> 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.
The question isn't if... it's when. We've already seen how far the left will go and the only reason they aren't jailing those they disagree with is because they can't.
This is the real issue. It's easy to talk big, but once you run up against the Constitution in such an obvious manner, it gets tricky. The NCAA was stripped of a lot of its power in a single disastrous session in front of the Supremes. This issue straddles the Freedom of Association issue in a fashion similar to the NCAA telling student athletes that their names, were, somehow, not they're names??? For Constitutional scholars, arguments like this are just a hard sell.
Not sure what the solution is? But as long as we're going to allow private universities, we're going to run up against the issue of them expressing the rights any other private organization would express. Maybe taxes might be a way to compel cooperation? It's clear however, that traditional legal remedies won't have teeth in the face of the First.
Ever since Woodrow Wilson, there has been a segment of the American ruling class that views the Constitution as nothing more than a pesky antiquated roadblock that gets in the way of doing whatever they want, because they're supposedly more enlightened.
That has to do with race based discrimination. There's a long history of law and case law that race can't be used to discriminate in a commercial setting. This is not race based, nor based on any protected attribute.
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.
> 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.
>What’s next? Cities imposing such restrictions? Should NYC or Austin require people to pass vibe check to ensure that the city life is vibrant?
That's pretty much what HOAs and micro-managerial local ordinances are. The whole point of them is that they make it an expensive hassle and generally crappy to either live in an above your social class. It gets kind of plausibly deniable on a city level when you've got nice neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods and they just differentiate by the degree of enforcement.
Obviously none of this stuff is water tight. It's all a sick game of relative probability. Some low class new money professional sports/entertainment types will retire to some waspy neighborhood in the Hamptons and persist but less of those people will do so than if places like that didn't actively try and be a nuisance to live in for the "wrong type of people". Likewise some guys who have a dozen cars in their yard will persist in their locations as the neighborhood gentrifies around them, much to the annoyance of their neighbors, but most of them will cash out and move out because having your neighbors constantly calling the government to harass you using laws that didn't even exist when you moved in gets real old real quick.
> You can join any private club you want with any composition of well-rounded people. What does that have to with higher education?
I believe that a key component of an effective education is studying the roots of philosophy. Surely you agree that the State should not prevent me from forming a private university that mandates freshmen take a philosophy class.
I also believe that a key component to an effective education is exposure to peers who come from a wide variety of different backgrounds and life experiences. Surely you agree that the State should not prevent me from forming a private university that considers the creation of a diverse student body as one minor factor in admissions.
Realistically, formal higher education is not simply a private matter. It's a part of the complex web of accreditation, government subsidies and entrenched social institutions (not necessarily state institutions).
A university is a public accommodation. You can certainly create a book club among your friends and forbid people of the opposite gender to join or require everyone to be of a different gender, maybe you can even call it a university; but that wouldn't be the same as doing such thing on the level of a large educational facility that e.g. provides the degree of Juris Doctor that allows you to take a bar exam.
So to answer your question, "Surely you agree that the State should not...", I would say "it depends on the particulars".
"Surely you agree that the State should not prevent me from forming a private university that considers the creation of a diverse student body as one minor factor in admissions."
The SCOTUS decision on affirmative action in college admissions has at least restricted race from that consideration.
Private universities aren't. They get loads of research funding, tax breaks, people paying for their education with government backed loans. All American universities are to some extent public.
> 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.
There’s definitely some racism, but intangible qualities can also boost some Asian students who otherwise look like basically everyone else applying to top schools.
Easily quantifiable check boxes don’t verify that someone is an interesting conversationalist. Arguably schools are better served by slightly lower standard and a random pick vs everyone whose parents have been min maxing the process since preschool. Overfitting arbitrary criteria is easy, but not productive.
> intangible qualities can also boost some Asian students who otherwise look like basically everyone else applying to top schools.
In theory maybe. In practice the overwhelming majority of the time it's just used to admit fewer asians.
> Easily quantifiable check boxes don’t verify that someone is an interesting conversationalist.
If we actually cared about whether people were interesting conversationalists in an objective sense (rather than just interesting to the person making the admissions decision - which mostly just comes down to having the same cultural background), we'd figure out a way to test it. These universities never tried, because they never actually cared about interesting conversationalists in the first place, it's always been nothing but a fig leaf.
> Arguably schools are better served by slightly lower standard and a random pick vs everyone whose parents have been min maxing the process since preschool.
Then make it random, if that's the goal - have an actual fair lottery between everyone who meets the standard. But again, it was never about being random.
Language isn’t culturally agnostic. If classes where taught in Malagasy being well read would refer to a different set of books.
> Then make it random, if that's the goal
That’s not the goal, the point is any system that can be gamed will be gamed. You can’t game random, but you can easily have someone else write a kids collage admission essay which becomes more likely the more you weight it and the higher bar you set.
> we'd figure out a way to test it.
In many ways that’s why the SAT is preferred over the ACT. Having a large vocabulary, being able to express yourself, being able to think logically are all reasonable proxies. It also explains why the math section excludes calculus questions as transcripts already show if someone took calculus so they can focus on something else.
The “supposed benefits” of well-roundedness? As GP said, they don’t doubt it is used for discriminatory reasons as well, but are you implying there aren’t benefits to being well-rounded and it is a made up characteristic?
Yes, in my experience "well-rounded" is 100% a made up characteristic that generally means "person like the person doing the assessing". Another reply mentions "interesting conversationalist", which mostly selects for someone having the same cultural background, and is the opposite of "diversity" or whatever this week's excuse for doing this stuff is.
You are making a lot of assumptions here. People don’t find others interesting conversationalists if they have the same background. Maybe if all you focus on is skin color, you may be right, but does somebody in Ukraine have the same background as somebody who grew up in South Florida? Does somebody who grew up in the San Francisco have the same background as somebody who grew up in Marin?
If all you look at is race, you might say yes, but these are very different life experiences. Also, there is such a thing as somebody being so different that it’s not possible for others to relate to them. Likability is not unimportant when it comes to working in a team.
Laptop professionals are remarkably similar wherever in the world you find them these days. London, New York City, San Francisco, Tokyo, Paris, etc. have all been converging on a similar set of tastes, fashions, beliefs, and consuming habits. So it's possible to have great geographic diversity, without introducing much diversity in terms of culture, class, political and religious beliefs, etc.
And conversely great diversity without geographic diversity or racial diversity. Diversity is oversimplified and measured incorrectly from the DEI perspective.
This is quite similar to the strongest argument for legacy admissions, even if the sons and daughters of the wealthy and powerful don't have the best test scores they contribute significantly to the value of going to that institution for other students by virtue of offering them access to those who are going to inherit wealth and power.
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:
As a note of caution: these demographic statistics are somewhat misleading because they use the demographics of the US as a whole, but the correct demographic set is to use for 18 year olds (70 year olds generally aren't applying to college)
When you look at these statistics through this lens you see that white relative underrepresentation is slightly reduced, hispanic significantly increased. broadly speaking, when you look at younger ages the country is a little bit less white and a lot more hispanic.
Perhaps we should investigate the systemic discrimination that is causing lower birth-rates in whites. There are whole academic fields for similar disparate outcomes in other groups, so why not treat this case the same way?
Looking at mean SAT grades is close to irrelevant when your (supposed) strategy is to pick Top-N candidates. If for example every single person got exactly the mean score allotted to them by their race, you'd actually expect that the top 5.9% of universities would all be 100% Asian, the next 57.8% of universities would be purely "White (incl. Jewish)", the next 18.7% of universities purely Hispanic and bottom 12.1% purely Black.
By that math, every single slot in an ivy league school "belongs" to an Asian candidate and even a single white person is already over-representation.
(Didn't separate White from Jewish since they don't have mean scores for just Jewish, possibly they should be first according to the estimate in the text below, but that doesn't really matter for the point made)
> Looking at mean SAT grades is close to irrelevant when your (supposed) strategy is to pick Top-N candidates.
Not if the mean SAT score predicts how many students surpass some academic cutoff used by the universities. It's like predicting who will win a best-out-of-3 100m dash, when all you have are the runners' mean 100m times.
I find it baffling how people become incapable of the simplest inferences, and capable of the smallest nitpicks, when they don't like where the data leads.
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.
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.
> 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.
There’s no need to construct a hypothetical when there is actual data to dissect. For example, in the cited links, the 25th percentile SAT score for Harvard students is ~200 points greater than the highest mean nationwide score. The middle 50% of all students (25th-75th) range is ~100. And on 7 out of 10 students admitted included SAT scores in their application. So one would have to make additional assumptions (I’m not sure what they are) to claim one’s groups scores lead to penalty and another’s leads to advantage. It could be true, but I don’t see it as a fact, hence my original position that other assertions don’t necessarily need to meet some bar.
A lot of the nonsense comes from the bonkers categories. Hispanic origin is sort of like being Jewish from a statistical perspective - it’s a layer, not a state.
We’re also decades after civil rights. People don’t fit in these boxes.
My nephews dad is Irish, mom is black Puerto Rican. Racists would consider him black, his name is Irish, mom is of African and Spanish origin. They don’t speak Spanish at home or really have a deep connection to Hispanic culture. Wtf is he for the college demographic survey?
Likewise for my Filipino friends… are they Asian? Pacific Islander? This particular family speaks English, Tagalog and Spanish at home. Culturally they are very much into traditional Filipino traditions, but their Catholicism practice is close to Spanish style.
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.
You didn't imply it might potentially maybe apply. You definitely, clearly, stated it not only applies but what the "correct" conclusion to come to was.
A policy that would exclude all Jews would potentially affect some 8 million Americans, same as a policy that lowers White participation by 3%. Which would be worse, and why?
I think the GP argument is that you can't argue going all on merit for Jews while demanding that Blacks and Whites are somehow equally represented.
> 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.
The point of donor child admissions, as I understand it, is to bring in additional money. Which could potentially enable more low-income students to attend.
The reason why some universities have ended legacy admissions recently seems to be that they have concluded that it doesn't bring in enough money. But they usually still have donor admissions.
We're stuck with a math problem. If you admit purely based on test scores then black and latino applicants would be significantly underrepresented and non-Jewish white applicants would be slightly underrepresented. If you address these problems by insisting on a full balancing then you're going to have to reduce Asian and Jewish admittance. But increasing black and latino admittance at the expense of non-Jewish white admittance when the latter group was already underrepresented is not only the same kind of quota system but not even satisfying the goal of proportionate representation -- and that's the one that seems to be happening. So what do you want to do?
Arguably, the problem of underrepresentation became already unsustainable during Affirmative Action by the classification of African immigrants as black. Because the latter displace African-Americans who do worse in test scores than Africans.
Addressing the underlying barriers preventing blacks/latinos from getting into elite universities, rather than trying to fix the symptoms by instituting illiberal policies like reverse discrimination.
Then you need people to stop getting mad at universities when admission based on test scores causes those groups to be underrepresented. They're not the ones who can fix the test scores and nothing is going to fix them before the next round of applications.
break us colleges into tiers based on academic rigor. assuming you met XXXX standardized test score you are automatically sorted into one of the appropriate schools at random on your 18th birthday.
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].
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.
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.
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.
> [it] 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.
I suspect if we looked at the overall set of students who were admitted to elite universities while their parents have given a $10M donation, that we'd find that that set of students was academically well above-average as compared to the overall population, probably above-average as compared to all students attending all four-year universities, even though they might be below the average of the overall admitted students to that elite university.
That doesn't make them anything close to "complete duds".
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.
Why would I go through all of the bullshit to get my kid into Harvard, if they don’t get to rub elbows with some Rockefeller heir? Do you think anyone wants to have Johnny learn the viola and sign up for 38 activities?
People with the cash to bribe their way into Harvard, who know smart people, are “top people”.
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.
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.
It's the same impulse that led Romania's former dictator's wife to amass fake diplomas as a world-class chemist, from both Romanian and European universities (including being admitted as a fellow in the UK's Royal Institute of Chemistry), despite only having four years' worth of actual education when she was 10, and already being the most powerful woman in the country.
It is a form of pride and pretend superiority, false legitimacy and so on.
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
Can you point to the requirement? I see that it says you can’t discriminate and enforcement mechanisms to document that discrimination isn’t happening.
I’m really not sure what you’re asking. You can paste the executive order #’s into google. You can search for affirmative action lawsuits on google, they are all related.
Depending on how much someone wants to politically punish someone depends on how much they are required to provide documentation and what kind of lawsuits they get into with the DOL. Here is one with Google [https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/ofccp/ofccp20210201], which requires they comply with DOL data gathering requirements and affirmative action requirements ‘or else’. Here is a document from the Clinton whitehouse calling out similar [https://clintonwhitehouse3.archives.gov/WH/EOP/OP/html/aa/aa...].
Schools often get impacted by department of education, NIH, and DOE grants. Sometimes by various state level programs, all of which transitively include similar language. I am not directly in academia so I don’t have links as handy, but the professors I know have all made clear references to the same thing going on.
The tricky part here is that in any given zero sum system (aka there are a fixed number of student slots, or open job positions, or affordable housing openings), you can’t ‘positively’ discriminate (aka affirmative action) on race (or any other concrete criteria) without ‘negatively’ discriminating on the same criteria to someone else. It’s a basic control system thing. It’s literally impossible for it to not happen, as even a basic whiteboard session will show.
Which has been impacting East Asians, Caucasians, and often Jews pretty heavily for awhile. This is nothing new, really. Harvard has been trying to limit Jews in its membership in particular since at least the 1920’s if I remember correctly.
But since discrimination (negative) based on race/ethnicity is clearly illegal, but discrimination (positive) based on race/ethnicity is (or was) required, everyone involved except the gov’t is screwed from a documentation perspective as they’ll be documenting criminal activity in order to not be performing criminal activity.
So the next time the political winds change, they’ll have clearly documented malfeasance (looking from the other side of the equation) which can be used by the other side of the equation to screw them over even harder.
This is why the old US stance of ‘don’t be racist, being racist is illegal, and we don’t see race’ was a thing. It minimized the balkanization/tit for tat problem, while allowing punishing obviously obnoxious behavior. Similar to ‘don’t talk about politics/sex/religion at work’.
But, racism still exists of course (it’s a basic human behavior/in group-out group thing and literally no group is immune), and it was far from perfect as it also discouraged discussing a lot of problems - many of which got larger under it. But it’s not like getting them out in the open necessarily solves them either.
Or that there even is a ‘solution’, just different types of problems to pick.
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?
I've heard that places like MIT quietly tell their alumni that their children have a better chance because "they know what they're getting into." And this may be true. But it's a way for them to have their cake and eat it too. They loudly proclaim they don't allow legacies. Then they quietly give them a boost on "cultural fit."
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]
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.
To be fair, good private schools ($60k/yr ) and their associated activities easily add up to a million over 12 years. It's a lot of money, but not unheard of, even among upper middle class families.
At the same time. If you invest 2 million in an index fund when they're 10, then it'll be ~$40 million by the time the kid is 40 yr old. So, donating it to USC might be a pretty bad investment unless 2 million is a genuinely small amount for OP.
I don’t know if a single k-12 private school that has tuition anywhere near that in the South Bay Area, except Harker for the upper grades only. Presentation, Bellermine, etc. are all half that.
The truly elite private schools in the Bay (Castilleja, Harker, Athenian, Stuart/Convent Hall, Town, Hamlin, Menlo, College Prep, Head-Royce) cost around $60k-90k/yr per student.
> you live in a different world than most of us
Probably.
Benefits of a dual income household with both earners making mid-6 figs base and fairly hefty bonuses (and equity), and both of us reached this point by our mid-20s.
This is a very common household structure in the Bay Area.
Your neighbor might be HNW or UHNW and you wouldn't even know it.
> So, donating it to USC might be a pretty bad investment
It is.
Before AB1780 it something we heavily considered only because we're Asian American and Asian American admissions at top private like Yale and Harvard have fallen after the Supreme Court's AA ruling, while legacy admissions skyrocketed.
Now that AB1780 exists, and will most likely have teeth in the next 30 years, there's no reason to partake in that zero sum game anymore.
> 2 million is a genuinely small amount for OP.
It comes out to top Bay Area private school tuition for 2 kids over a 16-20 year timeline.
apologize for the tangent but my cousin and her husband (both asian american, both harvard alumni) chose to move back to our hometown in Seattle so they could send their kids to lakeside, the same school bill gates went to.
i assume to increase their chances of getting into harvard. back of the envelope math works out to be $715k for their 5-12 education which may be more bang for your buck but also the college entrance strategy is not so much based on donor contribution and more on target school selection.
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.
BLS didn't normalize the above data to show the Bay Area where it's fairly common to break $400-500k TC by your late 20s/early
30s.
Furthermore, at least in the Bay Area Asian American community, both spouses are working these roles (or adjacent high paying roles like Medicine, Dentistry, High Finance, etc).
> 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).
> Do you think your kid will need a $2m+ boost to get into USC
Before AB1780 - yes. We're Asian American, and Asian American admissions at top privates has declined after the Supreme Court's AA ruling at the expense of legacies.
> Imho, the degree will largely be wasted on a student not smart enough or not motivated enough to get in without that help
Not necessarily. It's easier to make a case for a nepo hire/referral if your kid has a "Good" degree.
If you dig closely in intern and new grad hiring across early career tech roles, I'd say a solid minority (20-25%) were landed due to parents leveraging their professional networks.
With a "Good" degree it makes it easier.
Unethical - yes. But such is life
------------
All of this is moot now with AB1780 and the eventual addition of teeth to it in the next 30 years.
I think legacy admissions will eventually get banned in CA due to the political implications now that us Asians and Latinos are the plurality in California, but severely underrepresented in legacy admissions.
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.
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?
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".
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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. An earlier version had proposed that schools face civil penalties for violating the law, but that provision was removed in the State Senate.
The law already states the penalty for breaking the law. How are you gonna get anything extra?
> 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).
It will only matter to alumni donors. Friends of mine both graduated from the same institution. Their plan with donations was to use their corporate 3x match plus their own wealth to set their daughters up with admission locks.
Considering that they already publish how many legacy students each university takes each year, this law doesn't really do anything new other that stronger wording.
It's a good start. It's paving the road for penalties at a later day.
I guarantee you penalties will be added within the next 20-30 years because of the political aspect in California.
Us Asians and Latinos are the plurality now and underrepresented in legacy admissions - and it's a single voter issue that could flip entire demographics to vote for a candidate.
Newsome really seems to be trying to stay in the headlines these days. Seems like a new law notable enough for headlines signed every day the past week or so.
I could see this working for the majority of people who donate money but not millions. If you donate millions your kid will get in, they will find a way.
You’d think that but no. IITs in India would be filled with rich kids, India is a fairly corrupt place after all. But with education if you fully standardize all admissions and are strict about identity then you really can clamp down on it.
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.
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.
> 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.
Lower, but I don't know about "much, much".
The baseline acceptance rate is below 4%. Legacy applicants are probably better on average, but the gap between 4% and 30% is enormous.
The rate of applying is low enough that the baseline acceptance rate doesn't tell you anything. With acceptance rates of 4% and 30%, Harvard could be admitting legacies by a lower standard, or a higher standard, or exactly the same standard. If you don't know what the pools are like, you have no way to tell.
Note that if (1) your goal is to admit everyone above a certain quality threshold, and (2) you aren't able to measure quality with perfect accuracy, then the correct thing to do is to hold legacies to a lower standard. Because they have better parents, they regress to a higher mean than random applicants do.
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.
> the purpose of Harvard-type monastic institutions and MIT-type land grant engineering schools are /drastically/ different.
And the purpose of employment is 'hiring whomever the boss thinks will make the most money for him', without even pretending to provide a public good, yet the same suspects are hand-wringing about how workplaces should be meritocratic.
Likewise, when AA-admissions were killed, those people were also all for meritocracy.
Mayhaps the demand for meritocracy is just a fig leaf. It's never been about fairness, it's about preserving access to power.
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.
FWIW, the state is also (indirectly ) paying for this change. Private universities can exempt themselves from this law by not accepting state dollars, but I don't think donors can fill the resulting hole.
> If somebody's shelling millions funding a university, don't see a problem with enrolling his son.
The state shells more. A lot more, and is leveraging that so that mere-multi-million-dollar-donors-offspring don't get an advantage over non-donors (eventually. The lawmaker is cleverly taking a tick-tock ratcheting approach where each law builds on top of the last)
Why? Are these universities facing challenges with funding their humongous endowments? Or is so that every generation of peasants pays the social debt they owe to their betters?
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.
- Our tax dollars fund government-run schools that cost an $26k per student per year. Fewer than half the students at those schools meet or exceed grade standards for Math and English.
- Parents who choose to send their children to non-government-run schools get no vouchers: we pay taxes to fund government employees, and then use what's left to pay for the schools our children need.
I'm not from San Francisco, I don't have a horse in this race, I was just looking over the link that you posted and it doesn't seem to support what you're saying at all
- The link you posted doesn't talk about public schools at all, only private school tuition.
- This 2024 census.gov report[1] says that San Francisco public schools cost $23,654 per student
- According to graph on the link that you posted only 12% of private schools in San Francisco charge < $25000 annual tuition
- According to the article from the link you posted religious schools make up 48% of private schools in California, so mathematically, at least 3/4 religious schools charge more in annual tuition than a year of public school costs (according to census.gov)
- According to the article from the link you posted, religious schools offer special lower rates for families who belong to the parish, meaning the "cost per student" is even higher than tuition
> The link you posted doesn't talk about public schools at all, only private school tuition.
Yes, that was to show the cost of religious schools which is the type GP was talking about. I did not provide a source for the $26k cost of public schools.
> According to graph on the link that you posted only 12%
> of private schools in San Francisco charge < $25000
> annual tuition
Yes, the charts on the bottom half of that graph show tuition for parochial (religious) schools, which was GP's topic. Ignore the top half (non-religious) as it's not relevant to this discussion.
The median sticker price for parochial schools in San Francisco is:
Grades K-12: $10.9k
Grade 3: $10.4k
Grade 8: $10.9k
Grade 12: $27.0k
All of the above are calculated by weighting each school equally, as I don't have access to per-school per-grade student counts. Feel free to recalculate these. They're based solely on the data the SF Chronicle intern collected.
> This 2024 census.gov report[1] says that San Francisco
> public schools cost $23,654 per student
Well, that 2024 report is based on old data from 2022. That's two years old! Let's look at more recent data.
That's $27k per student per year, which is more than it was the last time I looked!
> According to the article from the link you posted,
> religious schools offer special lower rates for families
> who belong to the parish, meaning the "cost per student"
> is even higher than tuition
I don't have extensive data to back this up, but from anecdotes I've heard it's swings and roundabouts. Some families pay more than sticker price, and others pay less.
Yeah you're right, sorry for making you write that all out, I should have stopped after "I'm not from San Francisco and don't have a horse in this race"
No worries. You took the time to think and dig a little, so I don't mind being more specific. Anyway, whatever questions/doubts you had/have, I'm sure you aren't/weren't alone :)
Are those other schools half the cost because they exclude anyone with disabilities or poor upbringings and just cream off the easy students?
If so then you are enthusiastically cheering for kids to be thrown on the scrapheap to save you a few bucks. And using religion as a cover for it, which only makes it worse.
No. They're half the cost because they don't spend half their money paying for a central bureaucracy. They spend almost all their money on buildings and teachers.
1). You can lead a horse to books, but you cant make it think.
2). This statistic is meaningless unless without data about the inputs and outputs. I assume that that student populations are vastly different.
3). That's your choice. In Ohio, I get to fund religious education, which I am vehemently opposed to doing.
Have you considered that, perhaps if you and like-minded parents didn't remove their students from the public education system, perhaps the test scores would be higher?
Have you considered that, perhaps if you and like-minded parents didn't remove their students from the public education system, perhaps the test scores would be higher?
I didn't 'remove' my child from the public education system.
Government schools in my area are not an attractive option. I spoke with the principal of one of the top 3 most popular elementary government schools (measured by ratio of applicants to kindergarten spots). She made it clear that, if my son were to attend that school:
- my son would never be allowed to skip a grade
- under no circumstances would a teacher in grade X teach material normally covered in grade X+1
My son is in 3rd grade, doing math with the 4th grade class, and studying 5th grade math at home.
If he were at a government-run school, he would be in 2nd grade, and spend math lessons at school covering material he mastered 2 years ago.
In Ohio, I get to fund religious education, which I am vehemently opposed to doing.
In San Francisco, I get to fund an inefficient bureaucracy set up to benefit adult employees, which I am vehemently opposed to doing.
SFUSD has 1 adult employee for every 3.5 students. A minority of those adults are classroom teachers. Average class sizes are not 3.5, or 7, or even 14.
Meanwhile I bet those schools are exempt from standardized tests because they know the students (most) would flunk them. That’s the way it works here in Texas, there is no oversight or feedback that home schooled or private school kids actually meet any kind of standards at all. Now the governor wants the same type of vouchers and he was -heavily- “inspired” by money from charter school/religious school owning billionaires.
The feedback is provided by the market mechanism. Private schools and charter schools that don't do a good job would fail to retain and attract students, and shut down.
For government-run schools, most of the students have little or no choice. Standardized tests (like SBAC) show poor results in California (most kids fail to meet grade level standards in the test), but parents have little ability to change how school districts are run.
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.
If you want colleges to behave in a certain manner, the word manipulate is correct.
Federal funding goes to institutions that uphold the federal Govt, not those that oppose it. The federal govt works in the interest of what its representatives seek. Those representatives are enforced by a variety of constituents including corporations, NGOs, non profits, and individuals.
You believe that taxpayers should say where the money goes. In such cases, it only goes back into the taxpayers pockets.
I am not sure where the line lies. If you fund a program that is not run by the government, say 100 billion dollars, should the government not "manipulate" how the program runs? I believe there should be some sort of accountability. To my knowledge the government spends over 7 billion dollars on Pell grants, and if the government has little to no say in whom it should be awarded to, it makes no sense to me. If the University decides to accept less qualified students through legacy admission and give the money to them, it should be challenged I believe.
add: come to think of it, I guess private university can just not accept financial aids from the government and keep their own admission policy if they have enough money to subsidize students who need financial aids. Whether you like it or not, federal money comes with (or should come with) strings attached (or manipulation in your words)
On average I guess alumni contribute more through donation than they receive through the financial aids. I don't know the numbers on this topic, so please pardon my ignorance.
Every time federal loan guarantees and grants increase, so do higher education prices. Drastically cutting back on those loan guarantees and grants should lead to a drastic cut to higher education costs.
> Private university can do whatever they want with their admission as long as no public money...
We must distinguish "student loan guarantees" (or vouchers) from direct funding, otherwise there will never be such a thing as a "private school", only public schools masquerading as private.
I would very much like to get rid of federal funding for schools, and allow private student loan with the possibility of purging the borrowed money through bankruptcy procedures. I am not sure if such proposal is realistic.
Solution, don't lend money. Sell education in exchange for a promise to pay x% of salary for y years. Students won't go unemployed just to avoid paying it back and it aligns incentives. If colleges want to make lots of money, they will have to make sure their students get good jobs upon graduation.
Yep. It's a cliche that the token scholarship students are paid to do the homework of and take the tests for the rich kids.
Large public research universities (in STEM) skew to far more rigorous than Ivies because they're always clamoring for prestige and ranking because of their inherent insecurities about not being said Ivy. Little/no grade inflation and less homework and test trafficking. TLDR: Generally, people who put in the work and get things done went to state schools; while people who earn MBAs and found companies like Theranos and FTX go to big name private schools.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
They don’t need to be stunningly smart, but they need to look and sound competent enough to be put in charge. The entire system runs on plausible deniability where people can say it’s not nepotism just convincingly enough to avoid scrutiny.
Well, if the majority of Harvard graduates entered the workforce with little to no education, showing up to work hours late and coked out everyday doing diddly-squat, maybe at first nothing would change, but over time all those companies would be overtaken by those run by state school kids, and companies would no longer trust Ivy graduates as good hires.
Investment Banking and Business are about relationships and trust first, then competence. They are dealing with rich clients from the same background, something they've effectively spent their entire life preparing for. I assure you, any SWE could easily digest finance topics, but there is reason they're in SWE and not IB.
> Well, if the majority of Harvard graduates entered the workforce with little to no education
Check.
The actual classroom education at Harvard isn’t that good, imho. There are some signature classes that are definitely amazing, the access to resources for self-directed learning are incredible, and the competition and collaboration with one’s peers can push people to perform at new highs, but the base classroom instruction is generally not very good.
> showing up to work hours late
Maybe
> and coked out everyday
Stereotype, but maybe.
> doing diddly-squat
This can happen with anyone anywhere, imho. That said, what you consider “diddly-squat” may have more value than you think. See below.
> maybe at first nothing would change, but over time all those companies would be overtaken by those run by state school kids
This part of your comment makes me think that you and I see the college and labor markets very differently.
1. There are “worker bees” at elite schools and at state schools. These are the folks that seem to have a tireless ability to complete discrete tasks. The top worker bees at state schools are definitely on par with Ivy worker bees in terms of potential productivity, but not as much on ambition (as a whole).
2. There are “social capital” people at elite schools and at major state schools. These are folks who will rely mostly on their social capital to find work (as an employee or as a company owner). The main differences are that elite schools graduates will more often play for higher stakes often on a national or international level, while the state school folks will more often be playing for relatively smaller stakes on a regional, state, or local level.
3. The social capital people can show up to work late, coked out, and doing what some folks think is diddly squat, as long as they use their social capital to move things forward for their organization. This can be rain making for business deals, connecting the right people for a collaboration, or assembling a team of good worker bees who can do stuff for them. Worker bees tend to see the social capital people as grifters (and some are), but they are often linchpins in certain domains and businesss. Ignore them at your own peril.
4. Last but not least, you get the folks with social capital who are also good worker bees. These folks are pure gold, and they can be found at state schools and elite schools. They are rare. Most are amazing to be around. They frequently do amazing things.
5. Your idea of “state school kids” taking over the world is pure fantasy in my opinion. State school kids simply won’t have the connections or opportunities to do things at a scale that facilitates this.
> and companies would no longer trust Ivy graduates as good hires.
I don’t think that grads of any university are guaranteed good hires, and thinking so is a recipe for disaster.
Ivy grads can be highly productive in a generic corporate context, but only if they are solid worker bees (not every Ivy grad is), and only if you give them and endless number of hoops to jump through with accompanying rewards to get them to mid-career.
Most places of employment aren’t really set up like this.
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.
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.
As somebody who went to Harvard told me, the Finals Clubs are not cool. They are exclusive, but you would have to be deeply self-hating to not be a Boston Brahmin and want to get into one because you're so ambitious that it has erased every other facet of your personality so you can be an automaton whose only programmed purpose is to amass power and wealth.
In the world of the movie (which again, is not real life), the cost is that Mark Zuckerberg will never be happy. I'll admit, it's convenient to believe that the billionaire seems to have achieved what he wanted but at the cost of everything that actually matters to living a meaningful human life. And yet it may have a grain of truth.
Part of the movie's point is that Mark wanted to be accepted and "cool" so badly, that he was willing to do whatever it took in his own way to achieve that. Even at the expense of things most others wouldn't give for it, as you mentioned.
To many others, that social status is achievable in different ways -- athletics, personality, appearance, or is even inherited (name, money, etc.). So many, dare I say most, people joining the Finals Clubs don't have to make the kind of sacrifices Mark did because they just naturally fit in. And as a result, membership of those clubs is less of a "big deal" because they didn't have the mountain to climb to get in it.
In Mark's case, he didn't have any of the above to achieve that. But he found out he did have a really unique and "cool" way to socialize -- the social network. The popularity and notoriety from the things he did contributed to his "cool" status on campus. And as we all know, the money and power he got from it cemented his status as a "cool" kid with status.
The thing is, Harvard has "cool" institutions (at least relatively) and the Finals Clubs just are not in that category. Maybe they were 60 years ago, but they had become relics. The only thing cool about them was that they were maximally exclusive, and represented a previous model of American aristocracy that was already moribund. That's why the Winklevoss Twins are such comic figures. They are entirely out of touch.
What's wrong with Mark Zuckerberg (the character) is that he doesn't want to be cool, he wants to win. He resents Eduardo for "beating" him by getting into the Phoenix. What matters is winning, and to be fair to him, that's what Harvard is all about. It's about having things that other people don't. And while most Harvard students who I know, once they got there, accepted that they were going to be the middle of the class within the top of the class, some people have something wrong with them and they can't stop.
Legacy kids are pretty smart. The median SAT score for legacy Princeton admissions is between 1525-1585 (the average is 1535 for Princeton overall). GPA is similarly very high.
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.
Tautologically, each student at a university who is a blood relative of a graduate of said university has a social network that shares a node with the university's formal network.
"Social capital" is a term of art in sociology meaning "the network of relationships within a particular society", in this case a university. Robert Putnam has written extensively about the empirical benefits of high social capital, which include efficient allocation of resources, lower stress, and prosocial behavior.
A newly admitted student whose social network shares 0 nodes with the university's formal network makes no initial contribution to the university's social connectedness within the universe of people formally affiliated with the university. Whereas the legacy student is already socially connected at the moment of admission.
If you think your society is better than average, you want to continue its culture.
If you shred cultural continuity mechanisms, eg legacy admissions forming a persistent community, you erode the very thing that made your society better than average.
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.
These are all good points and perhaps should be addressed directly with law.
This law seems aimed at asserting control over something which does not belong to the government. The first amendment enshrines rights of freedom of association. While there is no punishment, there is an effort by the government to cast scorn upon certain institutions. I would say this is not a legitimate purpose of the government. Again because of the first amendment, nobody should be judged by the government due to who they decide to hang out with.
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.
I think it would be a different story if the state was using those benefits and the threat of withholding them to negotiate compliance. However, this is not that. This is the state simply ruling on private affairs by dictate.
I think people should be deeply wary of this logic of unilateral ex-post recontacting you seem to be raising.
I think it threatens the rule of law and contracting, social or otherwise.
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.
> 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.
MIT is a private university that does not do legacy admissions, yet it has no problem maintaining its existence or its exclusivity.
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.
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.
Also again there's flimsy evidence even here. Percentage of total student body isn't the same as percentage of applicants accepted nor are they necessarily related. For example, a wealthy benefactor offering scholarships could have switched their allegiances or whatever
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.
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. We call positive sexism is chivalry, and positive racism affirmative action and it's broadly supported. The population most strongly opposed to positive racism are people who want or are indifferent to negative racism so it's hard to know how to read that.
Or... not and the results of polls heavily depend on how the question is asked. Apparently more people say affirmative action is good than bad. So maybe? Even the pew poll gets wildly inconsistent results depending on the question. The only consistent thing in all the graphs is the left/right split and you're more likely to be against affirmative action when it's selecting against you.
> (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.
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.
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.
Grants fund research. These usually come from government agencies. If you are good at this, you don't have to teach undergrads because you already bring in $$$, and your grad students are cheap labor. Universities take a cut of grants for overhead. It is a substantial source of funding.
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.
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).
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.
It's not the universities that apply for research funding, and then build basketball courts.
Researchers themselves write and apply for grants, and the grants are for the researchers. The money goes to them and their research, not the university.
For each $1 of federal research funding, the university can take a cut of as much as $0.6 owing to the fact that researchers are using university facilities and admin staff. In fact, the money itself is not even managed by the recipient researchers themselves. The university manages the funds since they use them to pay the professors, grad students, etc.
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.
They're tax exempt. If they want to throw off the yoke of so-called authoritarianism, they're free to reincorporate as public benefit corporations and pay taxes on all the capital they've been hoarding.
Seems like the public benefit is clear.
The benefit provided by a non-profit need not be available to all.
In fact, they are allowed to be extremely exclusive.
Institutions, as legal entities, are created by government regulations. In the absence of such regulations, all organizations would be based on voluntary contracts between private individuals. And the people forming the organization, regardless of whether you call them members, shareholders, or trustees, would ultimately be fully responsible for the actions of the organization.
Your reply is reductive: Stanford is not some run-of-the-mill LLC - they have a charter legislated into state law, granting privileges not given(!) to most other self-organized groups in the state. Saying this is not authoritarian - that's just stating historical fact.
You and a few billionaire friends can't incorporate, buy land and automatically have the legal cover that Stanford has; so no, Stanford has no right to exist in it's current, highly privileged form
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.
Now apply this to every private business and their hiring practices and let me know how things shake out and whether people are happy about the results.
> 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.
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.
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?
> More prestigious private universities use a lot of government funding to fund widely cited research which is what makes them prestigious.
Just a correction, the unversities are NOT the ones that apply for, and receive funding from e.g. the NIH.
It is individual researchers that apply, and receive, funding. And this money goes towards their salary and research. No funding, no salary, no reseacher.
Universities don't themselves receive government funding.
This might be shocking to some, but when a researcher receiver a federal grant (for example), the university takes a significant cut which they refer to as Facilities and Administrative (F&A) costs [1]. The F&A covers the so-called "indirect" costs of conducting research on university facilities: buildings, utilities, admin and accounting, support staff for compliance with federal regulations, etc.
Each university has its own F&A rate, which can be as much as 60% of received federal funds [2]. This rate has historically trended upward.
Well, the university will take a big slice (sometimes ~40%) of what researchers get from the NIH as "overhead", and then spend it on admins. And if professors hire grad students, the university will take another big slice as "tuition" even if the grad students aren't taking any courses.
This is one reason I'm leaving academia – if I raise money outside of academia, I actually get to keep it.
> 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.
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).
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
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, university donors often give grants to specific programs and initiatives. And those very same donors are the ones that have the biggest stake in preserving legacy admissions. They'd have zero issues funding a legal defense of legacy admissions.
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
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...
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?"
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.
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.
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.
That, and the notion that most people in power allocating those grants are mostly alumni who might want their descendants to have the same opportunity. The ivy league is deeply entrenched in the power structure of the US government, major corporations, etc.
Those research grants perpetuate the exclusivity of the institutions and are very much part of the appeal. It's what makes students (and their parents) pay extra and bend over backwards just to be close to that hoping that some of that genius rubs off on them. It has everything to do with student recruitment.
This is of course nothing new or world shocking. This stuff works exactly the same way in other countries. Rich people looking after each other is a thing. So is nepotism. And feudalism.
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.
The difference is higher education is supposed to be a ladder. That may sound like idealism but removing (or limiting) that ladder based on class is against any ideals of economic mobility or meritocracies.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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
Well, no. You'd just choose which schools you wanted to apply to before fixing your pre-exam curriculum. Don't bother covering material you won't need.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
No, it’s not suspicious. And for the second time, the reason is because it’s NOT statistically significant. I don’t care whether it was the first year, a singular data point is not proof of anything suspicious, especially when it fits within typical statistical data. Please, for the love of God, take a stats class before trying to read a graph and draw conclusions. Your supposed gotcha is “hmmm isnt is suspicious if X is less than I think it should be?” When X is altered by so many variables that it is LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE to draw your conclusions from it.
Maybe less asians applied? Maybe less asians qualified? Maybe more asians bowed out than normal and runnerups took their slots, maybe, due to negative publicity, the asians went to different colleges? That seems far more likely than your conspiracy theory.
The fact that Asian enrollment is about the same as it was during the years that racial discrimination was legal is exactly why it's suspected that Yale is still engaging in discrimination. I'm seriously confused as to why you think you're helping your argument by pointing out how similar Yale's enrollment is post-AA ban as it was pre-AA ban.
Imagine University A stops discriminating against Asians and University B decides to continue affirmative action secretly. Which one would have admissions rates in line with years when affirmative action was legal? Which one would see a rise in Asian enrollment?
> Maybe less asians applied? Maybe less asians qualified?
Publishing the stats on how many Asians applied and the average SAT scores of Asian admits and diverse admits would shed light on this. Notable, Yale has not released this data.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I'm not a lawyer (I just read regulations for fun). My understanding is Congress can still explicitly delegate authority to agencies, but an ambiguity in the law is no longer treated as an implicit delegation of authority.
As an example, the authority to define foods is explicitly delegated by Congress.
> Whenever in the judgment of the Secretary such action will promote honesty and fair dealing in the interest of consumers, he shall promulgate regulations fixing and establishing for any food, under its common or usual name so far as practicable, a reasonable definition and standard of identity, a reasonable standard of quality, or reasonable standards of fill of container.
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.
Maybe because many of the legacy students were born with a silver spoon in their mouth?
It's not a level playing field when it comes to the resources required to complete your studies. One student may have to commute for <2h per day to accommodation the can afford. The other can have a studio next to the campus and a car, both leased through their dada's company. One has to work part-time to bring food to the table. The other has extra time for sports and study.
This could also be simply due to the Ivy league institution providing the service being bought. In other words, the parents of Timmy might be fed up and stop being sponsors if he gets bad grades.
Of course in rigorous fields of study this is hard to do but if your rich kid is studying art, the grades are almost entirely arbitrary.
No - I mean this is also true for proctored high school exams like the SAT and AP scores. But also - no professor is changing grades based on who your parents are unless they are uber uber uber famous.
> 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.
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?
I get your point, but it's also different in several ways:
The fired person knows of the illegal act, knows the facts, and has standing and motivation to sue. For the legacy admission, nobody knows it happened, much less knows the facts (the student's qualifications), much less has standing to sue.
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.
Assuming this is a serious comment, your legacy status would only help your children at that single institution anyway. They might not even want to go to the same school(s) you attended. I don’t see any real reason for concern.
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).
Many, maybe most, would lose massive prestige and possibly fail without all those government grants and the research papers they provide to the school as advertising.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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. 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.
“Had legacy or donor connections” does not mean “admit[ted] because of ties to alumni or donors”.
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’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
Isn't the point of an elite college is to rub shoulders with the rich and well connected? If you can't do that and are surrounded by other middle and working class students, why not just go to a flagship state school?
A large part of what makes elite schools elite is the people you meet. That legacy kid whose dad is well connected or is a VC, is just as important as the smart kid that invents the next great thing. These institutions brought together the brains and the money. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.
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.
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.
> "assuming I’m not discriminating in a way that has 14th Amendment problems"
The Supreme Court decision to ban race-conscious admissions in higher education is based on the 14th Amendment. This law by California is made in light of that decision.
A major contention seems to be if states should have the right to modify or add the list of protected classes that is included for the 14th amendment.
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.
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?
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?
In my view this law violates the institutions freedom of association rights. In practicality as much as many of us decry legacy admits, the fact remains that these institutions were built financially by legacy families. So if you’re talented and lucky enough to get admitted you’re benefiting from legacy admissions.
Well, they can stop taking any public money and do what ever the hell they want. it's a simple quid pro quo. Don't like the deal, don't take the money.
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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
With the advent of ChatGPT, universities are becoming more like networking clubs, since for all domains where you don't need a lab, ChatGPT already is often much better than a random lecturer in a class of 300 students that you will never have 1-on-1 access to (and the tutors are also busy with their own research of course).
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.)
I'm going to have to agree with Scott Galloway here, however much I hate to admit that.
The problem isn't so much how admissions are selected, the problem is that admissions went from a fairly normal thing for any educated young adult to an extremely rare privilege.
To solve the problem, there should simply be more supply of quality higher education. And the government should stop funding institutions that profit from deliberately making their education exclusive.
I love how so many people love meritocracy, but when it is applied to Ivy League universities suddenly it’s considered like autonomy is being taken away.
If they receive public funds, they can go and suck limes. They do receive public funds.
That being said, since they receive public funds, they should also be subject to the first amendment as strictly as public universities.
Imagine, Columbia ordered to reinstate the Gaza protestors, and Ivy League generally forced to provide as easy access to forums for conservatives as is provided to progressives.
While I agree that banning legacy preference is good policy, how do you prove a violation exactly? And who is gonna do the proving?
If you want to make this work, and you should, you need to do something like total application anonymization, which means identity can't be deducible from any application materials. This is doable with standardized tests, which are a good approach to solving the admissions problem anyway.
So, college admissions should be based solely on standardized test scores.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://archive.ph/xWXNM
> 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.
"This is a battle against powerful people. Wins will be incremental."
More likely there is concern over first amendment rights of association invalidating the law if they take it too far.
"if they take it too far."
The question isn't if... it's when. We've already seen how far the left will go and the only reason they aren't jailing those they disagree with is because they can't.
Yet.
This is the real issue. It's easy to talk big, but once you run up against the Constitution in such an obvious manner, it gets tricky. The NCAA was stripped of a lot of its power in a single disastrous session in front of the Supremes. This issue straddles the Freedom of Association issue in a fashion similar to the NCAA telling student athletes that their names, were, somehow, not they're names??? For Constitutional scholars, arguments like this are just a hard sell.
Not sure what the solution is? But as long as we're going to allow private universities, we're going to run up against the issue of them expressing the rights any other private organization would express. Maybe taxes might be a way to compel cooperation? It's clear however, that traditional legal remedies won't have teeth in the face of the First.
Ever since Woodrow Wilson, there has been a segment of the American ruling class that views the Constitution as nothing more than a pesky antiquated roadblock that gets in the way of doing whatever they want, because they're supposedly more enlightened.
The solution is to not violate the first amendment.
I doubt it. I don’t remember any First Amendment hand-wringing when affirmative action was on the chopping block.
That has to do with race based discrimination. There's a long history of law and case law that race can't be used to discriminate in a commercial setting. This is not race based, nor based on any protected attribute.
In a perfect world I would agree with you. In the world we live in they will sidestep the issue.
All the schools are dependent on those sweet sweet fed bucks. They'll just withhold the money.
Ain't no different than withholding highway funding for states that won't get onboard with your national speed limit BS.
Edit: I forgot we were talking state and not feds so the above doesn't apply.
Do private universities get CA state money, or is it private and federal money?
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.
You can join any private club you want with any composition of well-rounded people. What does that have to with higher education?
> 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.
What’s next? Cities imposing such restrictions? Should NYC or Austin require people to pass vibe check to ensure that the city life is vibrant?
>What’s next? Cities imposing such restrictions? Should NYC or Austin require people to pass vibe check to ensure that the city life is vibrant?
That's pretty much what HOAs and micro-managerial local ordinances are. The whole point of them is that they make it an expensive hassle and generally crappy to either live in an above your social class. It gets kind of plausibly deniable on a city level when you've got nice neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods and they just differentiate by the degree of enforcement.
Obviously none of this stuff is water tight. It's all a sick game of relative probability. Some low class new money professional sports/entertainment types will retire to some waspy neighborhood in the Hamptons and persist but less of those people will do so than if places like that didn't actively try and be a nuisance to live in for the "wrong type of people". Likewise some guys who have a dozen cars in their yard will persist in their locations as the neighborhood gentrifies around them, much to the annoyance of their neighbors, but most of them will cash out and move out because having your neighbors constantly calling the government to harass you using laws that didn't even exist when you moved in gets real old real quick.
> You can join any private club you want with any composition of well-rounded people. What does that have to with higher education?
I believe that a key component of an effective education is studying the roots of philosophy. Surely you agree that the State should not prevent me from forming a private university that mandates freshmen take a philosophy class.
I also believe that a key component to an effective education is exposure to peers who come from a wide variety of different backgrounds and life experiences. Surely you agree that the State should not prevent me from forming a private university that considers the creation of a diverse student body as one minor factor in admissions.
Realistically, formal higher education is not simply a private matter. It's a part of the complex web of accreditation, government subsidies and entrenched social institutions (not necessarily state institutions).
A university is a public accommodation. You can certainly create a book club among your friends and forbid people of the opposite gender to join or require everyone to be of a different gender, maybe you can even call it a university; but that wouldn't be the same as doing such thing on the level of a large educational facility that e.g. provides the degree of Juris Doctor that allows you to take a bar exam.
So to answer your question, "Surely you agree that the State should not...", I would say "it depends on the particulars".
"Surely you agree that the State should not prevent me from forming a private university that considers the creation of a diverse student body as one minor factor in admissions."
The SCOTUS decision on affirmative action in college admissions has at least restricted race from that consideration.
Looking at demographics we were beginning to approach a point were affirmative action would have helped out white communities.
The decline and fall of white power America. If only MLK had lived to see it.
That's not at all what the SCOTUS case focused on.
Private universities aren't. They get loads of research funding, tax breaks, people paying for their education with government backed loans. All American universities are to some extent public.
> Should NYC or Austin require people to pass vibe check to ensure that the city life is vibrant?
Don't give them ideas
The ideas are there.
The willingness to overtly implement them has been relatively low since the late 1960s.
> 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.
There’s definitely some racism, but intangible qualities can also boost some Asian students who otherwise look like basically everyone else applying to top schools.
Easily quantifiable check boxes don’t verify that someone is an interesting conversationalist. Arguably schools are better served by slightly lower standard and a random pick vs everyone whose parents have been min maxing the process since preschool. Overfitting arbitrary criteria is easy, but not productive.
> intangible qualities can also boost some Asian students who otherwise look like basically everyone else applying to top schools.
In theory maybe. In practice the overwhelming majority of the time it's just used to admit fewer asians.
> Easily quantifiable check boxes don’t verify that someone is an interesting conversationalist.
If we actually cared about whether people were interesting conversationalists in an objective sense (rather than just interesting to the person making the admissions decision - which mostly just comes down to having the same cultural background), we'd figure out a way to test it. These universities never tried, because they never actually cared about interesting conversationalists in the first place, it's always been nothing but a fig leaf.
> Arguably schools are better served by slightly lower standard and a random pick vs everyone whose parents have been min maxing the process since preschool.
Then make it random, if that's the goal - have an actual fair lottery between everyone who meets the standard. But again, it was never about being random.
> cultural background
Language isn’t culturally agnostic. If classes where taught in Malagasy being well read would refer to a different set of books.
> Then make it random, if that's the goal
That’s not the goal, the point is any system that can be gamed will be gamed. You can’t game random, but you can easily have someone else write a kids collage admission essay which becomes more likely the more you weight it and the higher bar you set.
> we'd figure out a way to test it.
In many ways that’s why the SAT is preferred over the ACT. Having a large vocabulary, being able to express yourself, being able to think logically are all reasonable proxies. It also explains why the math section excludes calculus questions as transcripts already show if someone took calculus so they can focus on something else.
The “supposed benefits” of well-roundedness? As GP said, they don’t doubt it is used for discriminatory reasons as well, but are you implying there aren’t benefits to being well-rounded and it is a made up characteristic?
Yes, in my experience "well-rounded" is 100% a made up characteristic that generally means "person like the person doing the assessing". Another reply mentions "interesting conversationalist", which mostly selects for someone having the same cultural background, and is the opposite of "diversity" or whatever this week's excuse for doing this stuff is.
You are making a lot of assumptions here. People don’t find others interesting conversationalists if they have the same background. Maybe if all you focus on is skin color, you may be right, but does somebody in Ukraine have the same background as somebody who grew up in South Florida? Does somebody who grew up in the San Francisco have the same background as somebody who grew up in Marin?
If all you look at is race, you might say yes, but these are very different life experiences. Also, there is such a thing as somebody being so different that it’s not possible for others to relate to them. Likability is not unimportant when it comes to working in a team.
Laptop professionals are remarkably similar wherever in the world you find them these days. London, New York City, San Francisco, Tokyo, Paris, etc. have all been converging on a similar set of tastes, fashions, beliefs, and consuming habits. So it's possible to have great geographic diversity, without introducing much diversity in terms of culture, class, political and religious beliefs, etc.
And conversely great diversity without geographic diversity or racial diversity. Diversity is oversimplified and measured incorrectly from the DEI perspective.
And your experience comprises how many cases?
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This is quite similar to the strongest argument for legacy admissions, even if the sons and daughters of the wealthy and powerful don't have the best test scores they contribute significantly to the value of going to that institution for other students by virtue of offering them access to those who are going to inherit wealth and power.
> There is critical value in assessing these hard to measure qualities for creating a student body
Value To Whom, university administrators?
Has benefit to students ever been demonstrated and proven?
Can you clearly state what is your hypothesis?
1 - it is preferable to be well rounded instead of narrowly specialised ?
2 - this preference can be taught at the age of ~18 and is not innate, and is not ingrained at early childhood ?
3 - excluding narrowly focused students and getting well-rounded ones instead benefits these students?
4 - university administrators are competent as assessing these yearning of the soul from a student’s essay?
We are witnessing late-stage higher education before AI guts out the education parts.
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:
https://archive.org/download/ivy_league/ivy_league.png
As a note of caution: these demographic statistics are somewhat misleading because they use the demographics of the US as a whole, but the correct demographic set is to use for 18 year olds (70 year olds generally aren't applying to college)
if you look at the ethnic breakdown of children in the US in 2023 (https://datacenter.aecf.org/data/tables/103-child-population...):
48% non hispanic white
26% hispanic
14% non hispanic black
6% asian
5% mixed
1% native
When you look at these statistics through this lens you see that white relative underrepresentation is slightly reduced, hispanic significantly increased. broadly speaking, when you look at younger ages the country is a little bit less white and a lot more hispanic.
Perhaps we should investigate the systemic discrimination that is causing lower birth-rates in whites. There are whole academic fields for similar disparate outcomes in other groups, so why not treat this case the same way?
Looking at mean SAT grades is close to irrelevant when your (supposed) strategy is to pick Top-N candidates. If for example every single person got exactly the mean score allotted to them by their race, you'd actually expect that the top 5.9% of universities would all be 100% Asian, the next 57.8% of universities would be purely "White (incl. Jewish)", the next 18.7% of universities purely Hispanic and bottom 12.1% purely Black.
By that math, every single slot in an ivy league school "belongs" to an Asian candidate and even a single white person is already over-representation.
(Didn't separate White from Jewish since they don't have mean scores for just Jewish, possibly they should be first according to the estimate in the text below, but that doesn't really matter for the point made)
> Looking at mean SAT grades is close to irrelevant when your (supposed) strategy is to pick Top-N candidates.
Not if the mean SAT score predicts how many students surpass some academic cutoff used by the universities. It's like predicting who will win a best-out-of-3 100m dash, when all you have are the runners' mean 100m times.
I find it baffling how people become incapable of the simplest inferences, and capable of the smallest nitpicks, when they don't like where the data leads.
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.
> 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.
There’s no need to construct a hypothetical when there is actual data to dissect. For example, in the cited links, the 25th percentile SAT score for Harvard students is ~200 points greater than the highest mean nationwide score. The middle 50% of all students (25th-75th) range is ~100. And on 7 out of 10 students admitted included SAT scores in their application. So one would have to make additional assumptions (I’m not sure what they are) to claim one’s groups scores lead to penalty and another’s leads to advantage. It could be true, but I don’t see it as a fact, hence my original position that other assertions don’t necessarily need to meet some bar.
A lot of the nonsense comes from the bonkers categories. Hispanic origin is sort of like being Jewish from a statistical perspective - it’s a layer, not a state.
We’re also decades after civil rights. People don’t fit in these boxes.
My nephews dad is Irish, mom is black Puerto Rican. Racists would consider him black, his name is Irish, mom is of African and Spanish origin. They don’t speak Spanish at home or really have a deep connection to Hispanic culture. Wtf is he for the college demographic survey?
Likewise for my Filipino friends… are they Asian? Pacific Islander? This particular family speaks English, Tagalog and Spanish at home. Culturally they are very much into traditional Filipino traditions, but their Catholicism practice is close to Spanish style.
Arguments like this lead to universities severely discriminating against jews in the not so distant past.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota
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.
You didn't imply it might potentially maybe apply. You definitely, clearly, stated it not only applies but what the "correct" conclusion to come to was.
A policy that would exclude all Jews would potentially affect some 8 million Americans, same as a policy that lowers White participation by 3%. Which would be worse, and why?
I think the GP argument is that you can't argue going all on merit for Jews while demanding that Blacks and Whites are somehow equally represented.
Legacies are not well allocated distributions either according to per capita numbers.
> 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.
The point of donor child admissions, as I understand it, is to bring in additional money. Which could potentially enable more low-income students to attend.
The reason why some universities have ended legacy admissions recently seems to be that they have concluded that it doesn't bring in enough money. But they usually still have donor admissions.
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.
Which ethnicities would those be, and how does this follow from the data above?
Your skill at crimestop is commendable.
What's the implication here, that asians should just suck it up because others have it worse?
We're stuck with a math problem. If you admit purely based on test scores then black and latino applicants would be significantly underrepresented and non-Jewish white applicants would be slightly underrepresented. If you address these problems by insisting on a full balancing then you're going to have to reduce Asian and Jewish admittance. But increasing black and latino admittance at the expense of non-Jewish white admittance when the latter group was already underrepresented is not only the same kind of quota system but not even satisfying the goal of proportionate representation -- and that's the one that seems to be happening. So what do you want to do?
Arguably, the problem of underrepresentation became already unsustainable during Affirmative Action by the classification of African immigrants as black. Because the latter displace African-Americans who do worse in test scores than Africans.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2007/may/29/internatio...
Addressing the underlying barriers preventing blacks/latinos from getting into elite universities, rather than trying to fix the symptoms by instituting illiberal policies like reverse discrimination.
Then you need people to stop getting mad at universities when admission based on test scores causes those groups to be underrepresented. They're not the ones who can fix the test scores and nothing is going to fix them before the next round of applications.
break us colleges into tiers based on academic rigor. assuming you met XXXX standardized test score you are automatically sorted into one of the appropriate schools at random on your 18th birthday.
no take backs, safety schools permitted.
[dead]
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.
Is that true? Harvard could be more elite by offering no financial aid, but they swing the opposite direction.
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.
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
I've seen a study showing that basically only legacies who donated had their children accepted.
> [it] 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.
I suspect if we looked at the overall set of students who were admitted to elite universities while their parents have given a $10M donation, that we'd find that that set of students was academically well above-average as compared to the overall population, probably above-average as compared to all students attending all four-year universities, even though they might be below the average of the overall admitted students to that elite university.
That doesn't make them anything close to "complete duds".
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.
Since when do public universities not practice donor admissions?
Yes, this is why the elite private schools must be forced to admit by lottery.
Wouldn’t that destroy their whole value proposition (both for the poor but talented and the rich but not as gifted)?
At that point you might as well abolish private universities altogether, because what’s their point?
Yup.
Hint: most of the people pushing for these things would be perfectly fine with that. But won’t admit it.
Why would I go through all of the bullshit to get my kid into Harvard, if they don’t get to rub elbows with some Rockefeller heir? Do you think anyone wants to have Johnny learn the viola and sign up for 38 activities?
People with the cash to bribe their way into Harvard, who know smart people, are “top people”.
>>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.
It's the same impulse that led Romania's former dictator's wife to amass fake diplomas as a world-class chemist, from both Romanian and European universities (including being admitted as a fellow in the UK's Royal Institute of Chemistry), despite only having four years' worth of actual education when she was 10, and already being the most powerful woman in the country.
It is a form of pride and pretend superiority, false legitimacy and so on.
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.
It would seem to be hard to convince someone you had skills in a social setting. Hence the use of a proxy.
Sometimes it’s also a flex to have to certificate but clearly not have the actual skills.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> My question is can donors buy not only admission but also grades? My guess is yes.
There's no need to buy grades. All grades are A anyway.
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.
it's a reference to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbNdcdO3_Go
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.
> Bonus points for brevity
I was just thinking it had a strong Strunk & White-ian vibe!
Although it is short, it retains plenty of words that add no value.
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.
Actually, until very recently race-based discrimination in college admissions was required wasn’t it?
It has never been required.
It was if they had any interaction with the US Federal Government, which almost all colleges or universities do in various ways.
[https://www.oeod.uci.edu/policies/aa_history.php]
There is still an active executive order requiring all government contractors to do it too. Which includes companies like Google.
It’s been a thing since the 70’s - to various degrees of enforcement.
Can you point to the requirement? I see that it says you can’t discriminate and enforcement mechanisms to document that discrimination isn’t happening.
I’m really not sure what you’re asking. You can paste the executive order #’s into google. You can search for affirmative action lawsuits on google, they are all related.
Depending on how much someone wants to politically punish someone depends on how much they are required to provide documentation and what kind of lawsuits they get into with the DOL. Here is one with Google [https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/ofccp/ofccp20210201], which requires they comply with DOL data gathering requirements and affirmative action requirements ‘or else’. Here is a document from the Clinton whitehouse calling out similar [https://clintonwhitehouse3.archives.gov/WH/EOP/OP/html/aa/aa...].
Schools often get impacted by department of education, NIH, and DOE grants. Sometimes by various state level programs, all of which transitively include similar language. I am not directly in academia so I don’t have links as handy, but the professors I know have all made clear references to the same thing going on.
When they can’t do that, guess what happens [https://www.npr.org/2024/08/22/nx-s1-5086410/the-diversity-w...].
The tricky part here is that in any given zero sum system (aka there are a fixed number of student slots, or open job positions, or affordable housing openings), you can’t ‘positively’ discriminate (aka affirmative action) on race (or any other concrete criteria) without ‘negatively’ discriminating on the same criteria to someone else. It’s a basic control system thing. It’s literally impossible for it to not happen, as even a basic whiteboard session will show.
Which has been impacting East Asians, Caucasians, and often Jews pretty heavily for awhile. This is nothing new, really. Harvard has been trying to limit Jews in its membership in particular since at least the 1920’s if I remember correctly.
But since discrimination (negative) based on race/ethnicity is clearly illegal, but discrimination (positive) based on race/ethnicity is (or was) required, everyone involved except the gov’t is screwed from a documentation perspective as they’ll be documenting criminal activity in order to not be performing criminal activity.
So the next time the political winds change, they’ll have clearly documented malfeasance (looking from the other side of the equation) which can be used by the other side of the equation to screw them over even harder.
This is why the old US stance of ‘don’t be racist, being racist is illegal, and we don’t see race’ was a thing. It minimized the balkanization/tit for tat problem, while allowing punishing obviously obnoxious behavior. Similar to ‘don’t talk about politics/sex/religion at work’.
But, racism still exists of course (it’s a basic human behavior/in group-out group thing and literally no group is immune), and it was far from perfect as it also discouraged discussing a lot of problems - many of which got larger under it. But it’s not like getting them out in the open necessarily solves them either.
Or that there even is a ‘solution’, just different types of problems to pick.
Fun times.
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?
I've heard that places like MIT quietly tell their alumni that their children have a better chance because "they know what they're getting into." And this may be true. But it's a way for them to have their cake and eat it too. They loudly proclaim they don't allow legacies. Then they quietly give them a boost on "cultural fit."
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/
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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...
To be fair, good private schools ($60k/yr ) and their associated activities easily add up to a million over 12 years. It's a lot of money, but not unheard of, even among upper middle class families.
At the same time. If you invest 2 million in an index fund when they're 10, then it'll be ~$40 million by the time the kid is 40 yr old. So, donating it to USC might be a pretty bad investment unless 2 million is a genuinely small amount for OP.
…you live in a different world than most of us.
I don’t know if a single k-12 private school that has tuition anywhere near that in the South Bay Area, except Harker for the upper grades only. Presentation, Bellermine, etc. are all half that.
The truly elite private schools in the Bay (Castilleja, Harker, Athenian, Stuart/Convent Hall, Town, Hamlin, Menlo, College Prep, Head-Royce) cost around $60k-90k/yr per student.
> you live in a different world than most of us
Probably.
Benefits of a dual income household with both earners making mid-6 figs base and fairly hefty bonuses (and equity), and both of us reached this point by our mid-20s.
This is a very common household structure in the Bay Area.
Your neighbor might be HNW or UHNW and you wouldn't even know it.
> This is a very common household structure in the Bay Area.
But not typical for startup employees.
What is HNW?
High Net Worth. Ultra High Net Worth.
HNW is High Net Worth Individual
And UHNW is Ultra High Net Worth Individual
> So, donating it to USC might be a pretty bad investment
It is.
Before AB1780 it something we heavily considered only because we're Asian American and Asian American admissions at top private like Yale and Harvard have fallen after the Supreme Court's AA ruling, while legacy admissions skyrocketed.
Now that AB1780 exists, and will most likely have teeth in the next 30 years, there's no reason to partake in that zero sum game anymore.
> 2 million is a genuinely small amount for OP.
It comes out to top Bay Area private school tuition for 2 kids over a 16-20 year timeline.
apologize for the tangent but my cousin and her husband (both asian american, both harvard alumni) chose to move back to our hometown in Seattle so they could send their kids to lakeside, the same school bill gates went to.
i assume to increase their chances of getting into harvard. back of the envelope math works out to be $715k for their 5-12 education which may be more bang for your buck but also the college entrance strategy is not so much based on donor contribution and more on target school selection.
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
His tone isn't great, but he isn't wrong.
HN skews Bay Area.
BLS didn't normalize the above data to show the Bay Area where it's fairly common to break $400-500k TC by your late 20s/early 30s.
Furthermore, at least in the Bay Area Asian American community, both spouses are working these roles (or adjacent high paying roles like Medicine, Dentistry, High Finance, etc).
Is USC that hard to get into ?
My understanding is that Stanford, Berkeley, Caltech and UCLA are more selective and UCSD has better academics.
If you're a selfmade tech founder millionaire......maybe have some faith in the caliber of your own child ?
Nowadays, all of those schools are hard to get into.
I doubt you have ever worked in an early stage tech startup.
You must be fun at parties.
> 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).
> Do you think your kid will need a $2m+ boost to get into USC
Before AB1780 - yes. We're Asian American, and Asian American admissions at top privates has declined after the Supreme Court's AA ruling at the expense of legacies.
> Imho, the degree will largely be wasted on a student not smart enough or not motivated enough to get in without that help
Not necessarily. It's easier to make a case for a nepo hire/referral if your kid has a "Good" degree.
If you dig closely in intern and new grad hiring across early career tech roles, I'd say a solid minority (20-25%) were landed due to parents leveraging their professional networks.
With a "Good" degree it makes it easier.
Unethical - yes. But such is life
------------
All of this is moot now with AB1780 and the eventual addition of teeth to it in the next 30 years.
I think legacy admissions will eventually get banned in CA due to the political implications now that us Asians and Latinos are the plurality in California, but severely underrepresented in legacy admissions.
> Wins will be incremental.
I think the words you're looking for are "hollow gesture, dishonestly presented," not "win."
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 bet Ford is proud that multiple generations of families buy Fords. Why not? It validates that Ford is satisfying its customers.
I see that as legitimate. Especially for lesser known colleges.
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?
>> 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.
It's official: the word "ban" has lost all meaning, according to the New York Times.
You can call anything you want a ban now.
> 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.
Legacy includes more than just parents.
Doesn’t always help though. My uncle was a star football player at Stanford who got drafted into the NFL. Wasn’t enough to get me in.
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
> there are lots of options for a student to take easy courses for a great gpa
True, and the people who are interested in a person's gpa know that, and will look a little deeper as a result.
In Italy yes, in the US it's more a la carte.
This is, as a left leaning guy myself, one of my general frustrations with our current vintage of progressive thought..
Passing laws with weak enforcement mechanisms that leads to passing more laws with more weak enforcement mechanisms which leads to...
You get the drift
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.
https://facts.stanford.edu/academics/undergraduate-profile/
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.
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.
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.
"Qualified" is not a protected class.
All forms of discrimination are legal, except those that are protected class.
If I broke the law and someone was damaged based off of the breaking of said law I should owe damages right?
It Depends(tm).
Tort and civil law is a large speciality, and there are numerous situations where you might technically win but net zero actual damages.
You’d need to talk to a lawyer to get specifics.
Sue for breaking the law that California just passed!
Dude, the title is incorrect.
>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. An earlier version had proposed that schools face civil penalties for violating the law, but that provision was removed in the State Senate.
The law already states the penalty for breaking the law. How are you gonna get anything extra?
> 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.
It will only matter to alumni donors. Friends of mine both graduated from the same institution. Their plan with donations was to use their corporate 3x match plus their own wealth to set their daughters up with admission locks.
Considering that they already publish how many legacy students each university takes each year, this law doesn't really do anything new other that stronger wording.
It's a good start. It's paving the road for penalties at a later day.
I guarantee you penalties will be added within the next 20-30 years because of the political aspect in California.
Us Asians and Latinos are the plurality now and underrepresented in legacy admissions - and it's a single voter issue that could flip entire demographics to vote for a candidate.
Newsome really seems to be trying to stay in the headlines these days. Seems like a new law notable enough for headlines signed every day the past week or so.
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.
I could see this working for the majority of people who donate money but not millions. If you donate millions your kid will get in, they will find a way.
You’d think that but no. IITs in India would be filled with rich kids, India is a fairly corrupt place after all. But with education if you fully standardize all admissions and are strict about identity then you really can clamp down on it.
The main difference is that the media report will be read.
This is a good incremental step though. Once some colleges are on the list, it'll be easier to stir up some populist rancor.
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.
> 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.
Lower, but I don't know about "much, much".
The baseline acceptance rate is below 4%. Legacy applicants are probably better on average, but the gap between 4% and 30% is enormous.
> The baseline acceptance rate is below 4%.
The rate of applying is low enough that the baseline acceptance rate doesn't tell you anything. With acceptance rates of 4% and 30%, Harvard could be admitting legacies by a lower standard, or a higher standard, or exactly the same standard. If you don't know what the pools are like, you have no way to tell.
Note that if (1) your goal is to admit everyone above a certain quality threshold, and (2) you aren't able to measure quality with perfect accuracy, then the correct thing to do is to hold legacies to a lower standard. Because they have better parents, they regress to a higher mean than random applicants do.
Should university acceptance be meritocratic or not? HN seems to be suffering from dissonance.
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.
:-)
> the purpose of Harvard-type monastic institutions and MIT-type land grant engineering schools are /drastically/ different.
And the purpose of employment is 'hiring whomever the boss thinks will make the most money for him', without even pretending to provide a public good, yet the same suspects are hand-wringing about how workplaces should be meritocratic.
Likewise, when AA-admissions were killed, those people were also all for meritocracy.
Mayhaps the demand for meritocracy is just a fig leaf. It's never been about fairness, it's about preserving access to power.
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.
> Does it matter if you're paying for it?
FWIW, the state is also (indirectly ) paying for this change. Private universities can exempt themselves from this law by not accepting state dollars, but I don't think donors can fill the resulting hole.
> If somebody's shelling millions funding a university, don't see a problem with enrolling his son.
The state shells more. A lot more, and is leveraging that so that mere-multi-million-dollar-donors-offspring don't get an advantage over non-donors (eventually. The lawmaker is cleverly taking a tick-tock ratcheting approach where each law builds on top of the last)
Maybe universities should compromise with the state and be able to assign a certain quota (10% idk) for such individuals.
Why? Are these universities facing challenges with funding their humongous endowments? Or is so that every generation of peasants pays the social debt they owe to their betters?
It's not hard to imagine that there will be a push to include this information in college rankings.
For all the attention maybe there's changes planned.
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.
Here in San Francisco:
- Our tax dollars fund government-run schools that cost an $26k per student per year. Fewer than half the students at those schools meet or exceed grade standards for Math and English.
- The median cost of a religious school is about half the cost of government-run schools: https://x.com/RahimNathwani/status/1840965145604079997
- Parents who choose to send their children to non-government-run schools get no vouchers: we pay taxes to fund government employees, and then use what's left to pay for the schools our children need.
I'm not from San Francisco, I don't have a horse in this race, I was just looking over the link that you posted and it doesn't seem to support what you're saying at all
- The link you posted doesn't talk about public schools at all, only private school tuition.
- This 2024 census.gov report[1] says that San Francisco public schools cost $23,654 per student
- According to graph on the link that you posted only 12% of private schools in San Francisco charge < $25000 annual tuition
- According to the article from the link you posted religious schools make up 48% of private schools in California, so mathematically, at least 3/4 religious schools charge more in annual tuition than a year of public school costs (according to census.gov)
- According to the article from the link you posted, religious schools offer special lower rates for families who belong to the parish, meaning the "cost per student" is even higher than tuition
[1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2024/public-s...
The median sticker price for parochial schools in San Francisco is:
Grades K-12: $10.9k
Grade 3: $10.4k
Grade 8: $10.9k
Grade 12: $27.0k
All of the above are calculated by weighting each school equally, as I don't have access to per-school per-grade student counts. Feel free to recalculate these. They're based solely on the data the SF Chronicle intern collected.
Well, that 2024 report is based on old data from 2022. That's two years old! Let's look at more recent data.SFUSD's operating budget for 2024-2025 is $1.3 billion (https://www.sfusd.edu/about-sfusd/sfusd-news/press-releases/...).
It has 48,000 students (https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/sfusd-closures-b...).
That's $27k per student per year, which is more than it was the last time I looked!
I don't have extensive data to back this up, but from anecdotes I've heard it's swings and roundabouts. Some families pay more than sticker price, and others pay less.Yeah you're right, sorry for making you write that all out, I should have stopped after "I'm not from San Francisco and don't have a horse in this race"
No worries. You took the time to think and dig a little, so I don't mind being more specific. Anyway, whatever questions/doubts you had/have, I'm sure you aren't/weren't alone :)
Are those other schools half the cost because they exclude anyone with disabilities or poor upbringings and just cream off the easy students?
If so then you are enthusiastically cheering for kids to be thrown on the scrapheap to save you a few bucks. And using religion as a cover for it, which only makes it worse.
No. They're half the cost because they don't spend half their money paying for a central bureaucracy. They spend almost all their money on buildings and teachers.
1). You can lead a horse to books, but you cant make it think.
2). This statistic is meaningless unless without data about the inputs and outputs. I assume that that student populations are vastly different.
3). That's your choice. In Ohio, I get to fund religious education, which I am vehemently opposed to doing.
Have you considered that, perhaps if you and like-minded parents didn't remove their students from the public education system, perhaps the test scores would be higher?
Government schools in my area are not an attractive option. I spoke with the principal of one of the top 3 most popular elementary government schools (measured by ratio of applicants to kindergarten spots). She made it clear that, if my son were to attend that school:
- my son would never be allowed to skip a grade
- under no circumstances would a teacher in grade X teach material normally covered in grade X+1
My son is in 3rd grade, doing math with the 4th grade class, and studying 5th grade math at home.
If he were at a government-run school, he would be in 2nd grade, and spend math lessons at school covering material he mastered 2 years ago.
In San Francisco, I get to fund an inefficient bureaucracy set up to benefit adult employees, which I am vehemently opposed to doing.SFUSD has 1 adult employee for every 3.5 students. A minority of those adults are classroom teachers. Average class sizes are not 3.5, or 7, or even 14.
Meanwhile I bet those schools are exempt from standardized tests because they know the students (most) would flunk them. That’s the way it works here in Texas, there is no oversight or feedback that home schooled or private school kids actually meet any kind of standards at all. Now the governor wants the same type of vouchers and he was -heavily- “inspired” by money from charter school/religious school owning billionaires.
The feedback is provided by the market mechanism. Private schools and charter schools that don't do a good job would fail to retain and attract students, and shut down.
For government-run schools, most of the students have little or no choice. Standardized tests (like SBAC) show poor results in California (most kids fail to meet grade level standards in the test), but parents have little ability to change how school districts are run.
Home schooled children out perform government schooled children across the board. That's not even a disputed point.
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.
If you want colleges to behave in a certain manner, the word manipulate is correct.
Federal funding goes to institutions that uphold the federal Govt, not those that oppose it. The federal govt works in the interest of what its representatives seek. Those representatives are enforced by a variety of constituents including corporations, NGOs, non profits, and individuals.
You believe that taxpayers should say where the money goes. In such cases, it only goes back into the taxpayers pockets.
I am not sure where the line lies. If you fund a program that is not run by the government, say 100 billion dollars, should the government not "manipulate" how the program runs? I believe there should be some sort of accountability. To my knowledge the government spends over 7 billion dollars on Pell grants, and if the government has little to no say in whom it should be awarded to, it makes no sense to me. If the University decides to accept less qualified students through legacy admission and give the money to them, it should be challenged I believe.
add: come to think of it, I guess private university can just not accept financial aids from the government and keep their own admission policy if they have enough money to subsidize students who need financial aids. Whether you like it or not, federal money comes with (or should come with) strings attached (or manipulation in your words)
Alumni aren't taxpayers or people?
I don't think it is fair to accept Alumni as a sole recipient of lots of tax money for unfair admission.
Alumni are not recipients of tax money. They are funding the university with their own tuition expenses.
On average I guess alumni contribute more through donation than they receive through the financial aids. I don't know the numbers on this topic, so please pardon my ignorance.
Crazy idea: stop with the federal funding.
Every time federal loan guarantees and grants increase, so do higher education prices. Drastically cutting back on those loan guarantees and grants should lead to a drastic cut to higher education costs.
> Private university can do whatever they want with their admission as long as no public money...
We must distinguish "student loan guarantees" (or vouchers) from direct funding, otherwise there will never be such a thing as a "private school", only public schools masquerading as private.
I would very much like to get rid of federal funding for schools, and allow private student loan with the possibility of purging the borrowed money through bankruptcy procedures. I am not sure if such proposal is realistic.
Nearly every student will graduate owing vastly more than their personal assets.
Declaring bankruptcy at that moment would be the optimal financial strategy if it wiped out the student debt.
Solution, don't lend money. Sell education in exchange for a promise to pay x% of salary for y years. Students won't go unemployed just to avoid paying it back and it aligns incentives. If colleges want to make lots of money, they will have to make sure their students get good jobs upon graduation.
That'd be nice.
crazier idea: stop profiting off of education
That's silly. Why profit off anything? Without a profit motive, why do anything?
Yep. It's a cliche that the token scholarship students are paid to do the homework of and take the tests for the rich kids.
Large public research universities (in STEM) skew to far more rigorous than Ivies because they're always clamoring for prestige and ranking because of their inherent insecurities about not being said Ivy. Little/no grade inflation and less homework and test trafficking. TLDR: Generally, people who put in the work and get things done went to state schools; while people who earn MBAs and found companies like Theranos and FTX go to big name private schools.
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.
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.
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.
They don’t need to be stunningly smart, but they need to look and sound competent enough to be put in charge. The entire system runs on plausible deniability where people can say it’s not nepotism just convincingly enough to avoid scrutiny.
Well, if the majority of Harvard graduates entered the workforce with little to no education, showing up to work hours late and coked out everyday doing diddly-squat, maybe at first nothing would change, but over time all those companies would be overtaken by those run by state school kids, and companies would no longer trust Ivy graduates as good hires.
Investment Banking and Business are about relationships and trust first, then competence. They are dealing with rich clients from the same background, something they've effectively spent their entire life preparing for. I assure you, any SWE could easily digest finance topics, but there is reason they're in SWE and not IB.
> Well, if the majority of Harvard graduates entered the workforce with little to no education
Check.
The actual classroom education at Harvard isn’t that good, imho. There are some signature classes that are definitely amazing, the access to resources for self-directed learning are incredible, and the competition and collaboration with one’s peers can push people to perform at new highs, but the base classroom instruction is generally not very good.
> showing up to work hours late
Maybe
> and coked out everyday
Stereotype, but maybe.
> doing diddly-squat
This can happen with anyone anywhere, imho. That said, what you consider “diddly-squat” may have more value than you think. See below.
> maybe at first nothing would change, but over time all those companies would be overtaken by those run by state school kids
This part of your comment makes me think that you and I see the college and labor markets very differently.
1. There are “worker bees” at elite schools and at state schools. These are the folks that seem to have a tireless ability to complete discrete tasks. The top worker bees at state schools are definitely on par with Ivy worker bees in terms of potential productivity, but not as much on ambition (as a whole).
2. There are “social capital” people at elite schools and at major state schools. These are folks who will rely mostly on their social capital to find work (as an employee or as a company owner). The main differences are that elite schools graduates will more often play for higher stakes often on a national or international level, while the state school folks will more often be playing for relatively smaller stakes on a regional, state, or local level.
3. The social capital people can show up to work late, coked out, and doing what some folks think is diddly squat, as long as they use their social capital to move things forward for their organization. This can be rain making for business deals, connecting the right people for a collaboration, or assembling a team of good worker bees who can do stuff for them. Worker bees tend to see the social capital people as grifters (and some are), but they are often linchpins in certain domains and businesss. Ignore them at your own peril.
4. Last but not least, you get the folks with social capital who are also good worker bees. These folks are pure gold, and they can be found at state schools and elite schools. They are rare. Most are amazing to be around. They frequently do amazing things.
5. Your idea of “state school kids” taking over the world is pure fantasy in my opinion. State school kids simply won’t have the connections or opportunities to do things at a scale that facilitates this.
> and companies would no longer trust Ivy graduates as good hires.
I don’t think that grads of any university are guaranteed good hires, and thinking so is a recipe for disaster.
Ivy grads can be highly productive in a generic corporate context, but only if they are solid worker bees (not every Ivy grad is), and only if you give them and endless number of hoops to jump through with accompanying rewards to get them to mid-career.
Most places of employment aren’t really set up like this.
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.
As somebody who went to Harvard told me, the Finals Clubs are not cool. They are exclusive, but you would have to be deeply self-hating to not be a Boston Brahmin and want to get into one because you're so ambitious that it has erased every other facet of your personality so you can be an automaton whose only programmed purpose is to amass power and wealth.
In the world of the movie (which again, is not real life), the cost is that Mark Zuckerberg will never be happy. I'll admit, it's convenient to believe that the billionaire seems to have achieved what he wanted but at the cost of everything that actually matters to living a meaningful human life. And yet it may have a grain of truth.
Part of the movie's point is that Mark wanted to be accepted and "cool" so badly, that he was willing to do whatever it took in his own way to achieve that. Even at the expense of things most others wouldn't give for it, as you mentioned.
To many others, that social status is achievable in different ways -- athletics, personality, appearance, or is even inherited (name, money, etc.). So many, dare I say most, people joining the Finals Clubs don't have to make the kind of sacrifices Mark did because they just naturally fit in. And as a result, membership of those clubs is less of a "big deal" because they didn't have the mountain to climb to get in it.
In Mark's case, he didn't have any of the above to achieve that. But he found out he did have a really unique and "cool" way to socialize -- the social network. The popularity and notoriety from the things he did contributed to his "cool" status on campus. And as we all know, the money and power he got from it cemented his status as a "cool" kid with status.
The thing is, Harvard has "cool" institutions (at least relatively) and the Finals Clubs just are not in that category. Maybe they were 60 years ago, but they had become relics. The only thing cool about them was that they were maximally exclusive, and represented a previous model of American aristocracy that was already moribund. That's why the Winklevoss Twins are such comic figures. They are entirely out of touch.
What's wrong with Mark Zuckerberg (the character) is that he doesn't want to be cool, he wants to win. He resents Eduardo for "beating" him by getting into the Phoenix. What matters is winning, and to be fair to him, that's what Harvard is all about. It's about having things that other people don't. And while most Harvard students who I know, once they got there, accepted that they were going to be the middle of the class within the top of the class, some people have something wrong with them and they can't stop.
Legacy kids are pretty smart. The median SAT score for legacy Princeton admissions is between 1525-1585 (the average is 1535 for Princeton overall). GPA is similarly very high.
https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2023/07/princeton-...
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.
Do you have any examples? I look see cultural artifacts resulting from multiple generations attending an institution as a negative.
I want educational institutions to be merit based, but when I read this comment I just think of family names being thrown around.
Tautologically, each student at a university who is a blood relative of a graduate of said university has a social network that shares a node with the university's formal network.
"Social capital" is a term of art in sociology meaning "the network of relationships within a particular society", in this case a university. Robert Putnam has written extensively about the empirical benefits of high social capital, which include efficient allocation of resources, lower stress, and prosocial behavior.
A newly admitted student whose social network shares 0 nodes with the university's formal network makes no initial contribution to the university's social connectedness within the universe of people formally affiliated with the university. Whereas the legacy student is already socially connected at the moment of admission.
If you think your society is better than average, you want to continue its culture.
If you shred cultural continuity mechanisms, eg legacy admissions forming a persistent community, you erode the very thing that made your society better than average.
unfortunately for this narrative, there are lots of smart rich people, for obvious reasons
Well then they shouldn't be affected by this changed.
sure. all i’m saying is this is not the “system” at these schools
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:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League
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.
How?
If those were the only two kinds of people who existed, sure.
Never change, HN.
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...
These are all good points and perhaps should be addressed directly with law.
This law seems aimed at asserting control over something which does not belong to the government. The first amendment enshrines rights of freedom of association. While there is no punishment, there is an effort by the government to cast scorn upon certain institutions. I would say this is not a legitimate purpose of the government. Again because of the first amendment, nobody should be judged by the government due to who they decide to hang out with.
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.
I think it would be a different story if the state was using those benefits and the threat of withholding them to negotiate compliance. However, this is not that. This is the state simply ruling on private affairs by dictate.
I think people should be deeply wary of this logic of unilateral ex-post recontacting you seem to be raising.
I think it threatens the rule of law and contracting, social or otherwise.
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.
Seems like the public benefits from the private universities' research too.
> 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.
MIT is a private university that does not do legacy admissions, yet it has no problem maintaining its existence or its exclusivity.
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.
I would imagine there's a lot of overlap between those two groups
In fact I think it impossible to be part of the former without being part of the latter
> 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.
Well go add that to the Wikipedia page then because it's not there
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions...
Also again there's flimsy evidence even here. Percentage of total student body isn't the same as percentage of applicants accepted nor are they necessarily related. For example, a wealthy benefactor offering scholarships could have switched their allegiances or whatever
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. We call positive sexism is chivalry, and positive racism affirmative action and it's broadly supported. The population most strongly opposed to positive racism are people who want or are indifferent to negative racism so it's hard to know how to read that.
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...
"Racist admissions" lol. American society is systematically racist. Americans have a horrible legacy of racism and, frankly, haven't dealt with it.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/16/americans...
Or... not and the results of polls heavily depend on how the question is asked. Apparently more people say affirmative action is good than bad. So maybe? Even the pew poll gets wildly inconsistent results depending on the question. The only consistent thing in all the graphs is the left/right split and you're more likely to be against affirmative action when it's selecting against you.
> 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.
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.
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.
For example, Hillsdale College and Grove City College do not accept government financial support so they're not bound by various legal requirements.
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.
Grants fund research. These usually come from government agencies. If you are good at this, you don't have to teach undergrads because you already bring in $$$, and your grad students are cheap labor. Universities take a cut of grants for overhead. It is a substantial source of funding.
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.
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.
It's not the universities that apply for research funding, and then build basketball courts.
Researchers themselves write and apply for grants, and the grants are for the researchers. The money goes to them and their research, not the university.
For each $1 of federal research funding, the university can take a cut of as much as $0.6 owing to the fact that researchers are using university facilities and admin staff. In fact, the money itself is not even managed by the recipient researchers themselves. The university manages the funds since they use them to pay the professors, grad students, etc.
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.
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They're tax exempt. If they want to throw off the yoke of so-called authoritarianism, they're free to reincorporate as public benefit corporations and pay taxes on all the capital they've been hoarding.
Seems like the public benefit is clear. The benefit provided by a non-profit need not be available to all. In fact, they are allowed to be extremely exclusive.
Why should private schools be treated different?
Institutions, as legal entities, are created by government regulations. In the absence of such regulations, all organizations would be based on voluntary contracts between private individuals. And the people forming the organization, regardless of whether you call them members, shareholders, or trustees, would ultimately be fully responsible for the actions of the organization.
Your reply is reductive: Stanford is not some run-of-the-mill LLC - they have a charter legislated into state law, granting privileges not given(!) to most other self-organized groups in the state. Saying this is not authoritarian - that's just stating historical fact.
You and a few billionaire friends can't incorporate, buy land and automatically have the legal cover that Stanford has; so no, Stanford has no right to exist in it's current, highly privileged form
“ When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”
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.
Now apply this to every private business and their hiring practices and let me know how things shake out and whether people are happy about the results.
> 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.
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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.
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).
> More prestigious private universities use a lot of government funding to fund widely cited research which is what makes them prestigious.
Just a correction, the unversities are NOT the ones that apply for, and receive funding from e.g. the NIH.
It is individual researchers that apply, and receive, funding. And this money goes towards their salary and research. No funding, no salary, no reseacher.
Universities don't themselves receive government funding.
This might be shocking to some, but when a researcher receiver a federal grant (for example), the university takes a significant cut which they refer to as Facilities and Administrative (F&A) costs [1]. The F&A covers the so-called "indirect" costs of conducting research on university facilities: buildings, utilities, admin and accounting, support staff for compliance with federal regulations, etc.
Each university has its own F&A rate, which can be as much as 60% of received federal funds [2]. This rate has historically trended upward.
An example of funds allocation for a typical small NSF grant: https://austinhenley.com/blog/grantbudget.html
[1] https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED517263.pdf
[2] https://financeandbusiness.ucdavis.edu/finance/costing-polic...
Well, the university will take a big slice (sometimes ~40%) of what researchers get from the NIH as "overhead", and then spend it on admins. And if professors hire grad students, the university will take another big slice as "tuition" even if the grad students aren't taking any courses.
This is one reason I'm leaving academia – if I raise money outside of academia, I actually get to keep it.
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.
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.
> 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.)
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 agree, I should have said 1st amendment rights more generally. I've edited my post to update that - thank you.
>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.
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.
Yes, university donors often give grants to specific programs and initiatives. And those very same donors are the ones that have the biggest stake in preserving legacy admissions. They'd have zero issues funding a legal defense of legacy admissions.
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
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
https://www.justice.gov/crt/fcs/T6Manual7
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...
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.
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.
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.
That, and the notion that most people in power allocating those grants are mostly alumni who might want their descendants to have the same opportunity. The ivy league is deeply entrenched in the power structure of the US government, major corporations, etc.
Those research grants perpetuate the exclusivity of the institutions and are very much part of the appeal. It's what makes students (and their parents) pay extra and bend over backwards just to be close to that hoping that some of that genius rubs off on them. It has everything to do with student recruitment.
This is of course nothing new or world shocking. This stuff works exactly the same way in other countries. Rich people looking after each other is a thing. So is nepotism. And feudalism.
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.
The difference is higher education is supposed to be a ladder. That may sound like idealism but removing (or limiting) that ladder based on class is against any ideals of economic mobility or meritocracies.
Then: tie that funding to rule changes. If you want government funds, do as we say. Why do things the other way around?
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.
> 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
Well, no. You'd just choose which schools you wanted to apply to before fixing your pre-exam curriculum. Don't bother covering material you won't need.
You would. But your high school wouldn't.
Yes, your high school would be specialized in certain areas, and you'd choose by specialization.
> 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
https://web.archive.org/web/20220613065302/https://neup.inl....
22 US universities have a live reactor.
I haven’t been applying to colleges for some time.
> The MUTR was constructed in 1960 by Allis-Chalmers, and upgraded to a TRIGA core in 1974.
> the MITR-I was constructed back in 1956! The core was upgraded in 1974...
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/
2. After: https://mitadmissions.org/apply/process/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?
No, it’s not suspicious. And for the second time, the reason is because it’s NOT statistically significant. I don’t care whether it was the first year, a singular data point is not proof of anything suspicious, especially when it fits within typical statistical data. Please, for the love of God, take a stats class before trying to read a graph and draw conclusions. Your supposed gotcha is “hmmm isnt is suspicious if X is less than I think it should be?” When X is altered by so many variables that it is LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE to draw your conclusions from it.
Maybe less asians applied? Maybe less asians qualified? Maybe more asians bowed out than normal and runnerups took their slots, maybe, due to negative publicity, the asians went to different colleges? That seems far more likely than your conspiracy theory.
The fact that Asian enrollment is about the same as it was during the years that racial discrimination was legal is exactly why it's suspected that Yale is still engaging in discrimination. I'm seriously confused as to why you think you're helping your argument by pointing out how similar Yale's enrollment is post-AA ban as it was pre-AA ban.
Imagine University A stops discriminating against Asians and University B decides to continue affirmative action secretly. Which one would have admissions rates in line with years when affirmative action was legal? Which one would see a rise in Asian enrollment?
> Maybe less asians applied? Maybe less asians qualified?
Publishing the stats on how many Asians applied and the average SAT scores of Asian admits and diverse admits would shed light on this. Notable, Yale has not released this data.
> 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.
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.
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.
What do you make of Loper overturning Chevron?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loper_Bright_Enterprises_v._Ra...
I'm not a lawyer (I just read regulations for fun). My understanding is Congress can still explicitly delegate authority to agencies, but an ambiguity in the law is no longer treated as an implicit delegation of authority.
As an example, the authority to define foods is explicitly delegated by Congress.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/21/341
> Whenever in the judgment of the Secretary such action will promote honesty and fair dealing in the interest of consumers, he shall promulgate regulations fixing and establishing for any food, under its common or usual name so far as practicable, a reasonable definition and standard of identity, a reasonable standard of quality, or reasonable standards of fill of container.
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.
Maybe because many of the legacy students were born with a silver spoon in their mouth?
It's not a level playing field when it comes to the resources required to complete your studies. One student may have to commute for <2h per day to accommodation the can afford. The other can have a studio next to the campus and a car, both leased through their dada's company. One has to work part-time to bring food to the table. The other has extra time for sports and study.
This could also be simply due to the Ivy league institution providing the service being bought. In other words, the parents of Timmy might be fed up and stop being sponsors if he gets bad grades.
Of course in rigorous fields of study this is hard to do but if your rich kid is studying art, the grades are almost entirely arbitrary.
No - I mean this is also true for proctored high school exams like the SAT and AP scores. But also - no professor is changing grades based on who your parents are unless they are uber uber uber famous.
> 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?
I get your point, but it's also different in several ways:
The fired person knows of the illegal act, knows the facts, and has standing and motivation to sue. For the legacy admission, nobody knows it happened, much less knows the facts (the student's qualifications), much less has standing to sue.
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.
Assuming this is a serious comment, your legacy status would only help your children at that single institution anyway. They might not even want to go to the same school(s) you attended. I don’t see any real reason for concern.
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).
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.
Many, maybe most, would lose massive prestige and possibly fail without all those government grants and the research papers they provide to the school as advertising.
MIT doesn't have legacy admissions. Do they have a prestige problem?
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.
The school can take 60% of that as an administrative fee. It is absolutely welfare.
So any private organization that accept public funding should be regulated as if it were public?
So if you're running a startup, and you accept a government grant, you should be treated as a public company?
Yup. Quid pro quo.
Yes. Are you serious? Surely you're being silly here.
What if it is just removing state funding from those schools?
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.
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.
Let's face it - a lot of universities are pretty much professional sports teams, so professional sports team do have those things...
> 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. 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.
“Had legacy or donor connections” does not mean “admit[ted] because of ties to alumni or donors”.
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’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
Isn't the point of an elite college is to rub shoulders with the rich and well connected? If you can't do that and are surrounded by other middle and working class students, why not just go to a flagship state school?
No need to worry. They can keep the legacy admissions for the badminton club I guess.
A large part of what makes elite schools elite is the people you meet. That legacy kid whose dad is well connected or is a VC, is just as important as the smart kid that invents the next great thing. These institutions brought together the brains and the money. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.
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
If this 'ban' doesn't mean they lose their tax exempt status if they flout it, it's not really a ban.
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.
> "assuming I’m not discriminating in a way that has 14th Amendment problems"
The Supreme Court decision to ban race-conscious admissions in higher education is based on the 14th Amendment. This law by California is made in light of that decision.
A major contention seems to be if states should have the right to modify or add the list of protected classes that is included for the 14th amendment.
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
I think Grove City, Wheaton (and maybe Bob Jones/Liberty/ORU) are the only ones that go all the way here
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.
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?
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?
In my view this law violates the institutions freedom of association rights. In practicality as much as many of us decry legacy admits, the fact remains that these institutions were built financially by legacy families. So if you’re talented and lucky enough to get admitted you’re benefiting from legacy admissions.
Well, they can stop taking any public money and do what ever the hell they want. it's a simple quid pro quo. Don't like the deal, don't take the money.
Freedom of association has been a dead letter for decades though.
I am very confident that the anti-DEI mob will be all for this, on principle.
Disclaimer: corporate DEI programs are mostly lackluster windowdressing.
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 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.
It's not that big a deal for California schools. Stanford is 14% legacy admits. Harvard and Princeton, though, are about 30% legacy admits.
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.
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?
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.
The law: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billCompareClient.x...
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
With the advent of ChatGPT, universities are becoming more like networking clubs, since for all domains where you don't need a lab, ChatGPT already is often much better than a random lecturer in a class of 300 students that you will never have 1-on-1 access to (and the tutors are also busy with their own research of course).
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.)
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.
Admission by random drawn lot, with a public known fair pseudorandom number generator seeded by the state lotto for public transparency?
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?
Let's see them do children of donors next.
gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/30/us/california-bans-legacy...
When do they ban legacy admissions to weddings? Do uncles and great grandmothers really warrant admission?
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?
better idea: let's ban nepobabies in california politics
I'm going to have to agree with Scott Galloway here, however much I hate to admit that.
The problem isn't so much how admissions are selected, the problem is that admissions went from a fairly normal thing for any educated young adult to an extremely rare privilege.
To solve the problem, there should simply be more supply of quality higher education. And the government should stop funding institutions that profit from deliberately making their education exclusive.
I love how so many people love meritocracy, but when it is applied to Ivy League universities suddenly it’s considered like autonomy is being taken away.
If they receive public funds, they can go and suck limes. They do receive public funds.
That being said, since they receive public funds, they should also be subject to the first amendment as strictly as public universities.
Imagine, Columbia ordered to reinstate the Gaza protestors, and Ivy League generally forced to provide as easy access to forums for conservatives as is provided to progressives.
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.
Overreach into private education, but fine.
education and socioeconomic sorting are at cross-purposes with each other.
What about the merit of my ancestry?
While I agree that banning legacy preference is good policy, how do you prove a violation exactly? And who is gonna do the proving?
If you want to make this work, and you should, you need to do something like total application anonymization, which means identity can't be deducible from any application materials. This is doable with standardized tests, which are a good approach to solving the admissions problem anyway.
So, college admissions should be based solely on standardized test scores.
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.
I thought the whole point of 'private' was to allow nepotism, and to allow teaching any wacky thing they want.
Elite schools are a classic packaging scheme.
Bundle the smart kids with the rich kids and increase the asset value of both.
Always thought legacy admissions were kind of off.
Here's a better idea: make public universities better and more competitive.
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.
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.
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.
Stanford doesn't need your money
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.
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.
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.
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