“These aren’t just elite institutions, they’re elitist institutions”

Parents Forum
581

I get the feeling that some would like the “elites” admissions to be purely merit based (i.e. grades and test scores). If so, let’s open these colleges to everyone with top stats only and see what kind of freshman class you would have. Internationals might be 50% of the class and 70% male. Minority (non-Asian) acceptance percentages would drop into the low single digits and the competitiveness of their sports program and the arts would be non-existent. Alumni giving would drop considerably and the culture of these elite college campuses would be dramatically changed.

Do we want Harvard to be like UCSD where 50% of the freshman class is Asian and only 2% black?

Let’s not pretend we don’t already place restrictions on class make-up by gender, geography (both in the U.S. and Internationally), etc.

We social engineer the heck out of freshman classes and it certainly is not just the legacy category.

While I think more transparency in admissions would be helpful for all applicants, I do feel the Harvard’s of the world have made great strides in forming a well-balanced class of students (academically, talented, accomplished, athletic, rich and poor) today than in the recent past.

They are not perfect but the system for the most part works to meet their many institutional needs.

582

Ucb, I have never said, “But you do not seem to mind legacy pull for those who do not meet the usual academic and non-academic (excluding hook) expectation.” It seems you’re convinced this is de rigeur- and I am not. No matter what Data10 provides from studies. I have never seen an adcoms state, with respect to an underqualified legacy, “But she’s legacy.” Whereas I have seen the comment, “See what the coach says.” I.e., deferring decisions to someone not looking at the full app.

Nor do I say, what a college is looking for is “elusive.” Not at all, imo. Nor do I say, leave it to chance, as if it’s obscure. These elites want kids who can think past what their hs offers, what’s explained to them, etc. I do say, if you think you might be qualified, stats and rigor wise, with good ECs, look beyond that. Be the sort of full individual an elite looks for. Figure it out, better than crapshooting.

Issues like legacy and race do not give a kid a shot if he’s applying blindly. First, you make your own app as solid as possible. Do kids rest their apps on stats and hs status, missing the rest of the assets looked for? Too many, yes. And posters who recommend looking only at stats or the CDS, are not pointing them in the right directions.

Afaiac, the vast subpool of Asian American kids are a splendid group, motivated, activated, fun, etc. Resilient, aware. Plenty of spark, backed up by what they have done. But one issue is that those who apply in droves from some limited geo areas, can’t all get in. You aren’t going to fill the class with stem kids from the Bay Area, missing other majors or profiles. (In many cases, an As-Am from an underrepresented area, or a URM version of As-Am, or different majors, do have an advantage.)

This is one of the pitfalls of looking primarily at studies of who gets what ratings and who subsequently gets a nod. Divided by race or legacy. Too narrow.

Alums donate for many reasons. Lately, excitement about increasing monies available for fin aid. In development, sports is often its own subgroup. Far from the only reason alums give.

And calling the Ivies just a sports league doesn’t begin to express what they have become.

583

@roycroftmom - I stated my opinion about legacies up thread more than once. I was going to repeat it again in that post about spark, but decided it was too long as it was.

I am ok with Harvard having legacy admits because they get to choose the class they want so long as they aren’t breaking any laws. Harvard doesn’t claim anywhere to be choosing the most qualified class, whatever that means. Qualified is a fuzzy term, and ultimately unhelpful- whether you come at it holistically or quantitatively.

The world is not fair, college admissions aren’t fair, but I do have faith that the market will out. A class full of full pay legacies is institutional suicide, as is giving full rides to everyone. We all disagree on what the balance between the two is and how to find it. Vive la difference.

584

As I stated at the beginning of the thread, kids from the top 1% are 77x more likely than kids from the bottom 20% to end up at Harvard. Other than repetitive pronouncements to dig deeper and keep an open mind, lookingforward never says why they think this magical spark is 77x more common in rich kids than poor kids. If a law firm hires 77 men for every woman, I don’t need to read the individual resumes to detect bias, no matter how much the hiring manager talks about holistic and how not every applicant aces their app. If a complex statistical analysis from the law firm’s own expert witness shows evidence of bias, then continuing to beat the drums on how hiring isn’t “rack and stack” starts to look ridiculous.

585

Wow, blossom. The wealthy URM from a professional family is no more interesting just for that. It’s another asumption on CC, that they’re really looking for race alone. And wealthy, to boot? Check!

I do not “blame” kids for not being sophisticated enough. What I do say is, IF you think you’re tippy top material, it includes not falling for just superficials.

Of course, life is tougher in Camden. Again, we’re talking about kids who are elite level. Absolutely not limited to Short Hills. Imo, the issue of k-12 challenges and the kids who do not get any support is another thread.

It’s a slow boat to turn around. No question. There need to be improvements in k-12 to bring a wider array of kids into the process. But the fact of issues in some areas does not mean there are not worthy, striving, poor kids out there, achieving. Today. Lots of reasons. And as that pool grows, so will the number of qualified applicants.

Btw, driving a school bus would be a giant leap over what many poor kids live on. That does not mean the kid is bound to fail.

586

The wealthy URM from a professional family may not be more interesting, @lookingforward, but is undisputedly far more likely to be admitted

587

I agree with this and IMO is where much of the focus and investment (money, time, and mindshare) should be…not on the admission practices of a small proportion of colleges where an even smaller proportion of the population attends, in a country where less than half of the population graduates from college.

And yes, that’s another thread. K-12 education is failing our kids, families and our country.

588

“The wealthy URM from a professional family may not be more interesting, @lookingforward, but is undisputedly far more likely to be admitted”

Yes, 100 times yes. You guys can argue kumbaya all you want, but get any elite college adcom in a room, alone, off the record, and you will hear about how they are able to “round out” the class with recent immigrants from the Caribbean, who can check off either the black or hispanic box (I mean that figuratively, not a literal box) who come from professional, college educated families who in many cases represented the elites in their country of origin.

Again- admit who you want, but I’m not sure why folks like us need to drink their Kool aid.

589

Sigh.

590

I am making up numbers for clarity, but if you have 770 male applicants for every 10 women, it is a lot harder to detect bias.

591

And don’t forget the faculty brats who apply and are all presumably CT residents…

592

Not me, at least with regards to ‘elite’ college admissions, however defined. The ‘elite’ are just such a small number of students that their admissions policies are immaterial for public policy purposes, IMO. (of course, as long as they are not breaking state or federal laws…)

Personally don’t care what Harvard does.

OTOH, I would like to figure out a way in our state to improve the HS education of URM’s so that their education and grades improve so that they better qualify for UCSD. If we can fix middle school and HS education in the urban cores, the educational disparities of SES starts to fade away.

593

It’s not just that every study or review I am aware of that has ever looked at legacy admissions advantage at Harvard found a strong admissions benefit for being a legacy, including internal studies and reviews from Harvard Office of Internal Research. It’s also comments from Harvard itself including comments Harvard adcoms write on individual files, comments from the Harvard Dean of Admissions, and numerous Harvard comments in internal documents. All imply that legacies get a significant admissions advantage at Harvard.

It’s also some degree of common sense that can be derived without digging in to analyses from studies, or without listening to comments from Harvard itself. For example, it seems unlikely that legacies would naturally have a ~34% when non-legacies have a <5% admit rate. It also seems unlikely that legacies would have that same ~34% admit rate decade after decade, including in the 1980s when the college was far less selective for non-ALDCs, with a far higher admit rate for non-ALDCs. Or that admitted LDCs would naturally receive significantly lower ratings than non-ALDCs in all categories except athletic, including ones based on external reviewers .

You mentioned that you have not personally seen a comment within files. It’s my understanding that you don’t work for Harvard and have not seen any of the comments besides those that have been posted in this thread; and are instead assuming such comments do not exist. I wouldn’t assume all “elite” colleges have the same degree of legacy preference. Some “elite” colleges don’t offer any admissions advantages to legacies…

You seem to misunderstand how a multivariate regression analysis works. It’s not just looking at admit rate for race/legacy and comparing that to non-legacy or different race. It’s more estimating the average relative chance of an individual legacy vs non-legacy who have similar values for the other controls. These controls include application region and choice of concentration, among dozens of other variables.

For example, it’s more comparing Asians from CA who are planning to study CS to Whites from CA who are planning to study CS; rather than comparing the overall admit rate for Asian vs White. You can use a multivariate regression analysis to see if the difference in admit rate more relates to Asian vs White, CS vs other major, or CA vs other location, or many other variables. This is a well accepted method that is used in many fields and is used by Harvard itself to analyze the issues that have been the focus of this thread, independent from the lawsuits.

594

But what if the individuals that inhabit the upper echelons of power disproportionately come from the small number of students that attend these ‘elite’ schools. Then do these schools’ admissions processes matter?

595

^But are they? If the CEOs come from other places, like the stats seem to suggest, and they are the ones who wield the power (open question), then it isn’t an issue.

But, yes that is the ultimate inequity that concerns people. The question is how to address it. You can try by addressing the narrow issue of elite admissions, or the broad issue of all of the other inequalities that feed the narrow issue.

596

Sorry, a hypothetical is not worth being concerned about, at least to me.

597

Re lookingforward #570, the line about the student who spends time taking his/er grandmother to the doctor strikes me as an actual, authentic instance, and not a stereotype extending over all students from lower SES families.

If you are advocating that people need to dig into all of the publicly available information about what specific colleges want, I agree with that.

To the extent that you are saying that it is only possible to tell what is going on in Harvard admissions by reading the applications–which most of the posters obviously cannot do–I don’t find that helpful . . . it’s more irritating, really.

The anecdote that I mention next comes from Britain in the past and not from the US in the present, but I think it is still relevant to the discussion. If anyone has ever seen the Altman documentary film 7 Up, which covers the lives of 7-year-olds from different socioeconomic classes in Britain (in the 1960’s), they will probably recognize the scene. Three 7-year-old private school students are being interviewed together, and one announces that he reads the Financial Times, except on Mondays, “because the stocks don’t go up” then.

There are almost certainly American 7-year-olds who are living in the American version of that frame of reference, right now. Fast forward to the time of college application, and it is hard to see how any “normal” 17-year-old is supposed to compare in worldliness to someone from that sort of background. (You have mentioned that Harvard is looking for worldliness.)

598

For those who think that Harvard is doing just fine with its admissions, like socaldad2002, #580, if you are willing to share whether you are the satisfied parent of a student who was admitted to Harvard, or whether you are just generously inclined toward Harvard, it would be interesting to know.

I don’t mean to intrude on anyone’s privacy, so no pressure.

We have no Harvard applicants in the family, going back many generations. I guess that makes our family sort of “legacy-non-legacy.”

599

I have never said H requires worldliness. In fact, I think it’s a misleading concept.

“To the extent that you are saying that it is only possible to tell what is going on in Harvard admissions by reading the applications–” Lol. Didn’t say that either.

I’m saying you need to consider more, more of the conditions and context in which decisions are made. Set aside preconceptions. A good regression analysis does its due diligence first and watches out for mixing correlation with causation.

One can learn a lot from the nature of the rebuttals here. Funny, because for research, I was taught to strip out assumptions, the tendency to only follow results which prove your initial ideas, or assume you have a whole picture.

Edited

600

Then, that would already be controlled for in the statistical analysis. Further, getting 77x as many male applicants at a law firm would be such an odd scenario as to merit an investigation into why they aren’t getting more female applicants.