everything correlates with race. Height, disease, money, eye color, divorce, number of pokemon cards, you name it. You may as well call it eye-color discrimination, height discrimination, pokemon card discrimination, etc, as well. It just makes no sense at that point. So what exactly is the poi…

Actions can have racist outcomes whether or not they have racist intent.

(obviously one can argue about the intent until the cows come home if you wish, but the outcomes are more a matter of fairly straightforward facts about the world).

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

#639

Post by rayiner »

digging wrote: post #459
randyrand wrote: post #437

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. Everything correlates with race. Height, disease, money, eye color, divorce, number of pokemon cards, you name it. You may as well call it eye-color discrimination, height discrimination, pokemon card discrimination, etc, as well. It just makes no sense at that point. So what exactly is the poi…

> 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…

[flagged]

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

#640

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

dionidium wrote: post #394
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…

> 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…

The argument against affirmative actions was largely rooted in the concept that admission should be based on purely meritocratic considerations.

Legacy admissions are the opposite of meritocratic considerations, unless you believe that genetic inheritance is such an excellent predictor of cross-generational merit. Such a belief suffers from the same basic flaws as more clearly racist ideas.

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