41 billion endowment and they are going to use tax payer money to give to students who go to their school. Harvard is the classic liberal bastion. The rich elites steal from the little people and continue to live their lives of luxury.
From that endowment they should be paying for half their enrollments tuition and those students should all be from middle and lower class families. Instead they enroll Biff and Buffy rich elites and legacies and throw a bone to far too few less privileged who then have several hundred thousand in student loans to pay back upon graduation. Classic liberal elite behavior.
This is not quite accurate. Harvard is a no loan school. They don't make loans, and few students who need the help take them out from other sources. Over half who attend receive aid based on need; 1 in 5 doesn't pay a dime to attend.
Harvard, along with several other elite institutions, moved to a need-blind admissions policy years ago, with the aim of admitting the smartest of the smart, however you measure that. Sure, there are kids who get in through various channels, including the rich and famous from both ends of the political spectrum. But by and large, that is the exception to the rule, and Harvard admissions is mostly a meritocracy. They absolutely use their endowment to subsidize cost of attendance for more than half of their students, many receiving full support if they demonstrate need.
I defend them and their like because they are a shining example of how the private sector can work to deal with issues of social inequality. Their wealth guarantees access to those who otherwise would not be able to attend. That beats relying on the state in my book. That's my argument for their tax-exempt status. I'm not sure what the argument is for the church.
Wow. That is not correct. We know numerous cases with middle class minority students who have been valedictorians from some tough areas (Miami, South Atlanta, St Louis) that got next to nothing as far as scholarship. Our friends in Miami, their Cuban daughter with an almost perfect SAT and a 4.4 GPA and and incredible extra curricular resume got 15K assistance. Accepted but no help. Friends in South Atlanta, African American valedictorian, perfect GPA, a perfect score on the SAT, incredible resume got 20K assistance. This kid was from an impoverished area. The best of the best. They were accepted and given next to nothing
I get it. Harvard with a 41 Billion endowment wants you to believe their bullshit. Biff and Buffy legacy is huge at the school. We know a couple of people who are alumni, connected and who have had kids who are not worthy gain entrance to the school. One couple had both their children accepted and neither was a shining star. I have fired two Harvard grads over the years, both were entitled POS, lazy as hell. Both got in because of mommy and daddy.
Again I get it. Harvard could give every student a free education for 100+ years and not feel it but they don't want to look bad so they make up their bullshit.
Tuition has gone up exponentially since the Fed started giving out student loans. Harvard has taken horrible advantage of the American tax payer. The average professor makes 225K for doing next to nothing. They get about 425 million a year in federal research grants. Yet they still only give the top of the top minority students 15K in scholarship for what amounts to about a 65-70K per year education.
In short, there is nothing generous about Harvard and if you are connected you can get your kid in over a brilliant middle class kid who actually earned it.
So a list full of anecdotes. No, I don't think I'm wrong. More people apply to that school every year than any other and, as everybody knows, fantastic candidates are rejected. Nothing new. We can do "I know a guy" all day on Harvard or Stanford. And, yes, there are people who get a nudge for various reasons that would cause most of us to scratch our heads, including athletic recruiting. Much, much more the exception than the rule (except sports; that's a recurring and significant tunnel into the club). And, of course, we've all run into pieces of shit with fancy degrees. That some people turn out to be unmanageable POS should surprise nobody and really has nothing to do with this.
Legacy is not nearly as big as it once was ... effectively next to nothing now. Biggest myth going. Why do you think so many wealthy people got busted with that sting? If that's the way it worked in regular admissions, there would be no back channel black market, even at a sleezy school like USC. But there is an underground which preys on school functionaries (think women's soccer coach) who can't look away at $50,000. When it broke, all those school officials were fired. If I had a fucking nickel for every doc or lawyer on Mercer Island whose kid got wailisted or rejected at Brand A alma mater who now rants "not another fucking dime", I'd be a very, very wealthy man.
Here's an anecdote for you. I was personally acquainted, for years, with one of the luminaries at Stanford GSB who passed a couple of years ago. The kind of guy who has had chapters written about him in books and has Charlie Munger and the Oracle come guest lecture every year. When my middle one was up for college admissions, a kid with all the attributes, he pulled me aside after a board meeting and said this: "Hey, Creepycoug. Listen, come over for dinner one night when you're in town taking the kid to the Bay Area schools. But I want to get this out of the way now: I have no sway in admissions. Also, for undergrad, send her to a top LAC. That's still the gold standard." True story. That is exactly what he said.
Harvard will cover the full need of any kid they want. If they offer a kid $15 k, they've calculated that their parents can pay, or there's something else going on.
I'm not saying Harvard is a bastion of altruism. Not saying that at all. But they do want the smartest kids and they do want to social engineer, so they want who they want. And they have plenty of Cuban kids. Make that kid a poor Native American from Alaska, and I guarantee you he / she gets a full fucking ride.
I come by my information honestly. But let me ask you this: it's THEIR money right?. As long as they are pursuing their mission to educate and churn out research, who the fuck are we to tell them how to spend it?
This is where neo populism really gets confusing for me with collectivism. Harvard's endowment is mostly made up of gifts and earnings on investment. It's their property. Period.
I have a big problem with a school with an endowment of 41 Billion taking 10 million from the US tax payer. If you disagree, go ahead. Have at it. But that is not their money now is it? Trump had to make a call yesterday and force the greedy bastards to send the money back.
As for anecdotal examples, you provided me nothing that was any different.
One area we agree is Stanford. My old boss gave 50K a year for 25 years. When his son was not accepted he cut them off and we all had to refer to Stanford as the black hole and never utter the word "Stanford" in his presence ever again.
The following are verifiable facts. I would say that a 33% legacy acceptance rate at Harvard contradicts your point.
Many US colleges admit “legacies”, or students with a family connection to the university, at dramatically higher rates than other applicants. They are widely seen as a reliable source of alumni donations. “They do tend to be white, and they do tend to be wealthier,”
At Harvard, the acceptance rate for legacy students is about 33%, compared with an overall acceptance rate of under 6%. Countless powerful Americans have followed their relatives to elite universities.
He asked the dean of Harvard College, Rakesh Khurana, “What is so special about wealthy people that Harvard needs to have them overrepresented by a factor of six on its campus?”
Khurana responded, “We’re not trying to mirror the socioeconomic or income distribution of the United States. What we’re trying to do is identify talent and to make it possible for people to come to Harvard,” he said. Like the website of Harvard admissions, Khurana seemed to guide the conversation away from the number of wealthy Harvard students, and toward the opportunities afforded to low-income students.
Despite the best efforts of Harvard administrators, the influence of wealthy alumni was on full display in court. At one point, lawyers shared internal emails addressed to Harvard’s director of admissions. “Once again you have done wonders,” wrote the head of Harvard’s government school, after learning that applicants connected to potential donors had been accepted. “I am simply thrilled by all the folks you were able to admit.” One donor, he added, “has already committed to a building”.
According to court documents filed in support of the lawsuit, among white applicants who were accepted to Harvard, 21.5% had legacy status. Only 6.6% of accepted Asian applicants, and 4.8% of accepted African American applicants, were legacies.
Elite Colleges Constantly Tell Low-Income Students That They Do Not Belong Unwritten rules underlie all of elite-university life—and students who don’t come from a wealthy background have a hard time navigating them.
You just don’t debate @creepycoug on academis. You just don’t.
Well, I just did.
And lost. Why are you begging for another poundin to the roundin?
Uh yeah, sure. I posted the facts and like a tinker bell you ignore them and continue the immature hits from the protection of your keyboard in your mommy's basement.
You are conflating the absolute number of kids on the campus with a legacy profile and the advantages it confers to the applicant, and at the same time ignoring a huge variable: qualificaitons. Think Charles Murray's "super zips".
The truth is that the neo-populist crowd here in the Tug and elsewhere likes to generalize children of the wealthy like a bunch of Christian Brandos. As if they were all silly fucks ups like Lori Laughlin's girls. That's not reality.
Who are the kids of parents who attended Harvard? What are their attributes? Well, for starters, they have some leg up genetically more often than not. Harvard didn't get to be Harvard because of a good PR campaign. If your parents went to Harvard, then you're probably not the child of stupid or average people.
More importantly, whether they knew it before their Harvard days or after, they figured out what Harvard wants in terms of academic ability, and they tend to cultivate that in their kids. One very big deal in elite admissions is prep school. I don't mean mediocre parochial schools like Gonzaga Prep, Eastside Catholic and O'Dea. I mean Lakeside, Bush, Harvard Westlake, Andover, Exeter, Choate, etc.
A very poorly understood variable in elite college admissions is rigor of secondary coursework. It, along with your GPA, is the single highest predictor of college performance. 4.0s who took moderate work loads underperform in college all the time. The most selective colleges focus on this factor, and it's what makes admission to those schools different than admission to large state universities.
Harvard legacies have parents who understand this and understand the game. They send their kids to these prep schools, get them started early on the kind of vocabulary and critical thinking skills you need to do well on standardized tests, which were created by an organization that owes its existence to the cohort of elite New England boarding schools.
So, legacies are admitted at a higher rate largely because they tend to swiw in the deeper end of the applicant pool. As Harvard's president himself said:
"Their applications tend to be well put-together," Bacow said. "They have deep knowledge of the institution. So it's a self-selected pool, which, as a group, by almost any metric, looks very, very good relative to the broader applicant pool."
If you were talking about sports, we would be entirely on the same page, and it is an area much more ripe for criticism than pure legacy admission. Unfortunately, it applies to every elite school and, as we know, every other school. The admissions % for athletes, even at elite schools like Harvard, are fucking huge, and it's somehow not something generally known. I see this in my experience. I figured it out, but many people don't get it. Of course, a UW recruiting pool is going to look very different than a Harvard recruiting pool, even though they're both D1. But still ... I'd say of the families I know with kids who are at Harvard, Yale or Princeton, 80% or more are there because of sports. It's a massive leg up.
And, who else besides me do you suspect knows this little fact about the back door to the Ivy League? You guessed it: parents who attended the school. While my dummy old neighbors were trying to get their sons to excel in football, baseball and basketball, even though the evidence suggested little genetic chance of them every going far with those sports that have few social barriers to entry, my Harvard educated boss had his kids fencing and playing squash. And even they didn't get in, notwithstanding their Bush School educations and his donation history, because they weren't elite fencers or squash players. My daughter's classmate at a elite LAC college in New England, who attended the Lawrenceville School with her brother, got waitlisted at Harvard, while her brother, who had lower grades and test scores, got in because he's on the US national fencing team.
Trust me. Sons and daughters of Harvard people are not getting in w/o laudible credentials, unless they are athletes, in which case they are taking advantage of the same back door you and I could.
Want your kid to go the Ivy League? Get them to be good at a sport and do well in school. That is the best way.
I say again. Legacy is not the singular admissions lift it's made out to be. 50 years ago? Probably. 100 years ago? Definitely. Not today.
Also, I agree. Harvard should not take the tax dollars. I'm talking about what they do with their own money, which is their own money. The tax $$ to them is a drop in the bucket, and they should give it back forthwith. It's not even worth the PR hit.
You are conflating the absolute number of kids on the campus with a legacy profile and the advantages it confers to the applicant, and at the same time ignoring a huge variable: qualificaitons. Think Charles Murray's "super zips".
The truth is that the neo-populist crowd here in the Tug and elsewhere likes to generalize children of the wealthy like a bunch of Christian Brandos. As if they were all silly fucks ups like Lori Laughlin's girls. That's not reality.
Who are the kids of parents who attended Harvard? What are their attributes? Well, for starters, they have some leg up genetically more often than not. Harvard didn't get to be Harvard because of a good PR campaign. If your parents went to Harvard, then you're probably not the child of stupid or average people.
More importantly, whether they knew it before their Harvard days or after, they figured out what Harvard wants in terms of academic ability, and they tend to cultivate that in their kids. One very big deal in elite admissions is prep school. I don't mean mediocre parochial schools like Gonzaga Prep, Eastside Catholic and O'Dea. I mean Lake Side, Bush, Harvard Westlake, Andover, Exeter, Choate, etc.
A very poorly understood variable in elite college admissions is rigor of secondary coursework. It, along with your GPA, is the single highest predictor of college performance. 4.0s who took moderate work loads underperform in college all the time. The most selective colleges focus on this factor, and it's what makes admission their slightly different from admission to large state universities.
Harvard legacies have parents who understand this and understand the game. They send their kids to these prep schools, get them started early on the kind of vocabulary and critical thinking skills you need to do well on standardized tests, which were created by an organization that owes its existence to the cohort of elite New England boarding schools.
So, legacies are admitted at a higher rate largely because they tend to swing in the deeper end of the applicant pool. As Harvard's president himself said:
"Their applications tend to be well put-together," Bacow said. "They have deep knowledge of the institution. So it's a self-selected pool, which, as a group, by almost any metric, looks very, very good relative to the broader applicant pool."
If you were talking about sports, we would be entirely on the same page, and it is an area much more ripe for criticism than pure legacy admission. Unfortunately, it applies to every elite school and, as we know, every other school. The admissions % for athletes, even at elite schools like Harvard, are fucking huge, and it's somehow not something generally known. I see this in my experience. I figured it out, but many people don't get it. Of course, a UW recruiting pool is going to look very different than a Harvard recruiting pool, even though they're both D1. But still ... I'd say of the families I know with kids who are at Harvard, Yale or Princeton, 80% or more are there because of sports. It's a massive leg up.
And, who else besides me do you suspect knows this little fact about the back door to the Ivy League? You guessed it: parents who attended the school. While my dummy old neighbors were trying to get their sons to excel in football, baseball and basketball, even though the evidence suggested little genetic chance of them every going far with those sports that have few social barriers to entry, my Harvard educated boss had his kids fencing and playing squash. And even they didn't get in, notwithstanding their Bush School educations and his donation history, because they weren't elite fencers or squash players. My daughter's classmate at a elite LAC college in New England, who attended the Lawrenceville School with her brother, got waitlisted at Harvard, while her brother, who had lower grades and test scores, got in because he's on the US national fencing team.
Trust me. Sons and daughters of Harvard people are not getting in w/o laudible credentials, unless they are athletes, in which case they are taking advantage of the same back door you and I could.
Want your kid to go the Ivy League? Get them to be good at a sport and do well in school. That is the best way.
I say again. Legacy is not the singular admissions lift it's made out to be. 50 years ago? Probably. 100 years ago? Definitely. Not today.
Hey, your argument is with the researchers who looked at the data and published their articles. I just provided the links to that data that backed up my "anecdotal" examples.
This entire thread is about an elitist private university with a 41 billion dollar endowment that took 10 million tax payer dollars. That is until the President of the USA made the call to tell them no. The fact he had to take that initiative says a lot about rich liberal elites.
You are conflating the absolute number of kids on the campus with a legacy profile and the advantages it confers to the applicant, and at the same time ignoring a huge variable: qualificaitons. Think Charles Murray's "super zips".
The truth is that the neo-populist crowd here in the Tug and elsewhere likes to generalize children of the wealthy like a bunch of Christian Brandos. As if they were all silly fucks ups like Lori Laughlin's girls. That's not reality.
Who are the kids of parents who attended Harvard? What are their attributes? Well, for starters, they have some leg up genetically more often than not. Harvard didn't get to be Harvard because of a good PR campaign. If your parents went to Harvard, then you're probably not the child of stupid or average people.
More importantly, whether they knew it before their Harvard days or after, they figured out what Harvard wants in terms of academic ability, and they tend to cultivate that in their kids. One very big deal in elite admissions is prep school. I don't mean mediocre parochial schools like Gonzaga Prep, Eastside Catholic and O'Dea. I mean Lake Side, Bush, Harvard Westlake, Andover, Exeter, Choate, etc.
A very poorly understood variable in elite college admissions is rigor of secondary coursework. It, along with your GPA, is the single highest predictor of college performance. 4.0s who took moderate work loads underperform in college all the time. The most selective colleges focus on this factor, and it's what makes admission their slightly different from admission to large state universities.
Harvard legacies have parents who understand this and understand the game. They send their kids to these prep schools, get them started early on the kind of vocabulary and critical thinking skills you need to do well on standardized tests, which were created by an organization that owes its existence to the cohort of elite New England boarding schools.
So, legacies are admitted at a higher rate largely because they tend to swing in the deeper end of the applicant pool. As Harvard's president himself said:
"Their applications tend to be well put-together," Bacow said. "They have deep knowledge of the institution. So it's a self-selected pool, which, as a group, by almost any metric, looks very, very good relative to the broader applicant pool."
If you were talking about sports, we would be entirely on the same page, and it is an area much more ripe for criticism than pure legacy admission. Unfortunately, it applies to every elite school and, as we know, every other school. The admissions % for athletes, even at elite schools like Harvard, are fucking huge, and it's somehow not something generally known. I see this in my experience. I figured it out, but many people don't get it. Of course, a UW recruiting pool is going to look very different than a Harvard recruiting pool, even though they're both D1. But still ... I'd say of the families I know with kids who are at Harvard, Yale or Princeton, 80% or more are there because of sports. It's a massive leg up.
And, who else besides me do you suspect knows this little fact about the back door to the Ivy League? You guessed it: parents who attended the school. While my dummy old neighbors were trying to get their sons to excel in football, baseball and basketball, even though the evidence suggested little genetic chance of them every going far with those sports that have few social barriers to entry, my Harvard educated boss had his kids fencing and playing squash. And even they didn't get in, notwithstanding their Bush School educations and his donation history, because they weren't elite fencers or squash players. My daughter's classmate at a elite LAC college in New England, who attended the Lawrenceville School with her brother, got waitlisted at Harvard, while her brother, who had lower grades and test scores, got in because he's on the US national fencing team.
Trust me. Sons and daughters of Harvard people are not getting in w/o laudible credentials, unless they are athletes, in which case they are taking advantage of the same back door you and I could.
Want your kid to go the Ivy League? Get them to be good at a sport and do well in school. That is the best way.
I say again. Legacy is not the singular admissions lift it's made out to be. 50 years ago? Probably. 100 years ago? Definitely. Not today.
Hey, your argument is with the researchers who looked at the data and published their articles. I just provided the links to that data that backed up my "anecdotal" examples.
This entire thread is about an elitist private university with a 41 billion dollar endowment that took 10 million tax payer dollars. That is until the President of the USA made the call to tell them no. The fact he had to take that initiative says a lot about rich liberal elites.
My argument is spot on. You want to rely on the summary conclusions of people writing scandalous hit pieces on a well-known institution. I thought it was your group who tells me I should ignore the biased media. I gave you some insight and you just said, "yeah, so anyway ..."
And then the bold part, which of course is your entire focus. It's almost as if you don't know that there are many conservatives at Ivy League schools like Harvard.
You have anecdotes; and so do I. You sources are aggregating people with a single variable profile and ignoring any kind of intellectually rigorous analysis. That's what people tend to do when they have an answer they want to get to before they start their inquiry.
I honestly don't understand how you and others can be so politically obsessed and these sweeping political generalizations. It seems, I don't know, so limiting and tedious.
You just don’t debate @creepycoug on academis. You just don’t.
Well, I just did.
And lost. Why are you begging for another poundin to the roundin?
Uh yeah, sure. I posted the facts and like a tinker bell you ignore them and continue the immature hits from the protection of your keyboard in your mommy's basement.
You posted conclusory facts, but didn't make the case that legacy status, as a singular variable, gives applicants a big leg up in admissions.
You just don’t debate @creepycoug on academis. You just don’t.
Well, I just did.
And lost. Why are you begging for another poundin to the roundin?
Uh yeah, sure. I posted the facts and like a tinker bell you ignore them and continue the immature hits from the protection of your keyboard in your mommy's basement.
You posted conclusory facts, but didn't make the case that legacy status, as a singular variable, gives applicants a big leg up in admissions.
What? Do I need to post the articles again? They all mention legacy as being a big generator for cash and investments in the campus by private citizens who want their kids to go to Harvard, just like mommy, daddy, grandma and grandpa did. You called me anecdotal in my examples and I backed my examples up with facts and data.
Lets leave this where it is. I respect your opinions on this site but clearly you are convinced legacy doesn't matter at Harvard.
You just don’t debate @creepycoug on academis. You just don’t.
Well, I just did.
And lost. Why are you begging for another poundin to the roundin?
Uh yeah, sure. I posted the facts and like a tinker bell you ignore them and continue the immature hits from the protection of your keyboard in your mommy's basement.
You posted conclusory facts, but didn't make the case that legacy status, as a singular variable, gives applicants a big leg up in admissions.
What? Do I need to post the articles again? They all mention legacy as being a big generator for cash and investments in the campus by private citizens who want their kids to go to Harvard, just like mommy, daddy, grandma and grandpa did. You called me anecdotal in my examples and I backed my examples up with facts and data.
Lets leave this where it is. I respect your opinions on this site but clearly you are convinced legacy doesn't matter at Harvard.
Only try hards like David Hogg can make it in without some sort of payola. You don't get to $40 Bill any other way.
You just don’t debate @creepycoug on academis. You just don’t.
Well, I just did.
And lost. Why are you begging for another poundin to the roundin?
Uh yeah, sure. I posted the facts and like a tinker bell you ignore them and continue the immature hits from the protection of your keyboard in your mommy's basement.
You posted conclusory facts, but didn't make the case that legacy status, as a singular variable, gives applicants a big leg up in admissions.
What? Do I need to post the articles again? They all mention legacy as being a big generator for cash and investments in the campus by private citizens who want their kids to go to Harvard, just like mommy, daddy, grandma and grandpa did. You called me anecdotal in my examples and I backed my examples up with facts and data.
Lets leave this where it is. I respect your opinions on this site but clearly you are convinced legacy doesn't matter at Harvard.
That's fine. I only note that legacy, qua legacy, isn't the driver, but it makes for nice articles. My real point was that, sadly perhaps, that applicant pool tends to be stronger, and that's why they get in. I suspect, but don't know exactly to what extent, that legacy to the extent that it correlates with playing a sport they know their kid can get good at, is a big driver of the numbers when you couple it with a high powered prep school education.
I never said it wasn't an elitist place. It most definitely is.
We do agree on the tax $$. It's embarrassing that Trump even has to say anything.
You just don’t debate @creepycoug on academis. You just don’t.
Well, I just did.
And lost. Why are you begging for another poundin to the roundin?
Uh yeah, sure. I posted the facts and like a tinker bell you ignore them and continue the immature hits from the protection of your keyboard in your mommy's basement.
You posted conclusory facts, but didn't make the case that legacy status, as a singular variable, gives applicants a big leg up in admissions.
What? Do I need to post the articles again? They all mention legacy as being a big generator for cash and investments in the campus by private citizens who want their kids to go to Harvard, just like mommy, daddy, grandma and grandpa did. You called me anecdotal in my examples and I backed my examples up with facts and data.
Lets leave this where it is. I respect your opinions on this site but clearly you are convinced legacy doesn't matter at Harvard.
Only try hards like David Hogg can make it in without some sort of payola. You don't get to $40 Bill any other way.
Not quite true my Cuog brother in cheese. You get there with with gifts from graduates who've gone on to make a lot of money, and earnings on those large gifts. You also get there by being one the oldest institutions in the land and getting a massive head start on your economis position. That place was already more than 220 years old when the University of Washington was founded. They've been at it a long tim.
Comments
As for anecdotal examples, you provided me nothing that was any different.
One area we agree is Stanford. My old boss gave 50K a year for 25 years. When his son was not accepted he cut them off and we all had to refer to Stanford as the black hole and never utter the word "Stanford" in his presence ever again.
The following are verifiable facts. I would say that a 33% legacy acceptance rate at Harvard contradicts your point.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/23/elite-schools-ivy-league-legacy-admissions-harvard-wealthier-whiter
Many US colleges admit “legacies”, or students with a family connection to the university, at dramatically higher rates than other applicants. They are widely seen as a reliable source of alumni donations. “They do tend to be white, and they do tend to be wealthier,”
At Harvard, the acceptance rate for legacy students is about 33%, compared with an overall acceptance rate of under 6%. Countless powerful Americans have followed their relatives to elite universities.
He asked the dean of Harvard College, Rakesh Khurana, “What is so special about wealthy people that Harvard needs to have them overrepresented by a factor of six on its campus?”
Khurana responded, “We’re not trying to mirror the socioeconomic or income distribution of the United States. What we’re trying to do is identify talent and to make it possible for people to come to Harvard,” he said. Like the website of Harvard admissions, Khurana seemed to guide the conversation away from the number of wealthy Harvard students, and toward the opportunities afforded to low-income students.
Despite the best efforts of Harvard administrators, the influence of wealthy alumni was on full display in court. At one point, lawyers shared internal emails addressed to Harvard’s director of admissions. “Once again you have done wonders,” wrote the head of Harvard’s government school, after learning that applicants connected to potential donors had been accepted. “I am simply thrilled by all the folks you were able to admit.” One donor, he added, “has already committed to a building”.
According to court documents filed in support of the lawsuit, among white applicants who were accepted to Harvard, 21.5% had legacy status. Only 6.6% of accepted Asian applicants, and 4.8% of accepted African American applicants, were legacies.
Unwritten rules underlie all of elite-university life—and students who don’t come from a wealthy background have a hard time navigating them.
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/privileged-poor-navigating-elite-university-life/585100/
Harvard’s freshman class is more than one-third legacy—here’s why that’s a problem
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/07/harvards-freshman-class-is-more-than-one-third-legacy.html
Harvard’s well-off outnumber low-income students 23 to 1
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2018/10/22/harvard-children-wealthy-families-vastly-outnumber-poor-that-problem/dC8NG2jViPGfgLWaB2wEZO/story.html
43 Percent of White Students Harvard Admits Are Legacies, Jocks, or the Kids of Donors and Faculty
https://slate.com/business/2019/09/harvard-admissions-affirmative-action-white-students-legacy-athletes-donors.html
You guys entirely miss the point on Harvard.
The truth is that the neo-populist crowd here in the Tug and elsewhere likes to generalize children of the wealthy like a bunch of Christian Brandos. As if they were all silly fucks ups like Lori Laughlin's girls. That's not reality.
Who are the kids of parents who attended Harvard? What are their attributes? Well, for starters, they have some leg up genetically more often than not. Harvard didn't get to be Harvard because of a good PR campaign. If your parents went to Harvard, then you're probably not the child of stupid or average people.
More importantly, whether they knew it before their Harvard days or after, they figured out what Harvard wants in terms of academic ability, and they tend to cultivate that in their kids. One very big deal in elite admissions is prep school. I don't mean mediocre parochial schools like Gonzaga Prep, Eastside Catholic and O'Dea. I mean Lakeside, Bush, Harvard Westlake, Andover, Exeter, Choate, etc.
A very poorly understood variable in elite college admissions is rigor of secondary coursework. It, along with your GPA, is the single highest predictor of college performance. 4.0s who took moderate work loads underperform in college all the time. The most selective colleges focus on this factor, and it's what makes admission to those schools different than admission to large state universities.
Harvard legacies have parents who understand this and understand the game. They send their kids to these prep schools, get them started early on the kind of vocabulary and critical thinking skills you need to do well on standardized tests, which were created by an organization that owes its existence to the cohort of elite New England boarding schools.
So, legacies are admitted at a higher rate largely because they tend to swiw in the deeper end of the applicant pool. As Harvard's president himself said:
"Their applications tend to be well put-together," Bacow said. "They have deep knowledge of the institution. So it's a self-selected pool, which, as a group, by almost any metric, looks very, very good relative to the broader applicant pool."
If you were talking about sports, we would be entirely on the same page, and it is an area much more ripe for criticism than pure legacy admission. Unfortunately, it applies to every elite school and, as we know, every other school. The admissions % for athletes, even at elite schools like Harvard, are fucking huge, and it's somehow not something generally known. I see this in my experience. I figured it out, but many people don't get it. Of course, a UW recruiting pool is going to look very different than a Harvard recruiting pool, even though they're both D1. But still ... I'd say of the families I know with kids who are at Harvard, Yale or Princeton, 80% or more are there because of sports. It's a massive leg up.
And, who else besides me do you suspect knows this little fact about the back door to the Ivy League? You guessed it: parents who attended the school. While my dummy old neighbors were trying to get their sons to excel in football, baseball and basketball, even though the evidence suggested little genetic chance of them every going far with those sports that have few social barriers to entry, my Harvard educated boss had his kids fencing and playing squash. And even they didn't get in, notwithstanding their Bush School educations and his donation history, because they weren't elite fencers or squash players. My daughter's classmate at a elite LAC college in New England, who attended the Lawrenceville School with her brother, got waitlisted at Harvard, while her brother, who had lower grades and test scores, got in because he's on the US national fencing team.
Trust me. Sons and daughters of Harvard people are not getting in w/o laudible credentials, unless they are athletes, in which case they are taking advantage of the same back door you and I could.
Want your kid to go the Ivy League? Get them to be good at a sport and do well in school. That is the best way.
I say again. Legacy is not the singular admissions lift it's made out to be. 50 years ago? Probably. 100 years ago? Definitely. Not today.
This entire thread is about an elitist private university with a 41 billion dollar endowment that took 10 million tax payer dollars. That is until the President of the USA made the call to tell them no. The fact he had to take that initiative says a lot about rich liberal elites.
Harvard has a long history of social justice.
And then the bold part, which of course is your entire focus. It's almost as if you don't know that there are many conservatives at Ivy League schools like Harvard.
You have anecdotes; and so do I. You sources are aggregating people with a single variable profile and ignoring any kind of intellectually rigorous analysis. That's what people tend to do when they have an answer they want to get to before they start their inquiry.
I honestly don't understand how you and others can be so politically obsessed and these sweeping political generalizations. It seems, I don't know, so limiting and tedious.
Fuck Harvard, they're so far in bed with China, you can see the soys sauce stains.
Lets leave this where it is. I respect your opinions on this site but clearly you are convinced legacy doesn't matter at Harvard.
I never said it wasn't an elitist place. It most definitely is.
We do agree on the tax $$. It's embarrassing that Trump even has to say anything.
This discussion has been closed