Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We Don’t Do Legacy (2012)

mitadmissions.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–87 of 87 posts

Re: We Don’t Do Legacy (2012)

#81

Post by _m8fo »

whack wrote: post #78
_m8fo wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few questions need to be answered (that I couldn't find trivially on Google): 1. What's the average income of parents whose students get in? 2. What's the discrepancy in the admittance rates compared to the city on a whole? [2] 3. What's the discrepancy in the likelihood of admission as a function of the parents' income? Black people and women only recently were able to go to school at all . Is it shocking they are…

1. Check out the link above. Roughly half of the students come from poor/lower middle class families. 2. If you're talking about racial discrepancy, Blacks/Latinos are certainly under-represented. If you're talking about socioeconomic discrepancy, roughly half the students come from poor or lower-middle-class families, which I would consider to be a huge win for a elite school. 3. How would you propose remedying the…

1. Yup, I did check out the link. I completely agree with its conclusion -- that Stuyvesant's model need not be scrapped for something like Harvard's. Though, I never claimed that.

2. I'm in complete agreement.

3. I'm a fan of the lottery. Fair and to the point. It has its own issues, though.

Overall, Stuyvesant was in retrospect, a poor selection to emphasize the overall point I was trying to make. Though, one must wonder why Asian's prosper in that situation and not Blacks and Latinos. It's something I'll have to do research on later. Thanks for the link, it had some good sources, by the way.

Re: We Don’t Do Legacy (2012)

#82

Post by arcanus »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #60
arcanus wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yale, on the other hand, is extremely competitive in terms of grading Nonsense. 'A YDN survey of the Class of 2006 found the median GPA to be about 3.6' http://yaleherald.com/news-and-features/features/grading-inf... All the ivies (and all US news top25, really) have grade inflation. Yale's graduate business school doesn't even have grades.

Fair enough. I should have said "more competitive". Individual performance, e.g. being ranked against one's peers, is prized more at Yale than at Harvard. I have mostly hired Yale undergraduates and lawyers--no visibility into their B school.

Interesting! I've found Yale's to be more intellectual, although also less practical. Any other schools that (anecdotally) fit a profile?

Re: We Don’t Do Legacy (2012)

#83

Post by csa »

PaulHoule wrote: post #39

Legacy admissions have become a problem for the Ivies lately because they undermine their brand. Back in the 1980s you could count on a graduate of Harvard, Cornell, or some other Ivy to be pretty bright, but as legacy admissions accelerated in the 1990s, you started seeing graduates who were average at best. By the 2000s it was clear to the schools themselves that this was a problem because as much as the schools wa…

I have been at Ivies in some capacity in each of those decades. There have been "average at best" folks in each of those decades.

While the "average at best" folks may have increased in proportion to above average folks (something I am not sure I agree with), I think it may have more to do with the admissions process being more transparent with the rise in popularity of the Internet than it was pre-internet.

My personal and anecdotal take is that I have seen an increase in the proportion of tryhard bookworms who lack creativity, leadership skills, and/or raw intellectual power. I am not sure that this is necessarily a bad thing (these folks make great worker bees), but their proportion in the student body needs to be balanced with folks with other strengths like those mentioned above.

Re: We Don’t Do Legacy (2012)

#84

Post by [deleted] »

PaulHoule wrote: post #39

Legacy admissions have become a problem for the Ivies lately because they undermine their brand. Back in the 1980s you could count on a graduate of Harvard, Cornell, or some other Ivy to be pretty bright, but as legacy admissions accelerated in the 1990s, you started seeing graduates who were average at best. By the 2000s it was clear to the schools themselves that this was a problem because as much as the schools wa…

[deleted]

Re: We Don’t Do Legacy (2012)

#85

Post by itchyjunk »

madhadron wrote: post #79
itchyjunk wrote: post #6

I was randomly checking out MIT's admission page a few days ago and drooling about what it means to go to a school like that. I saw the no legacy preference and merit based admissions and was pretty impressed. What I didn't know was this was a non-common thing. Now I am curious about what all colleges does it legacy based. Edit: No luck finding just a list of colleges that does legacy admissions but found a list for…

> and drooling about what it means to go to a school like that. As someone who bummed around the high levels of the academy for years as research staff, let me tell you what it means. It means lots of stress (and has been described as drinking from a firehose), and lots of ego, and a more prestigious brand associated with your diploma, exactly comparable to having a Gucci purse instead of one from Banana Republic. It…

I am trying to get into math. For now, I am considering my cheapest options. (In a community college with Pell Grant keeping me afloat for now). But you are right, my brief exposure to a good university was full of ego and lot of extra stress. Neither of which I preferred.

Re: We Don’t Do Legacy (2012)

#86

Post by ocschwar »

uiri wrote: post #64
ocschwar wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>1. High schools that tend to send high numbers of people to schools with acceptance rates less than 20% tend to be dis-proportionally represented. [1] > 2. High schools that send kids to good college are more expensive (either inherently, or because they're in an expensive area). True, but there's nothing MIT can do about it except stop being MIT. At MIT, freshman calculus (if you didn't AP out of it - which you nee…

At my University, there were Calc I, II and III - roughly AB, BC and Multivariate. Calc I is a review of the high school curriculum (at least for local students). I think having a quick review of the chain rule and proceeding from there would be much less of a waste of time. I can't imagine anyone who got through HS Calc failing the first calculus course (although I'm sure it happens) and I think passing the Calc II…

What is unfair is that too many high schoolers don't get the opportunity to be MIT-ready when they graduate, and thus MIT does indeed get many incoming freshmen from the elite schools the parent comment is complaining about.
Post reply on HN