Stanford to continue legacy admissions and withdraw from Cal Grants

Stanford’s endowment is less than $40bn.

This is the first time I've seen this framing. Typically folks blame bloated admin and fancy dorms. Where can I learn more about this take on the student loan crisis.

As I understand matters, it started in the 70s and 80s as states pulled back from funding public institutions. This funding was the mechanism which allowed public institutions to be affordable to families such that a person could pay for a year of public college by working in a grocery store over the summer.

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.

That’s certainly one possibility for “merit” but “merit” could mean lots of things. Stanford goes big into athletics. Perhaps merit could mean they’ll only take students who placed in the top 10 in their state in some athletic competition. Perhaps merit means if your parents didn’t attend, you won’t get in.

Merit doesn’t have to mean SAT scores.

I think you injected a lot of assumptions in there.

The same group in society has been lamenting “too many Jews” in higher education for generations — and has several Supreme Court cases against their discrimination.

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.

For any student who meets the qualifications, it is essentially random. There is a process that seeks to find the best students but it is flawed in the same way the job interview process is. Plenty of exceptional applicants get rejected and more than a few accepted students don’t succeed at the level one would expect.

They consider all those factors and then aim for a mix. No admissions board wants a class of 100% track stars or 100% economic hard-luck cases or 100% rich kids, etc. But they are faced with a bunch of kids who meet the GPA etc. criteria and also fit into each of these buckets.

Result is it's effectively random for each qualified kid.

They do all that and then have 10x - 100x the students left in the pool. They can’t make offers to them all, so it ends up being mostly random in that final selection.

That’s why the person you are replying to said “qualified.”

But at institutions with sub 10% admit rates, it is random. It's not a uniform distribution because you can do things to help your odds, but unless your family has a building on campus or you're an olympian or something... admission isn't guaranteed.

> How about for schools that had racial segregation within living memory?

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.

> Alumni.

Often "Alums" nowadays, as Alumni is traditionally male gendered.

We know this argument does not apply in practice because tons of people want to go to top universities that do not consider legacy like MIT. Outside America, universities that regularly feature in global top 20 lists like Oxford, Cambridge, ETH Zurich and Imperial College London etc also do not do legacies and they also get tons of interest.

You're making big assumptions here regarding students desires to attend stanford. Ignoring everything else though, having two elite universities that cater to merit is better than one just for the sake of doubling the number of students.

Interesting point. Elite universities offer a good education, a respected credential, and connections. Stanford is also a startup factory, being (not coincidentally) adjacent to Silicon Valley and containing a business school in addition to the engineering school.

Universities definitely favor unrestricted gifts. But, to the degree that you make a restricted gift, you can be sure that there's often money shuffling in the background to the degree the gift is substantial.

edit/correction: 21% was the original proposal but it was reduced to 8% in the final bill that was passed

If rich people stopped going to Stanford, Stanford will loose its reputation in a few generations.

>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.)

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.

That 7% from rich people, where does it go?

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.

You do by wasting other people's time and money.

Almost every gen-Z I have met who owns a house got a loan from the bank of mommy and daddy.

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.

How did they save for the down payment? The ROI for college isn't what it used to be, but there isn't a clear non-college path in the US, either.

> 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.

I think you could still compromise on 2. by requiring legacy or other discriminatory admissions practices to be a small percentage of the students they give full ride merit scholarships on, or similar.

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.

Most, if not all, Canadian admissions are holistic. All the universities are pretty easy to get into as long as you have the grades, especially for undergrad. As a result, for undergrad at least, no one really cares what school you went to.

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.

Isn't the point that _all_ admissions from a range of institutions over a period of years (decades?) were "holistic" admissions, and thus basically all post-college success stories are holistic success stories? Further, _it's actively harmful_ as well as unfounded to post-hoc try to say that person X would _only_ have been admitted under a holistic framework.

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.

This has actually been one of the ideas floated by regulators.

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.

Maybe the way would be to correlate all admissions with success, and add a feedback loop.

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.

This may not count as “holistic”, but my grand-uncle went to City College of NY when it was both open admissions and free. He had the equivalent of an 8th grade education in his home country.

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.

The entire notion of "elite" universities is discriminatory. If going to your average state university with high admissions was okay then there wouldn't nearly be as much drama.

If the elite colleges are not comprised of the rich and well connected it beats the entire point of an elite college.

This is very eye opening. As a geek with strong academic background always felt cheated by the system.

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.

Counterexample: Caltech uses holistic admissions and no one has found any signs of it limiting Asians.

I don’t think that’s the whole story. The Ivy League are WASP institutions, and WASP culture always highly valued “well rounded” students and looked down on people who single mindedly perused an end. Back in the day, they didn’t need to screen for this explicitly, since it was already universal in the applicant pool. They just needed a test to sort out the smart ones from the dumb ones. When the applicant pool changed, holistic admissions became a way to maintain that cultural trait.

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.

I reject this. Refugees such as myself (for I was one as a kid), and many disenfranchised people would never have been able to become accomplished without this "hollistic" review you loathe. Asian and Jewish kids today can game the system. Instead of workign summer jobs like the rest of us, their parents can enroll them in private summer school and they get to rehearse full time on those tests you seem to favor. There is a reason we should consider the beyond. Grades and tests can be gamed by those who can afford to do so. I will take a refugee from Vietnam or Syria, a black kid from Detroit, or the child of a single mom who overcame adversity ANY day of the week over a rich Cali boy of Asian or Jewish descent who benefited from this system. While my experience is anecdotal, I think those on here who criticize the hollistic approach (and merge it with FOXNEWS crap like DEI, and I will add, coming mostly from WASPs, who were NEVER affected by it), have no idea what they are criticizing. America has always been about giving an equal footing. I proved myself in the business world, and those who had perhaps more music lessons and more standardized tests than I did, are currently employees at companies making mediocre careers. So if you are a young reader of this comment, and regard this nonsense like what breadwinner is espousing as normal, know that myself and many others stand for the holistic admission over the gamed system that today favors the rich. Stay curious, ask others for help (I will always lend a hand to any disenfranchised person), and while some doors will shut, you will find an opportunity you can seize. Most importantly, don't accept this crap. Your story is important, and accomplishments are not a game of numbers. If it was, China would be dominating us in many sectors, yet their contributions to much of STEM is mediocre at best. It is eclipsed by nations like France or Germany, 1/10th the size. Your story is so much more. Those in power seek to keep you out, by favoring a perfect test score so their offspring, lacking in ingenuity, can memorize and regurgitate. That's never the case in the business world, and rest assured it is not the case in the sensible one either :)

In Quebec, grades are normalized using a statistical formula that factors in how well students from your high school tend to perform in university[0]. This means an average student at an "elite" school could end up with a similar score to a top student from a weaker school.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_score

I took a grad marketing class once with a business professor who studied this sort of thing. GMATs rather than SATs but same idea. Basically GMATs mattered more than anything else especially metrics such as letters of recommendation that were basically worthless.

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.

There's a reason the military kept using the ASVAB even during the worst parts of COVID pandemic. ASVAB is a very solid predictor of success in training, and in Navy experience it's predictive value generally correlates with with how academic/technical the training pipeline is.

That paper is pretty misleading and flies in the face of most peer-reviewed research (I don't know that journal, for what it's worth).

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.

So? In many countries high school grades also aren't standardized and counts 100% for admission. The system still works reliably and not worse than in america.

The SAT isn't strong enough to predict anything. It can generally be answered by someone in their sophomore year at college or even their freshman, depending on what level of courses they are taking.

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.

I think it depends on the school at the time. I got rejected by one school probably because I didn't have a varsity letter and had a so-so interview. I got accepted to at least two others that were at least as "good" at the time.

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.

HS grades are a joke. All it takes is an unforeseen medical emergency or a teacher who hates you to tank your future. Thank god for standardized tests, otherwise I’d be living a very different life.

These days, people game them by claiming a disability so they get extra time.

Other countries probably have a more centralized, standardized schooling system. In the USA schooling is at the local and state level.

Yea, especially since the people who get the highest grades in HS, in the US where you have a decent amount of latitude to pick your classes, are generally just the students who refused to take any hard class.

Athletics + Test cheating:

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...

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

> GRE aren't perfect

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).

Cheating is not the norm in Asian countries.

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.

Also not that uncommon for the star HS quarterback to be functionally illiterate yet passing all classes with the required GPA for athletics participation.

No, at least not for all subjects. I think over here medicine still has an admission test. Engineering used to have one long ago.

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.

You are delusional.

You didn’t miss anything. That was a bizarre statement.

That would be Harvard - MIT.

But Stanford is in the same league for sure.

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.

They're West coast. "Elite" schools in the U.S. are typically East coast (old monied).

both DEI and legacy are going away so it works in your favour.

How do you compare GPA across different schools?

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.

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.

They went to jail because they bribed people who were not authorized to accept bribes instead of the people who were (with the latter people charging much more, of course).

Just because the bribes were too small. If they were large enough to help build a building, then they become legal again.

Stanford undergrad is only 22% white so this clearly isn't happening in practice.

> When you prefer legacy students, you perpetuate the kind of discrimination in effect when their parents and grandparents were admitted.

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.

But it's the people here that want more access to these elite circles.

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.

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.

Definitely has the opposite experience going from an around 100 ranked university to an around 20 ranked university. Maybe it depends on the department but I noticed a massive difference in the students, difficulty of classes, how well the professors taught in multiple classes in multiple departments. There were exceptions but there was definitely a general trend.

Ambition and a sense of entitlement (manifest destiny) built America.

The same Opportunity Insights found that legacies were more qualified than typical applicants.

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.

Yes sure there will be some elite purely academic places, but Caltech so small its a blip, most high schools are larger.

Which was always absurd as there's no less vestimentary affluence signaling in uniform high schools than in any other.

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.

It sounds hyperbolic and they probably mean high school students with 1500+ SAT-I, 5 AP everything, and other community leadership achievements.

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?

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.

The 'roots' were places of intellectual amusement, only for the very affluent idle and the clergy.

Ain't nobody else had time for that.

They really shouldn't get public money then