Good Legacies
From Unsplash
Have you ever noticed how some people are allergic to talking about particular issues? They think instead of discussing or solving a particular problem, we should focus on some unrelated issue that holds certain parallels.
It goes like this: Why are you focusing on the five people who died in that submarine near the Titanic wreckage when many more migrants died in a shipwreck near Greece? We can’t let in refugees because we still have homeless veterans who need our attention. Drag queen events for kids are off-limits from criticism because child beauty pageants exist. Why talk about police shooting black people unnecessarily when we have a huge black-on-black murder rate?
I always find it to be a soul-crushingly bad argument, even if I agree that the second issue is more important.
The latest whataboutism issue swap is affirmative action in college admissions and how we should be much more worried about legacy admissions. The summary is that affirmative action students are less qualified than the students they displace, but so are legacy admissions, and helping them is just a handout to the wealthy and well-connected. The claim is, at least with affirmative action, the student being boosted is from a downtrodden race.
Let’s be clear about what we’re talking about. A legacy student is not someone who was admitted because a powerful person pulled some strings, or because their father made a large donation to the school. A legacy student is someone who has an alumni parent and who then gets bonus points on their application. That’s it.
The most obvious defense of legacy admissions is Chesterton’s Fence; the idea that if you see a rule or policy that seems to exist for no reason, you should leave it alone until you understand why it exists. Colleges and universities today are fully captured by diversity advocates and social reformers, from the public schools to the private Ivy League. While a few have gotten rid of legacy admissions, most have held onto them despite the pressure.
So there must be some motivation to resist, and from what I can tell those motives are money and improving the admission process.
A 2022 MIT study looked at one elite school’s legacy admission program for 16 years – the study authors did not name the school – and found that with the school’s internal scoring system, legacy students are much more likely to be alumni donors and much more likely to be top donors.
Donations, of course, are the other big bonus that legacy students bring. At this college, the alumni engagement office assigned each alumni a score based on how graduates contribute after graduating. It’s unclear exactly how many dollars each point translates to, but legacies had an average “give” score of 48 points, 50 percent higher than the 32 point average of non-legacies.
It’s not that legacy students earned higher wages after graduation. Both groups – legacy and non-legacy – had an average income of roughly $85,000 a year.
Even more potent was the propensity to be a big donor. A whopping 42 percent of legacy graduates were flagged as potential top donors, which could include their whole family. Only 6 percent of non-legacy graduates were flagged as potential top donors.
Having more graduates from Connecticut blue blood families is a winning strategy if you want donations.
Schools need money to operate, and if letting in legacy students keeps the system running, then cutting them off is a ticket for higher tuition and fewer scholarships. I’d love it if colleges would stop wasting money on administration and luxury amenities, but that’s independent of saying they should turn off the money spigot of letting in a few ringers.
The other big justification, however, is that when legacy students apply, they tend to stay with that choice. Admissions is a large process and the MIT study found that when accepted, about three-quarters of legacy students matriculated – that is, they attended the school after being accepted. Compare that to about half of non-legacy students. That’s a significant difference and the school benefits from knowing how many students to expect in a year.
There’s an idea going around that legacy students are bad students. That may be true on average for student-athletes and affirmative action students, but legacy students by definition come from a family with at least one college graduate as a parent and are therefore different from the rest of the population.
If someone comes from a wealthy family that cares about education, they are likely a good student and going to get into a good school somewhere. In this case, the school that gave one of their parents a degree wants to snatch them up.
If schools want to get rid of legacy admissions, they are free to do so. MIT and CalTech have done so and good luck to them. For every other school, if they see an advantage to running a legacy program then let’s assume they know what they’re doing and leave it to them.
Not really, It’s not that we should be “worried” about legacy admissions – its that if Affirmative Action is now gone, then ANY mechanism that gives a select group an advantage needs to go. and Legacy admissions do give a select group and advantage in many private college and university settings.Report
More to the point:
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/02/1183981097/affirmative-action-asian-americans-pocReport
They probably think that they’re not being bumped by privileged people who also have privileged people kinda test scores, but being bumped by unpriveleged people who also have unprivileged people kinda test scores.Report
Schools need money to operate, and if letting in legacy students keeps the system running, then cutting them off is a ticket for higher tuition and fewer scholarships.
Well then. Lets do this. Make federal aid and research grants without which most universities cannot exist, dependent upon having a strict quota of certain minorities.
It operates on the same craven calculus as legacies, but in a different direction.
Voila. problem solved.Report
I have a question to start with, before we start talking about government money: Why do Ivy League schools with billion dollar endowments _need_ donor money? Or even tuition?!
Endowments by Ivy League: Harvard ($53.2 billion), Yale ($42.3 billion), Princeton ($37.7 billion), UPENN ($20.5 billion), Columbia ($13.5 billion), Cornell ($10 billion), Dartmouth ($8.5 billion), and Brown ($6.9 billion).
Harvard has an endowment that is _ten million dollars_ per student. Yale’s is nine million. Brown, the lowest per student, sits at a mere one million per student.
I’m not sure what interest their endowments are making, but even a mere 1% of Harvard’s is $100,000 a year. And in reality most large endowments tend to earn closer to 10% a year, so we’re talking a million a year for Harvard, and $100,000 for Brown. That’s _without_ reducing the total endowment, which will, of course, still be growing thanks to donations.
For the record, it costs ~$80,000 a year to attend Harvard at full cost, although there are programs that reduce the cost.
Now, of course, some of that interest might already be going towards reducing tuition, but…I think we can make the reasonable assumption Harvard tuition isn’t _actually_ $1,080,000 a year.
So…how the hell can donor money be a concern? Harvard has almost enough money to buy _General Motors_. They do not need donor money! They don’t even need people to pay to go to them!
The reason they do legacy admissions is so that wealthy people think highly of them, and it’s exactly the same reason they charge massive tuition and do not expand: What they are actually selling is elite status, and if the same extremely wealthy people couldn’t send their children exclusively to them and have some sense that those people were entitled to be at those schools (And some of the riff-raff if they try really really REALLY hard) , the schools would serve no purpose at all.Report
Most argument against affirmative action depend on the moral intuition of fairness, that giving any group an advantage is unjust and poor policy.
This argument is different, in that it frames legacies in simple mercenary terms of “what brings the money in”, and implicitly embraces the notion of Ivies as finishing schools for an elite caste.
But of course, if we as citizens accept the notion of Ivies as being finishing schools for our elite, then it makes sense to force them to bring minorities into the elite as well.
See that’s the trouble with arguments rooted in cynicism- they go in directions the proponents don’t often imagine.Report
Freddie has a fun essay on this whole topic.
The good part in the middle:
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Yes, I’ve seen this argument before, saying the exact thing about integration.
And its true! Integration helped the black elite pull away from the black middle and lower classes.
For that matter, capitalism also helps the black elite pull away from the middle and lower classes.
And so does military service. And civil service. And every other sorting mechanism we have as a society. That’s why the ladder of success is called the LADDER. A LADDER allows one to climb away, above something else.
Does Freddie have anything to say about that?Report
Um. Yes. Here, I will copy and paste it from what I copied and pasted above:
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He’s not saying anything that hasn’t already been said.
For instance, the idea that if college were universal the value would drop was made in opposition to the GI Bill.
And that was true as well, that the millions of degrees handed out in the postwar era cheapened the degrees previously held by the scions of the rich.
But so what? What’s his point of this observation?
Freddie’s just carping, without anything interesting or novel to add.Report
I’m pleased we’ve gone from “did he say anything about X?” to “he’s not saying anything new”.
I think that the observation that “you want contradictory things and you complain about the lack of whichever you don’t get” is an interesting one worth making even if someone has made it before.
He does have other interesting things to add (and some are even novel!) in the rest of his essay.
But you may have to actually read it to see these things.Report
Aren’t the novel things the ones that would be better used as evidence? Citing the truisms is really that great a case.Report
Evidence for what? The stuff that I thought was the good part? I am a big fan of restating contradictions that everybody knows about!
But if you want a novel paragraph, here. I think that explicitly saying that “we should allow affirmative action to allow people who wouldn’t otherwise get in!” is at odds with saying “that person only got in because of affirmative action” is one of those things that I haven’t seen explicitly stated recently.
(If you’ve seen it recently, please give me a link!)
Here’s Freddie:
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It’s weird to see this argument, in the very post where the author is explicitly saying “These kids only got in because their dad went there” as a good thing!
What’s wrong with saying, “Yeah, Bill was selected because he was black, and Joe was selected because his dad was an alumni, and neither Bill nor Joe would have gotten in otherwise”?
Why is unearned access somehow only a deep shameful thing when it benefits black folks?Report
Okay. This is a defense of Legacies.
Note: This is not me arguing “Legacies are *GOOD*!” or “Man, we need to keep Legacies around!” but a vaguely distasteful acknowledgment of reality.
The Legacies are, generally, why people want to go to Harvard.
Like, let’s take every single one of those legacies. Every one of them. And drop them all, every single one of them, into a brand spankin’ new college somewhere on the Eastern seaboard.
Suddenly, there is less benefit *OVERNIGHT* to going to Harvard. “Wait, how do I get into Eastern Seaboard?”, people will start asking.
Why?
Because one of the main reasons you go to Harvard is access to the legacies.
They’re the main event.
“But what about the opportunity to take an economics class from Amartya Kumar Sen?”, you ask.
Here you go. Yes, I know that they’re books and I know how much you hate to read but you can start there and read the books that those books tell you to read and get some of the benefit of taking his Harvard Economics course.
What you won’t get is the opportunity to sit next to the guy whose Uncle you will want to hire you.Report
I gilded the lilly down below… but this is fundamentally correct.
It’s why we care about Harvard and not UNC … Harvard seems to us a public institution that Curates the Elite.Report
I will say that Harvard is very different from Berkeley.
And keeping people out of Berkeley due to being yet another textureless math grind is fundamentally offensive in a way that keeping them out of Harvard isn’t.
But defending that view involves acknowledging things that we very much want to pretend don’t exist.Report
Berkely is also a public school… Asian Grinders are just as entitled as anyone else.
Harvard is a private club out of the emanations and penumbra of their mission a selection is made.Report
If the only way to get rid of AA in Berkeley is to destroy Harvard, that is a price I am willing to pay.Report
But…you’re good with affirmative action and don’t care one way or another about unearned privilege, remember?Report
I’m… not good with Affirmative Action? I think it’s bad?
As for “unearned privilege”, Yes. It’s true that I don’t care if parts of it get dismantled.Report
Yeah I know. I’ve been saying this since forever.
Unearned privilege due to affirmative action gets you angry, but unearned privilege due to heredity gets a “well, I don’t care one way or another…”Report
I think that affirmative action, as practiced, makes things worse.
I think that unearned privilege due to heredity is part of how the world works. Like, it exists. That said, I don’t care if parts of it get dismantled.
Go, do what you can to dismantle it. Knock yourself out.Report
Your position is what is generally the accepted view throughout the conservative world.
As opposed to the Enlightenment ideals.Report
Let me check to see what was going on in America during the Enlightenment…
Oh.
Oh my.Report
Yes.
There was a horrific and bloody struggle for the Enlightenment values, and your side lost.Report
My side?
Well, I’m surprised that I’m still around.Report
Seems like a two-fer to be honest.Report
But it’s so much easier to be able to spot those kinds of people from their credentials. Otherwise, you might start talking to them.Report
Heh, wait until the Automated Software Resume reading scandle erupts.Report
Evidence for backing up your point.
Is anyone saying that unqualified affirmative action applicants are being admitted instead of other qualified applicants? It’s my understanding that it’s merely a factor for consideration. Singling this leg up, while ignoring countless others, definitely helps tell me who someone is.
As for Mr. de Boer’s paragraph, I think he could, and probably should have, said “these college kids got in only because of affirmative action”, which is a horribly racist thing to say. Phrasing it the way he does conveniently fits his narrative. Trouble is, no one’s really saying that.Report
Is anyone saying that unqualified affirmative action applicants are being admitted instead of other qualified applicants?
Um.
Yeah.
Like, a *LOT* of people are saying this. This is one of those things that gets said ALL THE FREAKING TIME.
Wanna read a funny story? It’s written by Mindy Kaling’s brother. It’s called Almost Black: The True Story of How I Got Into Medical School By Pretending to Be Black.
You can get it used for about $14.
As for Freddie’s paragraph, I think that he’s talking about getting into Harvard “only” because of AA versus having to settle getting into Dartmouth.Report
You can say anything. Can you back it up?Report
Would a book by Mindy Kaling’s brother called Almost Black: The True Story of How I Got Into Medical School By Pretending to Be Black count as evidence of someone, somewhere saying that sort of thing?Report
“This page has extensive documentation that supports my story that I applied to medical schools in 1998/1999 as a black man and that I likely (emphasis added) gained admission because of it.”Report
This is the old “proof” versus “evidence” argument.
I can offer “evidence” but be told that it’s not “proof”.
At that point, I’m stuck asking “what would qualify?”Report
Proof. Back up your claim. Circumstantial evidence ain’t it.Report
See, and this is the thing.
I’m not sure what is the difference between “evidence” and “circumstantual edivence” and “proof”.
Personally, I’d be okay with providing evidence of Mindy Kaling’s brother’s book. “Okay”, I’d say.
“The burden of proof is now on me!”
And then I’d figure out how to provide enough evidence to shift who was shouldering it *OR* I’d demonstrate that they were lying.
As it is… I’m stuck here wondering “what would be sufficient?”Report
Why is the burden of proof of your claim on my shoulders? If you have direct evidence of someone getting shafted out of any college admission because an unqualified affirmative applicant got it instead let’s have it.
I gotta think that someone who majored in philosophy would understand the distinction between ““evidence” and “circumstantual edivence” and “proof””.Report
Because I don’t know what would constitute as “proof”.
“Here’s a book!”, I could say.
And it wouldn’t matter.
What would matter?
What would constitute proof?
We’ve already established that Mindy Kaling’s brother’s book doesn’t count.
What would count?
Is there anything?Report
Sure. Documented evidence of what I described happening. Not likely happened. It appears you don’t have it.
It’s fine if you don’t like affirmative action for whatever reasons you don’t like it. That is your God given right as an American free thinker. Personally, I don’t have a problem with it given what its beneficiaries have been dealt by the authorities in this country. Did you read Kaling’s (sic) the essay about getting pulled over in Chicago?
Have a great 4th.Report
If a guy’s own biography describing what he persionally went through when he transferred from being an Inditan-American to being an African-American doesn’t count, I’m stuck thinking that there might not be anything that counts and now I’m asking you to shoulder the burden of proof enough to tell me what would actually count.
So.
What would count?Report
Did Bill Clinton hijack your login? I’ve stated in no uncertain terms what I consider proof.Report
There are transcripts of chats and emails between admissions officers at UNC to this effect. Names of applicants aren’t shared but it’s in the court filings.Report
Here’s an article I found that discusses this: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/02/20/unc-race-admissions-1162175
The admissions officials freely admit color is a criterion in selection, but I’m not seeing them discussing the admission of any unqualified applicants. Which is what I was trying to get Jaybird to produce.Report
I think I see the distinction you’re making.
We agree that there is a numerical score of X.
And we agree that X is lower for this group of people than for that group of people.
And you’re asking me to give proof that X makes a person from *THIS* group “Officially Unqualified” but a person from *THAT* group “Officially Qualified” and a lack of documented evidence of X means that I haven’t demonstrated that X exists.
Fair enough.Report
Shoot, here’s the part I wrote before clicking the wrong button, apparently.
Let’s say I make a claim to be the world’s greatest golfer. At some point I’m going to have to prove it. As soon as I hit my first tee shot, I’d be exposed as a fraud.
Has anyone who’s been denied admission to college unequivocally been able to show he/she was denied due to the admission of an unqualified affirmative action applicant? It would be well nigh impossible to prove, I’d wager.Report
If you are willing to believe Mindy Kaling’s brother, he has a website devoted to his experiences.
You can visit it here.
Here is an excerpt from the website:
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I’m still stuck on why anyone thinks this is a bad thing.
I mean, you yourself said that no one cares about legacies.Report
So long as we’ve switched from “that isn’t happening!” to “why is that bad?”, I’m good.Report
So long as we’ve gone from writing 40 comments attacking affirmative action to suddenly being good with affirmative action, I’m good.Report
I’m pretty sure that the Supreme Court decision still stands, Chip.Report
What you’re asking for is a logical impossibility. An unqualified person can’t be in school, because he’s in school, so he qualified. That doesn’t mean a more qualified person wasn’t rejected though.
But logic also works against your position. See the recent discussion of Asians and the two letter grade disadvantage. It may be impossible to identify the person who was more qualified and didn’t make it in, but there has to be one. It’s like a non-parallel lines thing.
Along similar lines, at least one person gets passed over when a less-qualified person gets an offer, but that one is the least. A dozen may have been passed over, even though only one would have received the offer. This is one of the practical problems with affirmative action. The people who get shafted by it are always at least as many as those who got helped by it.Report
The word “unqualified” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
Highly selective colleges lower their standards so “anyone can get in” and then it turns out that the chances of a Black getting in with a C+ are the same as the chances of an Asian getting in with an A+.
(I can’t link to the chart I was reading but that’s what it said).
Then, after having lowered their standards to that point, the failure rate for the C+ students is massively higher than the A+ students.
Technically no one who was “unqualified” got in, but we get the results we’d expect if we let unqualified people in.Report
Especially since the truisms didn’t appear to have had bad outcomes.
Integration, military service, universal college…these things all had the effect of pulling out an elite from the ranks of the poor and oppressed.
But…so what? If some impoverished Appalachian kid joined the Army, learned a skill, went to college on the GI Bill and bought a house thanks to integration and ended up becoming some sort of elite, separated from the ones he left behind, does Freddie think this is somehow a problem?
Why then would a similar kid navigating the same path via affirmative action be a problem?Report
My expectation is those endowments reasonably linked to legacy admissions. If a Billionaire wants his kid there and is willing to donate the money to build a building, then they can just skip the building and do cash.Report
There is a really old joke that Harvard is a hedge fund with a university attached.Report
“There is a really old joke that Harvard is a hedge fund with a university attached.”
It’s like the joke that GM and Ford are banks with a loss-leader advertising arm devoted to automobile manufacturing.Report
Schools need money to operate, and if letting in legacy students keeps the system running, then cutting them off is a ticket for higher tuition and fewer scholarships.
My undergraduate alma mater is a state school and is peculiar in that the large majority of donation dollars go to a separate non-profit Foundation. The Foundation’s charter is to improve the university and its student body. The Foundation is not subject to any control by the elected Board of Regents or the state legislature. Similarly, the Foundation has no direct say in how admissions are run.
The Foundation was set up long ago by an alumni who wanted to make a large donation and didn’t trust the Board. The Foundation and the Board are still regularly in conflict over what to spend on. Over the years, when the two are having a fight, I usually find that I prefer the Foundation’s side of the argument.Report
Civil rights complaint targets Harvard’s legacy admissions preference
Lawyers for Civil Rights said it filed the complaint with the Education Department, alleging that “legacy” admissions preferences at Harvard violate federal civil rights law because they overwhelmingly benefit White applicants and disadvantage those who are of color.
…
Documents made public through the Supreme Court case revealed the magnitude of the “legacy” boost for Harvard applicants. About 34 percent of applicants from the United States who were children of Harvard alumni were admitted from 2009 through 2015, court records showed. That was far higher than the overall 6 percent admission rate for non-legacy applicants.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/07/03/harvard-university-legacy-admissions-civil-rights-complaint/Report
See? You don’t get rid of legacy admissions by demanding affirmative action.
You get rid of legacy admissions by getting rid of legacy admissions!Report
You overcome legacy admissions with affirmative action. Now, even with this complaint, the Iveies will still engage in legacy admissions because their endowments will be sufficiently large – and easy to replenish – to take any time deemed appropriate y the DoJ.Report
You overcome legacy admissions with affirmative action.
Really? You think that what had been done over the last X years was overcoming legacy admissions?
Surprising that there’s any work left to do!Report
Legacy admissions and affirmative action combine to make things extra tough for blue-collar whites and Asians. Despite straight As, mostly 5s and a couple 4s on ten AP tests, and a perfect score on the SAT, I didn’t get into any of my first-choice universities. Between legacies, international students paying full tuition, and affirmative action, top schools don’t have many slots left for people like me.Report
Except how do you know which factor was the tipping point? Why blame affirmative action?Report
Because it’s the big hairy thing he couldn’t control through his own actions.Report
There’s a bit of comedy on the twitters where the occasional person tweets out about the lawsuit challenging legacy admissions and someone quote tweets it and says “I can’t wait to see what conservatives have to say about *THIS*!”
And all of the replies are some variant of “I’m good with it” “Yeah, me too” “Who cares?” “Who in the hell supports legacies?” and so on.Report
Counter-intuitively, I’m sympathetic with Liberals and Harvard… (Private) Universities are intentional communities and should be able to constitute themselves however they desire, according to whatever principles, standards, and intentions they wish to pursue.
I expect we’ll see a return to ‘intentionality’ via (ironically for us) DEI statements… DEI will be a sort of substitute religion. A substitute for, ‘please write 250 words on how you would contribute to the Catholic Identity of the University.’ (A personal statement that existed 30-years ago, but has long-since died as Catholic Universities have abandoned even that)
And, that’s fine… Harvard returns to it’s roots as a seminary (at Chip elsewhere sarcastically commented); a seminary for a religion that maintains its position precisely through flux, language, and exclusion.
The irony as it relates to Legacies is that Legacies are the reason Harvard is Elite and not merely exclusive. The *point* of Harvard is to have the oppty to bump into a Kennedy scion, or failing that the scion of some Financial house whose wealth is as vast as its name is obscure (to those who don’t know).
In fairness to the long-game these institutions play, we have to recognize that every non-legacy nerdly achiever merit admission has the ‘chance’ to become the sort of legacy house that Harvard wants… and that’s regardless of race or creed (as long as the creed is apostacized). Over time, the *point* of Harvard is still to have an oppty to bump into the scions of these new (increasingly diverse) families. That’s what Legacies bring… they bring the Cache that the school is Elite, not simply exclusive.
So I hope you all are successful in nuking legacies… Harvard is already dead to many of us, let us make it an exclusive club for achievers and then we can wonder how the meritocracy works not on merit but on networks. On exclusive networks.Report
I don’t think your analysis is necessarily wrong but that’s why I see SCOTUS as saving these schools from themselves. At least when they were discriminating against Catholics and Jews they had the tacit support (or at least indifference) of the broader culture. Now they’re up against the massive success that social justice politics dare not ever acknowledge, that being that our country’s ethos has changed so much in the past 60-70 years that the kind of blatant, hardcore racial discrimination these schools desperately want to engage in is so deeply offensive to the vast majority of the population that doing it is self marginalizing. You simply can’t practice that kind of racist (or maybe technically racialist) behavior anymore and expect to be seen as legitimate in Normie America. And that’s without getting into the clear violations of the Civil Rights Act that even private institutions usually agree to comply with by contract and to receive certain public benefits.Report
Sure, obliquely that’s what I’m suggesting. People only care about Harvard (and maybe 10 peers) because we have a ‘collective’ notion of Elite institutions that are private but we imagine the provide a pbulic good. They don’t.
I have no interest in ‘saving’ Harvard. From itself, or from Progressives who think they have a ‘gotcha’ argument against conservatives.
I’d go further and suggest (contra Chip) that Harvard *doesn’t* have a unifying principle (the original etymology of University) that it could articulate as a ‘reason’ for determining who’s critical to furthering it’s mission. And tripling down, when it attempts to make it some sort of DEI-fication of DEI (contra SCOTUS warning) it will further erode the public perception that it does anything Elite.
Harvard exists to perpetuate the myth that Harvard ought to exist to arbitrate Elite. I’m fine watching it turn into a grind school for VPs of Finance and Product Management… HENRY’s galore.
The ‘tell’ is no-one cares about the co-defendant, UNC. Or the fact that the vast majority of people are educated at schools with 75%+ acceptance rates.Report
Well, I guess this liberal shares your sympathies, albeit maybe that I think a Harvard that fully embraces its post divinity school role could be a good cog in the machine of American influence and prosperity. I’ll also admit that on the occasions I’ve met attorneys with an ivy league background I’ve found them mostly effete and unimpressive when it comes to doing things beyond ritualistic mental onanism. Suffice to say I think they suck and I laugh at their misfortune.
Of course with my priors the win over UNC’s illegal discrimination is the real prize and I’m more than a little giddy about it. I have no compunction whatsoever about top tier public universities displacing the Ivies and think we’d be better for it.Report
Occasionally the topic of moving the federal district somewhere else comes up. I always suggest somewhere around North Platte, Nebraska because of the potential unexpected benefits. One might be that Congress would decide to get its work done in six months and go home, like they used to. Another might be that Ivy graduates would think, “No way I’m moving to the back side of nowhere; I’ll do something besides federal government and lobbying.”Report
If a swamp no-one wanted and a city so misgoverened that it drives populations outside its borders can still have some of the highest property values in the Nation, I can only imagine how delighful a do-over in North Platte would be. A true imperial city that has the benefit of an intentional ‘moat’.
But, yes, maybe the other thing would happen instead. 🙂Report
Yes, stopping government schools applying racist standards is the real prize. I’d like to see real education reform for higher education that subsidizes students at fixed rates (means tested, if desired… or better, means bonused) rather than institutions at variable rates based on FOMO. I also rather like Lottery admissions if slots are limited.
Details to support the baseline premises TBD.Report
Yeah, there was a funny thread on the twitters that talked about how one of those schools with a 75% acceptance rate talked about how it was going to respond in the coming days, weeks, and years due to this awful Supreme Court decision.
“Diddly squat? Is that your plan?”Report
There are probably dozens of employees who could be constructively re-tasked…Report
Yeah, this, times a thousand.
It’s to create both a social organization and some sort of excuse for all the incestuous rich people hiring each other and giving each other venture capitalist money.Report
I remember way back when, when feminist attorney Gloria Allred made headlines by demanding access to all-male Rich Guys clubs.
There were plenty of eyes rolled at why she wasn’t challenging the existence of exclusive clubs but in hindsight I think she had the right idea.
If America tolerates the existence of an elite then as a policy we should do everything in our power to make the elite as broadly representative as possible.Report
Fun fact that everyone forgets, the term meritocracy originated in a darkly cynical dystopian satire:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy
The whole thing about legacy admissions is that it gives away the ghost on the whole idea of meritocracy as a good. People are not really being picked for their merit but because of their status. Now some or a lot of these people who received some or a lot of help from legacy admissions might have worked hard in school but are they really there on their own merit or not? How do you tell?
I have heard numerous sources basically state these two things over and over again about our elite universities:
1. They can fill their entire freshman class with Asian-American or Asian students that excelled at school and were also first rate pianists or violinists and possibly had other activities; and/or
2. They receive so many qualified applications that they could basically set an admissions criteria, have thousands of applicants or more that meet that criteria, and basically do admissions by lottery or just picking names out of a bag.
I suspect there would be riots at any university that tried to do ether of these things.Report
Admissions by lottery for people who meet a certain set of criteria seem to be a growing popular choice among online liberals on how to handle this. I’ve even seen a lottery for entry level jobs suggested by some really radical people. Like you said, there would be riots if a university attempted this. Universities wouldn’t like the randomness and lack of control either.
There really isn’t a good way to do college admission in the United States. The various type of entrance exam systems, where you either have one entrance exam for the entire country or each college has their own entrance exam doesn’t work, and the wholistic approach has it’s issues. The lottery approach is plausible but will be really unpopular.Report