701–710 of 815 posts
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Why does legacy admissions being bad justify racial preferences? Two wrongs don’t make a right.
Here's an interesting defense of racial preferences a mutual acquaintance wrote on HN some years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4758529
A decade sure does change a person, especially when their kids start to demand college money in lieu of merit scholarships.
This was regardless of whether you went to an expensive private school, public school or any other factor.
Why is merit alone not the criteria everywhere? Is membership of some group as criteria to entry not discriminatory to others?
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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.
[1]: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/10/22/asian-american...
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Yes, that should not be allowed. The best should get in, not a relative.
I concede that maybe it’s not the way “things ought to be” But what’s your legal argument for why this practice should be prohibited?
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On the contrary, when California enacted a ban on AA in university admissions in 1996, enrollment of minorities plummeted. Sure, maybe some of them would have dropped out, and some may have changed majors, but at least they would have had the opportunity, and certainly some would have been able to take advantage of it.
It seems that the only demographics that plummeted were whites and Native Americans per https://edsource.org/2020/freshmen-enrollment-csu-and-uc-by-...
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Why does legacy admissions being bad justify racial preferences? Two wrongs don’t make a right.
> Two wrongs don’t make a right. This is nonsense, in any moral framework worth its salt. Consider a simple situation: 1. Lying is wrong. 2. Someone's running from a mob that wants to kill them. They went right. 3. The mob stops, and asks you if the person in question went right. 4. Two wrongs don't make a right, so you tell the truth. Or don't say anything, and let the mob go off in the correct direction and chase t…
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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.
Harvard posted that 70% of their legacy admits were white and 30% non-white. That's higher than the population of 18 year olds but maybe not as extreme as some would think.
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> It has to do with correcting specific and massive historical wrongs in which our government was complicit, not lifting up disadvantaged people generally. And I tuned out. I’m not paying for the sins of our fathers.
You’re definitely happily collecting the proceeds of those sins, though, I’m sure.
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For students, sure, but when being hired (or funded) they all have similar “elite” tier intelligence/potential, nothing about ruling class
In tech, sure, but that’s because it’s tech. How many MIT alums are on the Supreme Court?
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 studen…