I always found it wildly fascinating how US schools have things like legacy admissions, athletic scholarships, standardized admission test, admission letter, letters of recommendation, extracurricular activities, and what have you.
Such a contrast to other systems where for example your HS grades will count 100% - and similar "ungameable" systems.
Right. It is called holistic review. Originally invented to limit the number of Jewish people in top universities (not kidding)! Now being used to limit the number of Asians.
Elite-College Admissions Were Built to Protect Privilege
If HS grades were used for admissions in the US, it would incentivize college-bound high schoolers to avoid challenging classes like AP classes, advanced STEM classes, history classes beyond state requirements, etc.
The optimal strategy would be to take the easiest classes required to graduate, since there's no national authority to normalize grades across classes.
IncreasePosts · 37m ago
You just give multipliers for advanced classes then. That's how my high school calculated GPA - if you took all "A" level classes your max GPA was 4.0, but if you took AP classes and aced them you could end up with a 4.3 or something like that
LudwigNagasena · 1h ago
I thought most countries just do general country-wide admission tests?
typeofhuman · 1h ago
HS grades are gameable. Just look at public highschools across the US. A significant percentage of graduates can't read. And the policies won't let teachers fail or hold-back students so they cook their grades to push them through the system.
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.
dlcarrier · 1h ago
I'm okay with academia being an institution of the elite, as long as we stop pretending that their BS (or BA) will make everyone successful. We can't all be elite; that's not how that works.
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.
JKCalhoun · 57m ago
How likely is it we'll have the one when we don't even have the other?
We'll have neither, of course. The wealthy will always be able to pay for what they want — merit be damned.
wnc3141 · 1h ago
I agree that participation in the middle class shouldn't depend on borrowing six figures as a teenager. I dream of the day where any worker has economic security
rayiner · 1h ago
Props to California for doing this. Stanford showing its true colors here.
breadwinner · 1h ago
This seems reasonable. California doesn't want to subsidize the education of the privileged few who qualify as "legacy admission". And Stanford doesn't want to give up the financial support from alumnus.
rr808 · 2h ago
Legacy is better than people think. The undergrad academics at T10 universities really aren't anything special. People want to go because of the connections with wealthy & well-connected students, but then complain when wealthy well-connected students get a easier ride. You fill Harvard of Stanford with only people with 1600 SATs will turn them into places you dont really want to go to.
burnt-resistor · 1m ago
People with 1600 SATs tend to be ultra-productive, down-to-Earth individuals. (My high school had dozens of them.)
Legacy creates an closed, self-reinforcing aristocracy.
What kind of society do you want?
ethan_smith · 2h ago
Research from Opportunity Insights shows legacy preferences reduce social mobility while multiple studies find no evidence legacy admits enhance campus culture or alumni giving beyond what could be achieved through need-blind admissions.
yieldcrv · 1h ago
Top universities don’t exist for social mobility, that is merely happenstance that the people that want to pay have gatekept access to the purse by having attended university.
jfengel · 1h ago
When you prefer legacy students, you perpetuate the kind of discrimination in effect when their parents and grandparents were admitted.
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.
ryandrake · 1h ago
Yes. Imagine if you could get an elite Wall Street or Consulting job based significantly on who your dad is. That would be unfair, discriminatory, and otherwise pretty terrible, except for the already elite and wealthy. Oh, wait...that already happens, and it's indeed terrible in all the ways you would predict. This really needs to be cracked down on, but the rich and powerful will always support it.
CrazyStat · 1h ago
> The undergrad academics at T10 universities really aren't anything special.
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.
bumbledraven · 1h ago
> You fill Harvard of Stanford with only people with 1600 SATs will turn them into places you dont really want to go to.
Yes sure there will be some elite purely academic places, but Caltech so small its a blip, most high schools are larger.
IncreasePosts · 35m ago
You couldn't even do that - only about 500 people get a perfect SAT score per year.
lo_zamoyski · 1h ago
> The undergrad academics at T10 universities really aren't anything special. People want to go because of the connections with wealthy & well-connected students, but then complain when wealthy well-connected students get a easier ride.
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.)
yieldcrv · 1h ago
Exactly, that Austrian woman that tried to get rid of all her wealth found out that its impossible because even if she’s at £0 she knows too many people that will support her ideas, drive too much publicity to her causes, and food, shelter, board seats, academia, and everything else is always accessible. The path doesn’t have to be forged.
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.
xmonkee · 1h ago
This is such a bizarre and gross take. Yes our history is a history of class struggle. But history does progress. For thousands of years we were supposed to be property of kings so shall we mean revert to that?
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.
justinhj · 1h ago
They really shouldn't get public money then
kappi · 2h ago
Stanford has become legacy + LGBTQ only for undergrads. Even their math departments are filled with only them!
perfmode · 1h ago
Everyone at Stanford and Harvard has 1600s. even the legacies
genghisjahn · 1h ago
Pick up a copy of Palo Alto and read thru that. Lots of interesting Stanford history there.
alecco · 2h ago
Stanford became Harvard.
jen20 · 1h ago
Was there a point in recent memory where it wasn’t? As a non-American I’d always considered them to be the Oxford and Cambridge (respectively) of the US.
andrewl · 45m ago
Some would say Harvard and Yale are the Oxford and Cambridge of the US. But we’re a big country, and we have a lot of schools. Many lists of top schools include these, alphabetically ordered:
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.
JKCalhoun · 52m ago
They're West coast. "Elite" schools in the U.S. are typically East coast (old monied).
simianwords · 2h ago
It’s interesting to see that merit best admissions is pushed from both sides of political spectrum - legacy admissions and DEI.
DragonStrength · 1h ago
You’re close. The issue is we can’t discuss class, so they look for all sorts of other analogs which they can get the wealthy folks on board with. DEI is acceptable to the wealthy because they ultimately see less of a threat there than from a person of the same race from the South or Midwest. In the workplace, the female Stanford legacy can still be underprivileged then thanks to gender versus the white male from a poor state with a land grant degree.
simianwords · 1h ago
both DEI and legacy are going away so it works in your favour.
mc32 · 2h ago
I think legacy admissions is only supported by the elites —be they leftists or rightists. Normal leftists and normal rightists don’t support legacy admissions (pay to play). I think the vast majority of people would support fair admissions (GPA + something else that signals academic aptitude).
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.
impossiblefork · 15m ago
You can't be a leftist and support legacy admissions. You can be a right-liberal and support legacy admissions, but even the mildest mild-mild leftism would reject that kind of thing.
NewJazz · 1h ago
How do you compare GPA across different schools?
acomjean · 1h ago
Isn’t that why standardized tests like the SAT/ACT… exist?
mc32 · 1h ago
I think you can gauge that from the historical performance of students from those sources. Of course, there is a lag as schools either improve or dilute grades.
simianwords · 1h ago
I agree with you but I meant both democrats and republicans are pushing merit based admissions. Gavin Newsom against legacy and Trump against DEI.
On the point people vastly prefer GPA - I don’t agree because people on the left prefer DEI and affirmative action.
rayiner · 1h ago
I think even most democrats oppose it: https://manhattan.institute/article/study-finds-most-democra.... Though unfortunately, it appears that what swings democrats from support to non-support is learning that it hurts asians, not just white people. :-/
Cornbilly · 2h ago
DEI for rich mid-wits is fine for anyone else it’s Communism.
burnt-resistor · 2h ago
No surprise. C'mon, they host the Hoover Institution and celebrities and rich people pay coaches to get their kids in. It's a power funnel racket.
PS: I'm an ex-Stanford FTE.
IncreasePosts · 34m ago
Has Thomas Sowell ever commented on legacy admissions? I can't find anything but I imagine he would not be a fan, just like he isn't a fan of affirmative action.
georgeburdell · 2h ago
People went to jail for those bribes. It’s not a legal tactic to begin with
lotsofpulp · 1h ago
Just because the bribes were too small. If they were large enough to help build a building, then they become legal again.
energy123 · 1h ago
It was because the bribes benefited a small number of administrators instead of being equitably distributed across administrators
lo_zamoyski · 1h ago
Here's another perspective.
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.
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-...
Which is basically what the SATs are:
* https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/sat
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT
The optimal strategy would be to take the easiest classes required to graduate, since there's no national authority to normalize grades across classes.
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.
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.
Legacy creates an closed, self-reinforcing aristocracy.
What kind of society do you want?
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.
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.
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...
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.)
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.
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.
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.
PS: I'm an ex-Stanford FTE.
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.
[0] https://www.thomasaquinas.edu/