I can’t speak for @ucbalumnus. I’m for meritocracy if you haven’t figured out.
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Perhaps Caltech’s president should inform whoever fills in section C7 of its common data set.
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As you know, CDS data can sometimes be subject to interpretation, or may even be inaccurate. Here’s what its president has stated:
https://www.caltech.edu/campus-life-events/campus-announcements/2018-19-academic-year-welcome
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You have lambasted MIT and CalTech a few times in this thread, and at least in terms of MIT, I think it’s misplaced.
In an ideal world, K-12 schools would identify all kids that could potentially thrive at place like MIT or CalTech and fully develop their skills so that they are ready to hit the ground running when they get there. But we know that’s not the case. Many students are stuck in poor performing school systems that never develop their potential.
I have stated repeatedly that I believe raw talent is widely distributed among SES deciles. But raw talent alone is not enough. CalTech is quite possibly the most difficult undergraduate program in the USA, and MIT is close to the top as well in terms of difficulty. The program is hard even for exceptionally bright students that attended a rigorous high school, developed a solid understanding of math and science, developed good study skills, and already know how to multitask extensively.
But when it comes to the poorer performing school systems, quite often the bright kids were able to coast and never developed the study skills and other habits required to thrive when the difficulty increases substantially. They were the big fish in a small pond, not realizing that MIT and CalTech draws from the entire ocean. It would be a rare genius who can come from a poor performing high school system and then thrive at MIT.
For a number of years, MIT had a high suicide rate. When I was there, there were signs at all doors that led to rooftops or balconies giving the suicide hotline number and saying that help is readily available. MIT can be pretty humbling. You can be the strongest student in your state and think MIT will be easy. But MIT is also there to teach the 10% of the class that has national or international awards. It is there to teach the IMO winners from multiple countries. Almost everyone learns quickly that they are not as strong as they thought.
So MIT does not want to admit students that will not thrive. As we all know, high school performance correlates very highly with income. If you want students that have the demonstrated knowledge and work habits to thrive at MIT, they will overwhelmingly exist at school systems where people are high income. So it’s not MIT in any way filtering on high income, but instead choosing students on demonstrated talent and getting the high income as a side effect.
MIT recognizes the income bias (and other biases, such as too few women) and has a number of programs to address this. In the Boston area, they have a program to introduce students from poor communities into higher level math from an early age. They are not lowering the bar for admission by admitting unqualified students at age 17, but instead actively trying to engage them starting at age 11 to introduce them to the joys of STEM.
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Nearly every highly selective private college has a dramatic overrpresentation of wealthy kids and dramatic underrepresnetation of truly low income kids. The reasons for this are complex. One factor is that among academically well qualified kids, students who are low income tend to apply to local public colleges, rather than highly selective privates. For example, the abstract of the study at https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2013a_hoxby.pdf begins by saying, “We show that the vast majority of low-income high achievers do not apply to any selective college.” Most low income high achievers are not the type of kids who hang out on this forum and are focused on attending a top USNWR ranked college.
Another factor is that low income kids are less likely to be academically qualified than high income kids, particularly if “academically qualified” is defined in terms of SAT/ACT type test scores. While scores are often the weakest point for low income kids, low income kids are also less likely to have advanced course curriculum, and less likely to be well qualified in most other areas of the application.
Lower income kids are also less likely to have all 4 groups of ALDC hooks – less likely to be recruited athletes, less likely to be legacies, less likely to be special list kids, and less likely to be children of faculty.
Legacy preference is indeed one factor that tends to help wealthy kids and hurt low income kids. However, it’s only a small contribution to the overall reasons why wealthy kids are overrpresented, so removing legacy preferences is expected to only have a small impact overall.
I expect that Caltech and MIT do have less overrpresentation that HYPS. For example, in the Chetty study both Caltech and MIT averaged lower parent income than all 8 Ivies. However, I suspect this has far more to do with their reputation and focus on tech than legacy preferences. The kids who choose to apply to MIT and Caltech are a small and self selected group that is quite different from the general population, as well as different from the applicant pool at typical Ivy-type colleges.
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That wasn’t my point. My point was that removing legacy will not do much, and Caltech and MIT are good examples of the fact that removing legacy has not made their admissions all that much more equitable, in that low and middle income kids are still extremely underrepresented.
I also agree with most of what you wrote
I think that you re looking at this backwards. It is more likely that the reason that legacy admissions do not exist in these colleges is because these colleges have fewer kids of the wealthiest, most powerful, and most famous families.
MIT and Caltech have never really been at the center of the power structure of the country, the way that the other “elites” have. Consequently, they never participated much in the efforts to maintain power in the hands of the ruling “elites”. Moreover, the fact that they have a multitude of sources of income that do not include alumni donations meant that they never really had to think about that as well.
The fact that they are not at the center of the power structure also means that the wealthiest, most famous, and most powerful people in the USA are not all clamoring to get in. There is still a huge benefit of wealth, which is why these colleges are also dominated by the top 20% by income. However, the they are far less attractive for the top 1% or 0.1% than HYPS and other “elite” colleges.
So I do think that, if you got rid of legacy admissions in Harvard, mostly you would be doing is replacing the kids of super wealthy and powerful alumni with the kids of super wealthy and powerful non-alumni.
The bottom 80% is underrepresented in all “elite” colleges, including those without legacy admissions. That is because the major reason that there are few people of these SES in these colleges is not because of legacy, but because, in the USA, money not only buys you better schooling and ECs, it also buys you better grades and test scores. In fact, money will buy you every single one of the the factors on section C7 of the CDS except for Religious affiliation and Racial/ethnic status.
Of course, the more competitive a colleges is for admissions, the higher the standards are for ECs, GPAs, and test scores. Once the application numbers get high enough, most poor and middle class kids are locked out of these colleges. Removing legacy will not change this all that much. It will merely remove a benefit that one wealthy group has that other wealthy groups do not have.
That is not even starting to talk about the cost of college attendance, the fact that colleges do not recruit from poorer communities, the fact that schools in poorer communities is also terrible at college guidance. So even if a students is qualified for a better college, they won’t get the guidance they need to figure out how to apply.
Bottom line, the vast majority of kids from the bottom 80% by income never get to the point where the only thing that separates them from a legacy in admissions is the legacy status.
When legacy status becomes the major reason that low and middle income kids are being rejected from “elite” colleges, I promise that I will be in the first line to storm the barricades of this policy.
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I never claimed, nor did anyone else as far as I can tell, that the elimination of legacy admissions will significantly increase the representation of the poor in elite colleges. Instead, I’ve argued that legacy preference is an unfair and corrupt practice that benefits a few well-connected and/or well-to-do but hurts just about everyone else, including the poor. It shouldn’t exist (and only exist) in a country that claims to strive for fairness and equal opportunities for everyone.
Educational excellence is most correlated with parental education. People with higher educational attainment tend not to be the poor. The vast majority of them are in the upper middle class or the middle class (not the super wealthy or the very poor). So it’s not surprising that at Caltech or MIT, where excellence in academics is much more highly valued than most other places, their student bodies are overrepresented by well educated families, often in the upper middle class. But that’s an indirect effect. The only way to significantly improve representation by the poor lies in the K-12 system. It’s too late by the time they reach college age.
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Is it my imagination or does the legacy admission question bubble up right before each election cycle? I won’t be surprised if we see a(nother) politician grandstanding on this issue in the coming weeks.
I always struggle to support a view that more government involvement and regulation somehow leads to improvement, especially in this case where you are starting to see colleges do the right thing (need blind admissions, actively recruiting first gen, minority and rural students, etc.
All these things are possible because colleges have been able to put themselves in a financial situation where they can offer those opportunities. It’s easy to say that we should get rid of legacy/donor admissions when you are talking about schools like Harvard and Princeton that have more money than some small countries. But how about the school that has an endowment thats 1/50th the size?
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From what I see, it may be too late by kindergarten. I do pre-K physicals in a low income district. These kids, age 5, do not know their ABCs. They can sort of sing the song, but many of the letters are wrong. Few can recognize any written letters, and essentially none understand that letters make sounds. Most cannot count beyond 10, and again they do so only in a sort of sing-song way without any true understanding. When I hold up 3 fingers, they cannot tell me how many. In short, by kindergarten, they seem to me to be 2 years behind already (performing at the level of a typical 3-year-old in my rich district just 12 miles away.) This is a racially and ethnically diverse district, but none of the groups perform well.
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Not sure that’s how the virtuous parent would describe the conversation. Most likely, he meant he would accept Yale’s decision, if it ever decided to end legacy admissions, and might even actively advocate for it. No reason to caricature their thought process.
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Who knows what the thought process was of the so called “virtuous parent “. We are 2 or 3 levels removed from that conversation. It is an example of saying one thing and having your child (and spouse) decide on the opposite
Sure. Neither of us were there. I just think that when confronted with two possible interpretations of the same situation, choose the one that makes the most common sense, including the possibility that the son applied and was accepted without the legacy bootstrap.
Of course, in the counterfactual hypothetical that elite colleges did not have legacy preference, would the student be more likely to be admitted to other elite colleges in exchange for being less likely to be admitted to the legacy one?
If LDC students had to wear prominent signs indicating LDC status, would that affect their social standing at the school? I.e. analogous to what visible URMs sometimes encounter?
In my experience from back in the day, yes it can impact impressions. My H was a legacy and went out of his way to not tell people. Athletes got a lot of grief too but it was harder to hide that if they were in a high profile sport.
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The only way to improve representation is to reduce poverty. The fault lies less in the school system than in the economic one. A child who is worried about having secure food and housing cannot learn effectively, no matter how good the school system is.
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As others on this thread have said, the legacy admits are such a small number of the bigger admissions landscape and abolishing it will not realistically make anything better. People will find something else to complain about.
Legacy Admissions is something to aspire to…affirmative action is not.
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It will make the admission process of the kids that were rejected because of a legacy candidate better.
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Not really. That non-legacy kid is overwhelmingly likely to get rejected anyway ( just as legacy kids do), given the small chances of acceptance at super competitive schools.
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