> which will punish institutions that flout the law by publishing their names on a California Department of Justice website
Important to note that this is the only enforcement mechanism. You get put on a naughty list.
Will be interesting to see how important that is to the selective universities in the state. I don’t see how being named and shamed on an official government website is much different than the status quo of being named and shamed in a media report on legacy admissions.
> Important to note that this is the only enforcement mechanism. You get put on a naughty list
"In 2019...[Assemblyman Phil] Ting tried to push through a bill banning legacy preferences in California. That effort fell short. But he did succeed with a measure requiring private colleges to report to the Legislature how many students they admit because of ties to alumni or donors."
This time, "an earlier version [of the bill] had proposed that schools face civil penalties for violating the law, but that provision was removed in the State Senate."
This is a battle against powerful people. Wins will be incremental. About the smartest things those opposing this could have done would have been firing up (a) nihilistic elements about how nothing changes and (b) outrage at anything short of an absolute ban with criminal penalties and forced revocation of degrees to legacy graduates or whatever.
Do universities keep admissions data at that granular of a level? I would add a generic “culture fit” component to each candidate score which you could use as a hedge to admit legacies without calling them as such.
> I would add a generic “culture fit” component to each candidate score which you could use as a hedge to admit legacies without calling them as such.
This is not new. This is a battle as old as time.
Want to keep out poor people? Require them to live on campus instead of locally at home. Want to keep out the wrong kind of person? Start requiring college essays to get a "culture fit". Or add "geographic diversity" to get less NYC Jews, or require "well rounded" candidates that do more than pass tests to keep out Asian Americans. Or conduct interviews so you can see their race in-person without asking for it on a form.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_and_higher_educat...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...
> require "well rounded" candidates that do more than pass tests to keep out Asian Americans
While I agree with you that vague assessments like "well roundedness" can and have been use for racial discrimination in the past (both intentionally and unintentionally), it doesn't mean we should throw the baby out with the bathwater and solely use standardized tests or test scores to determine admissions.
There is critical value in assessing these hard to measure qualities for creating a student body. Each student in the university is not simply consuming an educational good in isolation from one another but is also offering their experience and perspective to the community. Having everyone maxed out on test scores at the expense of such diversity would be a travesty to the thing that makes campus life vibrant.
> There is critical value in assessing these hard to measure qualities for creating a student body. Each student in the university is not simply consuming an educational good in isolation from one another but is also offering their experience and perspective to the community.
Yeah and imagine how awful it would be if they got the experience and perspective of asians.
Seriously, the supposed benefits of these things are made up and no-one ever checks whether they're assessing the things they nominally claim to be assessing. The racism isn't some accidental side effect, it's the whole point.
Before wringing our hands too much about antisemitism or anti-Asian prejudice in universities, this is what the demographics of the Ivy League looked like in 2023:
It's not clear what your point is exactly. It's still possible that Asians, despite being overrepresented, receive some sort of penalty in admissions.
For any penalty Asians receive there are other ethnicities that appear to receive a much harsher one.
What's the implication here, that asians should just suck it up because others have it worse?
Which ethnicities would those be, and how does this follow from the data above?
Your skill at crimestop is commendable.
The point of this law is to reward merit and hard work and discourage universities from offering back-doors for wealthy donors and alums. The point of it is to encourage fairness.
Unless you're suggesting that Asians are overrepresented because their parents are part of an elite old-boys network that gives them an unfair advantage, I think you're missing the point here. If you want to suppress the number of Asians in school because their numbers at ivies are out of proportion with their numbers in the broader population, it sounds like you want more legacy-style admissions rules, not fewer. Maybe this is what you're suggesting and I just I'm just misunderstanding you.
I'm not suggesting anything, just adding needed context to the discussion. E.g. if you want to suggest that these institutions are rife with systemic white supremacy, be my guest. Just include in your assertions explanations for why there are, per capita, 8x as many Asians, 11x as many Jews, and 1.4x as many Blacks, as there are non-Jewish Whites, in the Ivies, despite Whites' many privileges.
Edit: Self-selection is at best an incomplete explanation. It fails to explain how, when comparing non-Jewish Whites vs Blacks, Whites' 177-point average SAT-score lead results in a 1.4x admission penalty. Meanwhile Asians' 73-point lead over Whites becomes an 8x admission advantage.
Scoring well on the SAT is an advantage for other groups, but somehow a disadvantage for non-Jewish Whites.
self-selection.
The population that applies to Ivies is completely different from the overall population, and different from the population that gets admitted to Ivies.
If there were no requirements to be admitted to Harvard, any tom dick and harry could send his application - only then you can reasonably conclude that the admitted population should reflect the overall population.
But because there are requirements like SAT GPA etc, there is some filtering happening and population that apply is slightly different.
But the affirmative action zealots require that the admitted population must represent the overall population, despite the fact that incoming applications have completely different distribution IQ/SAT/GPA/race wise.
This leads to discrimination, where White/Asian admits, who are overrepresented among applications with high scores, are clamped at certain threshold and then other races are selected with whatever grades they have
Just to add more context to the provided data. It provides mean nationwide SAT score numbers, and the provided comparison assumes that nationwide scores are reflective of Ivy applicant scores.
Also a per capita comparison assumes that the number of qualified applications follows similar distribution, no? I'm not sure if this is reflected in the provided data.
Also, the overall analysis assumes that per capita distribution is fair but that seems subjective. Even so, two schools skew the data for Black students (75% of Ivies are <1x per capita for Black students) and of course there is no mention of Hispanic students (one of the fastest growing demographics) which is mostly underrepresented on a per capita basis.
And then it doesn't get into international students and if/how they assimilate into a "race". Nor does it reflect stickier topics such as whether Hispanic students culturally assimilate into "White", effectively lessening their numbers under a per capita comparison (it does this for Jewish students).
I appreciate what the data brings to the conversation, but don't believe others' assertions have to take any of it into account considering the number of assumptions one must make to follow a "per capita" AND population SAT = sample SAT comparison.
> It provides mean nationwide SAT score numbers, and the provided comparison assumes that nationwide scores are reflective of Ivy applicant scores.
Does it really assume that? Suppose, for the sake of argument, one group had a nationwide average SAT score of 1500, and all other groups had an average SAT of just 500. Barring any bizarre distributions of those scores, we can infer from only the averages, that the 1500-SAT group would have more individuals that satisfy a university's academic criteria, than the 500-SAT groups. It's far from perfect, but does provide a hint.
> Also, the overall analysis assumes that per capita distribution is fair but that seems subjective.
I must have missed where in those charts a definition of 'fair' is given, and then relied on for further analysis.
> of course there is no mention of Hispanic students
Hispanic students are between Asian and Black on every chart.
> And then it doesn't get into international students
That is correct, international students are entirely excluded, in the sense that all the domestic students in a school are taken to represent 100%. I don't understand how not answering all these additional questions you raise makes the data irrelevant.
Arguments like this lead to universities severely discriminating against jews in the not so distant past.
I haven't made any arguments, I just presented the data.
If you hadn't said "Before wringing our hands too much about antisemitism or anti-Asian prejudice in universities," that might have been true. If you had just said "here is this data", then you would have "just presented the data".
You clearly expressed by that phrasing that you thought that the data in question would at least potentially be a reason to not wring hands about such things, and presented it for that reason.
If implying that data might maybe potentially apply to the conversation is an "argument", then you got me.
Legacies are not well allocated distributions either according to per capita numbers.
They ask on the admission form if you are a legacy, and legacy applicants answer yes because it helps them get in. So that’s very easy to track. Parents who get their kids admitted by donating millions of dollars presumably get a more “white glove” service, and I don’t know if that’s tracked in the same way.
> Parents who get their kids admitted by donating millions of dollars presumably get a more “white glove” service, and I don’t know if that’s tracked in the same way
A lawyer for Students for Fair Admissions "quizzed [Harvard College’s long-serving Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid] on the 'Dean’s Interest List,' a special and confidential list of applicants Harvard compiles every admissions cycle. Though the University closely guards the details, applicants on that list are often related to or of interest to top donors — and court filings show list members benefit from a significantly inflated acceptance rate" [1].
[1] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/10/18/day-three-harv...
if a donor's kid get accepted in exchange for $10 mln donation - that funds 20 scholarships to underrepresented students - is it a good policy or not???
would you rather have no legacy admits and ZERO scholarships whatsoever ?
or would you prefer to have some number of legacies + scholarships and new buildings funded from their donations ???
>if a donor's kid get accepted in exchange for $10 mln donation - that funds 20 scholarships to underrepresented students - is it a good policy or not???
But is that actually happening? Harvard only has around 7k undergraduates. For comparison the UC system has 230k. By all accounts ivy leagues is interested in cultivating an "elite" student body, not to grant as many students access to education as possible.
Zero legacies.
If the university is suppised to produce good students ir shouldnt be that 1 student in 21 is a complete dud. Because that's how it works, they are duds, who cant be kicked out and they will get their diploma even if they cant read.
In theory (not reality) those who finish top universities should be top people.
To tell it other way: would you be happy if 1 car in 21 didn drive? Or 1 apple in 21 was poisonous?
The top universities have long watered down their achivements anyway. Most is just pure nepotism.
You're completely missing the point of private universities. The value proposition isn't in a better education: they offer a marginally, if it all, better education than equivalent tier public schools.
What they offer is connections. Those rich kids whose parents bribed their way in? Extremely valuable connection to make. That's why private universities do the whole "eye-watering ticket price, but most students have some level of merit-based scholarship" setup. Mingling the talented and the well-connected is an extremely valuable proposition for everybody involved. If you're looking for a school made of exclusively meritocratic gifted scholars, that's what elite public schools like Cal are for. But if you want a school that creates the most opportunities for success, private schools are where that's at.
If someone pays $10M for their kid to get into the school, that's not a legacy admission; that's dynamic pricing. Legacy admissions are where the person getting in pays no more than the normal rate of tuition.
everybody pays tuition. legacies also donate heavily.
all these named scholarships and named professor titles - are coming from donations
>>Zero legacies.
state schools and community colleges do exactly that, how is that working for them?
>> If the university is suppised to produce good students ir shouldnt be that 1 student in 21 is a complete dud. Because that's how it works, they are duds, who cant be kicked out and they will get their diploma even if they cant read.
"complete dud" is doing a lot of work here, it is not necessarily true that legacies are dumb. Even if they are dumber than average, it doesn't mean they cannot go and achieve great things later in life.
For example Malia Obama - does she deserve a harvard admission just because her father was president?
or donald trump - he was admitted and graduated from wharton - does he meet criteria of "top people" ?
Can you believe that Jared Kushner's father only had to donate $2.5 million to get his son into Harvard? That's chump change for an institution that rich. They should have asked for more.
To be fair, and I can't believe I am even defending Jared Kushner of all people, but that $2.5M donation was made in 1998. That was a very high donation for the time. The price of tuition and academic donations has absolutely rocketed in the nearly three decades since then (way ahead of general inflation). That's equivalent to at least a $10M donation nowadays.
My question is can donors buy not only admission but also grades? My guess is yes. At that point, why not just buy the degree and save everyone a lot of time?
Edit: I guess, though, that the point of degrees from schools like these is not the degree, but the connections. But I'd guess those could be purchased as well.
> why not just buy the degree and save everyone a lot of time?
If you do business in the Middle East, you begin to notice the kids of the elites all went to weird no-name Western schools. Turns out they want a Western degree, but don’t want to be away from the capital too long. So they find random universities who will give them a degree for, essentially, no-show remote learning classes. Win-win.
What is the point of that? They already have the connections and power. They're not learning anything. What's the point?
The son of the high ranking individual is appointed in a high position in some ministry. Anyone who cries nepotism is quickly reminded that he holds a prestigious western degree, and that is the reason for the appointment.
Pretend prestige. They have the connections and power but not pedigree.
As someone without a college degree in tech, and who has attempted but failed to get a tradition “corporate” job based on skills and track record I can sort of understand. Not the same thing at all, but you’d be amazed (or not?) at how much importance some folks put on having a piece of paper even in casual social settings in some circles. Actual skills need not apply.
> What is the point of that? They already have the connections and power
One could say the same of a billionaire buying their idiot kid an Ivy League education. They're clearly not going to benefit from it. But it looks good and might fool a person here and there.
Many years ago, I was a grad TA at a school that is now top 10 in the US. Based on that experience, I think everyone paying full freight at these schools is buying their grades. It was de facto impossible to fail any student for cheating, or to punish them in any real way.
Too bad too, since the half of undergrads who weren’t cheaters were the nicest, brightest, salt-of-the-earth people.
Grades are almost guaranteed at Harvard Undergrad. A grader who gives out any Bs or less for any properly submitted paper can expect an outraged Professor to make them stop before he has to deal with the backlash which may include a lawyer.
This may vary by department or over time, but I think there's no reason to believe a Harvard Undergrad Alumni you meet ever did any college level work.
What year did you graduate that you developed this opinion? I received many Bs across a variety of departments while doing my BA from '96-2000. Getting As was significantly harder than it had been in highschool because of how much smarter and more hard-working the average student was at Harvard than they had been at the elite private school I had previously been on a scholarship to. The one time I contested a B I got rejected by the head of department in a meeting that took less than 30 seconds; he was so brutal about my result compared to those who got an A I never dared to contest another grade again - the curve they graded against was very strong in my time...
I was roughly the same timeline and didn't go to Harvard (had friends that did), but the grade inflation was already known. It certainly wasn't as pervasive as it is now, but at my school "crying to the professor" was a classic tactic to get grades bumped up.
But this was just before all the RateAProfessor sites got big and when I was still proud of my cum laude GPA. About 5 years later is when I started hearing everyone was getting As at Harvard, so I think it was a sudden shift right after your time and certainly not just a Harvard thing.
> My question is can donors buy not only admission but also grades?
This made me laugh out loud.
There are majors at every university that are easy to graduate from. Often these are aimed precisely at academically unambitious athletes and well-connected mediocre students.
Harvard is no exception.
Getting into elite schools is the hard part. Graduating is not.
> But I'd guess those could be purchased as well.
Maybe? Not really? If you’re already part of that social circle and socio-economic status (SES), you don’t have to buy it. If you’re not already in that that SES, then building elite connections requires quite a bit of cultivation that, imho, is not easy for most college-aged kids to pull off, largely due to ignorance of SES/class distinctions in the US.
I would say that certain majors being easy is a much smaller issue than getting the grades you want in any major.
In the old days Ivy league type schools gave “gentleman C’s”. Harvard rarely fails someone. Grade inflation is highest at Ivy league type schools.
Harvard could use an international airport.
The red line goes right to South Station, from which you can catch the silver line to the airport. The planes departing Logan fly right over Somerville at 60-90 second intervals when the wind is blowing the right direction.
I dare say that an international airport is about the last thing Harvard needs.
Checking a box is not how real power and influence works. Yes, donations are a big one.
But also, those off-the-books social connections are another one (how big/common is this - we'll never know - that's the point). Making sure the college president knows who you are, and that you have 14 other family members who are alums. Oh look, my son is applying now too, just letting you know!
> Do universities keep admissions data at that granular of a level?
In my experience, yes. (It's an outright question on many college applications.) But this law, together with the older one, mandate recording and retaining these data.
> would add a generic “culture fit” component to each candidate score which you could use as a hedge to admit legacies without calling them as such
This is a good way to turn a reporting requirement into criminal conspiracy with intent to defraud the state charges.
Yeah, I don't think so. There's no paper trail. Whether it's in person interviews or not, having a "culture fit" isn't what's in the law. Unless, allowing in legacies is mandated from above and documented, you're gonna have a hard time showing criminal conspiracy. If the form doesn't allow you to put in "legacy" commentary, there will even be "evidence" that it wasn't. If you want to embarrass them, just do it. Spend the capital (political or otherwise) to put it in the media, but pretending it's going to criminal court is kinda out there without some other political motive.
Frankly, there are bigger discrimination problems for qualified applicants than legacy for admissions at the most selective colleges. Certainly, nobody is going to prevent "athletic" ability, "extracurricular" experience, or SAT coaching in admissions.
There is no paper trail so there won’t be many criminal cases…
…but there is no paper trail so they might not be able to “fast track” legacy kids into the university so easily, it’s logistically hard to cheat for so many kids during the many steps of the process without creating a ton of evidence.
I don’t think it will make the problem go away, but I do think it will reduce the number of legacy rich kids getting accepted, simply because the bar is put higher (for parents’ influence).
> having a "culture fit" isn't what's in the law
Sure, alumni interviews may favor legacy, though if alumni start broadly asking about it I could see legislation targeting that being inspired.
> allowing in legacies is mandated from above and documented, you're gonna have a hard time showing criminal conspiracy
OP seemed to suggest creating a dummy variable to stand in for legacy. If that were to happen, and you could find communications basically admitting the purpose of that variable is to evade the law, yes, I could see criminal charges being brought.
More pointedly, you're describing an issue common to anti-discrimination law in general.
Here's a perfect example of a college essay turning legacy into culture fit:
The reasons that I have for wishing to go to Harvard are several. I feel that Harvard can give me a better background and a better liberal education than any other university. I have always wanted to go there, as I have felt that it is not just another college, but is a university with something definite to offer. Then too, I would like to go to the same college as my father. To be a "Harvard man" is an enviable distinction, and one that I sincerely hope I shall attain.
John F. Kennedy's application essay to Harvard, in its entirety (he got accepted, of course).
I thought you were kidding at first, but here it is https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/jfkpp-002-0...
Bonus points for brevity I suppose. And to be fair, Harvard (and all other colleges) was way less competitive back then. 1930s college and 2024 college are worlds apart in every way.
Fascinating example, but poor comparison.
University entrance requirements then were nothing like they are now.
An essay like this would get turbo-rejected today, unless they are on the z-list (and JFK probably would be).
You seem well versed in this.
Has there been a prosecution for academic criminal discrimination or criminal conspiracy to avoid discrimination protection in the last 20 years? I mean there's Title IX, but the Supreme Court has blocked even sex discrimination rules.
https://www.npr.org/2024/08/16/nx-s1-5064627/supreme-court-s...
> Has there been a prosecution for academic criminal discrimination or criminal conspiracy to avoid discrimination protection in the last 20 years?
I don't think anyone has been doing it. Race-based discrimination was, until recently, legal.
No one has been prosecuting it, or none of the 6000 some odd universities/colleges have discriminated in the last 20 years?
I can believe the former, but not the latter. If it's the former, why do you think they would suddenly start prosecuting now for a difficult to prove criminal conspiracy to allow legacy admissions? Political reasons?
Yes, it is far more detailed than I anticipated in the US, and likely compared to other counties.
I have worked on some enrolment and "lead generation" systems and databases in the US college space, including for high-schools and summer students.
The slicing and dicing of the data on the students leading to enrolment was quite detailed, even if the multiple SQL databases were not.
I wonder what fraction of legacy people end up in politics and/or board rooms.
A lot of value for the legacy people is in the connections you make, so I bet it's relatively high.
There are also laws that primarily rely on adversarial lawyer enforcement, even without the possibility of monetary damages from the defendants.
The most famous example of a law that gets enforced this way is the ADA.
> This is a battle against powerful people
Powerful institutions especially.
USC is the primary political powerbroker in Los Angeles (and by extension Southern California, and thus by extension all of California).
They're the largest land developer and one of the larger employers in Los Angeles (city and county), and both Democrat and Republican mayoral candidates make sure not to cross USC's path, and USC has been caught in LA corruption scandals multiple times due to this [0][1][2][3][4]
[0] - https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-09-11/usc-la-m...
[1] - https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-12-19/lapd-chi...
[2] - https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/mark-ridley-thomas-foun...
[3] - https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-usc-george-ty...
[4] - https://documents.latimes.com/los-angeles-memorial-coliseum/
-------
Anecdotally, I and my SO seriously considered doing part-time grad programs at USC (something EngMgmt or CS for me and Medical for my SO) because of the legacy+donor boost (specifically donating to the Athletic Fund, Association Chairman Fund, Widney Society, Parent Teacher Circle, and a couple other donor programs) which could help any kids we might have in the future.
It's not "that" expensive to donate to USC to get the donor boost assuming your kid isn't an idiot - it's just a couple million total over a consistent period (5-15 years depending on when your kid is starting).
Glad to see we probably don't need to worry about that anymore, as I expect penalties for offending private schools to become stringent over the next 30 years, as us Latinos and Asians are underrepresented in legacy admissions but are now the plurality in California but also a swing demographic.
We're much happier spending a similar amount in actual philanthropy instead.
> It's not "that" expensive to donate to USC to get the donor boost assuming your kid isn't an idiot - it's just a couple million total over a consistent period (5-15 years depending on when your kid is starting).
That is a staggering amount of money!
> According to research published by the National Library of Medicine and the Social Security Administration, the lifetime earnings of the average U.S. citizen (over 50 years from age 20 to 69) vary substantially, depending on the various factors we will cover in this article, with an overall average median lifetime earnings of $1,850,000 for men and $1,100,200 for women.
https://www.theknowlesgroup.org/blog/average-american-lifeti...
Are you lost? This is a forum basically exclusively for people working in tech, a disproportionate fraction of whom are tech founders. If you're in this line of work and making anything vaguely resembling median income, you've fucked up terribly.
It seems like you are trying to insult me and I'm not sure why. However, I will address the issue you raised regardless. The typical tech worker makes far less than you seem to believe.
For example, The Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates median pay for tech workers in 2023 was $104K - https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology
> It's not "that" expensive to donate to USC to get the donor boost assuming your kid isn't an idiot - it's just a couple million total over a consistent period (5-15 years depending on when your kid is starting).
Do you think your kid will need a $2m+ boost to get into USC?
Imho, the degree will largely be wasted on a student not smart enough or not motivated enough to get in without that help.
The folks who already run around in moneyed/connected circles have plenty of less rigorous college options that still provide access to social capital, and it’s trivially easy to get into some masters programs at USC if the student is willing to pay and wants the badge (fwiw, this is largely true at HYPS schools as well).
So… is the way for these institutions to “win” by performing a large scale Prisoner’s Dilemma exercise by all admitting at least one legacy student at the next opportunity?
Is it even about shame? Universities are proud of having multiple generations of (wealthy) families attend, and will go out of their way to advertise it.
I see that as legitimate. Especially for lesser known colleges.
The naughty list might actually work if they were required to report a demographic breakdown of the legacy admission as well. It would probably be extremely bad PR to point out 93% of students given a free entry pass were white.
Stanford 2023 incoming class was 23% white, so the change in legacy policy will primarily impact future non-white children of non-white Stanford graduates. This is a win for fairness, not much more.
Sure, but based on when college educated people have their first child on average, the average legacy admitted student in 2024 probably has a parent that graduated in the mid-90s.
I don't when Stanford started being majority non-white, but at least 20 years ago, and probably in the 90s. It was 41% white in 2006. Whenever the date was, it is a benefit that is been accruing to mostly non-White graduates for a long time, and about the time they get to use it, it is gone. It is good for fairness, but don't know that race should even be a part of the winner/loser discussion.
Seems strange the government can enforce such a thing on private organizations.
How would they even determine? Would need to prove that a legacy is clearly underwhelming.
If I ran an organization, I'd probably prefer the ability to accept family members and donors.
> You get put on a naughty list.
I don't see it that way. Sounds more like the state is doing free advertising. "Here is the list of schools Junior, who got a 4.0 in their basket-weaving major in high school, has a shot".
There’s what two schools an applicant can be a legacy to? This isn’t rocket science to begin with.
Does your parent need to graduate to be considered a legacy?
My dad went to 3 different undergraduate colleges each of his 3 years of undergrad, kicked the MCAT's teeth in, and got into med school without having graduated, went to two different med schools. (A long long time ago, probably not possible now.) Apparently the Mayo Clinic didn't mind his crazy academic record, and once he finished his residency at the Mayo, nobody else cared.
Mom went to one college, so maybe I would have been a legacy at 6 different institutions.
Many of the people I know who did grad school went to a different school than their undergrad. So up to four, I'd think. Although, you could really get an AA, a BS, a MS, and a PhD from four separate schools, but getting into a community college doesn't require legacy admissions.
You know everyone who cared already knew that.
1- I’m 40, and childless, so maybe I’m just out of touch, but do high schools do Majors? (Fwiw I’m from the northeastern US)
2- How would that work? Legacy admissions mean your family has a legacy. You can’t just conjure that up because you have a kid who can’t meet academic admissions standards.
3- If you pull a 4.0 in any specialty of academics, no matter how much engineers might sneer at you on their message boards, somewhere a school will admit you because they’re the “forefront of basket weaving in the country”, and I think that’s pretty cool.
> do high schools do Majors? (Fwiw I’m from the northeastern US)
There are specialised high schools [1]. Even my generic public California high school had unofficial "lines," e.g. if you wanted to take certain AP classes in senior year you needed certain prerequisites, and some bunches of classes naturally went together, socially and academically.
[1] https://www.schools.nyc.gov/enrollment/enroll-grade-by-grade...
This is quite different than the lines people were doing at my high school /s.
But seriously, earlier specialization does make sense. American education takes too long to get people into the workforce if you are in liberal arts.
while high schools don't do majors they have several tracks. I didn't have to take any math or science my senior year. there are lots of options for a student to take easy courses for a great gpa
In Italy yes, in the US it's more a la carte.
It’s possible to sue now. That’s my guess. They just wont get a lawsuit from the DA.
For example if I’m a clearly qualified and another person clearly less qualified then me gets in to Stanford but has a father who donated… I can sue for that because the school would be in violation of the law.
The listed name will clearly mark the school as a violator of the law.
What exactly do you sue for? Being poorer isn't a protected class
The university has a limited amount of spots and illegally denied a position you're qualified for and gave it to someone unqualified. The university broke the law and that affected you. Seek damages.
> Will be interesting to see how important that is to the selective universities in the state. I don’t see how being named and shamed on an official government website is much different than the status quo of being named and shamed in a media report on legacy admissions.
That government website will become ammunition for bad press, which will be driven by disgruntled parents (of which there are many). The list itself they don't care about, it'll be the downstream actors who do something with it which will create the problems.
Once those problems start landing, the schools will change their behavior to get off that list (but continue their selective admission shenanigans however possible).
There are plenty of lists of “bad colleges” that are laughable.
They could also stop state backed research funding
Heck, they could stop administrative fees (fees the university gets to itself) on state backed research funding at legacy schools and it would probably be very effective lol
The only private universities in California that are existentially dependent on research funding (unlike, say, LMU, which is basically just an undergrad teaching institution/networking mill) are CalTech, Stanford, and USC, and frankly I don't think anybody's arguing CalTech is doing anything but the most extreme meritocracy in their admissions.
Such a law very well could be challenged on it's constitutionality for how laser focused on USC it would be.
This is a good incremental step though. Once some colleges are on the list, it'll be easier to stir up some populist rancor.
For all the attention maybe there's changes planned.
Yeah that sucks. I'm all for private institutions doing whatever they feel like, but schools like Stanford get a lot of privileges from the state, e.g. they have a charter of incorporation to have their own city. The state could revoke the city charter and revert jurisprudence to the county, for example.
Or it ends up acting like an advert for those universities.
> it ends up acting like an advert for those universities
Because parents and donors are confused about which two elite California schools that observe legacy?
Stan-ford? Is that a car?
If we're talking in Cal. Tech-nically he could own one, it's a big state.
Caltech does not do legacy admissions.
Cal generally refers to UC Berkeley, e.g. the Cal Band [1]. (It was the first UC.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California_March...
And "Technically" usually doesn't have a dash in the middle. The comments above were embedding college names in ways to make them not look like college names. Hence, the "-" to split "technically" emphasize "Tech" immediately after the "Cal" from the previous sentence.
yeah, the legacy option is a big reason to go to Harvard or Stanford instead of MIT or Caltech. the success of your lineage will be automatically secured.
> the success of your lineage will be automatically secured.
At least at Harvard, this is very much incorrect.
The legacy admission rate is 30-something percent iirc. Much higher than the general population, but far from guaranteed or “secured”.
A few other notes:
- just because someone is a legacy and was admitted, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they were admitted because they were a legacy. That percentage is much, much lower.
- I also don’t think that legacies having a higher admission rate is that surprising. There is a certain type of applicant that elite schools prefer. If someone has cracked the code on that type, it’s not that difficult to shape your kid’s environment in such a way that they end up as this type. FWIW, “helicopter mom” type of stuff, while it works sometimes, is definitely not the best way to do this.
- Cal Newport has written two or three books on excelling in high school and how to be a strong applicant to an elite university. They aren’t how-to books (the specifics will change based on context), but he shows healthy ways to be awesome.
- for those looking for a “how-to”, my quick and dirty comments are: send your kid to a good Montessori school, have them do activities like one does in the scouts at a high level (like Eagle Scouts), and play any sport at a competitive level (ideally national or international, but regional is ok for competitive sports). For the last one, there is room to be creative — I met someone whose dad was the national small bore hunting pistol champion several years running. I wonder how competitive the youth division is.
Should university acceptance be meritocratic or not? HN seems to be suffering from dissonance.
Does it matter if you're paying for it?
Look, I'm European and I just cannot see the issue here. I'm all for government providing excellent public education, but if a private university does admission on whatever metric (unless it's discriminating for illegal, such as race, reasons) so be it?
If somebody's shelling millions funding a university, don't see a problem with enrolling his son.
the purpose of Harvard-type monastic institutions and MIT-type land grant engineering schools are /drastically/ different.
the big H isn't even really a school, it's a social mixing program for the future 1%. a way for the sons and daughters of the elite to make friends with the smartest of their generation, to ensure the latter get funding and the former are never unseated.
I didn't see this amount of bellyaching when race-based affirmative action admissions were eviscerated by SCOTUS. Then, HN was almost unanimous in the opinion that it was a good ruling, because academic meritocracy is a good thing.
:-)
I think reframing it as a consumer protection disclosure is fine
Maybe they only way for them to mandate it was to only gain leverage after an action was found, as opposed to forcing them to report the action
>You get put on a naughty list.
Might actually help kids pick where to apply and where not to, in the unintended way. Which institutions are meritocratic at best or "woke captured" at worst, and which are invested in perpetuating a ruling class
I went to a state school, but I understood that the system in the Ivy League is:
The smart kids get to take advantage of the rich kid's money and access, and rich kids get to take advantage of the smart kid's smartness. Depending on your point of view this is symbiotic or parasitic, but either way, it's a big part of why they have legacy admissions.
The problem with this approach is that the private universities still get benefits of federal funding through student aids and research grants. If no federal money was used for the undergraduate students, I would have no problem with this. Private university can do whatever they want with their admission as long as no public money is spent on the admission process and the admitted students.
The funding and grants mostly benefit the students and researchers though.
The bigger problem is their endowments and tax exempt status. The amount of wealth going through top universities is insane, with schools like Stanford and Harvard becoming appendages to giant hedge funds.
I don't care how the money is spent as long as it is their money. But the federal funding is not; it is tax payer's money. Tax money should be allocated based on decision made by the congress, which is the will of the people in the country. but to me it looks like the tax money the private universities get is spent on their terms, not the citizen.
Well, life sucks. Here in Ohio our tax dollars fund vouchers that can be used to pay tuition at religious schools.
To add, a lot of universities will reimburse education/administrative/maintenance fees on top of research contracts, so about 30% of the money they get for research actually doesn’t go towards research. While this is old, there was a 1988 event where a Stanford administrator bought a yacht from research funds.
Why would you want to leverage federal programs that were set aside for certain purposes like research and student assistance to also manipulate college programs?
It is sort of like you want to place colleges on similar to a terrorist list where no funding can reach them unless they get in line with the western world.
The word "manipulate" is dysphemism for "audit" in my opinion. As I commented below, I don't care how the money is spent as long as it is THEIR money. The federal funding is tax payer's money, and it should be spent according to the will of the people in this country. If the tax money was spent to favor your family members because you are an alumni, I am sure other people would have problems with it.
Also, the presence of multigenerational participants in an institution help it to develop unique traditions and culture that improve it in ways that are hard to articulate and measure, which I will artlessly describe as the opposite of the feeling you get from going to the DMV to renew your driver's license.
This is a fun platitude but what does it actually mean? How does this… relationship play out?
Rich kid's tuition and endowments from their families fund the school to a high level allowing them to pay for highly talented individuals and prestigious research. They might not do as well academically, but still get to trade on the name of having gone to the school
Smart kids get in on scholarships and grants and help uphold the prestige of the university name while getting access to the highly talented professors. They are able to take advantage of this access, do well in the school, and have prestigious results in the real world, move on to be involved in that prestigious research, etc.
You also have the elbow rubbing of the moneyed elite with people that might be very well suited to take that money and help grow it to even larger levels.
That's the idea, anyway. Whether or not it's reality, I don't know. I didn't attend an Ivy League (or quasi-Ivy League in Stanford's case) school. They also of course receive significant money from the government via grants as well, so it's not entirely all coming from the pockets of the rich.
> Rich kid's tuition and endowments from their families fund the school to a high level allowing them to pay for highly talented individuals and prestigious research
Are you predicting donations to Stanford and USC will crater to a level that existentially threatens either institution?
I'm predicting nothing. I replied to someone who asked for further clarification on how this theory is supposed to work.
I haven't put enough thought into it to have strong feelings one way or the other - I'm just aware of the argument being made.
God don't threaten me with a good time...
yep it pretty much works this way in practice. can confirm.
It's wild that the shorthand for "good school" is what sports division some schools in/around Massachusetts are in.
> It's wild that the shorthand for "good school" is what sports division some schools in/around Massachusetts are in.
Nice meme, but that really doesn’t do justice to the reality.
- Seven of the schools that became the Ivy League were “colonial colleges” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonial_colleges). William & Mary and Rutgers did not become part of the Ivy League, and Cornell (not a colonial college) did.
- They are all research universities, which makes them distinct from many colleges that seem to have similar origins.
- The schools are all in the northeast corridor, but Massachusetts is definitely on the Eastern side of the Ivy geographic area. Ivies center more around colonial era settlements than the state of Massachusetts.
It's intelligence signal laundering. Take 80% really smart people. Now pay $$$ to throw your rich kid in. Out comes 5 Harvard degrees. Your rich kid looks smart now.
> Your rich kid looks smart now.
A rich kid doesn’t need to look smart. Their family connections will be why they get access to good work, and many/most of them are aware of this.
That’s a great question.
Here is a good example:
A friend of mine from a humble background in Michigan decided he wanted to go to NYC and make it in finance. He eventually did.
After paying his dues in lower-ranked jobs in finance, some of his professional acquaintances were starting a hedge fund, and a key part of their strategy had to do with parts suppliers to Detroit car manufacturers.
They immediately realized that they needed a “local” to be their boots on the ground there. Northeast corridor (NEC) elites may have high social standing in the NEC, but they come across as pompous city slickers outside of the NEC. People were reluctant to share information with them due to lack of trust. My friend was able to develop that trust, so he was basically a go between for the Michigan parts suppliers and the NYC financiers.
That symbiotic/parasitic relationship netted him an 8-figure exit and an early retirement in his 40s, with a comparable bump for his NEC-born partners.
unfortunately for this narrative, there are lots of smart rich people, for obvious reasons
Luckily, one of the greatest movies of the 21st century is about this very dynamic. It's called The Social Network. It has very little to do with the real historical personage of Mark Zuckerberg but it totally captures the toxic parasitic relationship between the upwardly mobile regular rich kids and the aristocracy at an institution like Harvard. It doesn't end well for anybody.
It ended spectacularly well for all of the people who got Facebook equity.
I don't understand, wouldn't the narrative of that move be somewhat of a negative example, or a kind of "exception proves the rule" kind of thing?
Namely, the relationship importantly (to the story) does not go well, and Zuck's redemption is being able to overcome the fraught relationship with his old-money investors.
California does not have any Ivy League universities.
True, but that was not their point, and correcting it does not affect their point.
Stanford was setup by people who came from that tradition.
Stanford?
The Ivy League is a northeastern athletic conference:
California does not have any Ivy League universities.
Why are you downvoted? California does not have any Ivy League universities.
Probably because it misses the point of the argument completely.
That’s the beauty of the system. It’s mutually beneficial.
Is it? It seems like the rich kids are still playing a heads I win tails you lose game with the smart kids.
If those were the only two kinds of people who existed, sure.
Never change, HN.
I think this is problematic, and not in a way that disregards the backdrop of the supreme court ousting diversity admissions at universities. As far as I understand the state doesn't give any money to private universities via funding.
The supreme court was acting in a manner relative to federal funding, because those schools take federal dollars. On the other hand private schools in CA don't receive state funding, its federal dollars they operate off of, like every other university. So any justification would need to come from the federal side afaik. The private unis might have leverage to allow for this.
I'm not sure what I personally think, there may be a little bit of a reason to distinguish this from something like diversity quotas because of a family's history of attending a school seems somewhat reasonable to preserve. But it's still not completely different in principle either.
I get annoyed by legacy admissions as much as the next guy, but this strikes me as problematic. An institutions' membership or selection criteria is pretty fundamental to their right to exist.
Especially when the whole point of a "private" university is their exclusivity. Not only that they will lose their appeal in the first place, this has the potential to really mess up their endowments.
It's an ironic problem because California's public colleges already have an exclusivity problem.
> institutions' membership or selection criteria is pretty fundamental to their right to exist
Private universities enjoy tremendous benefits on account of their public benefits. If they want to have virtual sovereignty in how they admit students, they should be taxed and regulated like any other business.
Not sure if I understand the argument - private universities are still non-profit organizations and wouldn't be subject to business taxes.
If anything, non-profits generally have less responsibility. The Anti-Defamation League should not be forced to admit anti-Semites. You wouldn't expect Planned Parenthood to be forced to admit anti-abortion providers.
> private universities are still non-profit organizations and wouldn't be subject to business taxes
Charities have to disclose quid pro quo contributions in a way universities do not [1]. That's before we get to the favourable land use, permitting and employment protections (see: grad students) universities enjoy, or the student financial aid grants California provides private-university students or research grants and contracts it gives it.
> Anti-Defamation League should not be forced to admit anti-Semites
You're conflating being forced to admit people with certain characteristics with a ban on considering certain characteristics during admission. Very different. The analog would be the ADL not being allowed to ask applicants about their views on anti-Semitism, which is significantly less oppressive than what you suggest.
[1] https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organiz...
The idea that an entity as rich as an ivy league school can gain a tax shield by calling itself non-profit is the problem.
When a "charitable" donation is made in exchange for significant benefits to a family member (a university degree at a top university), then I entirely agree that this should involve losing tax-free benefits. This is the problem with many nonprofits, exchanging large amounts of money with tax benefits for goods and services of great value.
Things like university endowments that give preferential admissions should be subject to at least some tax.
Universities and academia as a whole are far too focused on being machines for acquiring donations and other funding. Not that they don't need a lot of money, but things need to change so that acquiring it is not nearly such a focus.
But you would expect doctors and hospitals to admit pharmaceutical and biomedical sponsorships, and you would expect accounting firms to admit conflicts of interests, and you would expect etc. etc.
Being a non-profit doesn't really have anything to do with whether or not the law can demand transparency.
Seems like the public benefits from the private universities' research too.
legister is claiming this essentially threatens the existence of Stanford in something like it’s current form. Whether that’s true can certainly be debated, but it seems glib to say “if Stanford has to be crushed or radically transformed, so be it; nothing is more important than government-style admission procedures”. I think one needs to actually argue that it won’t be that damaging.
Businesses are taxed because they produce income by distributing dividends to shareholders. If you tax Stanford et al to punish them for legacy (I am categorically against legacy admits, BTW), then you'd have to allow them to declare dividends and distribute to their shareholders. Fair is fair. Truthfully, I doubt Stanford would care.
IANAL, but this is from the linked bill text:
> (2) “Independent institution of higher education” means a nonpublic higher education institution that grants undergraduate degrees, graduate degrees, or both, that is formed as a nonprofit corporation in this state, that is accredited by an agency recognized by the United States Department of Education, and that receives, or benefits from, state-funded student financial assistance or that enrolls students who receive state-funded student financial assistance.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billCompareClient.x...
Seems like an institution is free to be fully private (not take state funded financial aid) and do whatever they want.
For example, Hillsdale College and Grove City College do not accept government financial support so they're not bound by various legal requirements.
That's kind of a weird distinction because my understanding is that the Cal Grants go to the student. The intent of the program is that it goes to the student's choice of qualifying institution. The state is free to rewrite their eligibility requirements however they want.
I'm not sure if the intended outcome here is that Standford stops accepting low income students on financial assistance.
> It's an ironic problem because California's public colleges already have an exclusivity problem.
Can you please go into a little more detail about the irony you see, because as someone who works at a public university, it's not obvious to me.
UC Berkley and UCLA for example have ridiculously low admittance percentages.
These are public universities, but you are still more likely to get into a private university, legacy admissions or not.
That's ... fine. Any California grade with a certain GPA is guaranteed admission into the UC system, which is well-regarded on its own.
I tend to agree. There is a lot that occurs in the private sphere that should be free of governmental influence, even if the consensus is that it would be better for society if they were organized or behaved in a different way.
The students are people who work really hard and those who were born right.
That second group, why are they there?
Let's not let some abstract amorphous principle about some legal fiction prevent us from fixing things.
> The students are people who work really hard and those who were born right.
You forgot the third group: those that got a free pass due to diversity hiring. These didn't need to work hard at all.
That's never how it worked although I'm sure with 5,300 colleges and universities some clickbait media sensationalist found an admissions officer saying something off-color on a hot mic somewhere.
The formula is to find something that happens < 0.01% of the time and scandalize it pretending it's 99.99% of the time. It's tired 1990s style tabloid nonsense repurposed in the public sphere.
Anyways, the Varsity Blues scandal was a real thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varsity_Blues_scandal and stuff like that should be the real focus.
The discovery from the recent supreme court contained an internal Harvard study that concluded the majority of black students would not be admitted if only academic performance was used in admissions. But you and the other supporters of racist admissions can go ahead and keep pretending it's 0.01% of the time.
There we go. That's not what happened as evidenced after Harvard changed their policy, the percentage of black applicants acceptance was within the normal variation. Percentage of total enrollment changed but not the percentage of applicant acceptance. Instead, application numbers went down. (https://nypost.com/2024/03/29/us-news/harvard-applications-d...)
This has been clumsily misreported by looking at incorrect numbers. It's acceptance rate as a percentage of applicants, not as a percentage of the total enrollment.
This entire sensationalist apparatus relies on sloppy reporting, imaginative thinking and fixing the facts around a presumed narrative. It can't withstand scrutiny because it's manufactured for ad revenue and content engagement.
Scandalous tall tales about Harvard letting in unqualified black students through a secret administrative backdoor is one of the ways grifters sell boner pills through podcasts and wordpress sites.
You are deflecting by talking about what happened to admissions after the SC decision. I am talking about Harvard's own internal numbers that they fought to keep hidden, but came out on discovery.
That's not how this works at all. Do you think someone with a 2.5 GPA in high-school and not much else outside that is getting into Harvard because they're hispanic or whatever?
They're sitting on a stack of applicants to the ceiling of 4.2 GPAs and good looking extracurriculars and volunteer work of all backgrounds. Literally all of them meeting the bar to be successful at $PrestigiousUniversity. Affirmative action is choosing how to pick from that stack.
And it turns out that if you use race to choose who to pick from that stack it's a blatant violation of the civil rights act of 1964.
According to the same jurists who gutted that civil rights act.
Not saying it isn't, am saying that nobody is getting a free pass.
But taking a step back, folks aren't really that opposed to "positive discrimination" when forced to actually reveal their preferences. Positive sexism is chivalry. Positive racism is affirmative action. The population most strongly opposed to positive racism are people who want negative racism. It comes off as trying to use the language of "liberals" to perpetuate a status quo of inequality. Like if racists hate viscerally hate something I think it's a pretty strong signal it's having positive outcomes.
I have no idea what you are getting at with that word salad, but Americans are against racist admissions by a 2 to 1 margin. https://www.politico.com/news/2024/01/16/supreme-court-affir...
If private universities are doing actual important research, it's government funded. This is a reasonable condition of funding.
Your other point is valid though: Public universities could set an example and compete more effectively for students who would otherwise go to a private university by increasing capacity.
> If private universities are doing actual important research, it's government funded. This is a reasonable condition of funding.
Sure, but most of that research is done by actual employees, who were (presumably) already hired in line with hiring law.
> Public universities could set an example and compete more effectively for students who would otherwise go to a private university by increasing capacity.
This is certainly already the case. UC's are way bigger than private schools, and already some of the best schools in the nation. Could be even bigger, I guess.
They are still free to choose their membership however they want.
The ‘punishment’ for breaking this law is to be listed on a website, so no one is stopping these schools from doing whatever they want, they will just be on a public list.
> Especially when the whole point of a "private" university is their exclusivity. Not only that they will lose their appeal in the first place, this has the potential to really mess up their endowments.
Tell that to MIT or CMU - both of whom do NOT accept legacy admissions on principle (George Eastman and Andrew Carnegie being self made men).
They're both doing fine.
Every private university takes tons of public cash for research. The most prestigious and exclusive private universities take the greatest amount public research funding. If an institution wants to play the "but we're private!" card, I'd say let them, but only if it means they are not eligible for public research funding.
They’re tax exempt organizations. I don’t think they have a “right to exist” nor to have absolute control of association just like we don’t allow their directors to self deal.
They are allowed to exist because they provide the public a benefit, which is degraded by legacy admissions depriving the deserving members of the general public of those slots.
There are a lot of private universities most nobody cares about. Without looking it up what is your opinion of Drake university? I'm sore most of us the answer is 'who'. (i hadn't heard of them either until I moved nearby. they claim they are great but who knows - not me)
most of us have heard good things about stanford. They won't lose any reputation because that isn't what it is built on. Drake isn't in california but even if they were not being on this list (if they are not I don't know) wouldn't make anyone not go.
> I get annoyed by legacy admissions as much as the next guy, but this strikes me as problematic. An institutions' membership or selection criteria is pretty fundamental to their right to exist.
Eh, it's pretty fundamental to KKK's right to exist! Businesses (e.g., US colleges) have to comply with Title VII of the Civil Rights Acts which curtail what they can set as their selection criteria.
Civil Rights Act only excludes discrimination against protected statuses. Organization legacies are not one of them.
Read up on disparate impact. It could very well be argued that legacy admission is effectively ethnic discrimination.
Title VII has nothing to do with legacy admissions.
Considering "they paid a lot so we let them in" is perfectly valid and legal selection criteria at private schools and universities, I fail to see how legislation like this is going to matter.
It might also be that their family contributed to the success and reputation of the university for a few generations. As small as that contribution might be, there could be merit in it.
There are universities for which that would be a valid argument. They are expensive places to store mediocre children of the wealthy and are deigned for purpose.
More prestigious private universities use a lot of government funding to fund widely cited research which is what makes them prestigious.
In that case why not just tie government funding to admission rule changes, instead of blanket regulate private institutions? Are businesses not allowed to pick their customers in the US?
Not since the Civil Rights Act of 1964
Businesses can still pick their customers, they can't just accept/reject customers based on protected categories (e.g. race, sex).
Government funded research is not, at all, what makes them prestigious. Harvard was prestigious long before the American government even existed.
Are not all universities "they paid a lot so we let them in"? I mean, there are subsidies and scholarships, but by and large it is pay to play.
now... when it is "they paid a lot so we gave them a degree" that is when you have a problem.
> Are not all universities "they paid a lot so we let them in"?
No.
Being able to pay tuition and all the other expenses is necessary but not sufficient to gain admittance.
My preference for admission is a lottery system. Have the school set the bar for admission (which can still contain some qualitative criteria) and then after that, it's a lottery for all that exceed that threshold.
How about this system:
Set the bar for admission as you described. Have two options for admissions for those who meet the bar. You can choose one and only one of the two systems per admissions cycle.
Option 1: Lottery. Every student is entered into a drawing.
Option 2: Auction. The highest bidders get admitted.
The proportion of slots available for auction or lottery is the same as the proportion of students choosing auction vs lottery.
This allows the rich to buy their way into the school while keeping the majority of the slots available for everyone without extreme wealth.
Now I know what you are thinking, "why should the rich get to buy their way in?" To which I reply, why not? We only sell a small percentage of the slots, only to otherwise qualified applicants, and only to the highest bidders (meaning they necessarily overpay per the winners curse).
You're describing the current system. It's a blind auction. It's how private universities in America are funded.
I'd argue that it's not the current system, and also not how the power-brokers who designed the current system want it.
One of the important functions of the current university system is to cherry-pick the smartest, most charismatic, most driven, and most ambitious poor children and give them a seat at the table, indoctrinating them in the ways of the well-to-do and providing them opportunities within polite society. Basically, take anyone who rolled an 18 on one of their D&D attribute scores and make them a lord. By doing this, you decapitate the leadership of any potential revolution. Anyone who has enough charisma, intelligence, ambition to organize the poors into a movement that actually has a chance of success instead has a much easier pathway of going to university, getting a degree and a middle-class job, and enjoying a comfortable existence without the risk of being killed in the revolution. Keep your friends close and your (potential) enemies closer.
Pure lottery admissions doesn't have this property. The biggest threat is that you miss someone talented, who then gets pissed off and overthrows the system. You want to have humans looking over the application packets of everybody, and you want lots of competing admissions departments so that if one of them screws up, that person gets snatched up by another university.
Legacy admissions at private universities are not blind auction.
It's not only money. It's a American way to have a class system.
> Legacy admissions at private universities are not blind auction
Donor admissions. I’ve literally heard Hamptons parents timing pregnancies to not overlap with billionaires’ kids, the theory being a million can buy a seat in an “off” year that would cost far more in an “on.”
That's BS. Billionaires don't have so many kids.
Legacy admissions take 10 to 25 percent of all admissions.
> That's BS. Billionaires don't have so many kids
What are you basing this being BS on?
Harvard takes about 2,000 kids a year. The Dean's or director's list is about 200 of those [1]. If a few more kids come from families giving tens of millions, that will absolutely reduce the odds of a family giving high hundreds of thousands making the cut.
[1] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/10/18/day-three-harv...
The dual option scenario is status quo as a matter of fact.
> The proportion of slots available for auction or lottery is the same as the proportion of students choosing auction vs lottery.
Wow, 99% auction again this year, what a coincidence.
Harvey Mudd College has need-blind admissions so being able to pay tuition and other expenses is in fact, not necessary to gain admittance. They make up the difference through financial aid. Many other highly-selective schools also do need-blind admissions. Even those that don’t may still admit students to whom they will give generous financial aid to make up the difference between what their family can pay and what the school nominally charges.
The counterargument is that the large donations (often $10M or even $100 M and above) that wealthy doners give to help their kids get admitted enables universities to grant generous scholarships to smart but not wealthy students.
When you think of it, I'm sure you admit that there are better ways than lottery.
a) increase the number of people admitted.
b) increase the bar for admissions so that it matches the admissions.
Private Ivy League's are massive hedge funds that artificially limit admissions.
For example, Harvard takes 1200 per year, receives 50,000 applications. Harvard could easily increase the number of admissions to 10 - 15 thousand and tighten admission criteria little bit.
A lottery is too complicated and can lead to bias, just choose based on merits. That not only reinforces the prestige of the college but by using qualitative data the entire way makes it impossible to claim biases were at play.
No, but it used to be. I got into the first state university that I attended that way. When I tried it again some years later at a different state university, it no longer worked that way.
Most of the good universities cover 100% of demonstrated financial need.
The most important thing for a university or a school is it's signalling value for a graduate. If people know that "X graduate" is a mark of a well-educated, smart person, a school will be successful beyond measure. If, however, a school starts to admit anyone who's willing to pay and stop failing people, then the signal will dilute quickly, as will the prestige and applicants, eventually.
Sadly half a million dollars isn't a lot of money any more.
Just make it outright auction. And release the name of student and how much were bid for admission. Seems the fairest route.
The Universities select for total donations yes, but they also select individuals based on the prestige they are likely to bring the University.
Which is also why they previously had their internal diversity mandates. That way their alumni as future leaders can legitimately claim they had a black or brown friend in college.
Maybe I'm naive, but I always thought the purpose of Affirmative Action in private universities was to insure those black and brown people were given the opportunity to become the future leaders.
Eh, I'd go the opposite route. You meet a threshold, you go into a lottery. They can all sit there on selection day where the hopper spits out the names of admitted students one by one.
Most admission should be by that route. Set proper threshold and then do lottery. But outright auction for some fraction of admission would be good subsidy for rest. Set minimum at proper level say at least 2-5x normal unsubsidised tuition cost.
> Considering "they paid a lot so we let them in" is perfectly valid and legal selection criteria at private schools and universities, I fail to see how legislation like this is going to matter
(b)(1) "'Donor preference in admissions' means considering an applicant’s relation to a donor of, or a donation to, the independent institution of higher education as a factor in the admissions process, including asking an applicant to indicate their family’s donor status and including that information among the documents that the independent institution of higher education uses to consider an applicant for admission.
...
(c) Commencing September 1, 2025, an independent institution of higher education shall not provide a legacy preference or donor preference in admissions to an applicant as part of the regular or early action admissions process."
§ 66018.4(b) and (c) of the California Education Code, as amended today
Because that's not what's happening here. They're saying "you had a family member graduate here, so we aren't going to expect the same academic prerequisites for your entry".
That means that a high-achieving student with uneducated parents will get rejected, while a low-performing student with a parent who is an alumni still gets admitted.
This, for an institution that is accredited by the state, that offers credentials that are widely treated as societal merit, represents a profound form of economic discrimination. It also completely destroys any illusion that the college's application process is meritocratic, which is a fundamental assumption of the system at large.
This system in inherently racist, because there are plenty of kids getting admitted because their parents or grandparents are alumni. That means that white kids are getting an easy entry to an elite school because their white parents or grandparents, who were born before the end of segregation, attended and graduated from that school before Black Americans were even allowed to enroll.
With our extremist SCOTUS now stripping Black Americans of the benefit of Affirmative Action, the only measure that actively leveled the playing field, tearing down this discriminatory system is more important than ever. Especially since these elite schools largely require familial elitism and socioeconomic superiority to qualify for admission, leading to the demographics of students at these schools to sway far whiter than the general college-attending population (because Black people are actively being discriminated against because of the nature of their familial history).
I found myself wondering how in the world they'd actually manage this and not be violating the universities' 1st amendment rights, and the answer seems to be:
> Republicans as well as Democrats in the California Legislature voted for Mr. Ting’s latest proposal, which will punish institutions that flout the law by publishing their names on a California Department of Justice website.
and from the latimes report:
> Although the California law makes legacy and donor admissions illegal, it does not specify any punishment for universities that violate it.
Which answers the question but certainly raises some questions of what it means for something to be "illegal" with no actual consequences.
Admittance isn't speech. (There might be an argument for assembly. But we already have precedence in e.g. the Civil Rights Acts that it can be regulated.)
I agree, I should have said 1st amendment rights more generally. I've edited my post to update that - thank you.
It absolutely is assembly.
Also, "businesses" have the right to pick their customers (in compliance with laws like fair housing).
I don't have a strong preference for/against legacy admissions, but I think it makes no sense that saying "we can admit only people of religion X" is ok but its wrong to say "we can admit people preferentially who have a family connection". Same with affirmative action vs race-based admissions.
There are so many sticky issues with the legality and meritocracy of admissions, that targeting a few rich kids seems like the wrong battle.
>I found myself wondering how in the world they'd actually manage this and not be violating the universities' free speech
One of the primary justifications I keep hearing for Affirmative Action is that legacy admissions are predominantly white, so minorities need an extra edge in non-legacy admissions to balance out the race quotas. If we take this to be true and assume that Affirmative Action is off the table then naturally it's necessary to eliminate legacy admissions.
Of course, you're right that there's no real point in enacting laws if they aren't going to punish institutions who violate them.
There's still a non-zero cost for compliance because universities have to report their legacy statistics.
Well, how is legacy admissions free speech and affirmative action “prejudice” and illegal according to the Supreme Court? Neither is based on merit alone.
No I am not arguing for or against affirmative action in college admissions. I am Black and graduated from an HBCU. I haven’t had a reason to think about affirmative action deeply enough to have an informed opinion.
Don't get me wrong: I think legacy admissions should be eliminated. And my understanding is that my university (Carnegie Mellon) has stopped considering legacy status as part of admissions.
But the answer is that legacy is a one-hop removed racial bias instead of a direct one, where the schools engaging in it can claim that it's based on a purely financial incentive and that it applies equally to all of their legacies. It's like money laundering for bias: Finding a proxy metric that happens to correlate extremely well with race but never explicitly mentions it. With the current supreme court, that laundering seems kinda likely to succeed.
You actually have it backwards. Your claim is that legacy admissions bias in favor of the predominant race might be true for a school that had race-blind admittance criteria. In the opposite case, however, legacy admissions bias against people of the predominant race (for the general student).
Since legacy admissions come first, schools which practice affirmative action have a heavy bias against the predominant race (because those slots are all filled by legacy candidate). Which means that if you're of the predominant race, you have next to no chance to be accepted by these universities... (I mean, everyone has next to no chance, but for people of the predominant race, they are discriminated against severely).
In general, though, college admissions are pretty terrible... Having spoken with someone who worked in admissions at one of these universities, if you have a bright kid, you're better off moving to the middle of nowhere to make sure they're the valedictorian, rather than trying to send your kid to a great high school where why might only be salutatorian. Why? For smaller schools they rarely take more than one student from that school in any given year, so when the valedictorian who filled out applications to 10 top schools gets in to all 10? The salutatorian doesn't...
The Supreme Court made race illegal as a requirement for admission.
Disparate Impact
Hence my comment that "With the current supreme court, that laundering seems kinda likely to succeed."
I don't disagree with anything you're arguing from a moral perspective. I'm not a big fan of what's happening at the supreme court these days.
We may get to find out: https://www.npr.org/2023/07/26/1190123323/department-of-educ...
Race is a protected class. Wealth is not. A bank can require a certain amount of money to be deposited in a checking account to qualify for certain cards and benefits. They can't just say "this card is for X race only".
Fine. If it’s not in the public interest. A “private” college shouldn’t be eligible for federal financial aid, tax exempt status, etc just like a bank isn’t. We should tax earnings from their endowments too
"Public interest" isn't an excuse to strip tax exempt status or withhold funding on a whim. The government cannot simply remove the tax exempt status of the NRA or Planned Parenthood because it decides that the organization doesn't serve public interest.
> The government cannot simply remove the tax exempt status of the NRA or Planned Parenthood because it decides that the organization doesn't serve public interest.
The (aggregate) government is the only one who can, as it's the only one who granted the status. The idea that something is ironclad because it's enshrined in law, is a failing to consider history. Laws change.
If you want to argue that it's unlikely, this also depends largely on those who have the money (or power) to fight for the change. I would agree there is not enough public sentiment, despite the wealth inequality implications, for private universities. Planned Parenthood? I think we got awful close.
Either way, it could be done. It is important not to dismiss the possibility.
Stanford alone has an endowment upwards of 30 billion dollars. They absolutely have the resources to fight the change.
There are specific laws about university endowments and how they can be spent. There isn't a single vault full of money called 'The Endowment.' It's thousands and thousands of buckets, each earmarked for specific purposes, usually invested so that the university can function off the investment of the endowment monies, instead of the endowment itself. But even so, many if not most of those buckets cannot legally be spent. Stanford can't reach into 'the endowment' and throw money at a problem.
The NRA also doesn’t get public subsidies from the government in the form of student loans nor is their membership exclusive. Anyone can join the NRA and anyone can walk into planned parenthood
And if you want to compare it to a bank - a bank pays taxes
There's plenty of laws like that. They're a statement about what someone oughtn't do in the hopes that people follow it simply because it's the law. I think it's a good solution to the situations where we want to establish a norm but it's beyond the scope of government to enforce it.
Assuming laws require enforcement is the secular version of "if you're an atheist and don't fear eternal punishment in hell, why are you good?"
Isn't this confounding legality and morality? But I do agree with the idea of trying to establish a norm somehow, since legality is a decent proxy.
The legal system is partly the codification of society's views on what constitutes unethical behaviour. Specifically, things that harm society as a whole.
Making an action against the law expresses a very strong disapproval of that action.
Well, most laws are made on moral principles.
College admissions is really messed up. Both colleges and students are ranked numerically, and the each tries to get the highest scoring counterparts.
This is dehumanizing to students, and makes all colleges look the same.
The advantage of legacy admissions is they aren’t going to the college because it’s the best ranked one. They’re going because they know that college specifically, and want that specific experience.
This obviously doesn’t apply to top tier colleges, but few colleges are top tier.
There are ways around this. Many colleges have “side door” admissions policies for students who clearly are interested in that specific college.
For example, “I want to study nuclear engineering, and your college is the only one in the country that has a live reactor for students to use” gets you fast tracked to Reed.
This is completely legitimate.
Of course a legacy admissions would know the side doors. Nothing wrong with that.
But I think these rules are really intended towards elite colleges, ignoring the fact that few colleges are elite.
> College admissions is really messed up
I actually think that a national entrance exam (ministered by individual colleges or by a region is okay) is a better way for admission. My fundamental assumption is that the simpler a rule is, the harder it is to game. I understand that many people believe that a holistic admission is more fair to minorities or to economically challenged families, but I'd like to question that belief. Holistic admission is so opaque and complex that families with means will have more advantage over those who don't. Remember the Varsity Blues Scandal? That's just one example. How about getting recommendation letters from a congressman? Which families have a higher chance to get them? And all the consideration about sports? The reality is that sports are expensive. A family who can afford private coaches and frequent travel will have a huge advantage over those who can't. In contrast, everyone can afford a good library to get access to world-class study materials.
BTW, the ivy schools introduced holistic admission to reduce the admission rate of Jewish students back in the 1920s, per Malcom Gladwell. Just because a process is institutionalized does not mean that the process is fare or efficient.
The problem with non-holistic assessment is that each college is a very different thing.
Can you imagine West Point admitting students based solely on their SATs? That would be insane.
Many other colleges have similar identities. Some have specific religious identities. Others have unique cultures and curriculums.
It’s totally legitimate for a school to try to find someone who knows and matched the ethos of the school.
For example, one college I know is does not compete with other colleges in athletics, but they offer “athletic-type scholarships” for competitive chess players.
Is that so wrong?
> The problem with non-holistic assessment is that each college is a very different thing
I was actually comparing holistic admission with entrance exams. Individual colleges can certainly have their own entrance exams, just as colleges in Korea/Japan/India do. I'm sure holistic admission has its merits. It's just that I doubt that holistic admission can pick more suitable students than entrance exams more fairly
If you have a single national exam, that all the schools are going to teach is this one exam, an example of horrible overfit. If, however, you have a diverse amount of colleges with different entry exams, then schools will have to teach the knowledge and skills required to pass all the different exams — which is closer to knowledge and skills you want to be taught at schools to begin with.
> you have a diverse amount of colleges with different entry exams,
Yeah, that's what I meant by saying individual colleges ministering their exams. This is also what Japanese/Korean/Indian colleges do. My key point is that holistic admission is full of backdoors and unfairness when compared to entrance exams.
There are functioning reactors at a variety of institutions.
In College Park https://radiation.umd.edu/reactor/
In Cambridge https://nrl.mit.edu/reactor
I haven’t been applying to colleges for some time.
For everyone going on about "but they are private!!!", these universities receive billions of dollars in public funds every year. Stanford alone got $1.8 billion in federal and state grants in 2023, sixth highest among all universities in the country. Yale and Harvard are the 9th and 10th in the list. The "private" designation does not mean they are not supported by our taxes.
Then: tie that funding to rule changes. If you want government funds, do as we say. Why do things the other way around?
If you're talking about research grants, those are awarded based on a extensive, merit-based process, and require them to produce research. These grants have nothing to do with student recruitment. You make it sound like they're receiving government welfare, when what they did was more like winning a competitive contract.
Would you be more comfortable with the government awarding contracts to build bridges to a construction company that hires its civil engineers through family connections, or via a more objective and technical recruitment process?
If you think you can find a company that size that never hires a useless admin assistant out of nepotism, I have a bridge to sell you. Whether the engineers have the proper qualifications is something that it's reasonable to care about. Whether there's any less-than-optimal decisionmaking even in unrelated parts of the company is not.
I'm beginning to question how feasible it is to enforce these non-discrimination laws in university admissions. Yale's first class after SFFA vs. Harvard saw a dip in Asian enrollment, despite ample evidence to suggest that removal of race-based affirmative action would show in an increase in Asian enrollment [1]. Universities had previously insisted that race-based affirmative action was the only way to maintain appreciable amounts of diverse students. Yet after its removal, the only ethnic group that saw a significant decline was Asians.
1. https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2024/09/04/in-first-yale-clas....
There is an administrative "deep state" (for lack of a less-loaded word) at all American institutions: government, corporate, non-profit, etc.
Corporations and governments and other institutions first and foremost serve themselves. Changes in laws and leadership are often helpless against an army of creative legal teams, adverse middle-managers, and just general bureaucratic resistance.
A new CEO, a new president, a new law, a new supreme court ruling -- they'll move the needle a lot if the bureaucracy is motivated to change, but will barely move the needle at all if not.
I once worked for a CEO and he would frequently talk about how it was nearly impossible to change his own company. This wasn't even a large company. He just knew that certain ideas would meet bureaucratic resistance and would be slow walked until they died on the vine -- even if the change was the right one.
It's the same reasons why corporate profits go up during inflation despite the actual cost of production staying flat. This was not the case in every sector, but it was in some. Contrary to popular belief. There are bad actors.
While we like to attribute bad actors motivation to purely money, in reality, people jockey for status in many more ways than money. Money is just an obvious measurement of status for which people will compete. In university admissions departments and non-profits, a different set of rules governs status and people who are status seeking in these environments may act out in different ways.
The reason profits go up during inflation is because inflation increases demand which (given fixed supply) increases the price markets will bear. In a competitive market, firms will generally always price at what the market can bear. Pricing what the market will bear does not make you a bad actor.
This is completely unrelated to affirmative action.
it is related to why asian admissions went down after affirmative action bans. Some people hold grudges / want to take advantage.
Are they status seeking or are they holding grudges? Grudges aren't why companies raised prices during inflation.
> the only ethnic group that saw a significant decline was Asians
Eyeballing the chart, the decline looks indistinguishable from noise. About all we can conclude is no significant effect.
But this isn't just a typical year. This immediately after racial discrimination was banned. Yale had previously insisted that absent race-based affirmative action there'd be an even larger overrepresentation of Asians and reduction in diverse student enrollment. This is what was observed at other universities, like MIT [1].
Instead the group that the Supreme Court had determined was being discriminated against in SFFA vs. Harvard saw a decline when this discrimination was (supposedly) removed.
Imagine a company is taken to court and found to have been discriminating against women. They insist that they've resolved the discrimination, but next year their number of women hired is even lower. That doesn't look suspicious at all?
1. Before racial discrimination was prohibited: https://mitadmissions.org/apply/process/composite-profile/
It’s literally not statistically significant at all. Numbers of students ebb and flow, as does their makeup. Asians are no less represented than they were a few years ago, if you believe that non-affirmative action is “racist” then how do you explain the previous dips when AA was still around?
For the third time, you're ignoring the fact that this the the first year of admissions after racial discrimination was banned. Many other elite institutions saw rises in admissions of Asian applicants. The courts found that race based affirmative action suppressed Asian representation. Attributing the decline to noise and ignoring the fact that this is the first year that anti-asian discrimination was supposedly banned is a very naive analysis.
Again: Imagine a company is taken to court and found to have been discriminating against women. They insist that they've resolved the discrimination, but next year their number of women hired is even lower. That doesn't look suspicious at all?
> It’s literally not statistically significant at all
You have no basis on which to make that claim at all. We cannot infer the variance from this chart.
> We cannot infer the variance from this chart
We can observe similar drops in Asians' share of admission, as well as similar levels, before the race-neutral treatment began. That's enough to, at a glance, dismiss this as evidence of anything per se.
It's really these sorts of charts that we should be looking at:
https://www.thecrimson.com/widget/2018/10/21/sat-by-race-gra...
If at Yale it still looks anything like that, I suspect it is likely race is still implicitly being considered.
These private universities can come with a solution: remove legacy; add a new dimension, let's say X, to evaluate applicants. Hire legacies because they have higher X.
This is how the insurance industry has operated for ages. They can't charge higher rates due to race, so they find ways around it: "credit-based insurance score, geographic location, home ownership, and motor vehicle records" [1]
1: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220310005380/en/NEW...
Some geographical regions have higher rates of accidents and crime, if that region correlates with a larger number of minority inhabitants that is not racial bias. As long as the insurance is measuring rates of claims per geographical areas and not rates of minorities I don’t see a problem with that.
It is quite nefarious of these insurance companies to use measures of insurability for pricing insurance.
Well I think that insurance companies are predatory parasites and that the government should introduce more regulations to prevent them from profiting off of poor people, even if doing so reduces their profit margins.
Good news, California now regulates insurance companies in the way you want, so much so that most of them have now stopped writing insurance in the state.
So you just keep cranking on the policy ratchet until you get the outcome you want. Loophole found? Loophole closed. Humans are tricky, and engineering around them is a never ending process. Certainly, the evidence shows that with sufficient incentives and punitive measures available, compliance is possible.
I don't see that he's saying it's not a reason to do it, but to expect that they will try to get around the rule.
Exactly. I hate this defeatist attitude of "Well a 100% solution to the problem is impossible, so why even try?" So they find a loophole which allows them to continue wrongdoing. Great, resolve that loophole with another law, and repeat. Laws should have frequent patch releases to address zero-day exploits.
The issue is that they are not closing the loophole at all. It is the same loophole every time, and the workaround/update is just a wording change. Just make up some new arbitrary criteria on a whim in an instant, as a response to very slow and costly (state/legislator/activist time)new legislation changes.
A more fundamental broad fix is needed.
I guess what I'm saying is that minor legislation changes shouldn't be slow and costly. There ought to be a way to quickly "patch" exploits that were against the intention of the original law's writers. Lawmakers should be able to see people exploiting a loophole at 9AM, quickly debate over a fix, and roll out the fix closing the loophole by 5PM. It's only currently slow because voters allow it be slow.
That's called administrative law. In the federal govt, Congress enacts a broad mandate as a law, and then individual agencies promulgate additional rules on top of that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_administrative_l...
As a random example, we benefit as a society when ketchup isn't runny. Congress doesn't want to waste time on this, so the FDA is granted a broad mandate to define foods. The FDA uses this mandate to provide a definition of the viscosity that defines ketchup as well as a way to measure said viscosity.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/21/155.194
> The consistency of the finished food is such that its flow is not more than 14 centimeters in 30 seconds at 20 °C when tested in a Bostwick Consistometer
It goes on to define the flow-testing procedure in excruciating detail to prevent loophole abuse.
> Check temperature of mixture and adjust to 20±1 °C. The trough must also be at a temperature close to 20 °C. Adjust end-to-end level of Bostwick Consistometer by means of the spirit level placed in trough of instrument. Side-to-side level may be adjusted by means of the built-in spirit level. Transfer sample to the dry sample chamber of the Bostwick Consistometer. Fill the chamber slightly more than level full, avoiding air bubbles as far as possible. Pass a straight edge across top of chamber starting from the gate end to remove excess product. Release gate of instrument by gradual pressure on lever, holding the instrument down at the same time to prevent its movement as the gate is released. Immediately start the stop watch or interval timer, and after 30 seconds read the maximum distance of flow to the nearest 0.1 centimeter. Clean and dry the instrument and repeat the reading on another portion of sample. Do not wash instrument with hot water if it is to be used immediately for the next determination, as this may result in an increase in temperature of the sample. For highest accuracy, the instrument should be maintained at a temperature of 20±1 °C. If readings vary more than 0.2 centimeter, repeat a third time or until satisfactory agreement is obtained. Report the average of two or more readings, excluding any that appear to be abnormal.
I would recommend opening the federal register and just clicking on random pages. This is what regulators actually create. It's mindnumbingly boring and necessary work that allows you to go to the grocery store, buy a bottle of ketchup, and not have to worry about it slowly being enshittified to save money.
They had a way to quickly “patch” things, the Chevron Deference, and it was found to be unconstitutional.
The fundamental broad fix is to have state universities that are funded to the level where they don't need to charge for tuition.
We had that, then got rid of it because university students doth protest too much (as in, they protested the Vietnam war). Apparently an educated proletariat is "inherently Communist" or something?!
Anyway. The removal of public funding means that public universities had to beg at the trough of private capital. Which means they need to be able to sell them something in order to get that capital; and that something is usually an extreme appeal to vanity. Shit like entire buildings named after a particular investor who thinks they're suddenly a building architect; or letting all their failsons attend purely to save face.
This need for private capital is also why "publish or perish" became the law of academia - with all the scientific scandal and misconduct that comes with it. Keeping a high profile means more research grants and those grants may just lead to patentable inventions that universities can charge royalties on.
And of course let's not forget the endowments - the billion dollar tails wagging the university dog. Because the reason why most universities went along with this systematic defunding was that they got the ability to play capitalist themselves. Every university is effectively a private, for-profit business, even if they aren't run that way.
I'm not sure why you think, if they were fully funded by the public, that they would not also continue to go for private capital in addition to those funds. Anything extra they can juice out of alumni, corporations, and "donors" would be gravy for their endowments, and allow them to gold-plate their administrative salaries. The steeper the line goes up and to the right, the better for them. No organization, private or public, profit or non-profit, turns down money they could potentially get.
Inconvenient fact for lots of commentators here is that at most Ivy Leagues, the legacy students generally have better scores across most stats than the median admit.
> private universities can come with a solution: remove legacy; add a new dimension, let's say X, to evaluate applicants. Hire legacies because they have higher X
You'd have turned a toothless reporting requirement into criminal conspiracy and wilful intent to file false reports.
"disparate impact"
This is a known and solved problem for the most part.
"Culture fit"
How will we identify a legacy admission?
In the past they were identified, at least in admissions records, because they were legal. Now they'll be admitted as a non-legacy student and then what?
Will someone sue the school, obtain the student's application and records, and create a case against their admission? Think of the student dragged over the coals publicly at 18 years old, accused of being too dumb for the school. How will they know which students' admissions to challenge? Who will have standing to challenge their admission - someone who didn't get in? The state?
If you wonder how a school will select legacy admissions, it seems easy: A private conversation with the dean. Also, any admissions officer will be expected to reliably know the landscape and act 'in th best interests of the school'.
It's like how you can't fire somebody for being black, but you can fire them for wearing an ugly shirt. If you can make decisions for arbitrary reasons, getting around specific prohibitions is just an intelligence test: are you so impressed with yourself, or so stupid, that you have to write down your illegal reasoning somewhere? Did you have to brag about it in an email?
The California legislator is just pissed that we the people keep voting "wrong". They've been grumpy ever since we voted down https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_16
Prop 16 wouldn't have touched, and Prop 209 doesn't touch, private universities.
I worked in the deans office of “prestigious university” for a bit. She’d openly admit how surprised she was to hear that there was a certain level of donation that guaranteed acceptance.
They’d also graduate students from other countries (mostly China) that had a kindergarten level of English. At best.
Experiences like that will really shatter illusions.
I’m a first generation graduate of a private California university.
I am quite annoyed my children will lose the advantages I had to work against to get to where I am. I succeeded against the odds of the legacy admissions system only to lose the advantages it would award my family for having done so. Long story short, it seems legacy admissions policies are working against me in every possible way.
That said, I recognize this is long overdue and a positive change on the whole.
This is something that I don't want the government to have any say in.
Make private universities private, don't give the students there any government aid, and let them run however they want.
European here, don't understand one thing: if the universities are private shouldn't it be their business who they admit or not?
I can understand some sort of protection against racial discrimination and such.
But if a big donor wants his son in, what is the issue?
I'm not sure I agree with this, only because it's a private university. Public, no question, ban legacy admissions. But private? Maybe goes a step too far.
Stanford received $1.82 billion in public funding in 2023 for research alone. The "private" in its name is meaningless. Top private universities in the country receive as much or more government support than state schools.
For research. That’s not welfare. Research funding is a merit and application based process with multiple reviewers. This is the same for every university or professor.
What if it is just removing state funding from those schools?
I’m strongly opposed to any legislation that uses elite colleges as the “typical case.”
Your typical private college is a small, liberal arts college nobody outside the state knows exists. It’s struggling financially, but not compromising on academics.
These colleges are great, and a national asset, but it’s not like they’re a golden gateway to wealth and power.
What is the public interest in preventing them from offering legacy admissions?
The typical non-elite college is not particularly selective about admissions so laws like this are irrelevant.
Plus graduates from elite colleges have a disproportionately large impact on society, so all this extra focus isn't completely misplaced. Should these rules only apply if the admissions percentage drops below some arbitrary cutoff?
Colleges are admitting students, not their whole families, so legacy preferences never made sense except as a easy to gatekeep the upper class. Laws like this do serve the public interest, and I don't see why a college should be exempt just because it isn't famous
Tangentially the US immigration system also has "legacy admissions" (called family based immigration)
Not going to the same college as your parents is not in the same league as not being able to live in the same country.
Tangentially the US immigration system also has "legacy admissions" (called Immigrant Investor Program)
As does US citizenship
Yeah Americans should be able to bring their parents to the US, they should be able to bring their kids, their SPOUSE ans sponser their siblings.
In addition a rich person should be able to BUY the GREEN CARD OUTRIGHT at a SET price the investor process is so tiring just set the price and sell it without this investor stuff which wastes time because people what to do other things with the money just set a price that goes straight to the IRS and get the green card mailed.
> just set the price and sell it without this investor stuff
Another idea is not to set an arbitrary fixed price, but to auction green cards off, with a limited annual cap. So the market would decide the price (the highest bidder wins).
CA wants to control who sits on private company's boards and who can be admitted to private school's student bodies. Is there any limitation on what CA can require of a non-public entity in the state?
FTA:
> Schools with legacy preferences have argued that they have not compromised their high standards and that children of alumni who are admitted are highly qualified, or they would not have been accepted.
So then this legislation will result in no changes for them right?
I have a question: how many students per year get legacy status benefits vs how much energy time and money have we spent trying to figure this out?
Is this a significant and continuous problem or is this some vanity project for a couple of politicians?
Im honestly asking is this a significant enough problem and how this solution helps solve our education system challenges?
We really have no idea. There are lots of legacy admits at universities, but also legacy students are often pretty good candidates on their own. At my alma mater for instance, legacy students typically had better stats than the median admit.
So it's hard to say how much removing legacy preference would change admissions.
But at max, it is only affecting a few tens of thousands students per year.
> Those reports showed that the practice was most widespread at Stanford and U.S.C., where, at both schools, about 14 percent of students who were admitted in the fall of 2022 had legacy or donor connections. At Santa Clara University, Mr. Newsom’s alma mater, 13 percent of admissions had such ties.
It's really about jealousy and populist measures
I'm torn on this. At large, I'm rather against legacy admissions. I'm also against regulations that are not necessarily results oriented. To that end, incentives for education facilities should probably be more oriented to testing or positive research?
This is like parents that get upset with kids for having a mess in their rooms. Which, I mean, sure? Seems a bit more appropriate to pay attention to school grades and such, than whether or not the kid is getting to sleep in a spotless room by bedtime every single night.
Granted, if the grades are already hopeless, it can make sense to start with more attainable goals to start. Is that the general idea here?
If I were a rich kid who got accepted into college because my parents paid my way in, I'd be embarrassed. But that's the problem today - the wealthy have no shame.
These laws are necessary because it's self-evident that elites controlling the status quo can't police themselves.
> If I were a rich kid who got accepted into college because my parents paid my way in, I'd be embarrassed. But that's the problem today - the wealthy have no shame.
At face value, entitlement was never burdened by the concept of shame.
>If I were a rich kid who got accepted into college because my parents paid my way in, I'd be embarrassed.
I don't think the stereotype that the "rich kid" who got in was a C student who's absent parents just paid the right people is accurate. A lot of these wealthy students are more than qualified, the schools themselves don't have enough seats. On paper, they are mostly identical students, credentials-wise, and the legacy got in because Dad donated last semester.
At Harvard, there are two styles of pseudo-'legacy' admissions: standard legacy and z-list.
The z-list is very small (on the order of tens of students per year) but matches the stereotype.
The typical non-zlist legacy student is qualified to attend and has test scores well above the admission median. I am not sure they even consider past donation history for these admissions. A more important factor is that they feel that legacies are more likely to attend vs go elsewhere (the 'yield rate'), which lets them lower their admission percentages further.
The blame here mostly goes to schools and system. If you are rich kid, you're still a kid and you see the world they way you were taught to see the world.
In some ways it applies to rest of the community as well not just rich people. For example the whole school district thing in US; where you get to go to a better public school if you can afford to live in better neighborhood.
If this 'ban' doesn't mean they lose their tax exempt status if they flout it, it's not really a ban.
I've always found it puzzling why universities seek information beyond a student's academic performance. It seems odd to me. Imagine if professional sports teams had "legacy admissions" or "affirmative action"...
Because what the most selective universities sell is not just education, which is usually solid but not necessarily top notch. They are selling the exclusively, the promise that the student will mingle with the right kind of folks. They sell intense networking opportunities with upwardly-mobile folks, and with kids from very well-off families.
BTW this is also why such institutions pay so much attention to.extracurricular activities, clubs, sports, traditions of certain elaborate mischiefs, etc. These all are bonding mechanisms that make the alumni networks more tightly knit and thus more valuable to the alumni.
This is a significant reason why they are glad to accept legacy admissions: it helps keep the links between fresh graduates and influential but older alumni, again making the network more valuable.
The academic load helps keep those with weak intelligence and willpower away. It also provides useful knowledge and a formal degree, but it's sort of secondary, technical detail.
I understand that's what they do, I just don't understand why. I imagine that most academics would want to favor academic excellence over providing a networking service for the rich and well-connected, but I'm evidently wrong. I guess my mental model of what drives US university administrators is flawed. By the way, this is mostly a US phenomenon as far as I know.
I suspect that selectivity of MIT and of Yale are not of the same kind.
The Los Angeles Lakers quite literally do have legacy admissions. They drafted LeBron James's son even though he's nowhere close to being an NBA-level talent just so that they could keep LeBron happy.
Let's face it - a lot of universities are pretty much professional sports teams, so professional sports team do have those things...
You haven’t thought about this, have you?
Money. Status.
The parents of legacies are… alumni. Alumni are the same people who are the biggest donors, the biggest cheerleaders (spreading the virtues of the university to people they talk to), and might even participate in the university application process. Frequently alumni will identify high talent kids and encourage them to go to their favored school. The joke that “daddy bought the new building on campus so Johnny can attend, despite low grades” is a trope, but it’s not wrong.
Affirmative action was (1) an effort to apply similar representation to the university to the wider population in the country (2) bring more diversified experience+culture+thought to campus and (3) to try and level the playing field after 200+ years of rejecting people based on things that are irrelevant to academic performance.
You seem to think that life is entirely a contest of merit. In practice, large groups of people almost never value merit over wealth, status, exclusivity.
I can't see any way this holds up in court. What am I missing?
Turning it around, what's the obvious challenge that will be guaranteed to work in court in your opinion?
Freedom of association is in the First Amendment with the other biggies.
If I have a list of people who want to spend $500 to join my weekly poker night club, it’s my Constitutional right to choose whom to let in, assuming I’m not discriminating in a way that has 14th Amendment problems.
You're correct. However, there's no mechanism for enforcement, so no one here will have any standing. It's like the laws making it illegal to desecrate an American flag. unenforceable, but sometimes on the books.
Really need a Constitutional scholar or attorney to chime in, but as far as I understand, you can base admission to a private club on protected characteristics as well. The cases in which you can't are businesses commonly understood to be public access, like restaurants and barber shops and what not that have street fronts. But Augusta National never had to admit women. They caved to public pressure and Master's sponsors withdrawing money, not to the law.
This is, of course, why all boy's schools and all girl's schools can still exist, too. If HBCUs wanted to formally ban white people, I'm sure they'd face some backlash, but I think it would be legal to do that. All-male priesthoods are still normal and common. The Church of Jesus Christ, Latter Day Saints had an all-white priesthood up until 1978 and that was legal, just another case of responding to public pressure.
“You can only get into our club if your great grandparents would legally be allowed to marry a white person before 1967 in Alabama”
This is why the law is fair
It's a private university.
Okay then they aren’t eligible for financial aid or tax exempt status
What you are missing is they didn't actually ban it. It is a name and shame law.
That's it! Thank you!
Found the text: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billCompareClient.x...
research grants and preferential tax status I'm assuming are the carrots/sticks here
pretty much all research grants are federal, so the state has no real leverage there
By enforcing fairness in the process, it perpetuates the con that the process and its result are worthwhile.
Admission by random drawn lot, with a public known fair pseudorandom number generator seeded by the state lotto for public transparency?
They’re not banning legacy admissions, right? They’re banning that criteria from the admissions process. So they’re becoming indifferent to it (in theory). That my skim of it, title is misleading
It's not that big a deal for California schools. Stanford is 14% legacy admits. Harvard and Princeton, though, are about 30% legacy admits.
That's great news. Now do the east coast[1]
[1] My understanding is that legacy admission is more pervasive and takes higher percentage of admissions in the east-coast private colleges.
I'm not a favor of legacy admissions. One of our former presidents was clearly a legacy admission and that didn't work out well for us.
But legacy admissions to private institutions seems...exceptionally legal.
Everything becomes blurry when institutions accept public funding (for research, etc.) as well as accepting tax breaks or exemption status.
I'm of the opinion that we actually require far too little of organizations that accept public money. We should be getting more public-good guarantees to go along with that money. (I'm thinking stuff like: any research done with public funding should have free-to-access results, published under a permissive copyleft-like license.)
better idea: let's ban nepobabies in california politics
those wealthy people weren't taking up spots at elite schools, they were adding value to the spots that others competed for.
it's window dressing that seems easier than dealing with the cheating, plagerism, and reproducability crisis' that have done way more harm than some wealthy kids have to the school reputations. half the point of going to university is to meet those wealthy and connected people and this ban reduces the point and the continuity a university provides.
I don't understand how the government has any legs to stand up to enforce this? Threaten to pull accreditation if they don't comply?
Overreach into private education, but fine.
it's a terrible idea. It will just result in all things being equal, fewer donations from alumni, hurting the very students this thing aims to help.
Let's see them do children of donors next.
What about the merit of my ancestry?
How to keep your populace dumber without a governor saying how to keep your populace even dumber.
I feel "banning" legacy admissions is not a reasonable approach (though it sounds like the penalty for legacy admissions is being put on a list of schools that do legacy admissions, but I'm not sure how that's a penalty? we already know which schools do that?) - these are private institutions.
I think the correct approach is to just say "No institution that has legacy admissions, religious restrictions, etc is eligible for government funding". Government/tax payer funding should not be going to educational institutions that are not equally available to all tax payers.
Absolutely agreed. And I think we'll get there, honestly. This particular bit of legislation feels toothless because it's fighting against some of the most powerful, politically-connected people in California. But we'll slowly chip away at that over time. Maybe it'll take another 20 years, but sometimes progress is slow.
Always thought legacy admissions were kind of off.
Note that they also banned affirmative action admissions, but they don't enforce it.
The entire reason you want your smart kid to go to these schools is so they can become friends with the rich kids from a legacy family. By banning the rich kids from them it makes the entire institution useless.
> entire reason you want your smart kid to go to these schools is so they can become friends with the rich kids from a legacy family. By banning the rich kids from them it makes the entire institution useless.
Yeah, kids and parents with this motivation aren't those we want affiliated with our top universities.
Without networking opportunities, what possible incentive would there be to attend a top university? Especially if you aren't directly performing research, you can gain most or all of the benefits of a top-dollar education these days by reading the necessary literature online.
> Without networking opportunities, what possible incentive would there be to attend a top university?
You're describing someone with zero intellectual curiosity and only a base form of ambition.
The networking matters. But it's not just about meeting legacy families or donors' kids. And broadly speaking, the people who are in a room just to meet the rich people and/or their kids are plainly obvious from a distance. If a kid got into an elite school with that attitude and upbringing, one of the most useful things they might learn is to grow past it.
> you can gain most or all of the benefits of a top-dollar education these days by reading the necessary literature online
No, you cannot replicate being taught by one of the brightest minds in a field by reading their published work.
> You're describing someone with zero intellectual curiosity and only a base form of ambition.
If attending university was merely a means of satisfying your intellectual curiosity, we wouldn't be concerned about legacy admissions. The problem is that a university education is seen as the only viable path to a good life and a good career, and elite universities being one of the few paths to membership in Western society's elite class. So in effect, a lot of young people are pushed into getting a university education so that they can have a good life.
> No, you cannot replicate being taught by one of the brightest minds in a field by reading their published work.
Personal mentorship by one of the brightest minds in a field is indeed difficult to replicate with YouTube videos and online courses.
Undergraduate-level lectures taught by bored TA's? Video lectures are almost certainly a superior alternative -- especially if the student actually has that intellectual curiosity and initiative.
> elite universities being one of the few paths to membership in Western society's elite class
One of the first lessons of the classics is in the danger to a society of empowering only those with the most base ambitions. To the degree we have elite rot in America, it’s largely perpetuated by incredibly-wealthy idiot dynasties.
More pragmatically, look at our current crop of elites. What fraction got there by being proximate to an elite’s kid in college (versus simply becoming conversant with money)?
> Undergraduate-level lectures taught by bored TA's
One, this doesn’t describe most classes at Stanford or USC. Two, I went to a public university. Behind the bored TA is a professor with office hours, research they need help with and internship connections.
Definitely agree that empowering those who's only desire is power is not a desirable outcome. As for the current crop of elites, I get the impression that there is a clear split between business elites and political elites. Wealthy but foolish kids are of only limited benefit in the world of business, but in politics knowing some senator's son opens a lot of doors. (This is not a desirable outcome, of course.)
To the extent that eliminating legacies disrupts this pipeline, great. The world does not need another President Bush.
> To the extent that eliminating legacies disrupts this pipeline, great
This is the root of my thinking on it. The heritability of power should not be materially more than the heritability of IQ.
America is actually really good at circulating elites. You can’t be the most powerful country the world has ever seen for considerable time without it. It’s not practical to expect the circulation to cycle in a generation though. But it will in due time.
I agree that the system has to allow for elite cycling but I probably disagree on the healthy timeframe.
You have it backwards. It’s not for smart kids to find rich people. It’s for rich people to find smart kids.
I'm an extremist on this. No inheritances, no legacy admissions, 0 advantages in life based on lineage. The rest of capitalism is fine. Start a business, become a billionaire, awesome. No more starting on third base, it's just bad game design.
Great so I've been giving to Stanford all for nothing? How is this even legal private schools should be able to admit whomever they want and teach whatever they want. If you don't like it, don't apply.
Legacy is a huge incentive for giving these colleges money which they then use to become a better college. This is a moronic law that I really doubt will ever be enforced, but if it is will result in slow degradation of educational quality over time.
Great, now actually follow through and deliver on the state's promise to do away with affirmative action as well.
You should be admitted due to your brain, not race or legacy.
This is stupid and pointless. I have no idea how this makes up for the disadvantages caused by American chattel slavery, which was the purpose of affirmative action. I don't know why I'm supposed to feel good that some college can't let in the children of people who went to that college, and with that maintain a continuity of culture, traditions and values. I don't even know why colleges were expected to take on the entire burden of atoning for chattel slavery.
Will one more descendant of American slavery go to college because a legacy didn't? I'd bet the opposite now that race-based affirmative action is over; that's the end of a period that resulted in a lot of black legacies.
These politicians are just pretending to work. Setting racial preferences in opposition to family ties (if you take away our "diversity" we'll ruin your family traditions) is not something that black people are asking for (except out of schadenfreude and does nothing for us other than somehow make us the bad guy in a fight between white people.
The enemy of black people isn't racism in university admissions, and our friend isn't racism to enforce diversity. Diversity is a theory about enterprises being more effective if they hire people from different backgrounds, largely and strangely based in capitalist fairy tales about Goldman Sachs hiring Jews and therefore doing better. If the effect is real, colleges that hire according to that theory will be more successful and others will be desperate to catch up. If it's not real, governments will have to write laws to force people to pretend that it is real.
The crime of slavery has nothing to do with that, and the fact that millions of slaves were released with nothing and without compensation is a problem irrespective of whether diversity is a successful strategy to build a business.
Historical note: meritocracy was invented - or first used in large scale - in Imperial China some fifteen centuries ago - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination
About a century ago you could still read American university stories mentioning try-hard "black shoe" students, I suppose by contrast with the spats-wearing and better socially connected ones.
Billionaires fking over the millionaires and middle class yet again. Just like their other worn down cudgels ESG and DEI.
Many states have laws against 'false academic credentials'. It is illegal to claim you're a graduate of X if you never actually graduated for example. This is a fraud claim.
In my opinion, the state should -- retroactively if possible -- require that anyone who was admitted into a university program, public or private, in which legacy plays a role has to note that on any resume. So Joe Schmoe who went to Stanford and got a BS in Comp Sci, will have to write:
Joe Schmoe, BS Comp Sci at Stanford (note: Stanford uses legacy admissions)
on their resume. To not do so would be a crime, because it's fraudulent by the new law requiring legacy admissions to be correctly advertised.
Universities will quickly end legacy admissions. Moreover, the state should probably investigate and be able to label universities as having legacy admissions.
This law would apply to anyone who wants to do a job in california.
This would end legacy admissions overnight, while not violating anyone's freedom. Universities would be free to admit students by legacy and grant degrees. Students would be free to tell employers about the degree they've earned, but california will make sure that the future employer has a full picture of the sort of institution from which they graduated.
>while not violating anyone's freedom
Compelled speech is a bright line violation. There are very few scenarios where it is allowed by American precedent, and a graduate's resume is absolutely not one.
Note that the legacy admission reporting required here is dependent on the universities accepting funding. The government requiring reports in exchange for funding is very different from compelling people at gun point to include information about their university on resumes.
Presenting false academic credentials is a crime already in most states. Yes, you cannot generally portray false credentials. The state does get to decide what form that might have to take. State regulation of advertising is well established, to prevent fraud. Employers are consumers as well.
