Columbia University, Cornell University, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, Rice University, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, Yale University
But this discussion of rankings reminds me of a quote from John Allen Paulos:
In fact, trying to convert a partial ordering into a total one is, I think, at the root of many problems. Reducing intelligence to a linear ordering—a number on an IQ scale—does violence to the complexity and incomparabilities of people’s gifts.
But Stanford is in the same league for sure.
Most people would detest the extracurricular noise that some institutions use because often only people with money can afford their kids doing those things and two they are bullshit things. By most people I mean potential students such as those that in great numbers end up in state schools or community colleges.
On the point people vastly prefer GPA - I don’t agree because people on the left prefer DEI and affirmative action.
Allowing universities legacy admissions is a position so far to the right that I don't think any political party anywhere outside of the US propagates for it. There isn't a social democrat in Denmark or something who has vaguely leftist view but who also believes that universities should admit people based on their parents having gone there.
CMU-style, or ETH-style or Independent University of Moscow-style elite universities are however probably an efficient use of resources.
Wikipedia has one (ideologies that seek social equality and egalitarianism), which this is clearly incompatible with. It's certainly unacceptable to socialists, communists, anarchists, syndicalists or social democrats.
Liberals are not leftists. Liberals are mostly inviolable-property + free-trade type people.
I don't see how that makes US university professors leftists. What definition of leftism are you using?
Leftism is an incoherent and false ideology fundamentally unsuited to the governance of human societies. Once you recognize that fact, the hypocrisy of actual leftists will cease to surprise you.
But why do you refuse to define it?
They are not particularly aligned with the working class or with leftism. They're usually centrists or liberals.
I think your confusions stems from believing that liberals are the left. Liberals however, are pro-free trade ultra-propertarians. Liberals are to the right of anti-free trade populists.
How can you say that they are leftists, when they do not fit the common definitions and you refuse to provide your own?
Universities were always finishing schools for the elite, for like 1,000 years its been that way, and the best ones in the US are here for that since before the country was incorporated, here since almost half a millennia ago!
The last 80 odd years of dealing with the lower class and proletariat at all is a footnote and will be an experiment of folly deep in a university archive for the next 1,000 years as they merely revert to the mean.
Every problem that universities have go away when they go back to their roots. Its the corporate and public sector that tied access to having a degree from these places, that’s not the university’s problem.
And to your point, correct, if the proletariat were only surrounded by themselves they would not want to be there.
I went to an “elite” public university in India which has a sub 1% acceptance rate. It was mostly extremely smart and driven middle class kids from incredibly diverse social backgrounds. Everyone had the time of their lives. And almost everyone now (20 years later) is doing incredibly well in life. They are doing startups, public policy, research, tech leadership etc. There is zero legacy admissions. And yes there is a network effect, of course. You can count on the friends you made at uni, but not because they inherited the influence. You don’t have to lick boots to have a good life.
This is very high level technical success, or tech elite probably upper middle or lower upper class. It isn't true elite - where did the regular company CEOs and Politicians study? Those are the truly elite universities I'm talking about.
> The politicians in my country are rarely highly educated,
This is what I'm getting at. Most countries are like this, the truly wealthy and powerful aren't technical geniuses, they're good at networking and politics.
Looking forward to inspiring consensus to do it at the federal level voluntarily too. The federal administration catalyzing that won’t be controversial after its done.
The current board members at these schools just need to be inspired by another school.
W Stanford
Ain't nobody else had time for that.
Isn’t that basically Caltech? They had a 3% acceptance rate in 2023, the lowest in the nation. https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/lowest-accepta...
Perhaps this is better for the school as a whole. But when that argument was made to help students who were previously discriminated against, people swore that didn't matter, because all discrimination is bad.
Legacy students are the easiest way to see that discrimination is not over yet. There are many others but this one is really transparent. There are many potential ways to deal with it, but "end discrimination for them but not for me" isn't a good one.
Universities will likely claim that legacy and (especially) donor admits bring more money into the university, which in theory allows them to increase overall economic diversity (and likely social and demographic diversity as well) of the student body by admitting a larger number of qualified students under a need-blind admission policy.
Many universities have adopted need-blind admissions (not including donor admits), eliminated or reduced student loans, and/or expanded undergraduate admissions - all efforts that support economic diversity.
Stanford (for example) implemented need-blind for domestic student admissions (but still not international), and largely eliminated (or at least reduced) undergraduate student loans. Undergraduate class size seems to have expanded from ~6500 (?) in 1983 to ~7500 today, and may continue to expand slightly:
https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2025/04/president-levins-r...
However, it's worth noting that Stanford acceptance was above 25% for the class of 1979 (vs. 3.6% for the class of 2029.) Application growth has drastically outpaced admissions and class growth.
https://irds.stanford.edu/data-findings/undergraduate-admiss...
Additionally, administrations have generally expanded much faster than the undergraduate student population.
Placing the notion of discrimination in the context of demanding access to an elite circle is like demanding access to a banquet while denouncing the recipe. It's incoherent.
Indeed. And the irony is that even when poorer students do attend, they find that the expensive habits of the richer students exclude them from mingling with them in many cases.
(Fun fact: one reason for uniforms in Catholic schools was to eliminate wealth from the picture.)
The signs may be more subtle and sublimized to a careless outsider, but in the schools those signals are obvious and stand out just as blatent as anywhere else.
This surprised me when I went from my decent but not great-by-ranking (generally ranked in the 50-70 range) undergrad university to a top 10 ranked university for grad school. The undergrad students weren’t noticeably smarter, nor did they work harder on average. They were more ambitious and more entitled. Cheating was rampant (pre-LLMs, I expect it’s even worse now) and professors mostly just didn’t care. The median household income at the top 10 school was more than double what it was at my undergrad school.
That was an enlightening experience.
Meanwhile, there's the ultra-talented people IIT turns away every year. Maybe the smart thing would be to also pick up international students as second-chance admits rather than chase away tourists, students, researchers, and workers?
Legacy creates an closed, self-reinforcing, entitled aristocracy.
What kind of society do you want?
Let's say Harvard's admission were to become largely based on social status rather than merit. You could say "so be it", but let it be known that that is what Harvard is. Being one thing while advertising another is lying and the greatest offense.
A positive side effect is that perhaps we won't fetishize Harvard as much and keep insisting that one must get into Harvard. You don't. Harvard's brand depends on you thinking you do, of course.
The current model of academia in the US and elsewhere is wretched. Obscene tuition is one thing. The failure to educate is another. Universities got out of the education business a while ago. Universities are focused on jobs, that's the advertising pitch, which is not the historical and proper mission of the university. So you end up with institutions that are bad at both.
So if these "elite" schools lead to a disenchantment with merit, I see a silver lining. It could provide the needed impetus and motivation to distribute education more widely in smaller colleges with a greater clarity and focus on their proper mission (e.g., Thomas Aquinas College [0]) while creating a robust culture of trade schools. The majority of people do not need a college education! And frankly, it's not what they're looking for.
Germany does something like this. Fewer people go to university there, and they have a well-developed system of trade schools.
Furthermore, you could offer programs that allow students at colleges to take classes in these trade schools.
Let's stop trying to sustain a broken model. The time is ripe for educational reform.
Such a contrast to other systems where for example your HS grades will count 100% - and similar "ungameable" systems.
Which is basically what the SATs are:
I knew the director of admissions somewhat at an elite school and he said that they basically put a couple of quantitative metrics (like SAT) on one axis and read essays and considered other metrics like interviews on the other axis for diversity before that term became popular.
The upper right more or less got in, the lower left didn't, and then they debated the middle ground.
The problem finding a hard enough test with as little human intervention for assessments. Because human intervention brings with it subjectivity. This subjectivity was manageable when there weren't so many people applying for top schools (e.g. in the early 1900's). But right now its not.
SAT/ACT/GRE are no indicator of success. What this "study" is merely proving is that schools may have regressed in their rigor for grading hard courses.
My guess is because it was focused on those attending elite institutions:
"In their paper on admissions to highly selective colleges... students at each of the schools in this analysis... Students opting to not submit an SAT/ACT score achieve relatively lower college GPAs when they attend an Ivy-Plus college..."
My guess is the meaning of a high or low GPA versus standardized test changes quite a bit when you have groups very highly selected based on a wealth of other information.
The Dartmouth report has always frustrated because they, along with that other paper, selectively present conditional means rather than scatterplots, hiding the variability around points to make things look more predictive than they are. Means by predictor level are almost useless without knowing the conditional variance for each predictor level. They're basically deliberately pretending that there is no error variance in the prediction equation.
Meta-analyses suggest that both standardized test performance and GPA predict later performance. For example:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10627197.2015.99...
In some literature, GPA is superior, and others, testing.
There are other studies from decades ago showing that when standardized tests are temporarily removed from admissions (e.g., due to a court ruling), it has almost no influence on outcomes of admitted students later, suggesting admissions committees are able to select comparable students without tests.
I'm not saying tests are horrible and should be omitted, I just think people really overstate their predictive utility and it causes a ton of problems down the road.
I don't know how it is in Ontario now, but when I went through HS there university admissions were your top-K grades for the last couple of years and they didn't factor in which school you attended. There were no shortage of private/alternative high schools in Toronto that catered gaming that system with lax workloads and inflated grades.
Over the past 7 years other schools have done so as well. Waterloo's adjustment factor list got FOI'd and made public if you want to find yours.
After seeing the list I'm kind of sad, I had the choice between two schools at 10 and 13, and chose the one with 13. A 3% difference can make or break an application in any competitive program... Well, at least it wasn't one of those schools with 20 point factor, wow.
The optimal strategy would be to take the easiest classes required to graduate, since there's no national authority to normalize grades across classes.
This, of course, leads to yet more grade inflation. Hard to compete with a >4.0 student when your school doesn't even offer advanced courses!
The ratione behind this was "ending the school to prison pipeline." They saw the correlation between drop out rates and incarceration and thought they could reduce the latter by gaming the former.
This is why you see a lot of college dropouts from that corpus because they can't make it. They were lied to.
Elite-College Admissions Were Built to Protect Privilege
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/histor...
The new holistic admissions policy worked as intended, successfully suppressing Jewish admissions.
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/06/23/a-lawsuit...
The 'holistic' admissions lie - The Daily Californian
https://www.dailycal.org/2012/10/01/the-holistic-admissions-...
The False Promise of 'Holistic' College Admissions - The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/12/the-fa...
Lifting the Veil on the Holistic Process at the University of California, Berkeley - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/education/edlife/lifting-...
My professor explained that academics alone is not enough for success in life. He explained that some of the smartest engineers report to average business majors in companies. And he explained that that I cannot get any scholarships with perfect GPA while my roommate, a B student, has scholarships because he plays basketball and will likely get in leadership role in early on. That is good for the university as their graduates are seen as more successful.
It was a hard thing to listen to but I accepted it. I wish he told me the truth though.
I heard the lack of balance in the Bay Area: "wierdos, tech bros, etc.". A geek can contribute either very positively or very negatively to society (ex: tech CEOs, unabomber, etc.),
Maybe too young to judge at university admissions, but still a reasonable proxy (another topic).
Had to listen to someone talking about "humping it across the line" this week.
Being smart is valuable, but it’s only one ingredient among many. You need to be able to communicate with others, take risks, work hard, have empathy, be a creative problem solver, etc
Being a brain with a body attached is not enough and that’s good
The entire premise was following 2 people, one guy barely graduated community college, the other was incredibly intelligent. Went to an elite university, got a masters really young, and I believe was a member of Mensa.
The difference was in other areas. The first guy had a lot of persistence and didn’t stop when things got hard. Ended up becoming a very successful person, married with kids, had their own business.
By contrast the other guy despite being legitimately one of the smartest people in the world, simply withered into obscurity, had trouble maintaining gainful employment, relationships etc. A very stark contrast to the first person.
I realize the point of a documentary is to highlight extremes but I think it does say something about the relative value of intelligence as it correlates to successful outcomes
But then that raises the question of why they want to go to an elite university. Well, obviously, because being able to pass as a good student does matter.
You see the same thing with asians today. The competitive-admissions high school I attended went from. 30% asian to almost 70% asian. There was a backlash, almost entirely from very liberal white people. I don’t think any of them disliked Asians per se. But they wanted to preserve a certain culture in the school and all the Asians led to a change in the culture.
Citation please.
Ok, screw that and screw the Ivy League and the WASPs with it.
I understand the sentiment and sometimes share it. But I’m also sad to recognize that while elite asians like me can excel within the systems created by WASPs, we probably wouldn’t have created such systems ourselves.
What other group in history has created a system so fair that they were replaced-without being conquered—within the very institutions they themselves created? My dad was born in a village in Bangladesh and my brother went to Yale and is an executive at J.P. Morgan (two of the WASP-iest institutions in America). WASPs are a minority in these institutions now. This sort of thing basically only happens in Anglo countries.
Good reading: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/05/opinion/george-bush-wasps...
I think that's really begging one of the important questions here. _Is_ the system fair now?
The system clearly wasn't originally fair (when elite schools excluded women, people of color, etc).
They became more open after decades of struggle driven in large part from the outside, and helped along by the GI bill, as well as a broader shift towards getting more public funds.
The demographics have changed, but to the degree that it's more fair, is that because WASPs created them that way, or because women and other racial groups changed society more broadly?
WASPs were unusual in creating systems that saw openness to outsiders as a virtue, and then actually giving up their own power to allow others into the institutions they built. The first black Harvard student was admitted in 1847. Two Japanese students got a degree from Harvard law school in 1874. But if you look at societies where African and Asian people have the power to exclude, those places aren’t very open to outsiders.
In your view, did that view of openness to outsiders as a virtue manifest in other ways? It's been a while since I had to study the period but the colonial northeast was perennially at war with the native population and French Canadian colonists. E.g. it seems Harvard was founded during the Pequot war. In that same year of 1636, Roger Williams set up Rhode Island because he had been banished from Massachusetts after being convicted of heresy. So in general, it seems like WASPs were founding schools in an environment where being native, French, or indeed the wrong kind of Anglo-Puritan was worth attacking. I'm not seeing the openness to outsiders.
> The first black Harvard student was admitted in 1847.
Harvard was founded in 1636, so it seems like they went a full two centuries with total segregation before it finally admitted _one guy_. Again, not so much a culturally inculcated openness to outsiders so much as a slightly imperfect execution of exclusion.
> But if you look at societies where African and Asian people have the power to exclude, those places aren’t very open to outsiders.
I'm trying to think of what a fair comparison would be. I do think there's a meaningful difference between a dominant/imperial power that (begrudgingly, slowly) allows room for its own citizens of diverse racial backgrounds, vs a previously colonized or dominated country making space for foreign powers.
So e.g. the oldest university in Asia is University of Santo Tomas, which was founded by the Spanish colonizers and is a Catholic university, and I think was under Spanish governance until the Philippine Revolution. Should the new fledgling country have made sure that it saved space for white students? I'm not sure whether they actually did, but I think that's a very different ethical question than, "should Harvard/Yale/Brown in New England built on native land with wealth substantially built off the triangle trade, admit BIPOC students?". The oldest "university" in the modern sense in China is Tainjin University, founded in 1895; i.e. they didn't have a university until a couple generations after the 2nd opium war. Should it have saved space for foreign students? The first "universities" in India were founded during British rule. Etc etc.
But where there _isn't_ a strong power imbalance, I would be curious to see historical examples of any group having an especially better or worse record on inclusion.
You should be able to think of a dozen examples off the top of your head. Virtually every society has minorities and immigrant groups (which have nothing to do with colonial history).
> I do think there's a meaningful difference between a dominant/imperial power that (begrudgingly, slowly) allows room for its own citizens of diverse racial backgrounds
Why would a dominant power ever make room for people outside their in-group? Where does that notion even come from? That's not how most societies work. Some multi-ethnic empires in history showed various degrees of tolerance for outgroups (e.g. Muslims that ruled over the Indian subcontinent imposed jizya on non-Muslims only some of the time). But you have to go back to the Romans to find a major power that allowed outside ethnicities to rise to the uppermost reaches of society (without being conquered by outside groups).
You can't explain the unusual inclusiveness of American society by pointing to anything minorities did. Minorities always advocate in their own interest--that's commonplace, but almost never works. The Uyghurs can tell the Chinese "we don't want to be oppressed" all they want, but that's not persuasive to the Chinese because that's just an expression of self-interest. It's not contrary to the self interest of the Chinese for the Uyghurs to be oppressed.
The unusual thing is the dominant group actually giving up power voluntarily. For that to happen, there must be something in the dominant culture to which minorities can appeal, something that can be used to persuade the dominant group to give up its own self interest.
Define "fair" for a system designed not only to filter an elite out of the rest of society, but in fact to have that elite's size remain detached from larger demographic trends. Is it fair for Zoomers to have an easier time in college admissions than Millennials, while being subject to what are supposedly stronger DEI measures?
What, in fact, do we think this system ought to be aiming for, and how is that fair?
For the moment it seems to me that the system is arbitrary and we're being fooled, in a way, into imposing conceptions of fairness and/or merit onto it that it really aimed at and which always served more as happy-face masks for the arbitrary organizational shoggoth underneath.
All the rest, there are very lenient high school diploma requirememts, and no crazy costs like the US. All that want can basically attend, until they fail to pass a few times.
Legacy admissions are part of the hereditary class system. The reason people go to elite schools isn’t just to receive an education, it’s also a status symbol and networking opportunity. If you do manage to get accepted by an elite school purely on merit, that’s not just an opportunity for you personally, it’s a chance to pass that status down to your children.
But yeah the rest of it is bullshit (and often a fig leaf for discrimination).
The SAT and GRE aren't perfect, but they're a massive help to students who would otherwise be outside the normal path. Get a high score on the SAT, and nobody cares whether you went through traditional K-12.
This is understatement, GRE being required for STEM postgraduate studies was always university requirement for all not something the STEM department would want.
One can argue that the quantitative part have a point but for the language part, you must be kidding me. Unless you are going to English literature it is just plain stupid (maybe even if you study literature).
For non-native speakers, it's just a test of how well they learned English, and nobody in admissions expects them to score as well as native speakers.
Beyond this, there are subject-specific GREs. They're far from perfect, but they're more uniformly comparable across all candidates than grades are.
There is no intelligence in most parts, it is just you memorizing a lot of words that you will never hear or use. Maybe you are confusing different parts of the exam.
> For non-native speakers, it's just a test of how well they learned English, and nobody in admissions expects them to score as well as native speakers.
That's different test/s. Programs will require TOEFL/IELTS for that purpose.
The vocabulary is not that difficult. If you regularly read literature as a child and adolescent, you will know most of the vocab in the test. Most people consider reading and having a decent vocabulary as signs of education and intelligence.
Beyond that, the verbal GRE is mostly about making connections between different words and concepts - just a test of reasoning ability.
TOEFL/IELTS are for a completely different purpose. That's why I said that the verbal GRE is only really meaningful for native speakers. You wouldn't expect someone who learned English as a second language to have the same command over the language as a native speaker. That doesn't mean that they're not smart.
Of course the top tier students were likely to achieve an A regardless, so the more challenging courses would look better. For me though it probably would've been optimal to choose easier classes; admissions might not even be aware that a more difficult option was offered.
* If I recall correctly though, colleges were usually interested primarily in the unweighted GPA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varsity_Blues_scandal
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2023-12-01/...
https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2019/03/admission-case-inf...
The real downside is that school is insanely competitive, students study incredibly long hours, and they feel intense pressure to perform well on their exams.
The upside is that the students are much more serious about their studies than in the US, in general.
And when it comes to the levers of power, connections are still what defines future leaders in Asia, not grades. This entire idea of "serious students" are ultimately just a bone to throw to the masses.
This is an unrelated point, is your contention that the US is better off with unserious students? Social mobility / wealth accumulation for the masses does suck in other countries but it's great that people are still seriously motivated by schools. It's a big reason those students immigrant to the US and companies here hire those people in masses.
It's that America has the capacity to fully absorb it's talent so it's not a problem. The reason why other countries have more is because they don't have the capacity to absorb them due to less opportunities so the competition is higher. Many of those "serious" students in China or India will still end working in factory jobs and delivery drivers because they weren't good enough.
>It's a big reason those students immigrant to the US and companies here hire those people in masses
Eh, if they were hiring domestic students I wouldn't say there would be much of difference. Unless if you are running a startup, most of these "serious" students will be just writing basic CRUD apps. Value comes from experience here, not talent. Well, if I was American though, I wouldn't bother competing againt millions of desperate Chinese or Indians for opportunity cost anyways, I'd be going more into law or finance. And those fields are less diverse.
If you do academics only, there's also the phenomenon where getting into the right Kindergarten-level school determines your entire school career. In many countries, your current school is a significant factor of your next school.
Imagine not getting into the right Kindergarten having life-long consequences.
My wife is Asian (born there) and when I told her and her family this they were literally speechless.
Admissions required a triad - top grades, top test scores, and something significant in extra-curricular activities. And finally, an interview. Bomb any of those, and you're out. I was rejected by MIT because of the interview.
There's a lot of luck of the draw when you're applying to schools with a pretty low admittance rate.
I joke with someone I know pretty well in my alma mater's alumni office that I'd probably never get in today and they smile and follow it up with an "oh well, you're fine." :-) And they're not unhappy that I'm an alumnus. 3 people from my school's 59 person graduation class got in; certainly would never happen now.
I knew nothing about Caltech, and by amazing luck it was perfectly suited to what I wanted and my personality.
For a while now, I've been running the D Coffee Haus monthly meetings, where myself and fellow nerds meet and talk about nerdly stuff. It's as much fun as the same thing at Caltech.
This is not a hypothetical btw, this really happens.
Rich people are going to waste their time and money no matter what, but I didn't want them also wasting yours and mine. The man-hours and percent of the GDP (often paid for with taxes) we put into conflating cause and effect is absurd.
We dodn't need merit-base academia, we need merit-based employment that disregards elite and academic status.
We'll have neither, of course. The wealthy will always be able to pay for what they want — merit be damned.
Economists call it costly signaling. The more elite of a status it signals, the costlier it can be, but with guaranteed student loans, the economics of it have become so separated that as the eliteness of a bachelor's degree has gone down, the costliness has gone up.
I am on a co-op board here in NY, pretty much all our young buyers the last 2 years are all gen-Z who went the non-college route and have saved up more than enough to put a downpayment on a home for themselves and have a mortgage instead of college debt.
Really? How much money did they start with versus how much they earned via working? This feels like a bit of burying the lede here.
You pull back the veneer and you find out that mom put down $50k on the house. There was a new coffee shop nearby to me and it had a really cool space, warehouse type, and I was talking to the young owner how cool their business is until they divulged that the space belongs to their dad - ok I guess daddy is just throwing money at you to keep you busy.
With the gap between capital income and labor income widening, it is becoming more difficult to obtain capital with your income at a young age.
You don't become rich by wasting time and money.
Just because rich people waste their time and money with academia, it doesn't mean anyone can become rich, just by wasting time and money on academia.
We effectively already have middle management being used to school elites; they get tours in various companies in the network, which means they build impressive resumes that would "win" any competition based on merit/success history.
Indeed, this may be necessary: the baseline investors committed to a company keep all the free riders on board through growth volatility. Is it too much to show their people the ropes?
It may be necessary, but it's probably self-destructive: foreign investors are often most interested in new technologies, not to profit from them, but to learn enough to compete. So they'll out-bid investors without such strategic aims. They're very much aligned with open-source, because their people leave with knowledge and the company is left without IP protections.
So... it's complicated. Going all-"merit" helped with civil service in the 1870's - 1950's, but people learned any system can be gained, and we can no longer afford slack-maximizing.
At Caltech and MIT for example they have way more people with very high SAT score than they have openings for. Most admitted students at both have math scores of 790 or 800, and reading/writing averages around 750.
The SAT is not reproducible enough to say that someone who scored say a 790 is better than someone who scored a 780. If both retook the test they would likely get different scores and would have a good chance of finishing in a different order.
Same for other standardized test.
The result then is that after you filter by standardized tests you still end up with a more people than you can admit that have high tests scores that give you no information about who would do well and who would not.
There are plenty of people who can get those high scores but would not be able to handle the class work at Caltech, and from what I've heard the same applies to MIT. To figure out who can actually handle the work they have to look beyond standardized tests.
And then some large number of high scoring candidates will miss out until we have a sufficient number of universities.
Irrespective of the mechanism, it is incredibly racist to use one’s race as a scoring mechanism perhaps by definition.
Make them sit some of the university's exams, and if they pass they get in.
Obviously if your test makers aren't very good you'll get full score being only 96th percentile. But you can make tests that don't have full score being that many people. We know because very few people medal on the IMO. Once you have a sufficiently hard test, rank everyone and choose top to bottom.
As people get better and better, you have to expand your universities. Of course, in the US you run into the problem where the towns consider students a pollutant[0] but I'm sure we can start new universities out in the middle of nowhere. We've done it before, we can do it again. And until we do, yes, if you had a bad day, try again next year
0: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-03-02/california-...
Boo-hoo, rich university loses money. Like the 21% Trump tax on endowment income, etc. Maybe they'll have to fire some useless, non-teaching administrators and build fewer country club dorms and luxury amenities, right?
But... Stanford would probably argue that admitting a single less-qualified donor child can cover the financial aid expenses of dozens of qualified students whose parents simply have less money. (Financial aid is 5% of Stanford's budget.)
If this is true, California's goal of banning legacy and (especially) donor admits could have an unintended consequence of reducing the number of qualified but non-rich students who will be admitted.
But... many gifts are restricted, you say! Buildings. Endowed faculty chairs. Particular research centers and programs. Specialized scholarships. Etc. Nonetheless, Stanford has to balance its budget, and even restricted gifts save money and allow them to shift dollars from one place to another. (Note debt service is 4% of the budget as well.)
Let’s say the school decides they have enough money without that 7%. They figure out they don’t need to be that rich. Does that mean they can’t do more institutionally or does it mean they can’t do more organizationally (which is just get bigger, more heads, more money)? What does it really mean for them to suddenly become ethical and say they don’t want that blood money anymore?
That’s what I’m trying to figure out. It’s a follow the money situation, and it’s important to figure out who is beholden to that 7% when it comes into their system. If we find out it’s the giant cafeteria building, then maybe we settle for a smaller one. But if we find out it’s making certain people fat in the pockets, then you’re on to something.
——
Aside, society should really start encouraging the most talented to consider the ethics of institutions they go to. Whether that be Palantir or Stanford. Legacy admissions is just straight unethical, and Stanford students need to protest this.
Sounds like an argument for taxing the rich, if they've got so much spare money they can carry dozens of other people's kids through school.
Alumni. Stanford may care most about just that one alumnus, but my suspicion is that they care at least as much about other alumni and alumnae. :)
Often "Alums" nowadays, as Alumni is traditionally male gendered.
Not for stanford. Its goals largely boil down to increase the endowment and create a powerful alumni network. Accepting legacies is a great way to accomplish both those things. This is the same reason schools give preference to athletes even though it brings down the schools academics. Competitive athletics requires skills that translate very well to the workplace(grit, teamwork) so successful athletes are likely to become successful corporate workers.
Not as many Nobel prizes - or elements on the periodic table - however. Berkeley (having many more undergrads) also has more alumni.
(But note for both schools that good researchers are not necessarily good undergraduate instructors.)
As a side note, I always found this obsession with sports to be a fascinating aspect of american culture. Being from an entirely different culture, it’s unclear to me why on earth would anyone give a fuck about this.
Also the Olympics seem to be a big thing every four years, particularly in the country where they are being held; Berkeley and Stanford do pretty well in that competition.
But just in case - it’s cool, I wasn’t being judgmental.
> What does stanford offer undergrads that berkeley doesnt? IMO access to legacies and the larger alumni network is about it
Non-academic advantages (e.g. athletics programs, student housing, etc.) are still advantages.
Berkeley has its own set of non-academic advantages, such as closer proximity and access to San Francisco (via BART).
If the elite colleges are not comprised of the rich and well connected it beats the entire point of an elite college.
Depends on how you define "elite", and I assume you mean some sort of hereditary or economic-class-based definition. But elite colleges could (and should) still work if they run on competency-based merit. I believe elite talent in as many fields of endeavour should absolutely be catered to.
> The entire notion of "elite" universities is discriminatory.
Well, when you put it that way, many things are discriminatory, for better or worse.
The functional purpose of a meritocratic elite is to concentrate the smartest and most ambitious in your nation (in each generation) so they can cross leverage each other. This dates back to feudal societies switching to a civil exam system during Enlightenment. (Also in imperial China.) That’s a productive form of discrimination.
I mean really, it's the question of why this over preexisting patronage systems. And looking at the "achivements" of this so-called "meritocratic elite" this last century (especially in enshittification) leaves alot to be desired.
It's just one self-serving 1% attempting to ursurp another 1%. And they certainly aren't going to be solving your problems. They don't have the ability to solve the coordination problem, the housing crisis, involution, climate change and Donald Trump.
That wasn't created by the meritocratic elite, that was created by the "preexisting patronage systems" where rich pays to get their kids influential credential so that they can continue to have outsized influence on the country...
> They don't have the ability to solve the coordination problem, the housing crisis, involution, climate change and Donald Trump.
The current system is what caused those, why do you think that is much better?
I don't think it's better. But I don't think it's worse either. It's exchanging one elite for another with the similar incentives. But what I would object though is how the education system has been essentially appropiated as a system of elite differentiation (and social mobility) rather than improving the 80% as function of overall social welfare. Why are we caring about a handful of colleges compared the hundreds of others we have? The opportunity cost really is to better spend our resources and time pushing up the average, mediocre student rather than focusing on all these unproductive signalling mechanisms. And I think from there, that's where the real saviours will emerge.
...why? STEM programs have weed-out classes for a reason. Astrophysics PhDs, similarly, are not vehicles for wealth or prestige, but must (and do) filter out below-standards candidates early.
Other types of discrimination are bad because they create effects that make society worse overall (more sectarian or class-based tension, more corruption, less growth).
Taxpayers, exercising their own self-interest, should pick and choose the good types of discrimination to support. There is no need for morality here.
TLDR, I am in agreement with you, but I wanted to frame the argument in this way.
From outside looking in, the American system has a hilariously unequal system. Certain opportunities are hoarded by an insanely small set of schools, almost entirely based on "prestige" and financial dominance. And it's this crazy arms-race/pressure cooker to get in. But once you're in, grade inflation is everywhere and people aren't actually working super hard. No one freaks out about admissions to "mid-tier" schools. It's entirely about a select coterie of schools who people rightly perceive as gatekeeping to an incredible extent.
None of the schools actually emphasize being accessible and hard to graduate from. The incentives are all weird and cater to a small elite population. The name on the degree is more important than earning the degree.
They didn't do legacy admits as far as I knew.
But what it's like today, I have no information.
I asked him, were you smarter after 10 years? He laughed and said nope, he was just willing to work this time!
(Another gem about Caltech - once you're admitted, they'll give you endless chances to come back and finish. Your credits did not expire.)
One of my friends finally graduated after 6 years there. He endured endless students mumbling "7 years, down the drain!" as they passed by. (The line was from Animal House.)
It was easily the most work and effort I had to put into anything, tons of peoole dropping/failing out, and the average GPA for most students was not that hot. Definitely not close to the well-known Harvard-tier 3.65+
This is because standard IQ tests are generally designed to measure around the median of the distribution (70-130), and so there is a lot of variance in measurement at the top end. If you happen to have a bad testing day and you make a dumb mistake, your measured IQ might drop by a fairly large number of points -- or, conversely, if you got lucky and guessed right, your measured IQ could be much higher than reality.
For example, the original Raven's Progressive Matrices says [2; page 71]
> For reason's already given, Progressive Matrices (1938) does not differentiate, very clearly between young-children, or between adults of superior intellectual capacity.
where "superior intellectual capacity" is defined as an IQ of ~125 or higher, and (if I am interpreting it correctly), the table on page 79 of [2] says missing a single question could drop a 20-year old from scoring 95 percentile to scoring 90 percentile. That's 5 IQ points on a single question! If you had a bad day, or didn't get enough sleep, you could test significantly worse than your actual "IQ."
Anyone that actually has an IQ of 160 with even a modicum of self awareness should understand that the IQ test they took is inherently noisy at the top end of the scale because sometimes people have off days.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_classification#IQ_classific...
[2] https://rehabilitationpsychologist.org/resources/SPM%20with%...
I agree that actually measuring his IQ would have been a dodgy idea, but there was no doubt he was a unicorn. He himself never made any claims about it. It was just something you realized about him after a while.
The main thing I want to add is that using IQ to quantify intelligence at the top end of the scale is scientifically bogus and in my opinion harmful because it validates depressed / insecure / chronically online people who use their "160 IQ" as a way to put down other people or to peddle pseudo-scientific nonsense. Those people often need genuine psychiatric help and (in my opinion) such validation only harms them.
I'm sure that Hal Finney was exceptionally smart, though. :)
I would have had a lot less trouble with Quantum Mechanics if I'd realized that nobody understands it, it's just that the math works. I thought it was just me that thought it was crazy.
Clearly you’ve never enrolled in a EECS class at Cal
Went to Cal for mechanical engineering, and while I survived the engineering classes, the physics classes wore me out and the math classes were almost impossible for me. I barely made it out of there.
I honestly wish I went somewhere easier so that it wasn't a constant struggle to keep up and survive. I think I would have actually learned more.
It's not like my only other option was to go to CSU East Bay, although I know people that built decent careers from there too to be honest.
This professor wasn’t demanding, he was just making zero effort to actually teach.
Great researchers are not necessarily great teachers, especially for intro courses. Anecdotally, I think this is a common issue at “prestigious” schools.
And it's not a conspiracy; it just shows how much power that elite has, that they're able to make these things happen when they need them to. A sudden turn away from nativism and condoning of proto-anarchy when the black population (first slave, then free) threatened to upend the social order. Socialism lite (and more immigration, but only from preferred European nations) to head off full-blown socialism after capitalism first drove to excess and then blew itself up. Truman getting the VP spot. Bank bailouts (so many bank bailouts). Even the begrudging "opening" of elite institutions to Jews, blacks, Asians (staring down the barrel of their own, rival, institutions).
Anything to prevent their power and influence decentralizing in an enduring manner.
The is partially true but leaves out an important difference between Canadian and American admissions. In Canada you are admitted to a particular major, not the university as a whole.
E.g. At the University of Waterloo, CS and some of the engineering majors can have < 5% admissions rate and are extremely merit based. At the same time, applying for the general Bachelor of Arts at UWaterloo is uncompetitive and very easy to get admitted.
He ended up with a BS in Chemistry, went on further academically, and eventually was the general manager of a big factory (I think for GE, but not 100% sure) in the 80s before being killed in a car accident.
There’s a million stories like this. Most debates about who is more “qualified” for what in this context boil down to subjective vibes about whatever people think. At best, it’s pride in Ivy League education, at worst it’s some racist nonsense about the “others” taking status and jobs away.
I went to a random state school that some would eyeroll at. Life has been fine, and I’m glad I didn’t waste my time pursuing some bullshit admissions process.
I read somewhere that people who graduated at the top of their class generally became average with respect to success.
Also, I suspect success has to be quantified, which might be hard.
I wouldn't say hard. It's expensive, time consuming, and the people who can perform qual to quant conversions usefully need to have a foot firmly planted on each side of the subject matter fence.
More to the point, nobody's really interested in compiling this kind of data. Adding dimensions beyond income to your definition of "success" would result in e.g. revealing there isn't anyone from your school successfully practicing family law.
In the same way, if up until last year, your company had any form of DEI, it's pretty toxic to point to any of your colleagues, claim that they were diversity hire and their success is a credit to DEI policies b/c that undermines them in a way that's impossible to provide evidence against.
The implication that "you were only <hired or admitted> because of a policy that gave you credit for <trait/circumstance>" can't have a factual basis unless you have all applications and notes from the admissions/hiring deliberation process, which the person in question almost certainly cannot.
The idea is that merit based admissions is actually pretty complicated, so we can allow individual universities continue to experiment with their own implementations and approaches.
However, we can hold them accountable by grading them based on retrospective data.
1. Admitting a certain amount of students based on legacy status is not necessarily a bad thing
2. A University should not be eligible for taxpayer funds if they have admissions like (1) or similar holistic criteria.
In a society as diverse as America I think 2 is a fair line to draw. And the universities with large and powerful alumni networks where legacy admissions are most relevant have the least "need" for public funds. They have huge endowments.
This is particularly so because the advantage of this kind of school is networking, and it's in the interest of the disadvantaged to give them opportunity to network with the advantaged.
But it's also no big deal if we don't make that compromise.
Public money is precious, and we should think really hard about taking money from the general public just to give it to wealthy institutions any time we do it.
There's also a difference between giving money to a school, and giving money to a student to buy an education they want
Have the basic grades and test scores? Ok welcome to CS1 where 2/3 of you will not make it thanks for playing
Obviously the situation is much more complex and nuanced, but this framing (amongst others I’m sure) seems appropriate if you are thinking on a 25,50,100 year time scale in terms of impact of your decision. The country is littered with public and private universities who made poor moral choices across the 19th and 20th centuries but I’m not aware of any institutions suffering long-term reputational harm (or threat of insolvency) as a result of those choices. (Then again, maybe it’s because the harm was swift and final at the time)
Everyone else jumped on it and abused the student loan system by jacking up tuition and then applying charity grants to basically all students. Leading to our current Student Loan crisis.
MIT + the more expensive private colleges are effectively a rounding error in terms of number of students matriculating, but they do play in the same market and will price accordingly. But the big driver of what they can get away with is that a college like University of Tennessee is $35,000 annually, for a total ticket likely north of $150k. (Not picking on them, just chose a state at random.)
Worth noting that this is a deliberate political choice. At any time, a state could choose to return to subsidizing in-state college at its public institutions, perhaps in exchange for working in the state after graduation.
Yes, absolutely this, and accelerating heavily in the late 00s after the financial crisis. In some states, especially for non-flagship universities, you can overlay the decrease in state funding and tuition increases and they're nearly the same line
Tuition explosion isn't all just the proliferation of assistant deans and VPs (although that is a problem, too), a huge portion of it is that public higher education is essentially public in name only these days
What stops the higher ed players from regulatory capture of the state agency in charge of those subsidies and milking that cow for all it's got?
Yes, you are correct that a corrupt state will deliver poor results. A key bulwark against in many places is effective oversight of public assets and administrations. But a corrupt state also could do much worse than $35k for undergraduate tuition. Which suggests priorities are being set to accomplish a different set of goals.
Also keep in mind that the primary mechanism here is not adding regulation. Rather, it's about things like ensuring universities have enough open slots for the children matriculating through their K-12 programs. Think about it more in the way states are generally capable of managing and subsidizing/funding student education at the K-12 level.
Bigger picture: consider why it should even be seen to be such a massive difference in capability for a state to run a public education program for the 4 years after high school vs the first 13 years.
My view is skewed towards California, where admittedly examples of cost decreases through economies of scale are lacking.
K-12 is particular is an area where critics demean public systems, but where we have yet to see anyone scale an alternative at lower cost/higher quality targeting the same goals. (Apologies if someone has done it, I am not aware.)
Note: this means that systems that exclude classes of students do not count as they have different goals. Obviously, one could more cheaply build a private education system for rich kids who all have similar capabilities. But that is not the goal of public systems, who are tasked with educating the poor and rich, the deaf, the blind, those who speak other languages, etc. Generally, they are able to do this for less money per pupil than elite private schools that are not able to serve all students.
Anyway the point getting lost here is that states do subsidize public universities, but not as much as they did in prior decades. The debate you seem to be aiming toward is whether we should have public universities, to which I would say that we should have more of them, and they should cost students less by having taxes cover a larger share of those institutions.
Edit: I want to come back to this for a moment. Water and sewers are really core functions of public governments, and in the US they basically work near 100% of the time. They involve tremendous ongoing logistical work at timescales ranging from emergency pipe burst to capacity planning for decades in the future.
The notion that government involvement means poor/expensive service delivery is a fiction constructed from the outliers of government work.
Apologies if my argument came out that way. I agree with a need for public universities, I just disagree with the need to have them at any cost. Ad absurdium, a public university that costs $1,000 / $10,000 / $100,000 / $1,000,000 per student are all a good deal to a purist because hey, a need is a need.
The current system, however, incentivizes extracting maximum value for the stakeholders (administration) while delivering minimum results to customers (students). With a single-payer there's even a stronger incentive to inflate the operating costs.
If you went through US higher education, you've probably witnessed a few tricks designed for maximum revenue extraction.
* credits from one [cheaper] accredited institution are not transferable to another [expensive one], ensuring that you'd be subjected to a higher tuition
* courses that can be delivered online are not
* courses that are delivered online are paywalled to ensure only those who have registered and paid can view the precious content (something Open Courseware stood up against)
* there's no system where one can test out of pre-requisites by taking similar courses cheaper (or free) elsewhere. E.g., if you self-studied through some MIT or Stanford courses online, you still have to pay full tuition at Fill In The Blank State University
Granted, it's not always about effort duplication and resource waste. California Community Colleges, for instance, is good at centralizing student registration, identity management, and financials, so that each community college doesn't have to run a fully staffed department doing all that.
Ideally, though, an eager high school student should be able to
* load up on as many courses as they can manage online on their own schedule
* have an ability to test out of the courses for a fee that's lower than the full price of the course
* arrive at the university and pay full tuition for the courses that do require in-person training (nursing, medical sciences, any course requiring labs)
You're right, end of the day a public university is an extension of secondary school, but with higher concentrations of students (and hence fewer locations required and all sorts of economies of scale at play). There's no reason that grades 13-16 should cost more than grades K-12, so why do they?
I think we can all agree with that. I think a sane position is to return to the level of state support of e.g. the 1960s or 1970s. This worked in a substantially poorer US until we chose to stop doing it.
> There's no reason that grades 13-16 should cost more than grades K-12, so why do they?
This is the key point. Like most things, this is driven by policy choices. The choice is made to achieve certain aims, or to ensure other aims are not achieved. We have the object lesson that subsidized college broadly worked in the US until we collectively decided to stop doing it. We can choose differently when there is political will to do so.
FWIW I would suspect that most of the explicit revenue extraction is less about the types of things you indicated and more about the # of full-fare international students a college is able to recruit. There's a huge difference between a $35k in-state student on financial aid and a $55k student who will pay cash.
This is my new favorite take on libertarian ideals.
Even among educational institutions there’s a 19+k private schools and 5,300 universities in the US. The vast majority of them don’t operate anywhere close to that scale.
Even adding all the churches, clubs, and nonprofits I don’t think it’s that rare. The Mormon church for example has ~293 billion in assets. Even the Church of Scientology is apparently worth ~2 billion.
There are less than 2,000 us companies with a billion dollar market cap, out of ~40 million companies.
I expect the reserves would be a substantially less than that. Maybe somewhere in the ballpark of low triple digit organizations with a billion+ dollar reserve. Maybe 200 nationally?
So 8 9’s = 100,000,000
If its 200/100,000,000, that would be 99.9998 or 2 more digits.
There’s a surprising number of individual buildings worth 1+ billion each of which are going to be their own org. Add pensions, trusts, nuclear reactors, large dams, government organizations, etc.
Here’s 30 US charitable foundations over 1B which isn’t an exhaustive list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_charitable_...
I have an argument to make in favor of allowing legacy status for admissions. I am basing this on personal experience and some analysis of data done at similar schools when they were forced to release it due to lawsuits.
The way admissions works in the US now it has basically become a lottery for qualified students. We have more qualified students than we have seats at the top schools. The idea that there are some unqualified students who make it in only because their parents are alumni, at least at Stanford I have never seen. The top schools are all so competitive that they are all pretty similar and they would not do things to jeopardize their reputation or standing. So I think it's just not the case that there are unqualified legacy admits. At Harvard for example the legacy admits had higher SAT scores than the average admitted student which makes sense when you think about it. Children of alumni are probably better prepared for admissions.
So when choosing, Stanford might have to make a choice between two students with the same GPA, the same SAT score, the same interests, etc. and legacy status could decide it and I am ok with that. Building a campus network of people is a huge competitive advantage a school can have. You would be surprised how many people who are non legacy admits have pretty well known parents anyway or have parents who went to an extremely similar school. Singling out legacy admissions is not extremely meaningful and I don't think it's used to let in unqualified students at all.
I think it is best to do away with legacy admits especially because of racial history but also because it is a kind of nobility system, but that will make schools rely on government more right now which seems to be as bad for academic freedom and freedom to not fund genocide as the donor model.
Maybe if you’re a Boomer, although even by the time they were going to university, racial discrimination was rapidly being replaced by affirmative action. This is the 2020s - even though some problems from that era still haven’t been solved, brute forcing the solutions from back then won’t make them any better and has already produced a major backlash.
If we’re talking about Asians, I agree with you, as far as non-Bob Jones universities are concerned.
This isn't pedantic nitpicking. Segregation is a deeply evil employment of the state machinery to enforce and persist strict racial divisions in a society.
People choosing to stay near their friends, family, and community centers & therefore the census showing large clustering of self-identified racial groups, is not in any way the same thing.
At the end of the day you just have to be open to figuring this stuff out. If your view is that people were herded into airless ghettos, and then just stayed there with all the lack of opportunity that entailed, because they were making rational free choices to deprive themselves and their children of economic opportunity, you’re living in a fantasy world.
It happens that some neighborhoods are dominated by a certain race / ethnicity, while in others it goes the other way. Unless you want to go back to busing there’s not an easy fix for this problem
That's not the way I would phrase it. A lottery would mean the outcome is random. There is nothing random about it. They consider essays, extracurriculars, and income, and look for evidence of hardship, diversity, athletic ability, and leadership. 100% subjective, sure, but not random.
If it was a lottery, they'd do a binary classification of "qualified" and "not qualified", and then they'd randomly choose who gets in. IMO that would be an improvement on the current system. Powerball and other big lotteries don't pay out on subjective criteria, each ticket gives you the same chance of winning, with no other information being used.
You can do things to tip the balance in your favor, but the most important things can come down to chance.
Some people's world views aren't robust enough to handle the idea that some of what they got they didn't deserve. It's unfair in the best way. It's luck. It's grace. Every person with access to this website has been granted things well beyond what is "fair".
Result is it's effectively random for each qualified kid.
That’s why the person you are replying to said “qualified.”
This is known to be false. Development cases, where donor’s buy admission, are real. They’re limited, but universities do them regularly.
If you look at Jared Kushner’s case, for example, his parents weren’t even legacies!
If they keep this number small, like five per year, would it really dilute Harvard’s brand? I doubt it.
I am making a case that goes against the stereotype of what a legacy admit is. I think that stereotype of a unqualified child of rich alums is not accurate anymore. The Harvard data suggested legacy admits were above the average admitted student. I think that is more likely the case today. Also, to give an example, since an 18 year old was born in 2007, those legacy admits could be children of tech startup founders and Stanford has a strong interest in cultivating tech ties. But the more salient point I am making is that the assumption legacy admits are unqualified I believe not to be true. No one has actually made that case. They argued instead along racial grounds.
> some analysis of data
> stereotype of a unqualified child of rich alums is not accurate anymore
Yeah. What data might that be? Gini coefficient has been rising since 1980, and student achievement / quality of US university freshman classes has declined since at least 1993. So what you're saying couldn't be possible, in fact, you're 200% wrong. It would be completely improbable to observe these trends and for you to also be right.
So I think you read a real report about Varsity Blues or whatever, and I think you are using this report to make believe that you are doing something other than first principles thinking. But the first principles thinking, "more students and greater selectivity, therefore, overall class at Harvard has gotten better," is wrong! It's not knowable from first principles what the quality of Ivy League classes are. The people who have measured see declines everywhere, and there's absolutely no reason to believe that those declines should be smaller among the top students - if anything, top students have far further to fall! How's that for first principles? Clearly a bankrupt approach.
Ironically, the appeal of an "elite" university depends on the public image of the student body. The university has to manage that image through its admissions process. Any open criteria for "merit" will quickly turn the student body into a monocultural freak show. This would in turn diminish the public image of the university -- the exact thing that the students were hoping to benefit from.
So just to spell the quiet part out loud, what you're saying is that admissions based purely on merit would mean the student body would become entirely Asian, and this would be a "freak show" that's bad for the university's image?
Quotas to DIE have all been ruled to, in practice, amount to illegal discrimination on the basis of race, but some people truly believe Harvard and UNC were right to discriminate against Asians.
Which makes sense. If it came to your kid, would you give up their spot at an Ivy for the “common good” (assuming you saw it that way)?
Or would your definition of what’s right/wrong change to fit the practicals of the circumstances?
So most people would benefit, a tiny minority who currently unfairly get into elite colleges would be hurt.
Merit doesn’t have to mean SAT scores.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...
side note: “monoculture” and “freak show” seem incompatible. an entirely homogenous student body doesn’t sound too freaky
Now all of this runs into the same fundamental issue that any decision like this does, namely, that ideally you want everyone to have an equal chance, but also, you want them to do a good job in their role. Unfortunately, people, through no fault of their own, are born into different circumstances, and some are prepared, in many different ways, better or worse than others, and this strongly affects how well they will perform.
My kids went to a competitive high school, and I saw how the top students funneled themselves into an extremely narrow range of interests. Those kids were nice, but putting 1000 of them in one place would be a freak show.
The choosing of rulers is an interesting and complex problem. An idea with some popularity in HN is "sortition" which is the selection of rulers at random. This could be applied to college admissions in the following way. The college doesn't want to admit the top 1000 applicants according to any short list of KPI's that can be gamed. So they admit from the top 10000 students by manual curation, which is guaranteed to be controversial.
Instead, why not identify the top 10000 applicants, and then send out acceptance letters to 1000 students chosen at random by a neutral third party. (Making up parameters here, just for definiteness). The schools would get the variety they want, with an opaque selection function that can't be inverted, and the same potential benefits that sortition offers for choosing the ruling class.
Edit: Oh, you think in a century we won’t still be in this situation? Hmmmm.
The Vietnam draft with College deferments broke colleges and universities.
Now every white collar job requires a degree - because every boomer overseeing those roles thinks it’s necessary.
> judged to a higher standard: the legacy admit must have both a higher gpa, and sat score than the inbound class average
“I didn’t learn anything in college” is either exaggerated arrogance, or you were doing something very, very wrong in undergrad.
But there's this mythology that the main reason you go to Harvard (which I didn't attend) is to network with movers and shakers isn't generally true in the main.
There is real work and learning that happens in universities and there are people who actually care about those things but that work is tertiary to the primary function of the university, which is ensuring the continued existence of itself
Your anecdotal evidence is not reflected in reality.
Of course, not every graduate meets the standards of the degree they got. Many don't have sufficient internal motivation to work hard and learn. And universities often lack strong sources of external motivation. No matter whether it's the government or the student who pays for the education, there is a heavy pressure to have people graduate in time, even when they have not reached the expected standards.
I found the most systematic way of teaching critical thinking is to do a lot of maths.
For those of us who went to state schools, it was about learning. Going to a 2nd tier state college instantly changed my social class from "family of laborers" to "highly paid white collar".
> You learn far more in a single year on the job than in your four year college degree (and I say this as an engineer).
Maybe. I've met plenty of experienced devs who didn't know fundamentals that colleges teach. College also teaches other skills, such as writing, presentation, and appreciation for the arts. Ideally it also teaches people how to be responsible members of a democratic society.
> In fact I think a STEM degree is mostly superfluous except for the connections you make in college which is very important.
Most people don't have access to a fully stocked chemistry lab, or super computer clusters. College is a place where you are surrounded by other people who also want to learn, so your own learning is greatly accelerated by the conversations you are able to have.
There are countless times I'd be stumped in a math class trying to understand a topic and I wouldn't get it until I sat down and tried to explain it to someone else in my study group.
Studying hard is harder work than having a normal job, much harder work. I've never been stressed in a job, but I have been stressed trying to learn too much in school.
I do not believe this is true in the slightest. I learned more in a single OS class than i learned in years of industry work. What you learn in industry tends to be distinct from what you learn in college, and if it isn't, then your college curriculum was probably a waste.
Not /s but not /100% serious either.
If you went to an elite school and your kid can't get in by competing fairly with other kids, they're subpar and shouldn't get in. Kids of legacies have a massive advantage even if their legacy status is totally ignored.
For example, I'm certain that I can get my kids into MIT (they're a bit young right now). I know exactly what they need to do, how they need to present themselves, what classes to take, courses, extracurriculars, how to stand out, who to ask for letters, who to ask for opportunities like time in a research lab, etc. I've even helped other kids make plans and then get in. Same for my wife for the Ivy League school she attended. Those connections, peers, knowledge, resources, etc. are hard to match. If the kids decide they want to do that.
There's no reason to give these kids (my own included!) any other advantage. They're born with such a massive head start that it's hard to lose, if they put in the work. If they don't, then they shouldn't go to these places.
The only thing legacy admissions do is take away opportunities from students that deserve to be there. Stanford/Harvard/etc. shouldn't get a dime of state or federal funding as long as they continue to do this.
I know a professor charging high schoolers to be his research assistant, because there's too many people asking for research labs roles. I know people that got into top business schools because they already had thousands in MRR in high school.
My friend's kids are going there ahead of mine. I know plenty of people there, including folks involved in admissions. I'm contacted to write letters for candidates. etc. You stay plugged into the system.
I have no idea what mechanism a faculty member would use to charge a highschool student. But I think that's rather unethical and useless. Finances of labs are such that this money is worthless.
In any case, plenty of labs, mine included have several highschool students at any one time. But guess how you get in? With connections.
Depends on how much money we’re talking about
Things start getting “interesting” maybe around $50k. And yes there are people who will pay that much
University professors are also grossly underpaid relative to the difficulty of the job
In any case, I would never charge a summer student. And I have no idea how my university would do that if I tried. There's no mechanism. And even if there was, that money would go to the university not my lab. So it's useless.
I very much doubt this is going on. It's definitely not happening at top 10 places.
This is a fundamental issue in my view. The types of people who will do good work are precisely the type who have not been trained by privilege to believe that they can get by without doing good work. But it is those with the privilege who are most able to get themselves into positions where good work would be beneficial. Hence the incentives are exactly backwards and we need to make a deliberate effort to exclude exactly the types of people who most "naturally" will crowd into certain jobs and positions, and include those who are least likely to naturally do so.
The university wouldn't know what was going on, and there wouldn't be anything technically illegal.
Speaking fees are one obvious way to do this.
Most of the time, college professors don't want anything to do with high school students, or even undergrads most of the time. They only do it because they are told to or there is some personal benefit to them.
The faculty member is keeping the money for themselves. Some might call it a bribe.
It's unethical (and possibly worse) but it is happening. The students themselves aren't doing actual research, they're given busywork because it's understood to be resume padding.
> But guess how you get in? With connections.
Over time, "connections" degrade into kickbacks and corruption. My point is that these lab positions are going to be meaningless in a decade due to bribery.
It will be similar to how every student at top high schools is an executive in a club because those schools have fake clubs that don't meet or do anything.
OP's point is those kids will still probably wield exceptional wealth and power. Wherever they congregate will thus become the de facto centre of the elites.
The state isn't pulling subsidies for the school to beautify its campus or some such.
It is canceling financial aid grants to low income students that are accepted to Stanford.
This is presented as a punishment of Stanford, which has no shortage of applicants.
I might as well have said they're going to crush 10 puppies a day until Stanford relents
I don't think that the Cal Grants program was ever designed to remove those people from the program. It was designed to make sure they didn't get an advantage. In other words, it was prevent universities from letting people who otherwise would not have made the grade in just because their parents made the grade.
Giving alumni's children an advantage isn't giving an advantage to "the smartest, most charismatic, most talented people" -- it's giving an advantage to the luckiest (the ones who happened to be born into it).
And the phrase "it would be ideal if those born into privilege could also clear the SAT" is such a strange one. OF COURSE rich people can "clear the SAT;" in fact, they get the advantage of MUCH better preparation, etc. So this is absolutely about giving an advantage to kids who could not qualify on their own.
To be clear: I don't think Stanford is doing this to keep poor people out (their scholarships have always been very generous). But I do think the administration probably done some basic calculation: they get more in donations from alumni who want legacy admissions for their progeny than they get from Cal Grants.
And Stanford has decided that accepting some kids who just don't make the grade is worth that economic advantage.
That is the "real world". Everything else is just an abstraction, propped up by a system that has only existed for a definite period of time and will not exist outside of that.
Without it, you end up with some entirely merit-based schools and some true Ivory Towers and the Twain rarely meet.
Once I'm overlooking poor test scores for the 'landed gentry' background, I've got little defence when people demand I overlook poor test scores for other backgrounds too.
Before I know it, a trivial amount of arguably-unfair-ness that was flying under the radar becomes a non-trivial amount, and now everyone's mad at me.
While I hate the taste, it makes sense to combine smart with powerful if you want to produce industry.
The rich don’t need to be particularly competitive academically - they are hyper-advantaged socially.
Exposing them to intelligent thought keeps them from being powerful ignoramuses, and encouraging the academically gifted to rub shoulders with those that can help them to implement their ideas is also an advantage.
I hate it but it actually makes sense to me.
I’m not sure that was the motivation in this case though, easily could have been an accounting decision.
But would it not also, for the same reasons be good if the rich and powerful were exposed to Native Americans, military veterans, wheelchair users, religious minorities, minority sects of religious majorities, young parents, trans folk, mature students, reformed convicts, people with mental health problems, and so on?
What if you want to produce equality?
Nobody wants equality. People merely don’t want to be thwarted in their pursuit of a worthwhile life.
We should do what we can to ensure that special barriers aren’t erected for anyone and that everyone can succeed on their merits, but also we must balance that ideal with the fact that some people wield disproportionate power, either as a result of their merits or otherwise.
There is no easy solution, only less bad compromises
People are not born with equal potential in athleticism or intellect. It’s inconvenient, but it’s true.
The only way to achieve equality is to severely attenuate potential to the lowest common occurrence. Pol Pot tried that.
First, you don't need to achieve exact equality, just approximate equality. That approximate equality can incorporate a range of levels of wealth and still be enormously more equal than what we have today. It is fine if someone with an IQ of 130 has 100x the wealth of someone with IQ 70. It's not fine if someone with an IQ of 130 has 10^9x the wealth of someone with IQ 70. It's also not fine if someone with IQ 130 has 10^9x the wealth of someone else with IQ 130. (It's questionable whether IQ is even a meaningful measure, but I'm just using it here as a proxy for whatever kind of "innate ability" we want to posit.)
Second, you don't need to achieve equality of all forms of outcomes, just economic means (and political rights, etc.). Not everyone can be a concert pianist or a venture capitalist, but that's okay as long as concert pianists and venture capitalists don't have 1000x the wealth of everyone else.
It's perfectly fine for people to have different aptitude and even different levels of aptitude in general. It's just not fine for those differences to translate into enormous differences in baseline well-being (e.g., food, shelter, time).
Ironically, of course, if we achieved this, it would then be much less objectionable for Stanford to do whatever it wants, because it would mean we've created a society where going to Stanford doesn't really matter so much. But the question is what does Stanford (and everybody else) need to do in the meantime to get to that point.
I don’t defend that a doctor should make 20x what a nurse does, or that the c-suite should make 20000x what the janitor makes. But it’s also fine that some people don’t produce anything of value, at all, while others produce a lot of value for society. A meritocracy with a mechanism to limit suffering and harm to those who cannot participate seems a reasonable solution. We don’t need or want to incentivise parasitism at high or low levels.
Are people born smart not also "lucky"?
I have no comment on that but, side note, was every researcher mentioned a woman?
Every life decision was him opting out of responsibility and prestige to spend more time on his interests.
So “people of equal talent, and commitment to their work at the cost of all other qualities of life including relationships” looks very different than that quote wants to suggest.
The calculation was beyond basic - I read somewhere here that it was around $3m that they were getting from Cal Grants.
Around 8 years ago, I heard (from a friend of mine) that the min donation to guarantee admission to Stanford was ~$10m. Wouldn’t be surprised that it’s even a higher number nowadays…
Their benefit is also much clearer, the $10M donation you mentioned can clearly and directly help a lot of students.
The benefit is clear, I would argue the detriment is also clear: Stanford is arguing that bribery is an acceptable method of doing business, not something that deserves opprobrium.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-08-08/trump-se...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/07/universities...
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/trumps-war-big-law-le...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/08/07/tim-...
So the calculation was that a report showing how much unfairness there is in the admissions process will hurt the Stanford ‘brand’ by more that $3M per year. Ouch.
At least the British aristocracy had the concept of noblesse oblige, while the US aristocracy loves to lecture the poors on how they should be pulling themselves up by their bootstraps (and it always bothers me that that analogy was invented to point out the impossibility of actually pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, but somehow came to mean the opposite).
But something happened: people who didn't understand it was meant to indicate somthing impossible started using it like it was some moralizing good. And here we are, saying dumb shit on the internets.
This is an argument for stricter regulation, not more lenient. It means that schools that give such advantages to the already-privileged should not be able to even exist, nor should businesses that give such advantages in hiring, nor should any entity that gives such advantages. In other words, if this rule didn't succeed at making those people (or rather, their advantages) irrelevant, then we need an even harsher rule.
Does that include preventing discrimination based on race, religion, ethnic origin, gender, and age?
All law is the use of force to realize a preferred society.
What about this: public funding (and tax exemption) is reduced in proportion with the number of legacy students a university accepts? The idea being the university should be able to monetise these slots to more than compensate for the decline in public funding. And said slots do not serve a public purpose, but one more particular to the graduates of the university.
Is it a student whose admission decision was influenced by legacy status? Or merely someone who was a child of an alum?
MIT claims to not have legacy status affect admissions decisions. Would their taxes increase if they admit the kid of an alum?
Not really. The university would need to certify it did not consider legacy status or donations during admissions. If someone decides to get sneaky, that’s tax fraud.
Networks of wealth and power will start to congregate elsewhere and if necessary sabotage the place which now hostile to their interests (which includes that of their offspring).
Would the institution carry the same prestige if it was purely meritocratic?
If NO --> Would it be a magnet for overseas talent? Would Xi's daughter want to go to it?
One can recognize the significant societal downsides while also recognizing the picture isn't very simple.
Calling 99% of the world's universities irrelevant is certainly a take. And not a very intelligent one.
If Stanford was just filled with kids who got high test scores, that purpose would be gone. Plenty of startups have a story "we met in college" and one had brains and another had the social connections and family finances to make things happen.
Society has managed to mess that pipeline up, first through massive student loans, and now through just general unemployment.
But the system worked for a long time.
The Ivy leagues are something different. Society can only have so many "elites", or else they stop being elite and just start being irritating rich people. There needs to be a path for new blood to enter the elites, so feeder lanes exist.
This all worked rather well for at least half the 20th century, but recently the elites have gone a bit too far into the "eat the poor" territory, and society is starting to crumble around the edges.
No, college started out as academic institutions of learning, not instruments of social mobility. It was never intended as a job training program, rather a place of academics to work together on a topic, and was heavily restricted to the aristocrats and elites from the start.
Alot of the problems here is stemming precisely from trying to use higher education for a purpose it was not originally designed to do.
People have completely forgotten why it mattered on resumes to begin with. Association with a university signaled an appreciation for philosophy, now it signals tolerance for administrative abuse.
Top schools are also entirely capable of attracting members of privileged elites to network at their events without shepherding them through the curriculum.
I went to an Ivy. That was not the point, and a lot of these comments have little in common with reality.
Let's be real, legacy admissions are about increasing donations to a school - everything else is just BS rationalization.
Details matter. If a conscription term lasts for 9 months and the richest people do their best to get their offspring exempted (which is how it worked in Czechia prior to professionalization of the army), I am not surprised by the lack of overall effect.
If a conscription term lasts 3 years and the local elite feels compelled to take part (Israel), the effect may be much bigger.
Note that college is closer to the latter in its parameters.
You pretend we need the established world order because this is how the world works but the actual world works in certain ways due to policy. The same policies that allow the rich to pay no taxes while the mid and poor do.
I understand your attempt at a pessimistic yet pragmatic view but I think There is an alternative that still works and doesn't actually make universities "irrelevant".
The wealthy unqualified can always be VCs/funders.
You're not removing the people, you're removing the privilege. Those same people can still apply on the same terms as everyone else.
More exposure to less connected people who can derive value from knowing the child of someone who accomplished something.
And students who get into the highly competitive schools where this matters most get by on nothing but a top-tier education?
Seems like everyone wins honestly.
They often do. Or at least are very close.
I got into an elite engineering school (off the waitlist at the last minute, no donation/legacy), and the admission folks basically told me "we accept the top X, but if we just ignored the top X and took the next (X+1)-2X (or three), the result would be the same."
Basically, these schools are so competitive that if you wiggle things a tiny bit, on the margin, you're not really sacrificing much. However, if they wiggle too much, that would obviously degrade pretty quickly. But from my experience, that hasn't been the case.
So a school like Stanford is probably thinking, within the margin of noise, if we let in folks because their parents did well here as students/faculty/etc, that's probably net positive.
The donor one is a bit different, but again, on the margin, and with some math around donations vs Cal Grant, they probably see it nets out better for them.
The problem has worsened over decades; applications have ballooned ~7x (600% increase) since the 1970s, while class size has only increased by 15%.
The question is whether universities can still play a role in establishing groundwork values for how people are treated. If they're not participating in public education initiatives, they have no incentive, and efficiency+competition will squish that out.
Conflates two utterly different cases.
Big donor admissions amount to a subsidy of the education costs of all the other, non-donor admissions. Legacy admissions OTOH are just an old boy's club.
the people who go on and on about meritocracy and despise diversity, etc… love this. they have loudly cried for years about meritocracy but despise any program that takes away clear and obvious advantages to certain people.
it’s similar to the carrot and stick argument. they claim certain classes of people need more money to work while claiming that other class needs less money so they feel the fear. in certain people’s minds, executives will only work for the 100s of millions in carrots while conveniently that other class will only work appropriately if they get the stick.
Who exactly is being punished here? Stanford has no shortage of applicants.
I think it might weaken the connection between 'elite' status and the particular university, to the point where the university actually becomes something academic, almost technical, again.
Public funds shouldn't pay any tuition costs for anybody that attends Stanford as an undergraduate. I'll admit for PhD programs the benefit is typically via publicly funded research so I think that can stay. But it's absurd that a California taxpayer would fund elites that consider everyone else beneath them.
Second, I think the legacy folks see their relationship with the university as multigenerational and therefore they donate more. These donations benefit more than just themselves.
Universities are cartels of prestige and access.
burnt-resistor•6mo ago
PS: I'm an ex-Stanford FTE.
georgeburdell•6mo ago
lotsofpulp•6mo ago
energy123•6mo ago
rahimnathwani•6mo ago
lotsofpulp•6mo ago
The point is you can gain admission via some nebulous definition of merit, some combination of merit and knowing someone who gained admission before, or paying for admission.
Also, while the “institution” receives the money, I guarantee some people (the highest admins and their friends - fund managers, construction contractors, etc) gain more than most others (e.g. adjunct teachers and students).
ivape•6mo ago
orangecat•6mo ago
IncreasePosts•6mo ago