43% would be a huge increase versus currently 18% Asian Americans.
Combine that with the dubious and subjective “personal rating” score that is used to measure character traits such as “courage” and “likability” it doesn’t take an expert in college admissions and statistics to realize that Harvard has employed questionable admission criteria to get the desired result. No wonder they don’t want to disclose this kind of information publically!
If Harvard really wanted to let in the most talented athletes, it would leave the Ivy league and all the restrictions on which athletes it can admit, join a competitive athletic conference like Stanford or Duke, and really recruit. Or it could go the other way like MIT or CalTech and state that its not giving one inch to athletics and every top swimmer must have a Nobel prize on the resume too.
Harvard also has many more athletic teams than most other schools. If it wants to admit the top Archer from Oklahoma rather than yet another perfect SAT, valedictorian from NYC because Harvard thinks that Archer will being more interest or variety to the class, what’s wrong with that?
I think we need to put this lawsuit in context. In the 1920’s Harvard was getting a increasingly disproportionate amount of Jewish students:
“In 1922, Lowell and other administrators had become “increasingly alarmed” over the rising number of Jewish students earning admission to the College based on their high test scores, SFFA’s document reads. Jewish applicants scored a significant amount of spots due to their top marks on the exam. At this time, 21.5 percent of the student population identified as Jewish.”
To counteract this “threat”, Harvard instituted new admissions criteria:
"The “character and fitness” criteria of admission revolved around “five pillars”: academic promise, personal qualities, health and athleticism, geographic distribution, and Harvard parentage. The College stressed “personal qualities of character” was of “major importance” in its decision-making process, according to SFFA’s filings.
Note: previously admission to Harvard was based on academics but changed to more “holistic” to continue to shape the class as they see fit.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/6/21/holistic-admissions-origin/
“Being more interest or variety to the class” is not the primary reason why Harvard gives a massive preference to recruited athletes. However, the hypothetical archer would not get this huge recruited athlete preference since Harvard does not have an archery team. Instead archery would likely be treated as a quality EC activity (better EC rating), which does not denote a comparable admissions advantage to being a recruited athlete (1 athletic rating).
There are several issues with the recruited athlete preference. One relates to the sheer magnitude of the preference, being far stronger than the preference for any other ALDC group or any other analyzed group. Athletes are regularly admitted who do not meet Harvard’s basic academic qualifications that are required for any other analyzed group besides athletes. Many Div I schools are far worse than Harvard in this regard, but that does not mean there is no problem with the system.
While not all legacy applicants are wealthy (the vast majority are), the legacies that get admitted tend to be quite wealthy. In the most recent Harvard freshman survey, roughly half of legacies reported a >$500k income, while ~1% reported an income below the US median.
This topic has inspired me to convince my son to take the long shot and submit an app to Harvard when the time comes.
@Data10 I’d quibble a bit with the impression this leaves: “Athletes are regularly admitted who do not meet Harvard’s basic academic qualifications that are required for any other analyzed group besides athletes.” If you’re referring to those with an academic rating of 5, we’re talking about 4 athletes over a 6 year period. The vast majority, roughly 85%, of athletes admitted during those 6 years had academic ratings of 2 or 3. (Many or most of whom probably tested only once, early in a junior year, and stopped there because a coach told them the score was good enough).
Regarding the paper linked to initially, I’m one who thinks this whole comparison of admit rates is nonsensical. No one who understands the system (unless trying to make a point for a court case) would think that is a meaningful comparison. Of course athletes have a high admit rate. The system is structured so that the important decisions—by athletes, coaches, admissions and FA officers—are made before a full application is submitted. Athletes who won’t be admitted or who don’t fit the coach’s system are filtered out. Unlike the regular admit pool, there aren’t thousands of ‘recruited athletes’ throwing in apps at Harvard on a whim. The actual admit rate for applications with coach support probably is closer to 100% than the study suggests (I suspect, but could be wrong, that the athletic code of 1 captures athletes who did not actually receive full coach support but applied anyway…and that the 1 is probably used internally for NCAA and Ivy reporting and compliance). So what? Do we really expect any of the stakeholders in a D1 athletic program to leave these things to chance?
If the argument is that a Harvard shouldn’t set up a structure that allows coaches to recruit and athletes to commit in a predictable way, it’s hard to see how one could run a D1 athletic program that way. But if that’s what folks want, go ahead and make the argument to Harvard. Good luck.
MIT is unusual among highly selective private universities in not considering legacy status in admission.
But consideration of legacy in admission indicates that inherited legacy status helps, beyond all of the other advantages that being a Harvard legacy correlates with. I.e. while legacy alone will not get an applicant admitted, it can help some applicants who would otherwise get rejected get admitted.
Why not just do like MIT and eliminate legacy consideration to reduce the perception of unfairness or rigging in favor of the already advantaged?
I was more referring to an academic rating of 4+. Specific numbers are below.
Athletes with 4+ – 80% admit rate, 15% of admitted athletes have 4+
Non-athletes with 4+ – 0.06% admit rate, 0.16% of admitted non-athletes have a 4+
Athletes with a weak 4+ academic rating were extremely likely to be admitted, and roughly 1 in 6 admitted recruited athletes had this weak academic rating. In contrast, it appears near impossible for a non-athlete to get admitted with the same weak academic rating, regardless of how strong the rest of their application is. 99.94% of non-athletes with a 4+ academic rating were rejected.
Eliminating legacy preference runs counter to its main objective of preserving its influences across the board. Unlike MIT or Caltech, which offers no legacy or donor preferences but only need to maintain their influences in science and technology, schools like Harvard wants to preserve their influences in politics, business, etc. What better way is there than to offer preferential treatment for the children of the already influential, powerful and famous via legacy consideration and other similar special considerations? Besides, one of the attractions is the opportunity to rub shoulders with these people, especially if you’re in politics or business, isn’t it? Why would these schools voluntarily give up such preferences?
The cost at American (elite) universities has been rather prohibitive for many families, and the “holistic approaches” used by many (if not all) again require certain wealth: good/competitive schools are in high-housing price neighborhood, Standardized testing, GPAs, sports involvement, all have positive correlation with family income. In a way, all elite colleges consider legacy in a broad sense, the legacy of rich parents raising more “successful/competitive” college applicants. MIT does it covertly, Harvard/Yale/Stanford/Duke… overtly.
Arcidiacono places the extraordinarily large athlete preference within the context of Harvard’s hypothesized institutional priority structure:
I love that – athletes as a group are a “consumption amenity” for their high wealth, high ability classmates.
The document is linked in post 34; see page 8 for the quote.
I speculate that there’s a connection between the kind of student Harvard recruits in this process and Steven Pinker’s lament that he usually lectures to half-empty halls. It’s not so much that Harvard students are lazy, he says, as that their priorities are elsewhere than in learning things in a classroom. That may be all the more likely if you recognize that it wasn’t a passion for learning things that got you into Harvard in the first place but something to do with a ball or a pedigree.
There’s nothing new in all this. It is the common wisdom about Harvard. This paper simply spells it all out incontrovertibly with statistics.
^ where is there evidence that ANY student admitted to Harvard doesn’t have a “passion for learning things”? If you’re talking about the <30 athletes admitted each year with academic ratings of 4-5, those athletes undoubtedly had the athletic talent to command serious interest at other schools. You think they chose Harvard for the parties?
"where is there evidence that ANY student admitted to Harvard doesn’t have a “passion for learning things”? "
“If you’re talking about the <30 athletes admitted each year with academic ratings of 4-5, those athletes undoubtedly had the athletic talent to command serious interest at other schools. You think they chose Harvard for the parties?”
What is most relevant is Harvard’s own rating of the academic quality of the admitted students. This rating is based largely on academic statistics from high school, but not exclusively so. It also incorporates the admissions officers’ subjective judgments on the academic ability of the candidate being reviewed, based on long experience with outcomes of admitted students.
Not Athlete, Legacy, Development/Special Interest, Child of Faculty
Share rated 2 or above – 82.1%
Share rated 3 or below – 17.9%
Legacy, Development/Special Interest, Child of Faculty
Share rated 2 or above – 77.7%
Share rated 3 or below – 22.3%
Athlete
Share rated 2 or above – 24.8%
Share rated 3 or below – 75.3%
These minimally overlapping distributions essentially trace two different schools in terms of average ability (athletes versus non-athletes). As athletes are 10% of the class, such a wide disparity will necessarily require Harvard to adjust its general class difficulty and/or offer easier classes in certain areas. No doubt this dynamic in part leads to the observed high graduation rates at Harvard and similar elites, which is one of the reasons admission to certain schools is so intensely desired regardless of the ability level of the candidate. No one tries to buy her way into MIT or Caltech, for instance.
Percentage share data above can be extracted from Table 2 on page 41 of the report linked in the original post.
@dropbox77177 , the differential between the LDC admits (i.e. the legacy, development and faculty child categores, excluding the athletes) and the non-ALDC admits is much greater than Table 2 indicates in respect of at least one rather significant dimension - academic preparation. For that analysis see Table 6. If one looks only at the comparisons between white LDC and white non-ALDC applicants, the differences are stark at every level of the ten academic deciles of Harvard applicants (1 being the lowest, 10 the highest):
6.32 percent of LDC admits come from the lowest decile. That decile alone supplies a greater percentage of LDC admits than all the deciles combined for non-ALDC (4.90 percent). Indeed, no non-ALDC admits come from that lowest decile, and only .39 percent come from the second lowest (as against 12.20 percent of LDC from the second lowest). That pattern continues throughout the deciles: the admit rates are lopsidedly in favor of LDC in all the deciles, with the result that 33.47 percent of all white LDC applicants are admitted to Harvard, whereas only 4.90 percent of all white non-ALDC applicants are admitted. The figures for Asian American applicants are similar.
The figures are as you say more extreme than these when the comparison is to athletes. As the authors say, those figures make the merely LDC advantage “pale by comparison.”
The combined effect of these preferences together with the point system itself (which assigns only 25 percent importance to academics) means many things, but one of them is that academic promise and achievement have a devalued significance in gaining admittance to Harvard. But Harvard is recruiting the student body it wants. I am all for letting it do that: other schools will fill the needs of the many academically talented students that Harvard is turning away in order to recruit its teams and maintain its endowment.
This is the nature of the Ivy League Academic Index system, which generally requires that the combined average AI (GPA and SAT/ACT stats) of athletes is no more than 1 standard deviation below the average AI of the full student body. You can have a minority of high impact recruited athletes with stats far below the -1 SD athlete average who get balanced out by a minority of athletes with stats on par with typical non-athlete students. Some of the latter group is not recruited and doesn’t see much play time. This essentially results in 2 separate GPA+SAT/ACT AI stat distributions for athletes and non-athletes – one distribution with a mean ~1 standard deviation below the other. Recruited athletes have even worse average stats than the overall athlete distribution since recruited athletes are more likely to be on the lower end of the athlete AI distribution, below -1 SDs.
Yes, the AI creates significant variation within the group of recruited athletes. Which is why it’s probably not useful to talk in terms of averages with this population, or to pretend the group is homogeneous, except for the purposes of compliance. There are quite a few athletes with high academic ratings.
Regarding the two prior posts, which suggest that “athletes” are somehow dumbing down the curriculum or showing that Harvard undervalues academic achievement: using Harvard’s rating system, 716 admitted athletes received ratings of 3 (which seems to be treated as a crucial dividing line in post 66). But 1832 admitted non athletes received the same rating. Athletes represent less than a third of the lowest three academic ratings (3-5). That doesn’t look to me like a lack of overlap, or like athletes are diluting the academic quality of the university. I do think it would be interesting to study the performance of those two groups while at Harvard, were it possible to control for the competing demands on an athlete’s time (perhaps if a large enough subset of non athletes were working or participating in clubs with a comparable time demand).