Something tells me “prestige” has a bit more to do with it than any kind of unique experience. Not just wanting to be an elite, but wanting others to be instantly recognized by others as such. Closely related to that would be ego. Wanting to be able to tell yourself that you’re “the best.” As a wise man once said, if you just want to do something unique, then “put some jell-o down your pants.”* You don’t need to dump several hundred thousand dollars and four years into Harvard for that!
Naw, you’d be wrong. It’s actually somewhat embarrassing to be identified as a Harvard grad, because that’s what people think of you. All my reunion swag says HR## (the year i graduated, in 2 digits) and none of it features the name “Harvard” or the school seal, because too many grads wouldn’t want to use a beach towel in public that advertised that they went to Harvard. Almost all the “Harvard” gear sold in the area is purchased by tourists, not students.
Hmmm. We had a coworker who was a Harvard grad (MBA). We had a pool on how many minutes it would take him when meeting a new colleague to mention he was a Harvard MBA. The over/under was three.
Well now you see that’s why I didn’t want to go to Harvard, Yale, or Columbia for law school (I have an ego, but I also have shame). But you better believe I still went to a T14, and it’s not because I was so interested in learning alongside a diverse cast of characters. I could have gotten that at a second tier school that would have prepared me just as well for a public interest legal career.
So maybe I’m projecting, but if all an aspiring student wishes is for diversity, they don’t need to go to Harvard to get it. Hence my skepticism.
Many people go to Harvard to make connections, and to be connected. Harvard is a propagation system for the ‘elite’. Your Mom or Dad is a big shot DC lawyer or New York financial maven, and you go to Harvard because they did and because all the movers and shakers send their kids there, and their kids become movers and shakers and connecting to them is important to your future wealth.
Harvard is also where you go to find a fellow rich, conmected person to marry so you don’t dilute the family wealth into Hoi Polloi.
Harvard used to be a place where you went if you were one of the top brains in the school system, and because Harvard was full of top brains the classes were hard and the degree meant you were the cream of the crop. it’s still like that in a few faculties. But many of them are now no better than any other school, or even worse.
At least at the undergraduate level, it’s not about diversity, its about diverse excellence. Its about kids who grew up in refugee camps or rural Alaska or public housing or facing systemic racism or and are still performing academically at a very high level and have accomplished something else that is remarkable or interesting.
Right. It’s diversity to the extent it adds to the prestige. It’s interest convergence. As I said earlier in the thread, affirmative action as it should have been was snuffed out 45 years ago. Diversity is just something conservatives dreamed up to make themselves feel better, while ultimately still serving the ends and interests of the elite. Not as a genuine remedy.
Not at all. It is not that this theoretical diversity creates this symbolic prestige, its that actually going to school with a diverse array of high achievers from backgrounds far different than their own actually, really is a more interesting and satisfying experience for the elite than going to college with a bunch of upper middle class suburban try hards. It’s what they want, not just what they think they have to say they want.
No, not really. What I’m saying is that you tell whether a place has a quota by looking at trends over a number of years. And when you look at Harvard’s trend in the 00’s it shows pretty clearly that there is an Asian quota, or at least was at that time. (Again, I don’t have access to data for the 10’s, but would love to see those, especially in conjunction with a place like Caltech. It seems like they must have loosened up at least a little, but I bet the trend line doesn’t look like Caltech’s.)
What going up or not over the next several years will show is what Harvard wants its messaging to be about it at this point in time: whether their message is “see, look, we no longer have a quota because our numbers are going up,” or “screw it, we don’t even care if it looks like we are continuing to have a quota.”
Harvard MBA is entirely different from Harvard undergrad. I agree, all the Harvard MBA’s I’ve known like to show it off. There’s a joke with Harvard undergrads that if you ask them where they went to school, they’ll say, “Boston.” If you keep pressing them, they’ll say, “Cambridge.”
I think that elite universities should be trying to find the students with the greatest potential; both academically and in terms of organizing / participating.
Therefore, how it should work IMO (and frankly, this is another of those times where most countries are already doing it this way):
Not directly factor in race (it’s often difficult to define race anyway)
But factor in economic circumstances; if you’ve come from a poor neighbourhood, and a lousy high school and achieved level X, that implies your potential is greater than someone who has had the best tutoring their whole life and only obtained the same level X. One had a headwind, one had a tailwind, now they’re about to have the same level of assistance. (of course, the ivy league universities are crazy expensive so I guess I’m just saying “kid with scholarship” weights better than “kid with daddy paying”).
Also factor in involvement in community projects, volunteering etc or just work experience. Universities benefit by having at least some students contributing more than just showing up to collect their scroll.
Race based diversity decision making is now disallowed; is cultural based diversity still okay?
Can a school still aim for a class that has reasonable representation of lower SES rural, lower SES urban, first generation college, immigrant experience, etc. students?
Yes, except to the extent it would be national-origin based, in theory.
There’s nothing stopping someone from making the argument that such practices have a disparate impact on particular protected classes, though, if they’re really set on mirroring the civil rights era but in reverse.
As I say: trying to aim for a particular level of diversity is the wrong framing in my view, and indeed, something AA was explicitly not supposed to be doing – it was only supposed to be about factoring race into the decision e.g. if you are native american, it’s a slight plus to your application, all else being equal. Not about trying to get X native americans into a given institution.
So I am saying that coming from an underprivileged background should be a slight plus, all else being equal. If this sounds like it will become unfair to kids who go to fancy schools, the point is that all else will not typically be equal: the kids who go to an elite boarding school are generally gonna destroy the kids from an under-resourced, under-staffed school in the inner city.
Factoring in the kids’ backgrounds will just slightly shift the balance from being grossly unfair to just very very unfair to kids from poor backgrounds.
For a very particular definition of “supposed to,” I guess that’s true. Specifically, the definition where you ignore where these policies actually originated, and start with the Supreme Court decisions that said schools couldn’t actually do what they wanted to do, but could do a very watered down version (and then last week said they couldn’t do the watered down version anymore either).
I mean, of course it’s the case that the goal was to have a certain number of minority students in the school. That is the entire point – there didn’t used to be any, so they implemented new policies intended to make it so that there would be.
Sure but it’s the distinction between the motivation for bringing in a policy and the policy itself. I was responding to a point about “diversity decision making” which implied the implementation itself included targets.
It wasn’t, and to make it clear: what was the target number? How were universities coordinating to pick the same number?
Anyway, it’s all academic now, so to speak.
I don’t think there should be targets, but I would be in favor of the application system giving a plus for coming from an underprivileged background, especially while it still contains factors like a legacy application bonus.
That would be having a quota which is not what I am asking about. Or at least I believe there is a distinction?
If I was building a university class at a highly competitive program I would want the class to be full of:
Students likely to achieve well in the program. Past grades/accomplishments and circumstances that they have had to overcome to achieve those factors in to my assessment. But frankly above a certain level a higher GPA or test score is not predictive of greater future ability to achieve.* At a competing school the pool to select from that are likely to achieve well far exceeds the number of spots.
Students with a variety of backgrounds and experiences. I believe that only experience interacting with those of a variety of backgrounds can adequately prepare you for a future career interacting with those of a variety of backgrounds. I have some who are excellent musicians but if I already have a bunch of them but few who have demonstrated community leadership I may be primed for looking for those with that more. If I have few from rural poor backgrounds then someone with that background is more attractive, assuming they meet my standards otherwise. So on.
To no small degree this is like building any other sort of team. I don’t want a basketball team full of great centers and no great point guards. I do want to have every student to have their preconceptions challenged by experiences. Such would benefit all.
*ETA that my own experience is that the very top is also a negative predictor. Of my medical school class the very top would not be who I would want to see, nor the very bottom. The middle 90% made the best clinicians.