“… Those so-called legacy admissions, raised earlier in the case but under intense scrutiny Monday, create a campus dominated by children of the rich, said Richard Kahlenberg, an advocate of a ‘race-neutral’ system. He was testifying for the plaintiff, a conservative-led group called Students For Fair Admissions, which wants to make Harvard abandon the use of race altogether in its selection process.” …
Isn’t diversity a goal that Harvard pursues? Isn’t it used to justify some of the practices by Harvard’s admissions? Or is the diversity in SES just undesirable from Harvard’s perspective, despite what the school’s past public statements have led people to believe? I’m confused.
Presumably for marketability, Harvard wants a small percentage of lower and middle SES students in order to make it appear that it is not exclusively a school for the scions of the wealthy and well-connected, even though it mostly still is (57% of undergraduates do not get FA grants of scholarships, which Harvard’s net price calculator suggests needs a $2xx,xxx family income, and only 11% get Pell grants, meaning from approximately bottom half of family income in the US, according to https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=harvard&s=all&id=166027#finaid ).
Although preferring a strongly upper SES skew is not what they will publicly say, it is likely to be desirable to them, since (a) it means less FA cost, and (b) elitist employers probably prefer those from upper SES upbringing, and those from lower and middle SES backgrounds become more acceptable to those elitist employers after four years of socialization in a predominantly upper SES environment.
No different than many top private schools.
It will only end under a court mandate, alumni
contributions are far too important to institutional financial health.
Besides, now that the Govt is taxing endowments the Feds need it too!