fyi – Hopkins eliminated legacy admissions starting what the class of '14.
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Yep, I know. But since their average legacy % was around 8.5%, I think I’m not supposed to be very impressed.
Just going to affect a few kids.
Since subtlety proved ineffective, let’s rephrase:
Might I remind members of the forum rules: “Our forum is expected to be a friendly and welcoming place, and one in which members can post without their motives, intelligence, or other personal characteristics being questioned by others."
and
“College Confidential forums exist to discuss college admission and other topics of interest. It is not a place for contentious debate. If you find yourself repeating talking points, it might be time to step away and do something else… If a thread starts to get heated, it might be closed or heavily moderated.”
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To be clear, discuss legacy admissions at every single college if you do choose. Provided it’s done politely, without unnecessary debate (c.f. definition of “celebrity”), doesn’t drift into a discussion more appropriate to the Politics Forum, or otherwise violate ToS
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It seems to me that, if Princeton’s percentage of legacy admits is more than twice as much as Wesleyan’s and everyone, including Princeton, agrees that it gives them an even greater advantage in admissions, the imperative to end the preference should be easier to see, not more difficult.
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Just that not all 7 or 8% of legacy admits needed the legacy hook to gain admissions. Would 5% have been admitted without the legacy hook? 2%? We may find out in the coming years, or we may never find out if Wesleyan decides not to keep those statistics or even ask the question any longer. If it is on the common app, Wesleyan may ask that field to be blocked or just ignored. Some legacies are going to apply just because they want to go to Wes and be accepted because they are qualified without the hook.
Also, some of the legacies in the 7% may also have been in another category too, like an athlete or the child of a faculty member but also a legacy. Does Wesleyan double count those applicants? If they take those applications out of the legacy bucket, does the legacy percentage fall to 5% but yet the exact same student body is at Wesleyan?
I don’t think it matters. Wesleyan is in the best position to judge if it is going to have a negative effect on donations or applications (if, for example a legacy is also a legacy at another LAC and EDs there to use the hook), and Wesleyan has said it is negligible. If it was always a tie breaker between two equally qualified students, it shouldn’t make any difference at all in the academic chops of the student body. Individually, the legacy may be out and it hurts that particular student, that familly, but doesn’t change the student body at all.
It would not bother me if schools keep their legacy preferences, give an employee benefit to the children of faculty and staff, to big donors. They run the schools and know what is best for that business. Need a movie star? Admit one. Need a social advocate? Admit one. If I were running the school I’d likely make different admission decisions but I don’t have an issue with how they do it now or if they want to make changes.
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I think if we subsititute the word priority for preference, some of us may better understand what you are saying. Prioritizing the number of children of alumni attending the college has not been a Wesleyan University goal that I am aware of. In fact, I’m almost sure there has been an inverse relationship between the admission of First Generation/Low Income applicants - which really has been a priority - and that of the admission of applicants with legacy status in recent years.
The same may even be true of Princeton since they too have a relatively small (relative to Harvard and Yale, at least) percentage of alumni children in attendance.
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Yes, the media are treating it as a recent event. On CNN this morning, there was a graphic showing the college insignia of Wesleyan University, Amherst, JHU, MIT and I think I heard “Carnegie Mellon” in the voice-over. I will try to get a screen shot.
They are treating the recent spate of policy revisions as a companion piece to the DOJ investigation of Harvard.
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Agreed that (less well informed peeps!) are lumping all these events together. You would think the media could be more accurate in what they write.
CMU did change their recent CDS to reflect that they don’t consider legacy in admission, but didn’t make an announcement AFAIK. Pitt also recently changed the CDS to reflect legacy isn’t considered.
[so-called] journalists never let the actual facts get in the way of their message. A trend occurring slowly over the past decade is not exciting as the (political?) DoJ investigation.
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Your assumption turns out to be incorrect. In the main thread about the recently released study, someone posted a breakdown of sources of revenue for MIT vs Harvard (and Yale IIRC) and the short answer is that “gifts” (both current and from endowment) are a much larger % for H and Y than they are from MIT, which gets a far higher % from ‘other stuff’ like tech revenues/royalties/etc.
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Not important, but it was Princeton rather than Yale. That isn’t going to make a difference.
I’ll just toss in again (as I did over there) that Harvard broke it down by subunit, and it was easy to see how research grants and such played a much larger role for their tech subunit than net tuition, whereas for their non-tech subunits it was the opposite, although if the subunit included science it would still get some significant research grants.
And all at Harvard depended a lot on gifts, although again non-tech even more so than tech.
This is not really a surprise. Elite tech (and science) gets a lot of outside grants. Elite non-tech, that’s going to be mostly a combination of gifts and net tuition.
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Thanks for correcting and clarifying.
But yes, they all get (way) more $ as a % of revenues from donors than do the pure tech schools.
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And since we are here, here is Wesleyan:
68% of Wesleyan’s operating budget comes from net tuition. This is very high compared to research universities. But I think we should generally expect that from standalone LACs.
Endowment income was 18%, and Contributions (which appears to be largely gifts for current use) was 3%, so that is 21% total from what I have been calling generally Gifts.
7% was research and other government grants, and 4% other income. Again, that would be very low for a research university, but this is an LAC.
So, yeah. Wesleyan needs to watch how much it gets from net tuition.
By the way, I should emphasize this is all just the operating side. Capital budgets are very different, and that is where a lot of endowment income and other gifts tend to go (doesn’t everyone want their name on a building?). So I don’t want to make it sound like Wesleyan students don’t also benefit from gifts in other ways.
But in terms of paying for the ongoing activities of the college, the above is how they do it, and it is indeed not only different from a tech university like MIT, it is different from research universities like Harvard or Princeton too. Because it is none of those things.
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By the way, at a high level–this may help explain why elite LACs like Wesleyan may be a bit quicker than Ivy/Ivy-Plus non-tech universities to give up on legacy admissions. At least in terms of operating revenues, they are much more net tuition driven, and presumably there are lots of different ways of targeting net tuition. The whole multi-generational giving theory associated with legacies–even if true–is less salient to them anyway.
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Which is low for a R1 research uni but pretty high for a LAC due in no small part, I’m sure, to Wesleyan’s doctoral programs which were targeted to include Bio, Chem, Physics/AstroPhysics, BioChemMolecularBio, Math and Ethnomusicology more than half-a-century ago.
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You helped clear that up today, as well as elucidate why some folks have a particular bee in their bonnet about the allegedly performative nature of Michael Roth’s announcement (even though Roth himself made it very clear that it wasn’t going to change where we see the sun rise and set). Thank you and Droid for adding meaningfully to the discussion.
I wasn’t around in 2014. Did everyone in these parts purse their lips as tightly as we’ve seen here when Johns Hopkins publicly announced they were doing away with legacy boost for their mere 8.5% legacy classes? I’m assuming you and Droid know better than I the operating economics of that rather large research behemoth, which typically tops the charts in government research dollars received. Or are they similarly reliant on alumni largesse as the Ivies? We know one guy who throws a few dollars their way, and given Bloomberg’s politics I doubt it pissed him off at all.
Can you walk me through this a bit more? My impression is that Wesleyan is fairly reliant on gifts. Or, perhaps, more of those go toward the capital budget, as you say. Though the annual “parent fund”, or whatever it’s called now, is a focus for helping with annual operating spend. One thing to factor when thinking about Wesleyan is that, after years of burning through cash like a trust fund kid spending the summer in Europe, they have tightened their belts considerably and are at work building the endowment and being disciplined on managing the draw for ops.
Bloomberg might not; his daughter Emma, Pton class of 2001 ( with a major in medieval literature) might. She gave them $20million in 2001.
Bloomberg gave most of the FA money he donated to JHU in 2018 ($1.8B, he’s given them other $$ too), after JHU eliminated legacy in 2014. I assume Bloomberg knew that, but JHU didn’t announce to the rest of us until 2020 that they had eliminated legacy in admissions in 2014 (under the auspices that they had to understand the impact of that decision, which makes sense).
A little history:
JHU ends legacy preference in admissions | Hub.
And, a recent statement from Ron Daniels here: Ron Daniels on LinkedIn: Why We Ended Legacy Admissions at Johns Hopkins | 429 comments
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Interestingly, my only “expertise” is a willingness to look up operating budgets and maybe do some extremely basic math.
But here is Hopkins:
https://finance.jhu.edu/reports_guides/financial_reports/AnnualReport2022.pdf
Not very user-friendly–on brand, I guess–but the immediate thing that leaps out is being closely connected with a hospital makes this way more complicated.
That being said, it looks like $295,778,000 in current gifts, $339,175,000 in endowment income, $634,853,000 total gift revenue, so about 8.5% of the operating budget. That is indeed WAAAAAY lower than we saw with Harvard and Princeton. Sponsored research is $4,125,904,000, 55.4%, so WAAAAAY higher.
The hospital part might be some of the explanation, but obviously only a part of it. As you expected, I think Hopkins is way more research than gift funded than colleges like Harvard, Princeton, or for that matter Wesleyan.
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