I think they will regret removing this. I think Asians will over run Harvard, Yale, etc, etc. If access is just/mostly on marks, that’s the only way it plays out I think. But, then most universities make double tuition, or more, on foreign students, so they won’t mind much I’m sure.
I suspect white folk, who think their kid will get a better shot now, are in for a big surprise.
I find the idea that an increase in the number of Asian kids would be described as “overrun by Asians” to be offensive. Harvard would be just fine with a higher percentage of Asian kids.
But fwiw: Access is not mostly on marks, and i don’t expect the percentage of Asian kids to increase, at least not much.
I expect to see fewer Black kids, more White kids, and about the same number of Asian kids, with probably about the same split between East Asian and South Asian. But time will tell.
I hope what we see is a renewed emphasis on closing the gaps that led to affirmative action in the first place.
As a white guy, if an Asian kid scores better than mine and gets his place in college, well, my kid should have worked harder. I am not afraid of merit-based admissions. If the schools become 80% Asian, my response would be to say, “What are those Asian parents doing that we aren’t?”
By the way, if you are worried about diversity (real diversity, not diversity of skin pigment), it’s still okay to use lifestyle, extra-curriculars, etc in determining college admissions. The only thing you can’t do is force ‘diversity’ based on immutable characteristics like race.
So if you are worried about Tiger Moms working their kids 18 hours a day such that the kids aren’t well-rounded, you can certainly add other factors such as extra-curricular activities or sports ability to your admissions, so long as they aren’t a proxy for race or other immutable characteristics.
Frankly, a much bigger injustice in the Ivy’s, and a major source of institutional inequality, is the legacy system. How about getting rid of that first? I’m always surprised by how little progressives seem to care about that, as its a major factor in maintaining cross-generational wealth and cementing power into the same families and groups over decades.
Do you expect to see better students on average, worse students on average, or about the same?
But it’s not just charitable giving that is the issue.
Most prestigious universities and some that aren’t so prestigious have a policy called “needs blind” admissions, which means that the admission procedures do not take a student’s ability to pay into account. For some schools it ends there - if you are admitted it’s on you to figure out how to pay for it.
But the really prestigious schools with large endowments have “needs blind no loan” policies. Harvard is one such school. What that means is that if you are admitted, you will receive a financial aid package (grants or a combination of grants and work/study opportunities) that bridge the gap between what it costs to attend the school and what your family can pay. The package will not include any loans, nothing has to be paid back. This is guaranteed if you are admitted.
From a practical POV, it’s hard to “blind” the admission process, especially if the school uses a holistic model. And the reality is that legacy students are likely to have parents that can afford to pay all or most of the tuition, and that alone makes them an attractive choice.
Doesn’t this actually mean normal white students, who don’t have rich parents or parents who went to Harvard themselves, are significantly disadvantaged vs students of other races? Since there is a de facto quota system, and almost half of white students admitted fall into one of these categories.
I still find the ‘legacy’ system really shocking - coming from a country where class discrimination is a huge deal, giving an advantage to already privileged young people seems as wrong as giving an advantage to white students would to an American. The big controversy when I went to university was Oxbridge admitting so many private school pupils (and I probably benefited from AA there) - but they at least purport to be following meritocratic principles.
About the same. Harvard has vastly more highly qualified applicants than slots. I’m sure they will continue to select highly qualified applicants.
Not that I’ll be able to see that, of course. But that’s what i expect the faculty will think.
Yeah. That’s who i expect to benefit from this, not Asians.
Of course, a lot of the athletes don’t come from especially privileged backgrounds. But the legacy kids and the kids whose parents made massive donations do.
It’s true, as @Ann_Hedonia points out, that the tuition payments of those privileged kids help make it possible for the poor kids to graduate debt-free. That’s not nothing. I mean, it may not seem like a big deal to people from countries that fund college, but it’s a huge deal to Americans.
Having private universities just seems bad, tbh. Of course they exist to transmit privilege, and all the commitment of the staff to equity can’t hope to change that. The best thing that might come of this is more recruitment to important positions from lower level institutions from all races, rather than relying on Harvard to decide who gets to be a leader.
Giving preference to children/grandchildren of alumni is pure corruption only exceeded by giving a preference to children of donors and politicians. Although I consider racial preference scandalous as well, it at least has the excuse of being done out of a good motive.
One corrupt practice that needs more sunlight is schools receiving government money — as they all do — giving preference to children of politicians. I know this went on where I went to school, for members of the state legislature, and just found evidence it goes on at Stanford:
The difference between public and private has declined over time, There have been big reductions in the proportion of state university budgets coming from the state’s government. And, although there are ups and downs, I think that federal funding sources, available to all research universities, have increased.
Here is one middle-ground school, and there must be others:
And even the “public” colleges are very expensive.
Wow. But what can you expect? I realised these private universities are more like Eton than like Cambridge. In the end, it’s all about money.
I’ve thought for a long time that the policy of sending more and more people to university is misguided. Creating more graduates does not create more graduate jobs, it just makes a degree simultaneously less useful and more essential. Send those who need it and no more; employers can and should train people if necessary, and everyone else can save the cost of loans and make more money at the same time: win win.
Employers don’t want to pay to train someone who will then quit and with for a competitor.
I mean, employers do train entry level employees, but they certainly have little incentive to do it any more than they need to.
Probably the large majority of graduate jobs don’t use anything learned in the degree. So although this is a real problem, it’s not applicable to too many people going to university. If they couldn’t get graduates, companies would simply look at school grades and achievements instead.
Its even weirder than that. The full pay kids atany university are the customer. The full aid kids are there because they help provide the sort of experiences the full-pay families want. They want their kids to go to school and study with a heavily curated diverse population, because that’s more fun than homogenity and because it helps broaden their minds.
@DemonTree points out that suburban white kids seemed squeezed out by the system. And they absolutely are. A kid who went to a fancy feeder school and grew up in a household with an annual income of over 400k doesn’t want to room with a kid from Topeka whose dad is a CPA. He either wants to room with someone like him, or someone “exotic”.
So the kids who need full or near full aid really should be seen as something the university provides its actual customers. And its not a bad trade. You serve as a rich kid’s cultural experience but you get a fantastic education and get launched straight into affluence yourself.
Now, most admissions officers are really committed to helping kids and they work really, really hard to support them. But institutionally, the motives are less altruistic.
Some are perfectly happy to do just that. They go to one of the many solid state universities for half the cost of an ivy league school. And they tend to make just as much money, either way. The ivy league don’t really give much of a career boost to kids who are already at the top of the heap, unless they want to go into some very specific fields.
What if there was more to it than that? Suppose the Asian students who beat your kid for the admission were from countries in Asia. Let’s also suppose that it’s widely known that the education system in those countries was different from ours; that the most promising students were identified early, enrolled in special schools with small class sizes and the best teachers. They’re given individual coaching and tips on how to write the best application essay. In short, the kids who are being admitted didn’t just out-compete your child on a level playing field, but they had advantages that your child did not have access to.
Perhaps that’s an exaggeration, or an over-simplification. I think the people in favor of affirmative action would consider your “may the best man win” scenario to be over-simplified in the other direction.
Well, sure, but those aren’t the ones that are at Harvard. The kid who goes to a $50k a year prep school and then pays $80k a year for Harvard isn’t doing it for the ROI, any more than people spend money to travel for the ROI, or buy the house they love for the ROI. They (kid and family) are going to Harvard because they want a particular experience and they are willing to pay for it. A key part of that experience is being surrounded by absolutely amazing people, and if you swapped out the current set of full-aid kids for a set of upper middle class suburban kids with perfect grades, test scores, and similar extracurriculars, it would not be that same experience.
Yes, that’s absolutely true. And that’s what Harvard means when it says that it values a class with “diversity”. It’s not about having the same racial demographics as the country. It’s about having really interesting students who add value to the experience of the other students.