My understanding is this thread is about the new Chetty Study.
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And btw, itās not like their admission practices are dissimilar to ones being discussed in this thread.
Ok, then I bring you this, from the horseās mouth (one of the studyās authors), as a peace offering:
āEach day Iāll dig into a different aspect of the paper. Tomorrow I will explain how we estimated the benefits of attending an Ivy-Plus college, and why our findings differ from prior work. On Wednesday Iāll offer my own interpretation of those findings, in particular the role of on-campus recruiting in explaining why Ivy-Plus colleges make such a difference for top-end outcomes. On Thursday, Iāll talk about the practical problem with holistic admissions, which turns a microscope to every detail of an applicantās life in a futile effort to discern who is most deserving. On Friday, Iāll tell you what I would do if you made me the U.S. higher education czar. So stay tuned.ā
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Top page with links to current and upcoming articles:
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Any bets on what he will propose?
A lottery?
Gifted cringe-worthy thoughts from famous member of the .01%.
What would possess a very wealthy Harvard trustee married to a Cornell/Pton trustee with 3 kids as legacies at Harvard to weigh in on this issue for others?
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If those with connections to Ivy+ schools refrained from opining on such issues, then CC would me a much quieter place.
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To me, itās just another sign that Harvard wouldnāt (and canāt afford to) wait too long to make its decision on abandoning legacy preferences. Legacy admissions everywhere will likely be history sooner rather than later.
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It probably will be, but after only Kristoff and his colleagues have taken advantage of it themselves. He wasnt leading the charge when he was on the Board and his own kids applied; the hypocrisy is staggering.
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Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post also went on the attack against legacy admissions at Harvard (gift link):
āThe premise of holistic admission is that if we stare long and hard enough at a 17-year-old kidās self-presentation on their college application, we can discern who is most worthy. I think that is folly, and our paperās results back me up.ā
āOur paper shows how rating applicants on non-academic factors favors the wealthy, even though it doesnāt predict success. But an even bigger problem with holistic admissions is its purposeful ambiguity. Nothing is guaranteed, and you never quite know where you stand. For achievement-oriented kids (and parents), that ambiguity means that no college preparation is ever good enough. Weāve created an unhealthy college admission culture centered around gaming the system and figuring out āwho gets in, and why?ā Thatās bad, and itās likely to get worse as more schools go test-optional.ā
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Iāll be curious to read what his solution is - quotas are briefly mentioned, but I have a hard time believing that would stand up to any kind of legal scrutiny (and I can hear the howls of outrage already). In terms of his analysis, did they control for students who had both high academic ratings AND high personal quality scores? Iām not sure how they separated the two.
Itās a 125 page paper. They try to control for everything. An then they try to control for those controls. 
This is a truly ground-shaking work.
Dale & Krueger is history.
āAll else equal, applicants with high non-academic ratings donāt do any better in terms of earnings or graduate school attendance. However, academic ratings strongly predict later life success. The implication is clear, at least to me ā the āextrasā in a s studentās application privileged by holistic admissions policies donāt do a very good job of telling us who is going to succeed.ā
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āThe mission of Harvard College is to educate the citizens and citizen-leaders for our society. We do this through our commitment to the transformative power of a liberal arts and sciences education.ā
If Harvardās mission is to educate the citizen-leaders for our society, wouldnāt it be an important institutional priority to continue to admit strong legacies and donors to the university?
Who is likely to become a future citizen-leader, an extremely hooked applicant or a HS prodigy from a middle class family from Peoria, IL?
Admitting Jared Kushner, Joseph Kennedy III, James Murdoch, Malia Obama, and Xi Mingze made a lot of sense for Harvard, since they were likely to become future citizen-leaders.
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Itās a web site, not a stone tablet.
They can change it.
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Why would they want to change it? They are arguably the most successful, desired, and envied university in the world. Itās worked out pretty well for them following their game plan. Harvard has never claimed to educate only the ābest and the brightest.ā Meanwhile, our citizen-leaders are often not the best or the brightest.
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Arguably 
Definitely a top 5 
But they changed many things before, some because they wanted it, some because they had to, and will change many things again.
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Of course, when there are no common measures where the ceiling is high enough to distinguish in a reasonably fair manner between top-end applicants, even highly selective colleges where the admission focus is primarily academic strength (e.g. Caltech) need to use holistic reading in their admissions.
As to why such measures do not exist in the US, that has been discussed before (e.g. in standardized testing, the market is too small for TCB and ACT to bother with).
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Well, right.
There is a constituency of kids, maybe even more so their parents, who want a formula for admissions to what they see as the ātopā colleges. Get this GPA. Get this test score. Take this many APs and get these scores on them. Do X numbers of the following academic-adjacent competitions related to your intended major, and get Y state awards and Z national awards. Do this level of internship or research paper related to your intended major. And so on.
And they want a promise if they make their kid follow the formula, their kid will get admitted to one of the parentsā designated ātopā colleges.
Completely aside from how admissions works, I think it is terrible these parents, and by extension their kids, are thinking this way. Kids should be allowed to be kids. They should be allowed to explore interests. They should be allowed to do things just because they are fun, or their friends are doing them. They should be allowed to spend a lot of their non-school time doing things that are about social, emotional, and physical development, and not academics. They should be encouraged to sincerely care about others in their community, and devote time and energy to helping. And so on.
That author is concerned that measuring the āmeritā of non-academic uses of a kidās time and effort is very difficult to do in any sort of objective way. That is a fair observation.
But then if desirable colleges only credit academic uses of a kidās time and effort, that necessarily means that these parents will try to make their kids only spend time and effort on academic things. Probably from before HS. Which pretty much no person who actually cared about the mental, social, physical, and emotional development of these kids would actually recommend.
Frankly, it is already a bad situation that so many parents BELIEVE this is how college admissions works. You can already see all these kids online who have for years been doing nothing but trying to āachieveā for the purpose of having the best credentials for some lucrative intended major that was apparently decided long ago. And they are full of anxiety about any perceived imperfection, anything they think is missing from the magic formula. And to be blunt, they often strike me as kids who are way behind in terms of developing toward maturity in any non-academic way.
And I see that in our HS too sometimes. But fortunately, our experienced college counselors can fight back. They know who is actually admitted to the most competitive colleges, and they can explain that kids can be well-rounded, healthy, and indeed basically normal outstanding HS students, and still get admitted to the ātopā colleges. They can also explain how so many other colleges can be great opportunities for high-achieving kids when they are a good fit, and therefore that the whole idea of the ātopā kids going to the ātopā colleges is an extremely unhelpful framing. Instead, kids can explore their interests, work hard, and ultimately get into a range of choices that fit THEM well, as opposed to being high on some generic ranking published in a popular magazine.
So rather than just give in and actually conform college admissions to what these parents think it should be, I think we need to try to get these parents to think entirely differently about what is best for their kids. Which is hard, and obviously isnāt working in many cases. But Iād rather try to do what is actually best for these kids, as opposed to just giving in to what is terrible for these kids.
And yes, this is part of the same old sort of debateāwe get good counseling in our private HS with an excellent placement record, but most families donāt have that. Thatās a real problem, but do you try to solve that by āleveling the playing fieldā in the form of giving every family equally horrific advice about how a kid should be spending their time and effort? Or do you try to actually raise the quality of advice available to more families?
Again, Iād prefer the latter.
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