We’ve been over and over the legacy issue on many threads. And most legacies are not the children of uber donors who can get special consideration. (Even those need to meet standards.) And there are not overwhelming numbers of kids of uber donors applying in any given year. Not all of those parents have high school seniors.
^Hurwitz proved conclusively legacies get a major boost, even if they aren’t the children of uber donors. Or if you want a more recent source, go look at the lawsuits documents from Harvard’s own testimony, internal analysis, and expert witnesses, as to the lineage benefit.
Do you prefer actively managed mutual funds over index funds?
CPA here - choose index funds if you want to end up with more money. Choose actively managed funds if you’re less concerned about your money than your ego.
Agree completely but I’m pretty sure you missed my point :-),
Nope, reinforcing why I’m interested in exploring randomized admissions and removing human bias/potential for error. I’ve seen the data on the index/managed funds and it’s clear the humans aren’t as smart as they (and we) think they are.
“And there are not overwhelming numbers of kids of uber donors applying in any given year. Not all of those parents have high school seniors.”
Maybe not seniors but these colleges not only recruit athletes but the development office recruits children (typically international) of wealthy families to apply so they don’t have to worry about FA and can lock up a wealthy donor down the road. A school like Harvard will make sure it has a lot of wealth in its entering class, there’s no doubt about that. That’s not really a holistic process to get them in, the lawsuit is revealing in that it looks like half the class does go through some kind of holistic evaluation, the other half doesn’t. Again, they can do what they want as long as it’s not discriminatory.
I will admit I am not crazy about legacy benefits; but if you consider the “didn’t have the privilege of being born” part of your sentence there are many, many items that are tacit, if not explicit disadvantages, and they can’t all be mitigated.
I contend that far more “unfairness” would occur from a random event than from thoughtfully considered choices. I don’t know how that can be argued.
Legacy seems to have helped more recently, but rarely would it get an unqualified kid in.
I’d be all for that, actually, sports for sports sake. But an argument has been made that Very-Good-Win-A-Lot sports teams are critically important for the Ivy League, and even academically elite D3 schools.
That’s what they lose with a lottery, among other things.
Where does this lottery start and stop? Should the high school you attend be a lottery or even the classes you take? After college, should graduate school be a lottery? How about job applications for employment at say Google? Random lottery?
Regarding “legacies”, how many internships and jobs were achieved by “legacies” i.e. people knowing family members, alums, friends, etc. These are all preferences that many of us receive the benefits of on a daily basis. You can try to eliminate it in college admissions but in the real world many jobs are “legacy”.
“A school like Harvard will make sure it has a lot of wealth in its entering class”
Given the metrics Harvard etc. use, they don’t need to seek out wealthy kids. They need to actively seek out and admit the bottom 75% of the income pyramid. If you choose based on high school rigor, GPA, activities, and test scores, you’re going to get a very rich incoming class.
They ALSO give a tip to development cases, but they’d end up with a class much richer than the US population even without that tip.
“CPA here - choose index funds if you want to end up with more money. Choose actively managed funds if you’re less concerned about your money than your ego.”
CPA and MBA here too — the only thing that index funds have performed better than actively managed funds in the long run is due to the fee structure (to pay the mangers). Without these fees, top actively managed funds could out perform index funds. And we are talking about top schools’ admission office.
Funny that one might assume that because a task is preformed by people at a “top school” that it will be well done. Since the subject of investment fund management has come up, you might want to research how well Harvard’s experts have done managing its endowment for the past decade. Spoiler alert - it’s not pretty. Harvard’s returns trail those of most other elite schools and the mismanagement has resulted in cuts to programs, number of graduate students and salaries.
Hopefully Harvard’s admissions office does a better job picking students than Harvard’s internal endowment management team does picking its investments. But the initial data dump that’s come out of the recent lawsuit indicates the human controlled admissions process may have just as many issues.
Back to why a system that eliminates the human bias and errors that happen even at a “top school” might be worth testing…
It’s not funds management.
Adcoms, like coaches, get to choose the kids they want on their “team.” The college gets to define the team they want.
There is a starting point in many of these “Let’s change admissions” discussions. And it’s the certainty that the current process is flawed. Watch for that. (There are some pretty absolute statements being made, from the outside.) It’s often based on personal and pre-conceived notions of how things “should” be. Opinion. And of course, one’s own biases.
Holistic is not rack and stack. It’s not about defining the best stats and picking top-down. Or saying, all these kids are tall enough, let’s choose every twentieth applicant.
Many posters have their own ideas about what “merit” is. And the colleges have theirs.
From the kid’s point of view, the high school attended is not generally in his/her control (it is based on decisions made by his/her parents). So a kid may have “won”/“lost” the lottery of having parents whose decisions placed him/her in a good/bad high school.
And the kid has to face that he doesn’t always get into the top college he wants, either. It’s in his control to make the most of the hs years, to write a great app, choose the right LoR teachers, be engaged in productive ECs. But NOT in his control to get into his target colleges. As I told mine when they were ready to submit, “Now it’s in their hands.”
And for folks who mentioned the Chinese National College examinations, those have an element of unfairness. Each province has a certain number of slots for the top schools (Beijing, Tsinghua, Fudan, etc) and the cutoff score for the provinces are quite different. Some provinces with high results on the exams will have a higher cutoff qualifying score than others. The more rural provinces/provinces with higher numbers of non-ethnic Chinese will have a lower cutoff qualifying score. So there is an element of affirmative action present in the Chinese system as well.
To make this more understandable, imagine that Harvard has a certain number of slots. A California or New Jersey kid would need to get 1550 on the SAT whereas somebody from Alabama/Mississsippi will qualify with a 1200 SAT.
Which is just the way National Merit works, different cut offs for different states. Stinks. 
We don’t need a lottery. You can change admissions by limiting the number of applications by students.