Wesleyan ends legacy admissions

[1NJParent]

@TonyGrace

I thought we established that legacy, as a group, is not “less qualified.”

They aren’t “less qualified” as a group, but they’re “less qualified” than the non-legacies they replaced, if they needed their legacy boost to be admitted over those non-legacies, are they not?

[roycroftmom]

Perhaps many of them didn’t need the boost.

[1NJParent]

Yes, many of them don’t need the boost. They aren’t the ones benefited from legacy preference. The preference only benefits those who need the boost, who, by definition, are “less qualified”.

[roycroftmom]

Or perhaps, as suggested above, it is a tie-breaking factor among applicants of equal qualification. I am not sure if that is considered a boost or not by you.

[1NJParent]

No two applicants are identical, or identically “qualified”. A large group of applicants may appear “equally qualified” only when standards are sufficiently lowered.

Preferences (of any kind) are ultimately about their unfairness. I don’t think anyone can claim that legacy preference is fair.

[roycroftmom]

There are so many 4.0/1600/solid EC kids applying, I am not sure how one can distinguish often among the average excellent students. Living in Wyoming or being a legacy can be a distinguishing factor

[1NJParent]

AOs often claim they can distinguish among their applicants. But if they can’t, doesn’t it mean their standards are too low?

[roycroftmom]

In holistic admissions I think it is difficult to compare standards, particularly for extracurriculars. For example, the year I was tracking our area had an applicant who was state debate champion, an applicant who had run for City Council, an applicant who had published biomedical research with a local university professor, and an applicant with a national role in a youth movement. Assuming all had the usual good grades/test scores, which one was most qualified? There were no bad choices.

[merc81]

@1NJParent

I don’t think anyone can claim that legacy preference is fair.

I believe Milton Friedman may have debated this in the affirmative (i.e., legacy preference is fair).

[1NJParent]

I don’t know what Milton Friedman may or may not have said, here’s what The Economist said recently about the fairness of legacy preference:

Worse, supposedly progressive universities like Columbia operate affirmative-action schemes for deep-pocketed dullards in the form of “legacy” admissions that shower advantages on the relatives of alumni. One study found that undergraduates at Columbia are more than 100 times more likely to belong to the top 0.1% of families by income than to the poorest 20%. The best way to promote fairness would be to eliminate such a regressive pathway to admission.

In the 1920s Harvard moved to a “holistic” admissions system because its president thought it had too many Jewish students (who excelled on the standardised exam adopted in 1905). A century later, Harvard is being sued over a holistic admissions system that limits the number of Asian-American students, who also do well on tests. Based on that case, the Supreme Court is expected to rule that race-based affirmative action is unconstitutional. A cynical observer might conclude that universities are jettisoning quantitative measures, the lawsuit’s key evidence, to make discrimination harder to detect.

Fixing educational inequality requires more data, not less. Susan Dynarski, an economist at Harvard, makes the case that free, universal testing helps unearth promising young talent from rough backgrounds. Timely reminders about financial aid also help. For decades, elite universities have sought skin-deep diversity to paper over abysmal socioeconomic diversity, a failing that is exacerbated by legacy admissions. If the Supreme Court rules that stratagem out, universities should not devote their energies to maintaining an undesirable status quo, but to crafting something better: a true meritocracy shorn of an unjustifiable, hereditary mediocracy.

American universities are pursuing fairness the wrong way (economist.com)

[roycroftmom]

The meritocracy of which the Economist opines is unlikely to “reflect America” and thus be unacceptable to US schools

[gardenstategal]

It may be less hard to compare students who plan to avail themselves of the same resources at a school, but how does a school that hopes its alums will make a mark on the world determine the relative value of someone who will stay in academia as a mathemetician and one who may go back to an ubderserved community as a leader in education, housing policy, or education? We need all of them.

Schools aren’t choosing between two runners with the same time for the Olympics. So often, when folks talk about meritocracy, they assume that all these personal attributes are quantifiable.

If 2 applicants are great - even two who have similar plans - and the AO decides to give the nod to the legacy based on policy, it doesn’t mean that one was worse! This is like having to decide on whether to vacation in Italy, Spain, or France. You can have a policy that says you will pick based on cost. Or how well you speak the language. Or weather. The two that lose are not worse, but the decision was made by your policy.

[mtmind]

@1NJParent

AOs often claim they can distinguish among their applicants.

Which AO’s claim they can’t distinguish among their applicants? I’ve never seen such a claim. Citations?

@1NJParent

But if they can’t, doesn’t it mean their standards are too low?

If you are talking about academic measures such as grades and test scores, the answer is no. Contrary to popular belief goal of admissions isn’t line students up from best to worst by your preferred measure, whether such ranking is meaningful to the mission of the colleges, or not.

[TonyGrace]

@1NJParent

Worse, supposedly progressive universities like Columbia operate affirmative-action schemes for deep-pocketed dullards in the form of “legacy” admissions that shower advantages on the relatives of alumni. One study found that undergraduates at Columbia are more than 100 times more likely to belong to the top 0.1% of families by income than to the poorest 20%. The best way to promote fairness would be to eliminate such a regressive pathway to admission.

First of all, calling legacy kids dullards is offensive.

Second, the “deep-pockets” in the scale required to get in as a “dullard” is more of a case of a big donor that happens to be legacy. Like the athlete that happens to be legacy, it was not the legacy factor that got them in.

Lastly, by the argument we might as well prevent every upper class kid with educated parents from getting accepted because the issues seems to be not they are legacy but that they are wealthy.

[fiftyfifty1]

@gardenstategal

how does a school that hopes its alums will make a mark on the world determine the relative value of someone who will stay in academia as a mathemetician and one who may go back to an ubderserved community as a leader in education, housing policy, or education?

Did you mean to say “determine the relative value of someone who will go into IB and one who will go into business consulting?”

[TonyGrace]

Actually, as it turns out, according to the Princeton paper piece, legacy is more likely than other groups to do the things @gardenstategal suggested.

[1NJParent]

@TonyGrace

First of all, calling legacy kids dullards is offensive.

That’s the term The Economist chose to use. I’m sure they chose it carefully as they usually do with every word they put down in their pieces.

[TonyGrace]

Just because they used it, it does not make it less offensive or true.

[Mwfan1921]

@fiftyfifty1

Did you mean to say “determine the relative value of someone who will go into IB and one who will go into business consulting?”

So much animosity on this thread. Last I looked a not-insignificant proportion of grads from non-highly rejective schools such as Baruch, Marist, Fordham, Dayton, U Delaware, SMU, TCU, and IU went into banking, investing, and/or consulting jobs too.

[1NJParent]

Perhaps they meant to offend?