Harvard did not discriminate against Asians.
That was proven in court with by the defendants (and neither disputed nor ruled on by the Supreme Court). Case’s rebuttal of Arcidiacono’s work demonstrated conclusively that the model was built by Arcidiacono was designed to achieve a desired outcome.
If you’d like to discuss that further there is a long thread in the Politics forum.
An alternative way of looking at it is that they have two functions for the next generation of the aristocracy:
For the existing aristocracy, these colleges help maintain the aristocracy across generations, though they weed out the “less worthy” scions while allowing a select few from the non-aristocracy to join and provide “new blood”.
From the colleges’ point of view, 1 preserves their connection to money and power, while 2 maintains their popular perception of being academically elite.
Singapore is exceptionally well run, especially from a technocratic perspective and I would say that Lee Hsien Loong has done a pretty good job though he is not Lee Kwan Yew.
A bit of a reveal since many of us have had some spirited conversations. My family is mixed which I am sure just came as a surprise to some.
Singapore works well but Singapore is not a democracy except in name and there are limits to freedom of speech, human rights and, ironically immigration that most in the West would find unacceptable.
Although not everyone (in Israel or otherwise) likes him and his politics / policies.
Singapore may be run well in many aspects, but is generally considered only middling in terms of political rights and civil liberties.
Isn’t that also the case for Ivy-educated American political elites?
Yes.
Just to quickly put some meat on those bones . . .
Carleton is #5 on the (admittedly crude) PhD list, the first after three tech schools (Cal Tech, Harvey Mudd, and MIT), and a fourth that is relatively into tech for an LAC (Swarthmore).
So, I thought I would look up where Carleton grads end up. Fortunately, Carleton has a very deep study on this!
Banking/Finance was 4.2%, Consulting 3.6%. Not the smallest numbers, but not cumulatively the same sort of percentage as at Harvard and its peers.
So . . . if your family values align more with the Carleton list than the Harvard list, maybe prefer Carleton, right?
Now this is not exactly slumming it–Carleton is #6 on the US News National LAC list.
But I guess I am always a little surprised that people who don’t like what the Ivies are doing do not then seek out alternatives like this.
But was he the best choice? Was he stack ranked against all possible choices?
BTW I agree with your assessment of Lee Hsien Loong but I am confident that he wasn’t picked on the basis of “merit” as some would like to define it for elite college admissions.
I think that works too, and is actually broadly consistent. The model I gave is more just providing some detail on what “new blood” means these days, and why it is valued, but it is overall the same basic concept.
I am assuming that you are referring to college athletics in general. Athletics and competition have long had a strong following in American culture. Major universities recruited for and promoted athletics long before admissions became the subject of conversation that it is today.
I would posit that this reflects what their constituents desired. For state flagships like Michigan and UCLA it brought visibility, recognition, and respect. For other schools it was part of what was necessary to belong and be desirable relative to their peers.
If schools did not see significant value in athletics driving engagement and other benefits they would not fund them. Given that they obviously do see benefits in athletics is should not be surprising to see schools trying to attract candidates possessing skills and traits that the schools value.
I’m not so sure. Plenty of Americans (and others from supposedly more democratic countries) would want to move there, if they could. The limitation on the freedom of speech is mainly due to its libel laws, which many in the West may not object to, considering the current state of affairs (with polarizing media outlets and social media) in many Western countries.
Except for Carleton’s net price calculator (while offering good need-based financial aid) did not even come close to the package offered by a few of the colleges to which my D22 applied. Carleton was actually a fairly serious contender on her original list two years ago. I think that she even had an alumni interview there. It was very appealing to her, but the NPC came out to more than twice as much as her current college. And it would have meant that she’d need to borrow, which I strongly discouraged. I know my previous post sounds like I am putting down Ivy+ colleges, and I don’t mean to be. My daughter has had a fairly good experience during her freshman year, and she describes fantastic classes/professors, but at least her friendship group seems to skew towards kids who want to be rich and that was not her goal a year ago. On the other hand, she is barely 19. Things may change again.
As an aside, I note Singapore is a city-state. That makes it a bit hard to compare to large federal countries like the United States.
Indeed, it would be interesting to see what would happen if, say, the Houston or Atlanta metro areas were their own city-states. But obviously we won’t be running that experiment soon (I would think).
I agree, there already exist alternative sources of students with Ivy type profiles of equal achievement. I continue to be amazed at how the NESCAC LACs (along with Claremont, Pomona, and a few others) manage to fly under the RADAR in these conversations. They are wealthy, highly rejective, and provide undergraduate educations in fields other than engineering that are equal to or superior to the schools that are always in the spotlight. Williams Math department and Wesleyan’s Physics departments go toe to toe with anyone at the undergraduate level.
But it does not mean that they should change their values and institutional priorities to reflect those of a subset of society whom sees them as unfair or wishes that they better reflected their priorities.
That’s a big part of the issue, right? That money has to come from somewhere.
I guess the next question would be whether she looked at colleges in the same part of the college family tree as Carleton, but which might offer more merit aid and such.
However, I really don’t mean to interrogate you, nor for that matter suggest she did something wrong in actual fact. I was merely trying to point out that different colleges with different alumni outcomes do exist.
Just for the record, I don’t think it is putting down these colleges to acknowledge the actual social and economic position they occupy in the greater US and indeed international social and economic system. Indeed, that is precisely why many people value them so highly.
But nor do I think it is putting them down to say that maybe those values are not the ideal values for every single very smart kid in the United States. Indeed, to me this is so obvious that I still struggle with the fact so many people I encounter (not you, others) seem to strongly believe otherwise.
Anyway, to me the relevant point is just that this whole web of things we have been discussing that makes this form of school so popular from certain perspectives includes very generous aid. But the whole web is connected, so teasing out just the good parts and leaving behind the unsavory parts is a lot easier said than actually done.
A qualifier is the table 2/4 review controls for test scores, which are correlated with income. Example numbers are copied below, from Chetty’s earlier study: The new study implies that the distribution becomes increasingly skewed as you continue to go higher, to top 1% income.
1500+ SAT: 67% have top quintile income, 17% upper quintile, 9% middle quintile, 5% lower quintile, 2% bottom quintile.
They are expecting the actual student distribution to be similar to the national score distribution of students with very high scores, with upper income families being tremendously overrperesnted among students, and lower income kids being tremendously underrepresented. Table 2/4 looks at why top 1% families are overrpresented even beyond this score-based expectation.
In appendix table 4, the author estimates the following non-test score factors contribute to top 1% income family being overrepresnted beyond score expectations, compared to top 70-80th percentile income family. In order of degree of influence, for a 1600 student class:
I personally consider some (not all) Ivy+ to be very strong runner-ups for high-level math/TCS type kids after MIT/Caltech. Definitely not ideal in my book - but better than most other alternatives down the list. It has less to do with values, prestige, or leadership qualities that require and/or instill, but simply with the strength of the peer group compared to the alternatives.
The problem is, if you want to play in the major league, you have to play the game as it is - but you don’t have to like the rules. And you sure are allowed to complain. After all, this is not Singapore 
I guess you are right, if we want to focus on the private aspect of it.
But college sports obsession is not unique to privates, nor is a concept of academically elite institution uniquely American. And in the most of the rest of the world, admission to those elite universities is not ties to one’s pedigree or athletic prowess.
I do understand your points above. My only pushback is that in other threads you have advocated looking closely at the college or university’s mission statement in order to see what the admissions offices’ value. The mission statement at my daughter’s college doesn’t indicate enhancing personal wealth is a central value of the institution. If anything, social justice, community service, intellectualism, and leadership are highlighted as central ideals. While those ideals don’t necessarily contradict personal gain, wealth generation part is not described as part of its explicit mission though I admit there are plenty of unstated indicators that wealth is important to the institution, and I don’t think anyone (including my daughter) is misled into enrolling. I tend to see mission statements as a combo of the truth + rose-colored vision + external marketing --not the necessarily how the sausage is made to use a blunt metaphor.