Legacy Admissions - Williams Professor "Why legacy admissions are a good thing"

Parents Forum
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I don’t either, it feels like one more benefit to me as well.

I’m not too bothered by any of the LDC preferences. People get all worked about them but we all know that they do not significantly impact any non-hooked individual applicants chances for admission. Admissions chances are driven down by the sheer numbers of highly qualified applicants trying to attend these schools. Eliminating LDC preferences would not significantly raise ones chances for admission.

The ‘A’ preference isn’t a preference in the same vein as the others but rather a highly developed talent/skill that some schools highly value.

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Yes, I’m enough of an economic realist to think the D is just so obviously consistent with the whole concept of an endowed private college, and thus so obviously to the benefit of every other student who isn’t a D, that it is also an easy one to justify.

As for A and L, those are interesting to me because sometimes the argument is donation-based as well. Which is fine, if true, but then I kinda want to know if it is actually true. Like, show me the money.

But even so–if a private college simply thinks athletes and legacies and whatever are important to their community-building, I just can’t get that worked up about it. Probably because I don’t necessarily think these colleges are irreplaceable, so to me this is like if a luxury car company makes certain design choices. Don’t like it? Don’t buy the car. There are other cars.

But I do get these colleges get tax breaks thanks to their nominal educational mission, so some public scrutiny of how they are actually fulfilling their mission is fair. I just personally have a sort of Claude Rains, “I am shocked–shocked!–to find that gambling is going on in here,” reaction to all this. Like, it seems to me a lot of people are “shocked” that elite private colleges are elitist . . . but of course they still want their kid to go to an elite private college and collect their winnings.

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Probably because the image of elite colleges among the general public is that of academic eliteness. Because of that image, and because most (i.e. unhooked) applicants are trying for the academic eliteness lane, the other lanes reserved for hooked applicants (particularly the unearned ones, meaning the non-athletic ones) are commonly seen as unfair and undesirable.

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That may be it. I always saw them as social/academic hybrids, and indeed understood that to be why they might “place” better than educational value-added alone would explain. If people think the placement value-added is all academic but the admissions are social/academic hybrids, I could see why someone high on academic capital would think this could be fixed just by changing admissions.

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I really wish more people embraced this approach. The focus that some people and groups put on the Ivy+ has really created a very unrealistic and unhealthy focus on a very small set of schools where the perception of these schools relative to their peers is very distorted.

Harvard gets roughly 60,000 applications for about 2,000 spots and they have said that 75% or more of those applicants would do fine at Harvard. Those are the numbers which drive admissions chances, not ALDC but people skip the difficult thinking on this, it is easier to just get angry.

So what happens to the 43,000+ qualified but not admitted applicants? They don’t disappear, they go to other schools and they create smart, driven student populations at those schools. There alot of equally smart kids that never apply to Harvard/Ivy+ flowing into those schools as well. Kids smart enough for the Ivy+ can find plenty of peers anywhere within the T40 (probably beyond the T40) and in the top LACs.

It is a misguided assumption that the peak of academic eliteness rests within the Ivy+ for most students. Great schools all, but perceptions don’t always align with reality.

If someone wants to study engineering or CS most of the top schools are outside of the Ivy+.

For a classical liberal arts education the little Ivys (ironic naming) and some others arguably provide an equal or superior education (which those who know, know) resulting in equally rejective admissions without all of the attention.

Some may argue but I think that this is a problem created by many people seeing these schools through a lens of what they want/believe these schools to be rather than what these schools see themselves as.

I agree that how they see themselves (MIT and Chicago possibly excepted). For better or worse; they see themselves as developers of leaders who impact the wider world (or at least the Consulting/Finance world :slight_smile: ). They happily accept the accolades of being “the best” but in their eyes “the best” isn’t just excellence in the academic lane, the societal lane is equally important to most of these schools. The real “value add” of an Ivy+/T10 LAC education is not tippy top academics but rather the broadly excellent academics combined with the unique and influential social network.

When viewed from that angle the importance of legacy in their eyes makes more sense. It also is frustrating because what is important to them limits the access of others and the benefits which that access may bring.

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26

This is where it comes full circle to me about the replaceability. This is a little bit of a tangent, but I am still somewhat reeling from “reentering” the college conversation and suddenly finding out that at least in certain circles, some people who are interested in tech fields are now at the same time talking about “T20” or Ivy League or what not.

Like, that was never how the working engineering people I have known have ever thought. Sure, props to MIT, Cal Tech, Stanford, CMU, and Cornell . . . but also Berkeley, Michigan, Georgia Tech, Illinois, Purdue, Texas, UCLA, Wisconsin, TAMU, Virginia Tech, Penn State, and so on.

I gather the rise of CS has helped muddle that picture a bit, but still, to me the center of gravity for top engineering colleges is still shifted toward publics. The old Eastern non-tech privates, universities or LACs, are more where you go for social sciences and humanities and such. Natural sciences is then either way.

So when people with STEM aspirations are complaining about Ivy League admissions policies, there is a large part of me which is thinking, “Why do you care? Aren’t you applying to MIT and Michigan? Or Cal Tech and Berkeley?”

Now, the other big cohort of people personally concerned about all this seems to be the people wanting to use the Ivy League and such as first-for-that-family entry paths into elite business careers. I again think there is a lot of mistaken overlooking of the “top” publics, and in fact overlooking of some other super-connected colleges like SMU or BYU or so on. But still, there I think it is true the “top” privates (including “top” LACs) can sometimes have some potential value-added for the most selective business positions.

And yet that is right where I really do wonder if that would remain true if you eliminated all elite-favoring admissions policies. Like, would kids from middle-class, middle-America families, or for that matter international kids, actually gain any advantage in getting jobs with elite investment banks and such by going to Harvard or Claremont McKenna if those colleges did not have disproportionate representation of students of parents who worked at elite investment banks and such?

Not so sure that would still work if you got rid of all those extra kids from those families. Wouldn’t that more likely just end up recreating the current conditions at the Plan B colleges that are supposedly inferior to the current conditions at Plan A colleges?

So to me it is likely this is a balancing act–how do you balance having enough kids from the already-made-it families for networking purposes, with opening up access to those networks for kids from wanting-to-make-it families? And I have no idea, but I am open to the idea that colleges that want to keep feeding into those networks have to be conscious about the balance they strike.

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