Bendintheriver said:

creepycoug said:

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.

creepycoug said:

"Their whole endowment system should be looked at."

Them's fightin' words. Plus, most of that money was gifted to them. They're not giving it up w/o a fight.

Once a Croom, always a Croom.


Fuck Harvard, they're so far in bed with China, you can see the soys sauce stains.

Bendintheriver said:

creepycoug said:

Bendintheriver said:

GreenRiverGatorz said:

Bendintheriver said:

creepycoug said:

YellowSnow said:

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.

salemcoog said:

Bendintheriver said:

creepycoug said:

Bendintheriver said:

GreenRiverGatorz said:

Bendintheriver said:

creepycoug said:

YellowSnow said:

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.

This discussion has been closed