> More than 13 percent of students admitted to USC, Santa Clara University and Stanford in 2022 were related to alumni, according to numbers the schools had to report under past legislation.
Obviously, there are political and legal ways for private universities to fight this proposed law.
But I suspect there's also a statistical approach, that would ~99% do the job. If you collected enough data points on each applicant, then started looking at correlations - would there be an applicant-weighting formula which obviously ignored "legacy"...but gave results close enough for the Office of Development to happily sign off on it?
Evil Overdeans might also try a procedural approach. Say, Stanford started an expensive summer program for "gifted" 15-year-olds. Participants in that program might naturally weight toward children of well-to-do Stanford alumni. And doing well in such a program would be an oh-so-reasonable basis for favoring those kids a few years later...
It would be very interesting to read the text of what is actually passed into law (if anything), to see what loopholes it contains.
Everything is a lie and this is the only real fact.
Really dig into any human endeavor and you will uncover nepotism and favoritism and sexism and racism and all the other negative-isms that you can think of.
College admissions --- the gateway to the American dream --- doesn't even make an effort to hide it. This should serve as a warning that the way things work in the real world is nothing like the dream.
Obviously, there are political and legal ways for private universities to fight this proposed law.
But I suspect there's also a statistical approach, that would ~99% do the job. If you collected enough data points on each applicant, then started looking at correlations - would there be an applicant-weighting formula which obviously ignored "legacy"...but gave results close enough for the Office of Development to happily sign off on it?
Evil Overdeans might also try a procedural approach. Say, Stanford started an expensive summer program for "gifted" 15-year-olds. Participants in that program might naturally weight toward children of well-to-do Stanford alumni. And doing well in such a program would be an oh-so-reasonable basis for favoring those kids a few years later...
It would be very interesting to read the text of what is actually passed into law (if anything), to see what loopholes it contains.