<p>I did not see this posted, if it is a repost, please ignore.</p>
<p>From the article:
[quote]
President John Hennessy weighed in, arguing that Stanford should set a precedent of determining its own admissions criteria based on the University’s needs.</p>
<p>“I think we will find ourselves, as will the rest of higher education, increasingly trying to protect our rights to decide who are the best students to come to Stanford, just as we did in the Michigan case with affirmative action,” Hennessey said at the meeting. “We need to protect our right to make that decision.”</p>
<p>Karen Cook ’68 M.A. ’70 Ph.D. ’73, professor of sociology, agreed with Hennessy.
“The one advantage to this list is it is ‘truth in lending,’ ” Cook said at the meeting. “I mean, this is what we do—admit legacies and people in all these categories.”
<p>Is that news? Legacy is listed as “considered” in Stanford’s common data set. And it is generally assumed that relation to faculty or a big donor is an admission preference at many universities.</p>
<p>Wow. They are not admitting the best and the brightest. They are admitting children of celebrities, children of big donors, children of faculty members and children of legacies. </p>
<p>So why would an employer or a graduate program value a diploma from Stanford over a diploma from one of the UCs where the criteria are fair, open and without the heavy thumb of money, power or celebrity and which do seek out the best and brightest by GPA, SAT and ECs?</p>
<p>Some employers may actually prefer to hire those “with the right breeding”. Lacrosse, a relatively expensive sport that tends to be favored by those from higher income backgrounds, seems to be a favored EC for investment banking hiring, for example.</p>
<p>Indeed. The nice thing is - you can vote with your pocketbook and not apply to Stanford! Plenty of people don’t, and the world still turns! You can also not go into investment banking either - plenty of people don’t, and yet they still manage to put food on their tables!</p>
<p>Here on CC, the elite privates (which likely all do this sort of thing) are the ‘wow’ factor, while both the parents and the students look at the state flagships as sort of a fall back safety place to attend college. </p>
<p>But given the fact that these privates like Stanford use such elitist criteria unrelated to a student’s academic potential, the schools that should be looked up to are the ones who admit students without regard to celebrity, money or legacy.</p>
<p>“Wow. They are not admitting the best and the brightest. They are admitting children of celebrities, children of big donors, children of faculty members and children of legacies.”</p>
<p>-- And this is news how? Harvard, Princeton and Oxford have been doing this for ions… doesn’t seem to hurt their world-wide rankings…</p>
<p>PS And you’re fooling yourself if you think Stanford isn’t admitting the best and the brightest. It is. Plenty of them. It’s just that they admit others as well.</p>
<p>Indeed, back in 1959, Vance Packard wrote in The Status Seekers that HYP were trying to balance admissions between academic eliteness (admitting those with the highest academic ability and motivation, often from public schools) and SES eliteness (admitting those from SES elite prep schools (which were not necessarily academically elite back then), alumni children, donors, etc. in order to keep the donations coming). It was noted that the latter group tended to be content with gentlemen’s C grades, while the former tended to strive and live up to the academic elite reputation.</p>
<p>In D1’s class of 122, 6 students were accepted to Stanford. All 6 were legacies. And all 6 were highly qualified…emphasis on highly qualified. Only 1 anecdote, but I doubt that most of the legacy admits are unqualified, it’s just that a tie goes to the one with connections.</p>
<p>Oxford (and Cambridge) do not do this, at least not for undergraduates. Any time there’s a suggestion that Oxbridge are admitting on anything other than academic ability, there is a huge scandal. Admissions are done by faculty.</p>
<p>The context of the story is that everyone – at Stanford – seems to be acknowledging that the faculty as a body has the right to set admissions policy. I don’t know how true that is elsewhere, other than for PhD programs.</p>
<p>More than half the kids at Stanford get financial aid and 18% of them get PELL… Also they have field competitive teams in many sports which means they give out sports scholarships and have some sort of preferences for recruited athletes.</p>
<p>Over the past few years Princeton has posted the % of the incoming class that are the children of alums or faculty . . . last years I looked it was ~14%</p>
<p>As to Lacrosse (post #4)–my middle school PE teacher introduced this sport to us. Totally foreign in the south I thought it was the stupidest thing ever as did everybody else in the class. And still think so today even though I was really good at it. It never occurred to me that she was doing us a favor. Maybe I should have followed up on that unsuspected talent. Could’ve been an investment banker! ’ I’ve muddled through though…</p>
<p>The article addressed a range of preferences other than legacy. As a private school, they can admit who they want. What they are trying to do is be more transparent about this, for which they should be commended. </p>
<p>As to legacy qualifications at selective schools, from the article:
</p>
<p>Also noted was that there is no appreciable economic advantage to legacy admission.</p>
<p>As the parent of a college lax player, I am hoping that article is true across other disciplines!!! Yep, sent it to her since she hasn’t declared a major yet!!!</p>
<p>When a public law school was found to be giving preference to children of politicians in hopes of a quid pro quo it was deemed to be corruption.</p>