Middle class people always get the shaft with these sorts of things. There’s too many of them not to! My sister was the high school valedictorian and had a 99.97 high school average. She didn’t get into Harvard - there’s 5000 valedictorians every year. She went to a great school and life went on well.
Personally, I don’t really care that there’s a magical club for rich kids. If it wasn’t Harvard, it would be something else. I do think it would be better to just have different admissions slots and just have an auditable lottery. That way as a society we can move in from tiger moms forcing their kids into Cello, squash, or whatever the hot credential is this year.
Did she have a near perfect SAT? Highschool grades and val/sal matter a lot less then ranking in a more standard way against everyone (speaking as someone who was waitlisted at 2 ivies). Personaly, I think SAT score makes a ton of sense to rank on, and we should do away with the other non-measurable aspects or stop blocking people from getting in because you're saving spots for legacies or kids of donors (or mediocre kids of presidents/VPs as we've seen).
It was 20 years ago (my time flies); we had a kid who score a perfect on the SAT who was rejected by Harvard. We assumed it was lack if leadership based extracurriculars that sunk him.
My cousins got in to Harvard and Yale. They had a portfolio of extracurriculars, service, etc.
The issue with SAT is that it correlates to IQ, and its been rules in courts that there are racial differences in performance that are problematic. Civil service exams have been similarly impacted - if there are exams, they are trivia and grammar questions.
Admissions departments at schools like Harvard are not naive and are very familiar with probably the top 500 public high schools across the country, and another 100-200 top private schools, which ones grade inflate, how their academic rigor compares, etc.
Ever notice how it's a small set of phenotypes among dogs that are chosen as high level working dogs, e.g. police dogs?
Some dogs are highly intelligent and readily trained and some dogs aren't. You can guess by looking at their phenotype, i.e. breed, although not every dog of a preferred phenotype is capable.
Someone may be gifted at dancing.
Someone may be gifted at singing.
Someone may be gifted at hunting.
Why do we insist academic pursuits are equally available to everyone if we only throw enough resources at them?
Any selective program, music, athletics, military has a minimum entry level they're willing to accept. They know you can't turn a random person into an elite musician, athlete, or soldier.
Why does academia have to pretend that academic talent is evenly and randomly dispersed?
Because our assessments of the outcomes of different phenotypes have been hopelessly polluted by 16th - 19th theories, often based on the Bible, that have caused people to unleash untold and unrelenting violence on people with naturally servile phenotypes for dozens of generations.
That being said, slavery and colonialism are clearly dysgenic. Slavery kills the brave, the strong, the honest, the compassionate, those who can see the bigger picture, those with self-respect, those who love their parents, those who love their children, those who will not be raped, those who will not be enslaved. It selects for the apple-polisher, the scammer, those who are best at concealment, the selfish, the ruthless, the wily, the drone, those who can bear endless misfortunes, those who can lift heavy weights.
"Readily trained" isn't synonymous with "highly intelligent," although readily trained is the goal of breeding. To be "readily trained" is to be obedient; ready to take the master's priorities as your own.
Even with full reparations and the lack of further obligation that would mean for the US, black people will be in the position of trying to silence that part of our brains that has been bred to prioritize the problems and the presence of white people. Luckily it was only 400 years of damage.
There are cultures that never invented the wheel, written language or permanent buildings. They are highly intelligent in their own ways, but they are as unlikely to fit into elite academic as elite academics are to survive in a jungle on their own.
There are no white people. There are Italians, Germans, Slavs, Nords, and so on. They are different groups of people with different cultures and languages.
Grouping all light skinned people into one made up ethnic group is completely disregarding their unique and special heritages, and the oppressions that happened between them.
When you follow the narrative of white slavery, you’re taking a road that leads to some racists spewing whataboutism to somehow establish that slavery in America was acceptable.
Dogs aren’t chosen, they were bred over thousands of years for the job.
The problem is that peoples assessments of whom is best suited to what doesn’t work with sentient humans as it does with pack animals or dogs. The conversation tends to degrade towards whatever social biases are held vs any meaningful assessment.
When those great minds of the 19th century were opining on this, they weren’t thinking about the stupid white/black/indigenous (with or without Hispanic) categories used in the United States. They wanted to make sure that Irish and Italian bumpkins stayed away from polite society - because they were poor and presumably unsuitable.
Bullshit dogs aren’t chosen.
My wife very carefully chooses each pup she keeps, and they’re often “culled” from her program as young adults when they don’t meet her standards.
Anyone doing working/sport dog stuff 100% chooses the dog.
For instance, a friend of ours (has a pup from us) went through 4-5 litters where she was told “I have the perfect pup for you!” Only to have it not be anywhere even close. She eventually came to us, and we did have the right pup. And now he gets to sniff out dead bodies, ride I’m helos, and find lost people in the nm woods.
Yeah, a standardized test that can be prepared for in short order via expensive tutors is absolutely a great way to rank applicants, you’re right on the money, which is great because money money money.
Criticizing the SAT as being something you can prepare for with “expensive tutors” is old-money WASP bullshit. The test-prep centers in New York City are full of poor Chinese and Vietnamese kids: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/25/magazine/asian-test-prep-.... It’s not that hard in a major city in the US for a family to scrounge up $1,000 or $2,000 one-time per kid.
What’s expensive is the kind of extracurriculars that Ivy League schools look at when test scores are deemphasized. The kids in Chinatown don’t live next door to anyone who can get them an internship at an impressive non-profit or NGO, or near college professors who can help them get published. The parents working at a Chinese restaurant can’t invest the time it takes to get a kid to be world class in some instrument or sport.
> The parents working at a Chinese restaurant can’t invest the time it takes to get a kid to be world class in some instrument or sport.
Plus those are explicitly peacocking, in the sense of being a burden on the rest of your life while having very little chance of being useful to you, other than as a flex to get into an elite college. Very very few people make a living of any kind in sports or in music.
Having been that Chinese restaurant kid myself I can promise you it would have been an extraordinarily expensive way to get an education, in comparison to just studying the same old academic books.
I had a friend with a life coach in high school and he was absolutely devastated when he was only accepted to state school. He also hated the extracurriculars he had to endure.
There are plenty of people on HN who grew up in poverty and did well enough on standardized tests through hard study to get into good schools. Why repeat false political propaganda when it's so easily caught?
Knowledge is relatively limited. A big part of it is the mechanics of the test. There’s a pattern to the questions. AP tests are similar - a teacher who worked as a grader gives his or her students a massive edge.
The norm in school is a grade based on number correct. SAT is a composite score with different weights and treatment of answers. When I took it, an incorrect answer deducted points while a blank answer was neutral.
When I was in school, the good students got 1280-1450, and the prep classes would yield 40-100 points in most cases. It’s an optimization exercise. If Johnny can’t read, Kaplan isn’t gonna save him.
Much SAT prep is free. The study materials are ubiquitous.
The SAT is also incredibly easy. I got a 1200/1600 when I was in the 6th grade while going to a inner city school. I wasn't exactly doing SAT prep then.
high school and public libraries have ton of _absolutely_free_ materials for SAT prep, this is really lame excuse.
it is not the lack of money that is holding the kids, it is lack of willpower to push yourself to top 10%/1%/0.1%.
It is hard work and not every kid can do it, considering all the leisure alternatives they got
Money==High SAT is silly meme that only lazy parents perpetuate. If money could give high SAT then there would be no need in Legacy Admissions in the first place! (Why need legacy backdoor, if you can hire tutor to get top 0.1% score?)
You can't improve that much on the SAT. Anyone can buy the online test prep courses and study them. They aren't going to turn a knuckle dragger into a genius, they're just going to maximize an individual within their band and remove the penalties for lack of familiarity with the test context.
ya I agree. I think it's a disingenuous argument to make that Harvard is the only way poor or middle class people (who often have two parents with advanced degrees) can achieve success. It wasn't historically a school to help poor people achieve 'success' and it isn't now. It's a school for credentialists.
What is interesting is how Harvard's reputation remains lofty despite these admission practices. If everyone knows that a large proportion of each class is either legacy or racially selected, why do people still think it's a top institution?
> Harvard could afford to provide nearly full scholarships for every student with 1% of the annual return on its $50.9 billion endowment. Many other elite colleges could easily afford it too. They don’t, because they want to maintain an aura of exclusivity.
To me it would be more exclusive and prestigious if they gave everyone a free ride but it was entirely on merit. Like much of Europe, and how the UK used to be (tuition in the UK is still more reasonable than Harvard though).
Harvard continues to have a great reputation because they continually produce so many notable alumni.
You ought not to think of it as a rigerous academic forging fire for the meritocratically selected brightest minds, but rather as a finishing school for America's elite.
So long as they keep producing presidents, diplomats, CEOs, senators, and so forth, they will continue to have a great reputation.
> Harvard continues to have a great reputation because they continually produce so many notable alumni.
You don’t need to be a good school to have notable alumni. They aren’t “producing” anything. Ive league schools use the same curriculums as the unknown university I went to, and from the lectures I’ve seen, the teaching isn’t any better either.
They just reject anybody who isn’t a well-connected, hard-working high performer, so it makes it look like they are producing notable alumni. Good material in -> good material out.
And, yeah, you can discriminate pretty heavily and still be selective within the remaining groups you aren’t discriminating against. It’s not strictly either-or.
And, who knows, maybe they knowingly discriminate against lower/middle class people and against asians because they perceive those groups will struggle more after graduation due to their disadvantages (targets of racism / lack of connections / lack of money) and will not make the school look as good?
Is virtue based on the input or the output? Are people from lower incomes leaving and becoming senators, presidents, ceos, etc, at a higher rate than elsewhere or does that remain the domain of the legacy students who were already politically equipped at birth?
Having a brilliant son who would have previously been discriminated against by Harvard’s admission process, I’m happy to see explicit race components removed. However, should he choose to apply and go (mostly to be connected to opportunities he otherwise wouldn’t have), if he leaves with a degree and nothing more, what good is it? The one Harvard professional peer I had came from the middle class, ended up at the same FAANG as me (who is just about as unconnected as one could be), and burned out in the process. Sample size of one, but it wasn’t an inspiring story.
I’m talking about virtue from Harvard, and so it should be the input. If you have virtuous input, then your output should also be virtuous, unless the school is doing something that scrubs virtuous habits. Of course, I’m treating this as a black box that will admit anyone over a certain criteria, but that’s not reflective of the real world. So I don’t know if it’s based on input or output - so probably both?
I do think they have less of a monopoly on prestigious education than they used to. Not that they are not considered prestigious, but compared to 100 years ago, the Ivy League isn’t the only place that produces prestigious grads, especially in STEM (they do retain more importance in traditional “elite” occupations like politics and law). Some of that is just population growth, but I think some is genuinely filling niches that the Ivy League didn’t serve well, like engineering education.
Places I think of as “new generation” prestigious universities include: Berkeley, UT-Austin, Georgia Tech, MIT, CMU, UIUC, Caltech, U. Michigan, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, UW-Madison, UCSD, etc. (Most of those places existed 100 years ago, but weren’t considered top-tier like they are now.) One thing that’s notable is that a number of these are public flagship institutions.
Exactly - public institutions are now the top institutions for many STEM fields. It's simply where they've put their focus over the past 30-40 years and it's paying off.
Harvard's reputation is absolutely diminished, you can ask around millenials/zoomers to get a sense of true harvard rep.
STEM types absolutely dont wanna go to harvard for example - why try to push there and deal with bs of racial discrimination? if you can get better engineering education at CMU/MIT/Caltech, heck even Ohio State has pretty decent engineering progam
> Young people are overwhelmingly pro affirmative action
False, because Students for Fair Admissions (the org who sued Harvard for racial discrimination) - are young people and they have millions of supporters around the world
Local valedictorian of this year's class, in suburban DFW, is going to Harvard to be an engineer. She's Hispanic for what that's worth and was sold on trying to change Harvard's engineering reputation.
> To me it would be more exclusive and prestigious if they gave everyone a free ride but it was entirely on merit.
It's not up to you. It's far easier to be admitted into Harvard than to have your opinion on Harvard admissions be something that Harvard should be concerned about. Part of the definition of "exclusive and prestigious" is that elites get to decide what it is.
The reason Harvard is a top institution is because it is an elite institution. It is not because of its quality of instruction or thought, which are just fancy decorations.
Harvard is prestigious not from the education but the research, and alumnus network. Tuition is them selling access to both, and the endowment is to fund research projects.
My personal opinion is that the problem is the elite university system itself. It doesn’t matter how Harvard does admissions. It will always be elitist and can never be fair because the number of people who can go to Harvard (and other elite schools) will forever be vastly fewer than the number who could succeed at those schools.
Giving a tiny subset of able and hard working people a magic cookie that opens doors for them is inherently unfair to all the equally able people who don’t get that cookie. It doesn’t matter how you pick the lucky few. It’s not fair and can never be fair.
The only fair thing to do is to get rid of this system and stop treating these degrees as somehow superior to those of other good schools because of Ivy League branding.
Of course the elite social networks around these schools are the other reason they are special, and as we have seen in other contexts network effects are remarkably hard to disrupt.
> The only fair thing to do is to get rid of this system and stop treating these degrees as somehow superior to those of other good schools because of Ivy League branding.
Is it the responsibility of elite educational institutions to break up elite social networks? If it is, why wasn't it the responsibility of educational institutions to fix racism or to "celebrate diversity"?
How is it "only fair" to force (or convince?) people to think more of degrees they think less of? Should I be forced to buy tickets to movies in genres I don't like because people worked just as hard on them as the movies in genres I do like? Does the state have any interest in the children of PMCs being able to attend the colleges of royalty?
You're right, but good luck getting rid of that, even in animals there is a ruling class, it's ingrained in our nature. Force it out of Ivy League schools, it will go somehwere else.
It also did not mention that people identifying as white are the only ethnic group that is underrepresented relative to the population in the US. It's odd that there is not a clear definition of what an optimal percentage of different ethnic backgrounds should be.
I think Harvard discriminates against talented people who do not have parents who aggressively push them from a young age to get into an elite school like Harvard. White students are the least likely of any ethnic group to take test prep https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/03/th... Test prep has been shown to boost SAT scores so if there are disparate rates of taking test prep, the test would bias in favor of people who have parents that put their children into it. I think that's unfortunate for talented people who don't have parents that prioritize that for them. Harvard may well have attempted to compensate for this.
The interesting thing to me is why we don't have more universities starting in the short term. We'd expect there to be a bunch of polytechnics or technical unis.
Harvard should obviously conform to fully uniform visibly non-discriminatory if it wants tax privilege and funding through the state.
Perhaps the thing is that student loans make price competition impossible.
Yeah this is an interesting question. A fair few universities were founded during the previous gilded age by guys like Vanderbilt, Carnegie, and Stanford.
If you had $10B+ wouldn't it be somewhat tempting to instead of donating to an existing university, just make your own? Buy some site, hire some profs, make it clear you are after the top kids, give a free ride to all of them, you're guaranteed to get plenty of applicants. You'll have your own Stanford in a few years.
I went to school with a guy who had all the top credentials (absolute top math guy), got into the top schools, ended up taking a free ride scholarship instead. You're simply bound to win some of those if you pay for it.
I think this is a good idea but for an odd reason. Like a subtext of this battle over Harvard specifically is not that people are in need of education but that they are in need of prestigious credentials. This is really what this is about. In some sense, having more schools to compete against Harvard might reduce the prestige Harvard has but that may not be what people actually want. They may actually want a system where two or three schools have an admissions rate of 1% because the people who get in will want to entrench their power.
I don't know if it's actually good for the US to have a secondary education system that is so cutthroat. It's just very polarizing and gives too much power to a handful of schools.
Not an accredited university. Also named after perhaps the least intellectual person possible, I think it might be hard to establish an elite academic reputation.
Why does it make you cynical? If you can bring up the poor (especially the poorest) to make them middle class, their incremental tax rate at that point is still much less than 100%. They're still far better off.
Am I supposed to be bothered that the government gets more money when they succeed at doing this? No, I will not be bothered by that. I only wish they could have 10 times the success that they have had. If that gives them 10 times the extra money, that's fine. I'll take that state of affairs, gladly.
The middle-class aren't a protected class (or even a real category in the US because the children of multimillionaires claim to be as middle class as their servants claim to be.) Middle-class kids wouldn't even want to go to Harvard if it were full of middle-class kids. They could go to Florida State for that.
To who? Nobody deserves to go to Harvard any more than somebody deserves to come to my board game night. Harvard isn't a natural right, it's an organization.
> Harvard’s admissions process is not a good way to attract the best students.
Harvard's admissions process isn't intended to attract whatever your measure of "the best students" is. Harvard thinks the best students are a mix of children from alums, extremely high achieving normies, and a particular racial mix that makes them seem visibly cosmopolitan. They were told the the third class was illegal because it was racist. Other than that Harvard hasn't been restricted; who Harvard admits is who Harvard intended to admit.
> I think the goal isn’t to fill Harvard with a particular class, but to fill it with amazing students.
Who's goal? Harvard's goal is clear. What's not clear is why it should change its standards to ones that "middle-class" kids have better access to.
imo, it's the same energy as the fight against Affirmative Action; middle-class white people demanding that the standards exclude things that they can't be good at (like being black, or having fancy parents), and include things that they can do, like doing well at their mediocre high school and taking tests.
This is cloaked in pseudo left-wing rhetoric of fairness and inclusiveness, but a kind of fairness that doesn't consider the difficulty of black lives in a country that enslaved them, and is deeply worried about the access of children who never missed a meal to Harvard.
The only real case against legacies is that it is also racist, but it is a difficult case. Even to make that case would rest on Jim Crow, because your angle would be that their legacy admissions have been tainted by past racist policy, and are carrying that policy into the present. It still wouldn't be about middle-class wish fulfillment.
When my daughter applied to Harvard, they had her interview with a local alum. I assume that there is a huge network of local alum all over the country screening applicants before the school even gives them any consideration. That will certainly give the well connected in a community an advantage.
As the article says, I agree, let Harvard put its money where its mouth is, if racial and other kinds of diversity are as important as its faculty and admissions officers believe. Let them make the choice about the money or the diversity.
I think you'll find that the factions of people running the university (which by the way is a many, many-headed beast) would rather keep the money than act according to the principles they profess. I think you find that's true for a lot of liberal principles. (and conservative ones equally)
Harvard is free to experiment with social tinkering. Just not with my tax money.
One of the explicit dynamics to 'diversity as a target' is exposing talented rich kids to poor minorities that are more likely to fail (non-meritorious selection) and then allow them to network with rich influential families (legacy admissions). This is part of the reason why ivy leagues can produce greats. Or do you really think the professors are just that much better at teaching the same material that every other college has?
some ivy's post their lectures for free online. There's a reason that doesn't produce greats either.
Anything not based on random number generators is discrimination. Do you want kids that can read? Write code? Volunteered in Mexico? Perfect SAT?
Each decision is discrimination along some vector.
Maybe Harvard plays a role in political stability of the US (oldest democracy in the world) and helping the poor, and they are fine leaving the middle class to tread water.
If you don't want them to discriminate on A, then explain why discriminating against B is better.
Schools filled with the top test takers would be quite dull.
> Louis in suits referring to anything non-Harvard as "worse than sludge".
Poor Louis doesn’t realize that some people get offered admission to Harvard and turn it down. He’s optimizing for the wrong thing (of course his character is a parody).
Well in Suits they explicitly only hire Harvard Law grads, which is a big plot point and they note multiple times that this is a dumb policy they have for traditional and marketing reasons
Personally, I don’t really care that there’s a magical club for rich kids. If it wasn’t Harvard, it would be something else. I do think it would be better to just have different admissions slots and just have an auditable lottery. That way as a society we can move in from tiger moms forcing their kids into Cello, squash, or whatever the hot credential is this year.