I don’t think anybody is arguing that holistic admissions is a barrier to global prestige - nobody I’ve really seen is suggesting that.
But even top US schools receive US tax payer money - Harvard receives nearly $1 billion a year from the US government and receives significant tax breaks (a $50 billion nearly tax-free endowment aside from the small tax they pay every year).
There’s definitely an argument that people are making that top US schools aren’t really serving the general population. Privileging rich people and violating laws don’t do them any favors in winning over the now significant percentage of people skeptical of higher education.
Chetty et al. didn’t study the effect of ED (and ED2) on elite college admissions (probably because not all these elite colleges offer ED/ED2). If they did, they’d almost certainly find that it impacted the income distribution of students at these elite colleges. Students in certain middle-income range are less likely to apply ED (or ED2). Since ED and ED2 applicants receive an admission boost (despite the claims to the contrary by some colleges), admission rates of those students in that income range are likely depressed as a result.
Here is a discussion by the former Yale dean of admissions Jeff Brenzel in a podcast by Yale constitutional law professor Akhil Reed Amar on the affirmative action case. About 40 minutes into the podcast the parties get into a deep discussion of legacy preferences. I offer this to give an insight into the views of someone who is deeply involved with admissions and the legacy preference.
The year my kid applied to Harvard, there was no ED. Everyone applied RD. Eliminating early applications is another way for colleges to be more equitable. I can only speculate that Harvard found it difficult to handle all applications at one time, since the effort to eliminate early decisions didn’t last long.
Harvard was hoping that they would launch a movement by elimination early applications. No one followed them. So they were basically giving themselves a competitive disadvantage without bringing about change, so they gave up.
With Caltech’s recent switch of their EA to single choice, MIT is the last guy standing among peer institutions offering unrestricted EA (and with no statistical advantage to applying early).
(There is, of course, also an EA round at UChicago, but the purity of their intentions is somewhat in question due to the concomitant ED1/ED2 flying circus whereabout @marlowe1 and I had some spirited disagreements:)
In Harvard’s case, SCEA and ED are effectively very similar in terms of influence on class. In 2010 with no ED, yield was 75% for the full class. In 2011, when SCEA was added, yield split to 94% of SCEA admits and 68% of RD admits. I expect yield on SCEA is far above 94% today, with the increased selectivity over the past 12 years. SCEA has become a way to signal that Harvard is first choice, and Harvard has historically favored applicants with that signal.
Couldn’t listen to the whole thing. But former Yale Dean Jeffrey Brenzel refers to pushes to eliminate legacy preferences as “hysteria.” He says that people who are against legacy are misguided, saying they don’t understand it won’t increase diversity. He acknowledges that at one time, the legacy preference was larger, but says it is now small, and implies it is inconsequential and if it were eliminated, the kids of Ivy alums would just get accepted at different Ivys. He implies that legacy preferences actually help URMs because some alums are URMs. There are veiled warnings about the possibility of decreased donations. Another panelist asks him about the demographics at MIT and Caltech which don’t have legacy. Brenzel says Caltech is very non-diverse. The other panelist however asks him to comment specifically about Asians and he acknowledges the percentages are much higher and then the subject is rapidly changed.
Also, more yield predictability, so that the magnitude of over or under yield is likely to be smaller because much of the class has been admitted and matriculated ED.
While they didn’t spend much time distinguishing between ED vs SCEA vs EA, they do list the relative portion of Ivy+ students who applied early by income level, with control for test scores. Those numbers are below. 1 = overall average rate of applying early. 2 = twice as likely to apply early as average.
The author concludes the following (with test controls):
“If colleges were to then further eliminate the differences in matriculation rates by income – e.g., by addressing differences that arise between early and regular application rounds – the number of students from the top 1% would fall by a further 19.”
Even if this were true, would that mean better mutual fit matching of such students to colleges, rather than pushing students to their parents’ colleges which may not necessarily be the best mutual fit for them?
Is this really a subject of concern? That Yale legacies are now stuck there rather than applying to their true fit, Harvard, where they don’t get a bump?
Pretty low on the priority list.
Agree with your summary. His main point is that eliminating legacy preferences will have a minuscule effect on increasing diversity and will at most reduce the number of legacy students by a couple of percentage points since most legacy admits are highly qualified anyway. They will just be replaced with other “privileged “ kids. Eliminating affirmative action will cut URMs by 25-35% and getting rid of legacy won’t change that.