Pretty much the whole thing in a nutshell is the one chart showing the same student as Asian, 25%, White, 36%, Hispanic 77%, and Black 95%.
This is institutionalized racism. Perhaps Affirmative Action was needed in the past to kickstart the disproportionate enrollment demographics, but it was past due to get rid of it.
The most interesting part following SCOTUS' ruling is that Harvard said it wouldn't change their ways, and nobody enforced the ruling.
If you treat prestige acceptance rates as a derivative of the progression of racial policy, it absolutely makes sense why affirmative action is in place given the history of racial justice in America.
Can you really claim that the trend won't reverse if purely meritocratic admissions are reinstated (disregarding legacy admits...although very unfair to disregard since their racial makeup heavily tracks with asian/white/etc)
It's simply a single lever to change the racial makeup of the upper class. And certainly it goes both ways, but to simply remove it with no solution implies a regression to the former system, which was all but equal, much less equitable.
The price portion of this hits hard. My oldest starts college in 2 year and then his younger brother follows 2 years later. We make enough to not qualify for need based aid but not enough to just write a check, merit based aid + a meager 529 and our savings is their only hope besides debt.
Further, both are male, hetero, only 1/4 hispanic, and my wife and I are not drug addicts or alcoholics so they'll get nothing from the "whole student" review. There's a huge swath of the population in this boat. The middle/upper-middle class pays for everyone else as always.
> We make enough to not qualify for need based aid
Are you sure? If you're household income is <$340k (depending on details) you'll still get some scholarship, and as long as your household income <$200,000 tuition is free.
All this stuff is self identifying too, so there are far more dishonest applicants than someone with a single LatAm grandparent marking themselves hispanic.
Thats why its called price discrimination: you are trying to get as much money as possible from each buyer without regard to fairness. Heroin dealers at least set a fixed $/oz because they know that word getting around that someone gets it cheaper would get them shot.
Some random chart feedback. I found the use of red for elite colleges and then the use of red to mean white applicants to make the article slightly harder to read and understand. Recommend changing using completely different colors from that chart to he next one, because they are completely unrealted axis and
When you combine the fraction of "hooked" admits with the number of seats affected by affirmative action, you get something between 35%-43% (depending on if you discount hooked admits that were extremely qualified anyway). I think this is an interesting way to frame it. Left to its own devices, Harvard would only devote around 60% of its undergraduate program to simply educating very very bright students. The other 40% is/was for les vieux riches, athletes, generally connected kids, and racial diversity.
While I'm sure it varies by school, I suspect you will find a similar dynamic at many other elite private schools. The undergraduate program is going to be much less important to a top-tier research university, and consequently the admissions board can go nuts with other priorities. When even the runners-up (on a merit basis) are quite strong you can go quite far indeed before anyone would notice a slip in standards.
For all these completely anonymous, AI-generated investigative pieces that are hitting the front page of HN every week, I'd love to see the prompts. Because I suspect they say more about what the proprietor of the site is trying to achieve than the article itself.
conflates a couple of things: the legacy tip itself and the fact that legacies tend to have stronger academic profiles to begin with (they come from advantaged households). A skeptic can fairly say "of course legacy admits do well, they're better applicants"
> legacies tend to have stronger academic profiles
Maybe for Harvard, but I'm not sure a legacy for some random private liberal arts school nobody has ever heard of (or $STATE University) will be any more academically gifted than someone whose parents both went to college anyway.
Maybe we need to differentiate between "legacy of a school" and "legacy of a school with a historically high academic quality"
Sure, but not at the admittance rate that legacies get. There's been stats & studies showing for example some Ivys with ~3% admit rates having something closer to ~12% for legacy applicants.
Most people applying to an Ivy are already self-selecting as pretty exceptional applicants (putting aside the delusional) and the legacy admits had same/worse SATs, etc.
edit: just looked it up, Harvard is at ~34% legacy admit rate versus regular 6% admit rate..
“Among the admitted legacies, grades and test scores were indistinguishable from non-legacy students. Both groups had an average SAT score that surpassed 1430.”
At Harvard, my understanding is that the legacy admits have slightly higher test scores than non-legacy admits.
How likely is it to be a certain demographic given certain stats? Pretty much says it all.
The race factor is irrelevant in practice. Even more so when you look at literature indicating that your success is actually more predictive from high school success than college attendance.
In other words, if you get into Stanford you will likely succeed even if you don’t go.
"The published cost of attendance is a fiction almost no one pays."
"Net effect: a $175k household with a house and a 401(k) is judged "full pay," pays near-sticker from already-taxed income, and receives essentially nothing."
I never know how to resolve these two statements. In our case, my daughter happened to choose a good public university. Maybe that is what they mean.
It feels like with fewer foreign students college's will have to open more slots to those who can be reasonable ready to be successful and also pay full rate.
Looking at this without consideration for two factors (number of applicants and the number of applications per applicant) is borderline malpractice.
I can’t pull older numbers on my phone at the moment but in the last 12 years the number of applications to colleges (applicants*applications) has risen 50%.
So correct for the reality that…
1) that immediately skews your denominator and changes your percentages.
2) the upper middle class students are the most likely to apply to the most schools (because they can and don’t have the other paths)
3) more and more marginal students who previously would not have gone to college are getting encouraged to apply.
This is institutionalized racism. Perhaps Affirmative Action was needed in the past to kickstart the disproportionate enrollment demographics, but it was past due to get rid of it.
The most interesting part following SCOTUS' ruling is that Harvard said it wouldn't change their ways, and nobody enforced the ruling.
Can you really claim that the trend won't reverse if purely meritocratic admissions are reinstated (disregarding legacy admits...although very unfair to disregard since their racial makeup heavily tracks with asian/white/etc)
It's simply a single lever to change the racial makeup of the upper class. And certainly it goes both ways, but to simply remove it with no solution implies a regression to the former system, which was all but equal, much less equitable.
Further, both are male, hetero, only 1/4 hispanic, and my wife and I are not drug addicts or alcoholics so they'll get nothing from the "whole student" review. There's a huge swath of the population in this boat. The middle/upper-middle class pays for everyone else as always.
Are you sure? If you're household income is <$340k (depending on details) you'll still get some scholarship, and as long as your household income <$200,000 tuition is free.
[1]: https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/net-price-calculat...
Yet, you still have two years.
If you mean only one grandparent is born in a Latin American country, then according to the U.S. Census Bureau, you are Hispanic.
All this stuff is self identifying too, so there are far more dishonest applicants than someone with a single LatAm grandparent marking themselves hispanic.
Some random chart feedback. I found the use of red for elite colleges and then the use of red to mean white applicants to make the article slightly harder to read and understand. Recommend changing using completely different colors from that chart to he next one, because they are completely unrealted axis and
While I'm sure it varies by school, I suspect you will find a similar dynamic at many other elite private schools. The undergraduate program is going to be much less important to a top-tier research university, and consequently the admissions board can go nuts with other priorities. When even the runners-up (on a merit basis) are quite strong you can go quite far indeed before anyone would notice a slip in standards.
Maybe for Harvard, but I'm not sure a legacy for some random private liberal arts school nobody has ever heard of (or $STATE University) will be any more academically gifted than someone whose parents both went to college anyway.
Maybe we need to differentiate between "legacy of a school" and "legacy of a school with a historically high academic quality"
They also tend to be smarter because smarter people have smarter kids.
Most people applying to an Ivy are already self-selecting as pretty exceptional applicants (putting aside the delusional) and the legacy admits had same/worse SATs, etc.
edit: just looked it up, Harvard is at ~34% legacy admit rate versus regular 6% admit rate..
“Among the admitted legacies, grades and test scores were indistinguishable from non-legacy students. Both groups had an average SAT score that surpassed 1430.”
At Harvard, my understanding is that the legacy admits have slightly higher test scores than non-legacy admits.
The race factor is irrelevant in practice. Even more so when you look at literature indicating that your success is actually more predictive from high school success than college attendance.
In other words, if you get into Stanford you will likely succeed even if you don’t go.
"Net effect: a $175k household with a house and a 401(k) is judged "full pay," pays near-sticker from already-taxed income, and receives essentially nothing."
I never know how to resolve these two statements. In our case, my daughter happened to choose a good public university. Maybe that is what they mean.
I can’t pull older numbers on my phone at the moment but in the last 12 years the number of applications to colleges (applicants*applications) has risen 50%.
So correct for the reality that…
1) that immediately skews your denominator and changes your percentages.
2) the upper middle class students are the most likely to apply to the most schools (because they can and don’t have the other paths)
3) more and more marginal students who previously would not have gone to college are getting encouraged to apply.
And their model is just breaking.
In the UK you can apply to upto five colleges.
In the US the recommendation seems to be between 5-8