<p>Interesting read:
<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/evan-mandery/why-im-skipping-my-harvar_b_5246982.html?utm_hp_ref=tw#">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/evan-mandery/why-im-skipping-my-harvar_b_5246982.html?utm_hp_ref=tw#</a></p>
<p>Love it.</p>
<p>I disagree strongly with “racial diversity”, a euphemism to exclude Asians.
For class diversity, I’m almost in favor of a quota really today.</p>
<p>TLDR - Blah, blah, blah. I scrolled to the bottom, where he might have some good ideas, but was too exhausted to read it. More income inequality BS. Seven of the top ten fortunes in America today are due to one thing - the microprocessor. Those who have mastered it have made unprecedented wealth and made our society all the better for their work. I wish them nothing but the best and thank them for their efforts.</p>
<p><a href=“John Steele Gordon: The Little Miracle Spurring Inequality - WSJ”>http://online.wsj.com/articles/john-steele-gordon-the-little-miracle-spurring-inequality-1401751381</a></p>
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<p>Interesting, as it often seems on CC that URM “preference” is generally blamed for this…at Harvard at least it would appear that legacies are the larger elephant in the room.</p>
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<p>Hmm. </p>
<p>@MrMom62, amen to the income inequality BS. Soon as I got to that part I stopped reading.</p>
<p>It was quite a long read, but he made some interesting points.</p>
<p>income equality is a serious issue, did you not read the article? 1%ers are 20 times as likely as they should be to get into harvard, does that sound fair to you? Whose womb you’re born from shouldn’t affect someone that much. </p>
<p>Life’s not fair. So I have no problem with income inequality and Harvard’s admission standards. And I say this as someone who has no money to burn.</p>
<p>WRT to the 1% being 20 times more likely to get admitted to Harvard…it’s more nuanced than just having the advantages of money. The fact is, whose womb you’re born from does indeed affect your possibilities in life. Intelligence is in part inherited. It makes sense that some people who are financially successful are also very bright, and will produce very bright kids, apart from whatever educational advantages their money buys. It’s uncanny how close my kids’ standardized test scores are to each others’ (20 points apart) and to ours. We don’t remember our exact scores but we do remember what percentile we fell into. My kids also benefitted a lot from being born into our household, but not entirely because of money (they did benefit from being in a good school district). It was more because we value education and both my husband and I are avid readers. We’ve spent a lifetime reading to and with our kids, eating dinner with them every night and discussing books, the NYtimes, NEw Yorker articles. I was an art historian and took them to museums, my husband is a lover of shakespeare and took us to inexpensive plays. These are things that don’t cost a lot of money but do require time & effort. I really think what happens at home from an early age is key & read an article today in the Times about the Academy of pediatricians now recommending that pediatricians must encourage reading at each visit from birth on. It makes sense to me. I’ve noticed that neighbors who are clearly in the 1%, far more wealthy than we’ll ever be (& the husband is a Yale grad), but who aren’t readers (more into sports) and didn’t encourage their kids to read throughout childhood and adolescence, spent a bomb on SAT tutoring for each kid but neither did exceptionally well. They did tell us that their kids just weren’t readers. Despite the huge investment in tutoring, the kids had a ceiling on their scores. No matter how wealthy you are, you can’t buy SAT scores. Tutoring will only elevate them just so much. </p>
<p>Personally, I think he should have gone to the reunion and tried to persuade his fellow alums to listen to him. I suspect that most of the legacies who get in are like my son (multiple 800 SAT scores, top 1% of the class, ECs that make you sit up and pay attention). Don’t worry - he let someone else take his legacy seat since he thought Comp Sci was better at Carnegie Mellon. :)</p>
<p>Mathmom is right. I know a legacy from one of those type schools. STEM kid, MIT/CalTech PhD., Started a company, got a “genius grant” from a foundation. But of course, its all about his parents having attended. </p>
<p>This was posted a while back. Well written, I thought, but… not sentiments I shared. Can’t compare John Jay with Harvard or any selective school, I’m afraid </p>
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<p>Mathmom,</p>
<p>In your son’s case, it’s much more likely he got in on his own merits rather than any association from your status as an alum of H. </p>
<p>Unless one’s parents donate much more than tens or hundreds of dollars a year to one’s alma mater and/or is a well-known well-connected individual(Topflight academic in a field, politician, Hollywood actor, etc), even a child of alum parents are unlikely to get a legacy tip above those of kids with non-alum parents. </p>
<p>If you’re upper-middle class or lower who donate just a few hundred dollars or less, you’re unlikely to be treated differently than children of non-alum parents. </p>
<p>This was communicated to us loud and clear by my HS GC ~20 years ago and confirmed by some relatives/acquaintances who worked as elite private college adcoms. </p>
<p>Article states that the Dean of Admissions personally reads all legacy apps. That’s saying something at a school that gets 30K+ applications.</p>
<p>@RenaissanceMom - great post! So true!</p>
<p>I’ll never forget when I took my then 10 year old son to a house to help me measure it. (So helpful to have someone hold the dumb end of a tape measure!) On the way home he said to me, “Mom, those people didn’t have any books!” It was true. The little girl had * Pat the Bunny* and one other book in her room and there was one cookbook in the kitchen. That was it. OTOH there were TVs in every room. Needless to say our house looked quite different!</p>
<p>I expect more from a Harvard grad myself. The article is a mishmash of contextually irrelevant statistics (like comparing the ratio of wealth of Bill Gates against Carlos Slim to endowment of Harvard against Yale… What?). It’s just a big wall of whining text with no real relevance to Harvard’s 25th year reunion. </p>
<p>I’ll admit, I didn’t read the whole thing, because if I’m going to read an article that long I expect it to have better focus than a 3rd grader’s writing. I cannot fathom how this can be considered “good” writing. </p>
<p>I don’t really understand what the author wants. An egalitarian, predictable student body composition like John Jay? What is the point in that?</p>
<p>Harvard is a fascinating special place because of its complex microcosms and the products of it’s conflicting goals, molded and contorted by American ideals. There is no where else like it. </p>
<p>He doesn’t go to his college reunion to make a point??? The ONLY reason to go to a reunion is to meet up with people you knew and are curious about. They can try to offer all sorts of other stuff but it doesn’t mean anything without reuniting with the people you spent a significant time with.</p>
<p>btw- Harvard is NOT any more unique or any more special than any other college. I don’t find it all interesting, much less fascinating.</p>