Harvard has over $50 Billion in its endowment. If it wanted to expand its exceptional educational access across America, it very well could.
Harvard is primarily a brand for wealthy people, and they need the non-wealthy cohort to justify the legitimacy of their degree. Harvard does have world class institutions, but that’s primarily to reinforce the brand they’re selling to wealthy alumni and donors who wants their kids to enter the exclusive club.
Some parts of Harvard are world class, while others are riding on brand recognition. I've been at Harvard and several other schools, and Harvard had the highest ratio of brand to substance and in many cases was strictly inferior to the good state schools.
I remember laughing (from the Reed College library) at a radio interview about attempts to reduce grade inflation in the Ivies, because a student was interviewed complaining, "We have to study so hard, some weekends I don't even go out!"
If you take Albert Einstein and put him in University of Michigan or Harvard, he's still going to be Albert Einstein, and some rich kid from Hingham is still going to be just another rich kid from Hingham - not Albert Einstein.
On some objective level, Harvard is awesome. But it really doesn't matter that much.
Geniuses are going to be geniuses. And no matter how much resources you pour on some mediocre person, they're still going to be mediocre.
Where it does matter is that a person of equal skills from Harvard is going to get more/better jobs than the person from Michigan.
This is why I think it's fair to say it's "mostly a brand".
The value is not in the education you're getting. Harvard isn't going to make the same person meaningfully more skilled or educated than Michigan.
> If you take Albert Einstein and put him in University of Michigan or Harvard, he's still going to be Albert Einstein, and some rich kid from Hingham is still going to be just another rich kid from Hingham - not Albert Einstein
That’s ridiculous. Surely it depends on when and where you send Albert Eisenstein. it doesn’t matter how smart you are if the facilities around are up to the task to fulfill it.
> Geniuses are going to be geniuses. And no matter how much resources you pour on some mediocre person, they're still going to be mediocre.
Genius are only as much geniuses as the information they can retain, understand , and synthesize. It doesn’t really matter how much of a genius a 12 year old could be if you never teach him or give him the means to learn what an atom is.
are we seriously going to act as if certain institutions don’t allow better flourishment than others ? I’m not saying Harvard is the holy grail here but come on.
It's pretty common to have the op's misconception. Thinking that the natural progression is forward rather than a delicate balance of a large number of choices where any one or small number of total wrong choices ends you up in centuries of no progress or backsliding is so common it's even the basis of popular religions like Marxism and Marxism's progeny. I wouldn't be too hard on the guy, he's a symptom of our partially stagnant and/or backsliding time.
100% except for one minor correction - Harvard is a brand for prestige. Wealth is just one factor. They will continue to admit student cohorts that will maximize that prestige. That will include wealthy alumni, athletes, smart kids, and minorities.
The impact of these schools on the education and social outcomes of disadvantaged groups in this country is miniscule. I'm speaking as someone who went to an Ivy. If the US really wants to change outcomes for minorities, it needs to start at childcare and K-12. If the Supreme Court REALLY wanted to change shit up, it would limit public school districts to state level funding sources only and give vouchers to everyone.
Foundations aren't too great; although you can maybe give a couple administrative jobs to your relations, ultimately the bulk of money still has to go to nonprofits, and a foundation faces additional taxes and administrative fees that e.g. a donor advised fund doesn't.
Maybe you just haven't found the right country to house your foundation for tax purposes? Charitable foundations in Canada seem to be a pretty decent deal. You end up having to use 5% of the assets each year for charity but that can include an awful lot of management expense and the charitable giving doesn't have to be to other charities. You end up paying a lot less than you would have had you exposed yourself to more taxation owning the assets in your name, plus you avoid inheritance taxation while still being able to stream income to your offspring through cushy foundation jobs pretty much perpetually.
I understood. I'm saying that large endowments no matter their mission has a group of people that control that endowment. A conservative endowment can be used to leverage other positions members of this group can hold.
There is no reason both can't be true at the same time. Education is quite disconnected from research. Being good at one does not automatically imply being good at the other, but we do treat it as such.
Harvard is obviously a world-class research institute, but it seems to be funded by the wealthy essentially treating it like a social networking experience, and knowing that the label "Harvard" opens a lot of doors due to the research reputation. The education given to the "poor" and the stringent selection criteria imposed on them primarily serves as set dressing.
I would lean more towards "just a brand" IMO; would love to hear from grads though on if the actual education itself has prepared them for life in ways few other schools could.
I imagine it's of some quality, if for no other reason than the brand attracts talent and the money buys everything the talent needs. That said, what even is educational talent? Is that where the incentives are aligned for the institution, to get the best teaching talent?
Could probably find it in Google but I think there was a study that show Harvard (and some other similar universities) do offer an advantage in that it's the only way many people from disadvantaged backgrounds can mingle with people with connections, opportunities, etc.,. There's no educational advantage necessarily, but the same students going to a state school for example aren't going to be exposed to the same level of access to upwards mobility. People that are born into families with that access however, experience no additional advantage since they were already essentially born with it.
This is a big part of it; someone I know didn't even apply to HBS and kind of regrets not trying because they didn't at the time realize the scope of that network.
She ended up at Kellogg so still got a strong network, but Harvard is kind of unbeatable.
Who would even be able to make such comments? You go to one uni or another.
FWIW I don't think the content changes much between institutions. Certainly I don't see what an Oxford grad learned that some other engineering student at say Imperial or MIT didn't do.
I studied in a university in Hong Kong. What I found interesting is that our universities are considered pretty good (decent ranking), but in reality we lack a lot of courses that are offered by other universities (e.g. theoretical computer science), what we mostly have are courses in hot topics such as AI and CV, and a lot of professors can only do research and are terrible in teaching...
Exactly what I ran into at Oxford. The more decorated the prof, the less interested in teaching.
In the end the core of a degree is not going to change a whole lot, of course options will be slightly titled towards demand. Everyone who studied engineering did a bunch of math courses and a bunch of physics courses, just like everybody anywhere.
Harvard ‘buys’ faculty, that’s how they have become a world class institution. They rarely tenure their assistant professors. Whenever some professor becomes a rock star in some a second tier school, or non-elite school, HYP/S just buys these faculty with fat salaries, chairs, generous lab funds. Definitely, this makes many prospective Ph.D students flock to HYP/S.
All the talk about affirmative action is about undergrad/law school/medical school/business schools. Not so much about m.s/ph.d admissions. Because this exclusiveness is perpetuated; otherwise, Harvard ceases being Harvard. What happens if MBB recruit many UC Davis undergraduates; what if Louisiana state university law graduates become Supreme Court justices/interns at elite govt institutions.
HYP/S, uber wealthy, and their elite servant class(media, admission committees, c-level execs) don’t want to lose their power by distributing power across many schools, states, geographical centers.
Lack of diversity would damage their brand, so how can they legally promote diversity? Well they could promote poor students- affirmative action for lower classes.
I think allowing legacy while also promoting lower class students is OK. The lower class students benefit from the money of legacy student parents as well as the contact with the well connected legacy students themselves.
I could imagine that next there would be a supreme court case against this. A conservative court might then ban consideration of class. But then we are left with a Harvard that really is a just a club for rich kids. Smart kids who are not rich could try to fight against legacy promotion, but I doubt a conservative court would do anything about it.
Unfortunately in general, but fortunately in this one particular very specific case race is very correlated to lots of measurable things in America. So, I think colleges will easily succeed in promoting diversity while having ostensibly race-blind admissions policies.
The Supreme Court can I guess try to go case-by-case banning metrics. This stupid whack-a-mole game will look pathetic on their part and burn up whatever tiny bit of institutional legitimacy they have left, but at least they’ll probably fail.
>So, I think colleges will easily succeed in promoting diversity while having ostensibly race-blind admissions policies.
The diversity Harvard wants is the golden calf of American liberals: black Americans. Diversity is almost always code for black people. No other race seems to deserve any attention. See how campaigns like #OscarsSoWhite were propagandized as discrimination against blacks even though the percentage of black actors winning Oscars was nearly identical to their percentage of the population, i.e. Oscars were perfect representational of black people, meanwhile every other race was greatly under-represented.
A race-blind policy that factors in class/income will result in more poor asian students dominating placement, likely at the expense of black students. We already know from the discrimination lawsuits how much contempt Harvard has for asian Americans, I assure you Harvard don't want this kind of diversity.
> The Supreme Court can I guess try to go case-by-case banning metrics. This stupid whack-a-mole game will look pathetic on their part and burn up whatever tiny bit of institutional legitimacy they have left, but at least they’ll probably fail.
Conservatives aren't stupid enough to think they can and should solve all problems via judicial fiat, which is about as divisive, autocratic, and undemocratic as it gets. But, conservatives also know that there's been decades of terrible jurisprudence to undo, many of it done by activist judges. In particular, yesterday's ruling on affirmative action undid California Board of Regents Versus Bakki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regents_of_the_University_of_C...).
While the ruling actually declared that racial quotas violated the equal protection clause of the constitution, it simultaneously opened a massive back door to enable effective racial quotas in the name of "diversity". All universities had to do was prove a "compelling interest" in having diversity and they could continue factoring race into the admissions process. This ruling, among other things, inspired the "critical mass" argument, stating that to get the diversity benefit you have to have enough of each racial group: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/151579503.pdf
What's the difference between requiring a critical mass and having racial quotes? Well, not much in practice! In another bit of terrible jurisprudence, the court upheld the critical mass argument as late as 2015: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/cert/14-981
Unfortunately, our courts have made a lot of bad rulings in the past, and it's far past time they got undone or reworked.
What do you think the long-term trajectory is? In the absence of judicial activism I guess schools will be able to set their admissions criteria to whatever they want (other than some protections for individuals in protected classes).
> I think allowing legacy while also promoting lower class students is OK.
Why are you thinking in terms of class? Class-based conflict was the center of original Marxism. Then the 20th century Marxists, realizing that it wasn't working because capitalism was actually good for people, moved on to identity politics (neo-Marxism), with which they've had far greater success in disrupting and tearing down our society. And, now that there is finally some institutional pushback against neo-Marxism, you want to go back to classic Marxism?
I think your worldview needs to be updated to not be centered around group-based dynamics and politics. Individual meritocracy is the least corrupt system we've come up with to determine access to opportunity. How about we gate access to Harvard based on things like ability, and focus instead on making more high quality schools? This would increase the supply of quality education, which would actually make the world a more equitable place! It's amazing how many "equity"-based policies exist that actually make the world a less fair, less equitable place!
Part of the reason the above is so difficult is specifically because the institutional elite of our day want a class-based society. They want to be part of an emerging new nobility class, and they like having certain filters and gates like ivy league schools. This is what Marxism has always devolved into, really. Harvard loses it's power when we stop treating it as so special, and that goes hand in hand with fighting against those in power today who want to build a an ever-wider moat around their power.
Financially advantageous students enjoy huge benefits. Enough so that they end up in a self-sustaining insular group of their own- an upper class if you will. Do you really want this?
I understand what you are saying about meritocracy, and for sure Marxists went too far: it's fascinating looking at the what the early Soviet Union attempted: watch the Asianometry episode where they tried to ban money: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWWqhsh848E
So I think the answer is of course a balance. College admissions should mostly be a straight meritocracy based on grades and high school achievement. But some help for disadvantaged classes, plus some random chance, plus some legacy for the money and contacts it brings.
Pure meritocracy has problems: an example of this is police departments. Do you really want an all-white police force patrolling all black neighborhoods, even if all of the white applicants have better scores than all of the black applicants?
Also you ignore discrimination. Decades of redlining and other similar policies have created many of today's problems.
Harvard is about being a reproduction ground of the current elite ruling class, both literally and figuratively. Although it's also a great educational and research institution, a brand, and a hedge fund, those are all secondary considerations to its primary purpose, and analyses that don't center class miss its fundamental role in American society.
I’m glad affirmative action was shot down. I hope legacy goes away too.
While legacy admissions might not be a judicial issue, what about legislation that says no federal funding will be provided to institutions who use special standards for legacy applicants?
If you are a private institution and want these programs, that is your legal right (since it likely does not cross legal lines around protected classes), but the taxpayer shouldn’t subsidize it.
You may cheer for affirmative action's demise, but it will result in less opportunity for minorities, and less diversity in post-secondary institutions (which means less diversity in fields requiring advanced degrees) so consider that before you dance.
"Diversity" isn't an abstract number we try to grow, it's a word to describe human beings who are extremely capable of doing a thing that they're not allowed to do because of the shade of their skin tone or what side of the tracks they grew up on. You want diversity because living in a world where people get to do what they want is a better world than any alternative.
You also want diversity because you want the best people for a given situation, and the odds it's actually a bunch of rich white kids that are the best at being doctors and lawyers and whatnot is basically zero.
But I agree with my sibling commenter; ChatGPT will give you the best form of this argument, better than anything I can write.
I know the argument, the more people the higher the probability for something good or exceptional. But I havent really seen many examples of that in reality. We've got a lot more diversity in the system, but the people that rise to the top are still the same types of people, not the ones that were being advantaged by the old rules that were struck down by the Supreme Court.
Consider that every Fortune 100 company has a DEI initiative and some kind of DEI officer (dedicated, full-time role). There are so many benefits to diversity, that it's ubiquitous at the top companies.
I won't really be able to explain all of this here, but I do need you to understand that what you're arguing for is to allow more people to be oppressed because of their skin tone. I know that's not what you want, that's not what anyone wants.
I just asked it right now. It wrote me a 500-word essay with multiple important bullet points, each of which is probably a 300-500 word essay on its own. This is simply not a twitter-length topic. If you're really interested go educate yourself. If you're not, quit wasting both our time.
Please don't dissuade people from conversing over things here based on a class divide. Catharsis is nice, wealthy self-righteousness is more than infuriating, but please dont tell other people not to talk to each other. I like that, as a platform, HN fosters nuance.
Very true. I like that dang essentially sequestors topics that are political rabbit holes, but hn has... Intersectionality? That you don't find on other public forums. The college admissions stuff is so emotional, vitriol and shallow hot takes abound when they shouldn't, but seeing people with wildly separate experiences discuss things without that happens quite a bit too. I like to encourage it.
This kind of idealism is nice, but the truth is that the American government isn’t a computer we can program with just and elegant code. It’s a vending machine we have to pound on and shake until it dispenses not the just outcome we asked for, but whatever imperfect scraps it will give us.
Affirmative action may not have been an elegant way to counterbalance legacy admissions or compensate people who had been wronged, but it was the only thing that came out when we shook the vending machine, and now people have thrown it in the trash and are acting like something better is going to happen.
I think the last pieces of major legislation—laws that involved a regulatory effort* and not just shoveling money around—were in 2010. Dodd-Frank and the ACA. That’s six Congresses ago.
* or deregulatory, I’m not trying to make a partisan point
They very very much care about federal funding. At a perpetual safe withdrawal rate of 2% $53 billion generates $1 billion a year to spend. Federal research grants alone total more than $500M, and federal funding includes much more than just research grants.
A dozen or so years back there was an effort by many universities, including Harvard, to keep military recruiters off campus. When the courts ruled that this would endanger federal funding Harvard, like all the others, folded like a cheap suit.
> A dozen or so years back there was an effort by many universities, including Harvard, to keep military recruiters off campus.
I’m surprised to hear that. I know objection to it went back to the Vietnam war, but didn’t realize there might have been a recent episode.
Walt Rostow notoriously set troop levels from his office at MIT when he was “on leave” to work in the White House. That ended up causing the complete banishment of military research from MIT. Absolutely no exceptions, I mean, except that overtly military work can be done by MITRE and Lincoln labs (cough completely owned by MIT), ICBM navigation at Draper, the AI Lab and LCS sharing a building with the CIA for a long time, DARPA funding all over the place, whole departments essentially entirely funded by the Navy and the Air Force, and a continual revolving door between the pentagon and some departments.
Harvard still has ROTC students…but they have to get up even earlier and drag themselves over to MIT for early morning drills. I didn’t feel sorry for them; Harvard students don’t have to pull all nighters every week.
The richer you are, the more you demand the government's largesse. The idea they would need to drawdown on their own wealth would probably infuriate Harvard's administrators.
MIT’s endowment is half that (but it’s a much smaller institution) and still the bulk of its revenues are from the US government. It’s basically a huge research lab with a small school bolted on.
How small? Well last time I looked (2018) tuition was 14% of revenue. TBF spending on education (i.e. everything spent on students except for expenses of undergraduate and graduate students working on faculty research projects) was 16% of expenses. With their grant overhead (north of 70% iirc) they could cut tuition, but why bother? Break even is apparently fine. At least they don’t do legacies.
BTW I first looked at these numbers when I was an undergrad in the early 80s and that 14%/16% level has been fairly consistent for the last 40 years.
Plenty of Harvard students take out federal loans to attend. Plenty of professors accept federal grants for their research. While a few alumni donors might give a large amount of cash, the school also likes to brag that 1/6 students receives a Pell grant. The decision might go one way or the other but its outcome is not obvious.
Yes, they care more about legacy admits than federal funding. And probably only legacy admits for the whales. How many "rich" people brag about giving $1MM to their college, but for the elite colleges even such a big number is an immeasurably small amount.
If you don't think Harvard cares about federal funding, you don't know how money in higher education works.
Nearly all of that endowment is tied up in long-term investments and funds. It's not liquid.
Their cash flows and run rate are made up of a HUGE percentage of federal funds. Government grants and loans, research grants, and special programs. A large percentage of professors spend a large percentage of their time applying for federal money. That's where their operating budgets come from.
Ivys get a stupid amount of money from the feds, most Harvard PHD students are funded by federal money, and the university gets ~20-50k a year for each one of them. Just look at https://www.research.gov/grfp/AwardeeList.do;jsessionid=DA66... for a (small) exemple.
Harvard has according to their own estimates about $5.4B expenses per year. Their endowment would last about 10 years. Their goal to become completely financially independent (assuming an average annual return of 5% on their assets) would require an endowment just about twice that size.
Legislative actions cannot be effective in this way. Any metric the government specifies can be worked around. Harvard can say outwardly they don't prefer legacy students but they can just pad any of the subjective measurements they use like "likability" or "personality" in their favor. As long as it's not something they blatant write to each other in subpoena-able communications it would be very difficult to notice and prove they are purposely favoring whatever trait they want in students.
It might bite some influential people, but this is a generally popular move. I have never met anyone defend this use of my tax dollars. Would you care to be the first to explain why I am paying for the children of well connected parents to get a leg up in university admission?
From what quarters would this be unpopular? Obviously beneficiaries of this wouldn’t like it, but I bet it would be something with bipartisan middle class support.
It might help if you thought of affirmative action as not only righting a wrong, but also partial compensation for stealing the lives and labor of enslaved people for profit. That theft has never been repaid. Furthermore, Jim Crow, segregation, and myriad other racist policies and practices prevented black Americans from being able to meaningfully advance, while white America thrived on the wealth created by stolen labor.
Republicans like to think that affirmative action is about collective guilt. It’s not. As a white person, I don’t feel guilty about slavery. But, I do recognize a monumental theft which the victims were never compensated for, and which continues to shape our society.
Something of a hot take, but I'd contend the Legacy admissions are there to the benefit of the people who earned their place!
As someone who got into an "elite" university despite not coming from an "elite" background - the Legacy admissions are the reason people like me got the opportunity to integrate with people who otherwise wouldn't have given me a second glance. Being in a study group with a prince, going to a club with an heiress, or sculling with a billionaires' kid is not an opportunity most parents can give their children outside of sending them to a place like Harvard.
It's horrible that the world is so fixated on status, but you don't get to choose what game you play always - just how you play it. Ingratiating yourself with a Fortune 100 CEO's son can reap many orders of magnitude more benefit than being surrounded by randos who are better than him at calculus.
The value prop of a place like Harvard isn't that they're particularly good at teaching, it's the idea that, as a sufficiently smart and lucky regular person, you might have a shot at getting into an otherwise exclusive circle. No guarantees, and may people can't crack it (or choose not to, because it feels so slimy) even when given the opportunity - but Legacies are part of Harvard's value proposition.
Let's say they get rid of legacy admissions. Kids of rich and powerful people will still ostensibly need college educations. Not all of them will get into the elite schools, so they'll be spread out among more schools. That'd increase the overall exposure between wealthy and other classes, which would benefit both the wealthy and the other classes because exposure to other groups helps for better understanding humanity.
It would also encourage rich kids to focus more on their educations so they can have a better chance of getting into their preferred schools. A more educated elite benefits everyone. I see no downsides to society as a whole, just downsides for some value propositions.
Really good point. I think at a macro level it makes a lot of sense to do that and if Harvard were a state run institution the government should definitely try to share the benefit. To some extent this is what the use of national entrance exams in many countries (e.g. China, India, Kenya) do, with varying degrees of success.
The problem is, Harvard's incentive is to make a university which is best for its students - not society as a whole. They'd rather scoop up the cream of the crop in terms of affluence+intelligence and then leave the dregs for everyone else. Legacy admits are one tool they use to do that.
I sort of suspect the abolition of SATs serves a similar goal, where a university class can be curated on more than intellectual merit without articles like OP's getting published calling them out for it and the equity arguments universities have made for doing so are either facetious or misguided.
I think you first have to ask yourself why does an institution like Harvard, or Yale, or any other elite institution exist? The formal answer of course is that they exist to give the best and brightest an opportunity to learn from the best and brightest. But this isn't why these types of institutions exist.
They exist to recycle/refresh and to create elites. Any society (and organization for that matter) will have a minority group of elites. A healthy society has a function that can recycle and select for elites. An unhealthy society does not do a good job of this and the elites are inbred and only legacy. This is the purpose of an institution like Harvard and why legacy admissions exist.
Now the "best and brightest" are connected with the "rich and connected" and new elites are born. Existing elites with kids that can't make it in with legacy are recycled into the general pool in time and new elites are made from the best of the general pool.
This is the social function Harvard serves. It's a good thing if the elites are being recycled frequently enough by moving weak elites into the general pool and with deserving candidates from the general pool replacing those weak elites.
Ok, and? Remove legacy admissions from that equation and you accelerate the part of the churn where weak elites go back into the general pool. The best and brightest get to rub shoulders with each other and the strong elites. Seems like by your argument, legacy admissions are not helping society.
I mean, they sort of do already. Not everyone gets in that is legacy. They also contribute to the endowment, etc. And it's sort of their (the elite establishment) place in the first place.
But I'm not making an opinion here (on if they should do this or just how much they should do), just explaining why Harvard exists. And it isn't just for the best and brightest to get together. It never has been and it never will be.
I think you have that backwards. They exist to preserve privilege for legacy kids. They let in some of the best and brightest so that some of the prestige from their accomplishments rubs off on the legacies.
If only that then it’s a dysfunctional system. Ideally it’s a mechanism to recycle elites. Preserve elites that are of a certain quality, dispose of the low quality, and acquire new elites from the pool ensuring a high quality of elites that is not only tied to ancestry.
The cynical view is existing elites only steal from the best from the pool. I’m not sure empirical evidence supports this. The system probably over-selects existing elites. But it’s their system. I’d argue that AA was a tool to allow even more over-selection and preservation by consuming seats with unqualified and therefore uncompetitive quotas. Cultural cachet I guess and a moral justification for low quality elite preservation.
I also went to an elite university from a non-elite background, and in technology, it has not benefitted me - few of the Uber rich people I met went into technology-proper, those that did are largely mediocre and not valuable connections, and as far as I know none are VCs either.
I would have rather gone somewhere like MIT or Caltech where there are fewer legacy admissions/admissions from uber wealthy feeder schools, as I feel the value of my connections would have improved. I don’t think those schools are particularly suffering for reputation either
Yeah, it's how the rich kids get to connect with the smart kids. If it was all just smart kids then where is the value? The entire point of an institution like Harvard is to manage and cycle elites. Existing elites get to group their kids with the the types of up-and-coming kids from non-elite backgrounds but with elite level skills. New elites are made and the elites that weren't even good enough to get in on legacy will have their future lineage recycled back into the pool of non-elites.
This was in incredibly insightful comment for me, thanks!
And I think you can take it further, as it goes both ways. The value proposition is specifically the mix and ambiguity between the legacy and smart students. You’re selling the legacy students a chance to associate with (and, most importantly, appear to be themselves) smart students. And you’re selling the smart students the chance to associate with the legacy students (as you said).
Interesting angle, but feels like post-hoc rationalization more than anything.
Events where students can meet alumni seem far more productive, if slightly harder to organize. I'm sure Harvard can incentivize their alums well enough to attend, considering their sizeable endowment.
Harvard's alumni are so powerful exactly because of legacy admissions. Politicians and executives and supreme court justices generally aren't coming from MIT.
The issue is that this leads to the Harvard label being misused as an indication of skill or capability. You see, suddenly those princes aren't being hired because they are a prince - no, it is because they went to Harvard so obviously they must be very smart and capable. It'd be a lot harder to justify that hiring when they went to Random Mediocre State University instead.
I agree that it is beneficial to the lucky few "low-class" people who manage to get into Harvard, but that's at the cost of eroding the concept of meritocracy for all those who don't.
Without legacy admissions these people would distribute themselves over more schools, meaning more people would have access to them. The more they are bunched up, the fewer people have access.
Harvard wouldn't be Harvard without its legacy admits. It's how universities perpetuate their status.
Graduate becomes wealthy, their children become powerful, get into the school, make friends in their graduating class, help vault new graduates to the same circle. Rinse and repeat.
The real answer is taking some of their $$ and expanding seats. With how low acceptance rates are now, they could double their class size and still be very exclusive.
I disagree with your conclusion (imo we should make the country more meritocratic so that meeting a rich personal kid isn’t a huge perk) but must commend the spiciness of this take.
For institutions that try to paint themselves as the epitome of equity, the fact they maintain legacy is a glaring point that shows they really don't care about equity, they care about money and donations.
Ruling classes are always very concerned about appearing to be "moral", because a large part of what legitimize their domination overs us peons depends on it.
This always barks up the wrong tree: why, as Peter Thiel asked, haven't colleges with decades or centuries long track records of successful graduates been interested in expanding their student body 2,3 or even 10x over a phase in period to scale up the gifts its institution brings to the world?
For most people, outside of technical training, scarcity of "high quality" education is either artificial, or education is more about signaling competitive success by mere admission to these "elite" institutions rather than anything actually learned.
So, firstly, because that assumes that a successful university has some sort of secret sauce that makes it better at education than others, which it can apply to more students. They don't. Everyone knows how to run a university. Success is basically a coordination game, where you win by owning the point where the top 0.01% of students and top 0.01% of academics want to go. By definition, that doesn't scale.
Secondly, they have. It's now quite common for UK universities to have spin-off campuses a long way from their original sites:
The blocker for every major university expanding its enrollment is student housing. There's no space to build more dorms, and housing policies in all such cities actively blocks such efforts (look up Berkeley for a recent example of this).
They all want to accept more students. There's simply no space to keep them.
You'll have to pardon me if I find it highly dubious that given the option to attend with no guarantee of student housing for a secondary set of matriculants that thousands upon thousands more would not still _jump_ at the opportunity - even if they had to commute dozens of miles a day.
While this issue this is clearly beyond the scope of the 14th ammendment, I suspect most Americans would strongly support legislation to ban the use of family relations in university admission decisions where public funds are in play.
> While this issue this is clearly beyond the scope of the 14th ammendment, I suspect most Americans would strongly support legislation to ban the use of family relations in university admission decisions where public funds are in play.
If the Supreme Court interpreted the statutory language banning racial discrimination in federally-fund education the same way it interpreted the same language in employment, it would already be banned as disparate impact discrimination.
Also, I disagree that it is clearly beyond the scope of the 14th Amendment: yes, I’d agree superficially, but then if you took the main opinion in the recent cases at its word when it claps back at the dissent suggestion that universities could move to other bases which are not, but correlate with, race about the ruling banning racially-discriminatory treatment regardless of how it is framed, the current court would absolutely strike down legacies if they were properly before it.
(I predict that if such a challenge comes, in a case where they’d have to hear it to preserve legacies, they will tie themselves in knots to do so rather than act consistently, but that's another issue.)
Harvard can legally choose anything as a criteria as long as it isn't a protected characteristic. They could decide that only people who swear their favorite color is Blue will get in, but still not discriminate based on race.
Back in the 90s, there was a push to pass legislation banning or limiting legacy admissions, coming from a staffer in Ted Kennedy's office IIRC. Lobbyists from Harvard went nuclear and scared Democrats into opposing it.
I barely even need to point out that Republicans didn't need to be scared into opposing legacy admissions, as they eagerly supported them, for people who might be taken in by their meritocratic facade from the decision yesterday.
As mentioned in my post, the 14th amendment does not cover wealth, property or familial relationship as protected classes. This is not an issue for the courts. It would require a separate law.
Aren't the legacy students the real benefit of going to Harvard? AFAICT the social network you get from Harvard is the real benefit.
It's not really the education there that makes the name stand out: https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/harvard-university-2155... doesn't show any trends of it being particularly good at any subjects. Maybe CS theory, but that's not exactly a competitive area for universities.
Yes. Which is why these places are never serious about removing legacy students. The networks are what you're buying into at these places--if you get anything more than an acceptable education that lets you be a non-embarrassment to the network and the school, thats just a happy coincidence.
legacy student preference is obviously an issue, but my question is why haven't any billionaires started their own universities to compete with the established Ivy league schools that are rejecting talent?
Almost all of these elite private universities were started by random rich people and gained prestige over time. Modern rich people seem unambitious compared to people in the past. People forget that Harvard and Stanford are named after people, they weren't always these giant institutions
I guess for the same reason that few of them are building architectural wonders, museums, or really doing anything that isn't totally focused on themselves and their wealth. The closest you get is the "give away half of your wealth to foundations you control, as charity" move that's become very popular.
Actually building something for the future, not because it will make you even richer, seems to have fallen out of favor.
Drastically lowering the cost of access to orbit, potentially providing affordable worldwide internet coverage with performance that isn't dogshit, providing competition for terrestrial cable and traditional satellite networking companies.
If one day we do end up with colonies on the Moon and/or Mars, historians will point to SpaceX's drastic lowering of the cost of making it to orbit as one of the critical stepping stones that made it happen. Not only does it directly make such things more possible, but it increases the amount of economic activity that can occur in space, which grows the entire industrial ecosystem and indirectly unlocks even more possibilities in the long run.
Harvard didn't have to compete with Harvard. It didn't have to compete with anyone, because it was the very first institution of higher learning, founded to train clergy.
Now, with transportation across the country taking mere hours rather than months, a new college would have to compete with every college in the country.
On top of that, you need to deal with accreditation and lots of other red tape to even get to the point where you could start attracting the talent that is being rejected, meaning you are competing with top state schools and next-tier private schools.
Because it's a lot easier and a lot more fun to be Bruce Wayne as opposed to Batman.
And perhaps that's for the best, sometimes when well-meaning billionaires try new things we just end up with wacky dystopian shit at our expense, like Munger Hall :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXd7Y3HvUj4
I'd rather give billionaires the option to waste their money on yachts and meaningless trips to orbit, or give money to charity, than force that largely insecure, incompetent demographic into actual leadership positions. Would be like handing a machine gun to a pissed off chimp that just had its mate stolen.
Case in point, look at the account holders of Silicon Valley Bank who had essentially their entire corporate cash reserves, billions collectively, at that one institution. Frankly they all should have been wiped out down to the FDIC limit for such foolishness, but I'm sure as most rich people do they have a mountain of excuses. These people are largely not competent, they took stupid risks and got lucky, but the same stupidity that made them take the risks tends to stick around after they get lucky. Steve Jobs himself had the good fortune to get the rare CURABLE variety of pancreatic cancer, detected early no less, and he turned down standard treatment in favor of some new-age juice-diet bullshit. His stupidity cost him his life, and all the wealth in the world meant nothing. Thank God he never thought to open up a hospital based on his beliefs.
Starting universities was just faddish social posturing - "look how much money I have!", combined with the fact that there wasn't a whole lot you could do with excess money in the 19th century beyond building buildings. How many horses can one man have? Today the fads are space flight, or taking over a social media site, or launching a vanity startup, or buying a sports team.
There are plenty of universities - several in each state. We don't need more. Every flagship state school provides as good an education as any Ivy League. Harvard doesn't have any "secrete knowledge" that isn't taught somewhere else. So a wealthy person is better off contributing to their local public institutions, which happens a lot I think.
For starters, there are two schools like that already: MIT and Caltech.
I think most people rich enough to pull this can afford to buy their kids into Harvard/Stanford so it would take someone with a real principled interest in this approach.
Starting a research university (which you need to attract top professors) from scratch seems really challenging though because you need to build up your grants and either poach existing professors or hire junior ones. You could start a teaching or liberal arts university but a lot of students who want to go on to PHDs or take advanced classes would skip based on that.
Modern rich people likely think traditional education is bullshit and invest elsewhere. Some initiatives are more or less ambitious than others, but who needs to set money on fire launching a new university when all of the worlds knowledge is conveniently indexed on youtube for any self motivated individual to consume?
My cynical take is that modern billionaires are billionaires on paper only; not even paper, just rows in some bank database. Utilizing even a fraction of the wealth would lay bare that the wealth doesn't exist in real terms.
> My cynical take is that modern billionaires are billionaires on paper only; not even paper, just rows in some bank database.
I was disturbed back when Donald Trump was elected that one of the strains of opposition was "he can't function as president because he owns businesses. He should just own stock like a real politician."
The supposed concern is that, if you have an actual business going, you may experience conflicts of interest between your business and your political decisions. But (1) categorically excluding anyone who does productive work from holding office is a really terrible (if historically common) idea; and (2) it's not like we never hear complaints about politicians getting into conflicts of interest between their political decisions and their stockholdings.
Who wants to deal with all the controversy surrounding admissions and race and freedom of speech and sexism and sexual harrasment, politics and politicians? It's far easier to buy a sports team or fire rockets into space.
It's sad that the entire discussion around college admission policies starts and ends at Harvard. Harvard (and the rest of the ivies in general) are a special case in the education system. It is private, has possibly the strongest brand in the world and a $50B+ war chest. It also graduates a few thousand students every year. It is a university by the rich and for the rich. Harvard is really not what we should be using as the barometer for education for the masses.
The conversation should instead be focused on admissions and funding for the hundreds of public universities in the country. It's the responsibility of your state's university system to educate you, not Harvard. If you have a problem, knock on the doors of your state legislature instead. Why exactly does a university fully funded by taxpayer dollars have a system of legacy admissions?
"[...] recruited athletes, legacies, those on the dean’s interest list, and children of faculty and staff (ALDCs). Among white admits, over 43% are ALDC."
Nearly half of white students get (got) a VIP lane into Harvard.
Nearly half of admitted white students at Harvard got in via a VIP lane, which is really high.
But that doesn't necessarily tell the story for what it would be like to apply to Harvard as a white student. There is a subtle yet important distinction in this.
I would argue that recruited athletes maybe get a pass on being a “VIP lane.”
Sure, college is about academics, but someone who spends a lot of time mastering a sport (and is gifted at it) isn’t that different from someone gifted at math and working at it.
I feel like HN may disagree, but not all athletes are 2.0 GPA students who relied purely on height to get in somewhere and have never worked hard.
Nobody doubts that atheletes often had to train hard.
But you actually posted the counterargument by yourself:
> Sure, college is about academics
Exactly: college is about academics and not sports, so athlets should only get a "VIP lane" for academic achievement/potential and not for athletic achievement/potential.
I really disagree that Harvard is about academics. Harvard is about creating the next generation of American elite. They're looking for students who will have successful careers. I don't have data but reasonable to assume that athletes at the top of their game will find success in other areas. Same reason they don't just accept the students with the highest test scores.
I think the average accepted GPA at top business schools for MBAs is all the argument I need to see that academics has as much influence on career success as athletic achievement.
The CEOs are the future are more people skills related than anything else. If Harvard was all purely academically driven people, it would just create professors. Not exactly the college goal.
> If Harvard was all purely academically driven people, it would just create professors. Not exactly the college goal.
I am rather used to the German academic culture, but from this perspective I rather say: this is by the self-understanding of universities exactly the central purpose of colleges/universities (the rest is considered to be side gigs).
> but someone who spends a lot of time mastering a sport (and is gifted at it) isn’t that different from someone gifted at math and working at it.
Except in the stuff that actually matters in the context of going to school -- your schoolwork.
> I feel like HN may disagree, but not all athletes are 2.0 GPA students
Yeah it's not all of them but you might want to take a gander at football/basketball players at the P5 level. There are a huge number of them that are, shall we say, not exactly college material. The schools shove them in basket weaving majors and assign an army of tutors to keep them academically eligible.
I'd be curious to know how much the ~25pt asian-white SAT score gap is explained by ALDC students. In other words-- how much harder is it for a non-ALDC asian student to get into Harvard than a non-ALDC white student?
You might say nearly half of white student got a VIP lane but that doesn't mean it's easier to get into Harvard when you are white. In fact if you remove legacy admissions from the pool and calculate the % of admitted people among those who needed to go through the full process you will see the numbers are heavily stacked against white and Asians.
It's not like you can choose to be in a group that benefits from those legacy admissions when you're white. That's why the race based rhetoric is so dangerous to fairness - just because it's easier to some people who share some physical characteristics with you doesn't mean it's in any way easier for you. Part of the political spectrum wants to even turn it against you.
Btw I think private schools should admit whoever they want as long as they don't discriminate by race/gender/religious affiliation/sexuality and other features specified by law.
If they want to be a private club for children of their wealthy donors - let's be it.
The problem is elsewhere: degree should matter less. It's better to focus on attacking this one. It's just can't be good that decisions you or your parents made before you're even 18 shape your whole professional life in such radical way.
What do you mean "undeserving"? What's bad or morally wrong about being a person born into money vs a "successful" one who, as it almost always the case, scammed his way into it?
From the group of wealthy people i know, heirs are the best ones from a moral side. Next on are the group of crypto con artists. Then all the rest...
Ohh, now what are the odds a black person you meet at Harvard are deserving of their place in the world?
Anyway, it's not really a coin flip. Per this article 25% of legacies would make it on their own. And why aren't athletes deserving of their place in the world? And odds are staff children have a goodish chance of getting in on their own.
I would argue that athletes are deserving in this framing. They were outstanding enough in a particular way to earn a spot at the most prestigious school in the country.
Because you're good at football you get free entry into a university? I can understand a football school or something, but why do they need to get into Harvard?
Just because I'm an excellent coder (I wish!) should not mean I can get into the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.
Harvard's admission goal is to find the most successful people in the world, not the most successful academics. Top athletes are very successful, so yes, they probably deserve admission.
What I do not agree is that athletes should have a VIP lane to admission. Either they make it in like everyone else or the rules for everyone need to be changed to reflect the "most successful people".
The rules largely do reflect "most successful people". Harvard commonly admits people who are spectacular in non academic ways. Athletes are just the tip of the iceberg, they'll admit people with successful business, they'll admit students who lead popular political movements, they'll accept legacies because they're very likely to be successful. Harvard has never just accepted the top test scores for this exact reason. It just turns out the academic success is a good predictor for general success and there aren't tons of 18 year olds with tons of general success so a lot of the admits are from academic success.
"It just turns out the academic success is a good predictor for general success"
It turns out that this is not the case and a myth.
"Last month, accountancy firm Ernst & Young, one of the UK’s biggest graduate employers, announced that they were to scrap a requirement of at least a 2:1 from its graduate application process. The company claimed there was no evidence that academic success at university was linked to achievement in professional assessments." Guardian, Sep 2015
The one thing that Harvard is useful for are the connections you make in your time at Harvard, start something with the people you meet there and other people from Harvard you meet that help you with your career.
These discussions have never been about fairness, it’s about special interest groups getting what they want.
Believe it or not, but American universities have never been about simply taking the highest scorers. They want their graduates to be among the elite in all areas, which inherently requires representation from all relevant backgrounds.
If you want elite artists it doesn’t serve that interest necessarily to pick a mediocre artist with a perfect SAT vs award winning high school artist with mediocre grades.
Actually, Harvard was about taking the highest scorers until the growing number of Jewish students at Harvard would “ruin the college.”, according to its president.
Though I personally disagree with their opinion then private schools are free to do as they like. Wellesley college for example does not take men at all, half the population.
> These discussions have never been about fairness, it’s about special interest groups getting what they want.
Ascribing intentions to everyone who takes your opposite point isn't an honest way to discuss things. There are many, many people who care about fairness, not about special interest groups getting what they want.
All interest groups will argue that whay they want is "fair". There is no impartial group "outside" the system with an objective fair view, and this includes the supreme court. The discussions will never be about fairness, because there's no such thing.
So we can't look at the statistical distributions of students and the entire population to see whether individual groups have statistically significant advantages? Why not? Even if we can't get to 100% fairness, we can move away a bit from unfairness.
Not sure I understand this take. Maybe you're under the impression that Harvard is trying to maximize academic success? They're not. They're trying to maximize alumni power and career success. It's quite reasonable to assume that someone who is the best in the world at a sport will be able to succeed at other things they focus on.
To me, a more interesting question is how the students do after four years. Are the legacy students clustered toward the bottom 20% of the class? Are they evenly distributed in a way that suggests that legacy status didn't matter? Or did they do better, at least on average?
The admissions formula is so non-scientific that I don't think you can measure whether they would have gotten in or not.
Really? Pretty much every school I've ever seen has a special office of tutors that takes care of the various affirmative action admits. And also athletes. Definitely athletes. I don't think I've ever seen any such office for legacy students. Ever. Or even heard about some covert version.
Can you explain a scenario where this might be the case? The only one I can imagine is assuming that legacy students are rich and so they can just toss around more money on private tutors. Perhaps. But then the right statement is to say that rich students have better access.
That's the point... They're accepted because their family resources make them more likely to be successful which is what Harvard is trying to select for.
The rhetorical pivot here is really stunning. Seemingly the same people who 24 hours ago held that Elite Universities are Drowning Themselves in a Toxic Woke Culture...
... are now, without irony or introspection, arguing that, no, Elite Universities are Cloistered Hives of In-Group Kleptocracy.
The Ivies are about reproducing their own power and influence, not about "merit". Merit plays a role in that, but accepting rich kids with influential parents, even if the kid is a dumbass, still advances their goals by creating network effects with the parent.
This is why they do bullshit like reject Chelsea Manning for a fellowship and accept Sean Spicer instead. They are laser focused on being a hub of establishment influence, not about being "right".
This is why Brown just appointed Ashish Jha as their Dean of Public Health when he has demonstrably contributed to the deaths of many many people without resolving the pandemic. Why would you appoint a loser? Because he has an in with establishment power and did what they wanted.
Yes. As much as the idea of legacy admissions offends my personal sensibilities, they do in fact provide a good deal of value to the institutions and even some to the other students.
Part of the reason Harvard is appealing is that you can rub shoulders with the establishment. For that to work, the children of the establishment have to be admitted.
I don't like it, but it does make sense and add value that many are looking for.
That's kind of my point. This dude is a COVID minimizer and that's why he's been praised institutionally. He objectively failed at his job and helped move the US COVID response to the private market, so now the pandemic is invisible and few of the so-called "tools" are available to people.
>Ashish Jha ... has demonstrably contributed to the deaths of many many people without resolving the pandemic
Considering he was one of the early voices calling for the lockdown, which probably did save millions of lives (remember, flattening the curve helped prevent our medical system from being even more overwhelmed than it was), and the pandemic is functionally down to the same threat level as seasonal viruses, this is a pretty bad take.
> pandemic is functionally down to the same threat level as seasonal viruses
This is propaganda produced by the white house including Jha. The fatality rate when vaccinated is the same as the flu unvaccinated, assuming reasonable vaccine match (people aren't updating their vaccinations, so that will drift) or constant infections (long COVID). This view also omits the wild transmissibility of COVID vs flu, making is much worse even with the same IFR. Severity * number of people infected = impact. COVID reinfections can happen multiple times a year and have little relation to seasonality. Worse than flu.
Most people expected to catch the flu once every few years (maybe once a decade). People are getting COVID at increasingly rapid rates. New data from Japan said reinfections are possible within 3 months.
Yes people are tired of the pandemic, but the messaging you have been given is designed to protect the economy. Obviously. Other people, rich people, making money off your deliberately constructed ignorance of the basic facts of our situation are making stacks. Jha helped do this and that's why he is celebrated by elites.
I have HTTPS-everywhere and the HTTPS version of this page has an SSL certificate that expired 2 years ago. Maybe with a smaller legacy student fraction they could keep their SSL up to date!
What would Harvard look like without the contributions from the people who make these students legacies? Serious question.
Seems like it's just part of the cost of accepting the money from donors.
Everyone wants the brand of Harvard without donating a couple million. There is your avenue to compete for admission. It's their place, why do people feel entitled to make their own rules to get in?
Seriously, just go somewhere else. Harvard is status without necessarily having substance. Clamoring to get in only lends to the status.
People complaining about the fairness about legacies and donor children miss the point that these people are half the reasons people care about these top private schools.
If you want a meritocratic institution that is actually reasonably priced and provide great educations, then that's what a state school is for. Or like the few private institutions that are actually meritocratic (MIT, caltech)
Elite schools are for the children of elites who will inherit some amount of that power (political, wealth, ect) and for a small cream of normal people who have the iq, eq and luck to be chosen. The goal is to let these people mix. That way in 20 years after graduation when a brilliant mathematician has discovers a powerful algorithm that he has an inkling that it could apply to the stock market, he can phone up a college roommate that had an extremely wealthy dad in finance. The rich heir roommate can join and fund the venture that might billions on the stock market. Or the fact that an official in the state department went to college with the then daughter of South Africa's president, chances are that daughter still is influential. They can talk and maybe broker some aspect of foreign policy. They are finishing schools for the elite. Whether we like it or not, society's next generation of elite includes the most capable children of the current elite. Evn if those children are less capable than the most capable of the general populace, they stand to inherit quite a bit and they will have an outsized impact on the country and world. Their parent's and ancestors influence is important in their acceptance process because it's important in real life.
There is no real solution to this. There's a reason that despite America growing in pop insanely, foreign applications increasing exponentially, billions being donated to them and everyone going to college, these elite institutions have barely changed class sizes.
The exclusivity and mixing of the different types of people is a feature of these places. If you somehow get these top institutions to be more meritocraric like MIT or Caltech or increase overall student body size like ASU all that will happen is that individuals with power, wealth and influence will simply slowly coordinate to send their kids to different schools and soon enough those schools will face this scrutiny again.
Now I can understand that it is extremely unfair that when all our Supreme Court justices, significant numbers of national politicians, power brokers and many individuals with outsized influence come from a few institutions. If you are one of the many intelligent, hardworking and capable individuals who don't get in when others who are probably just as good as you might, it is extremely annoying. Their entire trajectory of life is changed because of luck that you didn't get. But sometime life is like that. College does not exist in a vacuum and just like most things in life, influence and wealth are powerful.
Those with power tend to want their descendants to have some of that at least and they will do what they can to perpetute that.
I want to say I'm not saying that this is perfect or even great. I'm just saying the way humans work and the way incentive structures are setup, this is how it is. To not mention this is to be ignorant. If you want to improve the status quo you need to acknowledge the reality of the situation and plan around this.
I did not attend one of these institutions for the record.
Private education is a failure. It should be a public good. Admissions processes shouldn't need to turn away applicants who otherwise meet some minimum requirement (e.g. completed highschool). If they are, its a sign that demand exceeds supply and more schools should be built and/or existing ones should be expanded.
At least this is HN and not reddit, and the commenters here do seem to recognize that these are actually two different things. (Not that I personally have any love for legacy admission practices myself).
I didn’t go to Harvard but lived in Cambridge and had a bunch of friends there. Everyone I met was pretty fucking smart, but I guess that could be selection bias.
If you're born into wealth, you learn pretty quickly how to cosplay smart. Doesn't hurt that a large segment of society correlates intelligence with wealth.
Harvard is primarily a brand for wealthy people, and they need the non-wealthy cohort to justify the legitimacy of their degree. Harvard does have world class institutions, but that’s primarily to reinforce the brand they’re selling to wealthy alumni and donors who wants their kids to enter the exclusive club.