Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt • Hacker News Board

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

#801

Post by tptacek » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 8:26 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #797

tptacek wrote: post #793

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Chicago suburb that I live in right now was debating a quota system to prevent Black families from moving here within my own lifetime, and was until the late 1990s spending tax dollars to subsidize apartments being held vacant for white families. The harm these programs attempt to correct wasn't in the distant past.

But what benefit are you deriving from that?

I can answer this, but first I want to understand better why it matters. It's deliberate, de jure harm inflicted on Black families regardless of the purported and actual benefits to white homeowners.

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

#802

Post by lazyasciiart » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 11:17 PM UTC

bumby wrote: post #739

lazyasciiart wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that was what I was saying. The "no evidence" comment is not made by the paper itself - it was made about a much weaker 2008 study. The linked paper actually claims that legacy admissions do increase alumni giving by implicitly favoring wealthier families. I think both papers have flaws.

The linked study literally says “our primary finding…is that there is no statistical evidence of a casual relationship.” It also controls for wealth: “after inclusion of appropriate controls, including wealth…” Maybe we’re referencing different studies. Which are you specifically referencing?

No, we're not. It controls for wealth, and then says that the policy itself affects the wealth of alumni, which makes it entirely inappropriate to remove that as a variable. In essence they are arguing that legacy preference systems are not what motivates higher donations, but they are a causal factor in the outcome of higher donations.

"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."

" we show that prior to controlling for wealth, there is a strong correlation between alumni giving and legacy preferences. This suggests that greater alumni giving at elite schools with legacy preferences is driven by the school’s ability to over-select from their own wealthy alumni populations—not a result of the preference policies themselves inducing additional giving."

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

#803

Post by vacuity » Sat, Jul 22, 2023, 12:05 AM UTC

rank0 wrote: post #678

alex_young wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I’m not suggesting we copy any one policy, but the assumption that people in the US are better off than everyone else and that it is somehow because we don’t tax wealth is kind of silly. By some measures many European nations are better off economically than we are. And many of these countries have wealth taxes. We’d also be remiss to overlook that the US had a tremendous advantage in not having our infrastruct…

Glad we could find common ground! I’m not claiming that life in America is inherently better…just pointing out that things are pretty fucking good all considered. I’m not in favor of a wealth tax though I frankly still don’t see any evidence that it improves society. Our edge as a nation comes from our insane technological and economic output. Squeezing the private sector too hard can drive away that innovation. At s…

> just pointing out that things are pretty fucking good all considered.

That might be true, but we can do a lot better in terms of eliminating poverty.

> I’m not in favor of a wealth tax though I frankly still don’t see any evidence that it improves society.

Blindly throwing money at things probably doesn't help. I daresay there are plenty of great initiatives the government could support with better spending. If money becomes the bottleneck, that's where the wealth tax comes in.

> Our edge as a nation comes from our insane technological and economic output. Squeezing the private sector too hard can drive away that innovation.

I don't think we have been squeezing the private sector hard enough. I value the notion of innovation enough that I don't support widespread nationalization of companies, but there's plenty of waste going on. Government contractors are a great example. Our unbridled capitalism has resulted in massive corporations focusing on making obscene amounts of profit. Insurance companies, credit companies, data brokers, FAANG (although some of what Google does is quite innovative), etc.. I imagine there's a disproportionate amount of innovation considering all the profit.

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

#804

Post by vacuity » Sat, Jul 22, 2023, 1:19 AM UTC

xdennis wrote: post #462

bilbo0s wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because money. Sorry. That's the reality that everyone fails to talk openly about when discussing athletics. It brings in a lot of money for the top schools like Stanford, Michigan, Texas, Alabama and so on. You find a way to replace that revenue, a lot of schools would be happy to get rid of it. But until then? I mean the B1G has a tv split of almost 100 million a year "per". Once all the former PAC12 schools unite…

But they're already filthy rich. Maybe I'm being too much of an idealist, but universities should be about education, not sport centers.

Too late now. Profits are more important. Maybe the people who benefit don't even understand where you're coming from because they're so greedy. Doesn't excuse them for it, though.

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

#805

Post by onetimeusename » Sat, Jul 22, 2023, 4:44 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #733

tptacek wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 later, turns out I was wrong. Ironically, it’s because the racial identity politics of the last decade made me realize I’m not white, and that race is such a pernicious concept that even the good white people can’t be trusted with it.

>turns out I was wrong

>race is such a pernicious concept

>even the good white people

...

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

#806

Post by jpadkins » Mon, Jul 24, 2023, 2:18 PM UTC

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #795

Auracle wrote: post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s funny how that article doesn’t mention the most obvious reason - it turns out intelligent people generally don’t get jobs as janitors, retail workers, or other minimum-ish wage jobs. Those intelligent people then have intelligent babies. For some reason a large part of our society doesn’t want to acknowledge that genetics (highly) influence intelligence.

Anyone who has lived in the real world knows that the conditions in which you grow up have a massive effect on where you end up. There are entire communities of people who live in deep poverty. It's not because they're all - uniformly down to the last person - dumb. The parents are poor, don't have a high-quality education, work long hours, can't afford tutoring, can't help their children with their coursework, etc.…

> Did Chinese people suddenly become smart for some reason?

Yes, they stopped following strict communism. They pivoted to authoritarian capitalism and got wealthier.

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

#807

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 24, 2023, 2:49 PM UTC

importantbrian wrote: post #772

Supermancho wrote: post #692

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Better by what metric? It has not been my experience that instructional quality is in any way correlated with budget or prestige. I can't explain why you haven't seen it, but it's quite prevalent due to the economy of educational resources. Let's dispense with qualitative arguments and just talk about availability. For example, try to find a class for learning Farsi/Persian in Fullerton, CA. Community colleges don'…

Cal State Fullerton literally offers Persian. They have 9 different course offerings for Persian. My grad school alma mater has 5 and it looks like the availability is pretty sketchy. From a quick look at it you'd actually be better off going to Cal State Fullerton than that particular elite institution if you want to learn Persian. I'm not sure why you think elite institutions aren't also subject to resource constra…

[deleted]

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

#808

Post by bumby » Mon, Jul 24, 2023, 8:01 PM UTC

lazyasciiart wrote: post #802

bumby wrote: post #739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The linked study literally says “our primary finding…is that there is no statistical evidence of a casual relationship.” It also controls for wealth: “after inclusion of appropriate controls, including wealth…” Maybe we’re referencing different studies. Which are you specifically referencing?

No, we're not. It controls for wealth, and then says that the policy itself affects the wealth of alumni, which makes it entirely inappropriate to remove that as a variable. In essence they are arguing that legacy preference systems are not what motivates higher donations, but they are a causal factor in the outcome of higher donations. "the policy allows elite schools to over-select from their own wealthy alumni. In…

I think you are pointing out a related but slightly different problem. The question being asked is not "Does admitting wealthy students lead to higher alumni donations?" but rather "Does admitting legacy students lead to higher alumni donations?".

The latter one is what is being measured when they control for wealth and conclude that the practice of admitting based on legacy status does not result, in itself, with higher alumni donations. But like you said, when it becomes a means to admitting wealthier students, it can result in the former. But the two questions shouldn't be conflated and measuring them as distinct questions is why it's important to control for wealth in the methodology.

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

#809

Post by lazyasciiart » Mon, Jul 24, 2023, 9:38 PM UTC

bumby wrote: post #808

lazyasciiart wrote: post #802

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, we're not. It controls for wealth, and then says that the policy itself affects the wealth of alumni, which makes it entirely inappropriate to remove that as a variable. In essence they are arguing that legacy preference systems are not what motivates higher donations, but they are a causal factor in the outcome of higher donations. "the policy allows elite schools to over-select from their own wealthy alumni. In…

I think you are pointing out a related but slightly different problem. The question being asked is not "Does admitting wealthy students lead to higher alumni donations?" but rather "Does admitting legacy students lead to higher alumni donations?". The latter one is what is being measured when they control for wealth and conclude that the practice of admitting based on legacy status does not result, in itself, with hi…

They cannot be measured distinctly when one is a proxy for the other.

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

#810

Post by dirtyid » Mon, Jul 24, 2023, 10:42 PM UTC

onetimeusename wrote: post #779

dirtyid wrote: post #720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 50-100 (really 140-450 points) is from Princeton study on Asian SAT stats for admission in private colleges vs other races. Apologies for wall of text. Alternate explanation is that particularly sneaky elite admissions boards have learned to coordinate to devalue SAT scores for Asians, they'd rather engineer their mean Asian SAT score around something not embarrassingly high as cover for other cohorts, especially…

I am not sure why that argument would not also apply to white people then where there are ~909,000 who took the test. That leaves a large number of white students who got perfect scores or were 1550+. For example 1% of the total is about ~9000 people. So a strong case could be made that Harvard actually discriminates even more against white students who are not on parity and actually the only group underrepresented b…

It does also apply to whites, hence anti AA actions was coordinated between white conservatives and some Asian Americans. One common talking point was AA + legacy was a double whammy on poor whites. Also it's not 1% it's 99+ percentile, i.e. any value less than 1%, which can be substantially less than 9000. States that have ban AA have demonstrated increased white and asian enrollemnt, so AA is indeed discriminatory towards whites. But if we use stats for institutions that banned AA in California, Asian enrollment uplift was highest, suggesting Asians are more represented on that end of SAT bell curve.

I agree at some point a 1500 and 1600 score are probably high enough even for elite universities. My broader point is that in composite admissions system like harvard, the score it self can be gamed to generate outcomes like racial composition. And institutes will figure out other ways to circumvent. But if they ever get slapped to move onto a score only admissions, that 1STD will make all the difference.