Elite schools want people from the power class. A lot of this is explicitly baked into admissions. Over 40% of white students at Harvard are side-door admissions (legacy, donors, children of faculty, etc.). This is especially true for minority admissions. For the most part, Harvard won't admit lower-class African Americans; they'll select from a much smaller pool who have already moved into the power networks. That's important for maintaining power networks now that the DEI movement means minorities will likely e.g. serve on corporate boards.
There is some amount of meritocratic admissions as well, but you can't look at this as an accident.
And all of this contributes to extremely low intellectual diversity at Ivy Leagues. I have the pleasure of frequently interacting with Harvard students and it is consistently true that they are always unremarkable individuals. These schools simply breed a managerial class that is capable of grinding hard and following orders.
>Historically, MIT faculty were nerds into neat tech problems.
Computer Science used to be for nerds that were into neat tech problems. Now it's just seen the same as business/law/finance/whatever. And accordingly, we now have a deluge of CS graduates that want nothing to do with tech and simply move into management as fast as possible.
Less popular but still hardcore places like Carnegie Mellon, Caltech, some state schools like Ohio State, UMich come to mind. Just stay away from woke ivy league
I’ve suspected this. There was always some seed corn of this type at MIT, even in the old days. I got SB, 1968-72. Hacker was a new word, and nerd was often spelled with a “u.” It would have been unthinkable to try to prosecute Jonathan Swartz then.
- Clever financial schemes and complex conflicts-of-interest
- Incredible salesmanship relative to the amount of substance
- ... and so on.
I've seen criminal activity there too (which I can't elaborate on), but I suspect the Institute is waiting for an Enron-style collapse. It will be a soft landing. The endowment is obscene at this point; the Institute can weather a lot.
I would agree that high-value donors definitely access a side-door. I know of one university that had an admissions officer who dealt with children of famous people and big donors.
But I think that children of faculty and legacies are not as clear-cut a case. For example, it takes a lot of skill and hard work (and luck) to become a faculty member at Harvard. If you are still there when your kids are college-aged, you are very likely tenured. It would not at all be surprising if your children were significantly above-average in terms of academic achievement. This would be the result of your intelligence, drive, mate selection, and parenting. The fact that your kids are much more likely to get into Harvard (probably around 40%, versus 4%) is due in large part to these facts. The admissions office may put a thumb on the scale, but it's undoubtedly the case that the average faculty child applicant has higher qualifications than the average Harvard applicant.
These same arguments apply to legacy admits, but to a much lesser degree. Harvard did not used to be much of an academic/intellectual filter, but since the 90s or so it was very difficult to get in. If you are applying now and your parents went there, there's a good chance that the hard work and skill that got them in was passed down to you, by nature or nurture.
I don't disagree with you entirely, but I do disagree with the last sentence that frames 'meritocratic' admissions as distinct from children of legacy and faculty who are admitted at higher rates than the average applicant.
However, Harvard admissions keeps a special list of ALDC students and admits from that list. It's not that there are no standards, but the standards are much, much lower.
Is this true for children of faculty? I realize it is certainly true for the A (athletes) and D (donors' kids). Are there any sources that break the standards/cutoffs out by subgroup? These are very different groups of applicants, and I would be surprised if they were all subject to the same processes.
What you say is true for undergraduate admission but unless you’re from an URM that’s not how graduate admission works. They admit people they think will make excellent researchers, or that they think are capable of graduating, for URMs. Law school, need school and business school may pay more attention to those kinds of concerns but I’m not aware of e.g. Yale Law having legacy preferences.
Or, maybe they don't anymore. But I bet that historically, there must have been some baked-in probability of how much a student will potentially give back in the future.
Not sure how that correlates with old vs new money. But coming from old money has some clear advantages, like knowing how to play the game.
(I'm fairly sure at least business schools judge applicants on their potential power and influence, in the future.)
> Over 40% of white students at Harvard are side-door admissions (legacy, donors, children of faculty, etc.).
I'm sure it's over 40%. It wouldn't surprise me if it's 70. There are a lot of side doors.
My information is dated, but as of circa-2008, the Ivies were including ZIP code and paternal (but not maternal) profession in their predictive modeling. The interviews (which are evaluative, even when people say they're not) are also driven more by class markers than academic factors.
> This is especially true for minority admissions. For the most part, Harvard won't admit lower-class African Americans; they'll select from a much smaller pool who have already moved into the power networks. That's important for maintaining power networks now that the DEI movement means minorities will likely e.g. serve on corporate boards.
This. Which is why I get so angry about right-wing populism. Yes, DEI initiatives mostly come from a place of insincerity. Corporates care about more about making the elite look more palatable than changing how it actually governs, and the minorities being accepted into the outer fringes of the (still inbred at heart) corporate elite will be discarded the minute they are no longer needed. But, nevertheless, the causes (racial, social, and gender justice) from which "wokeness" sprung are still quite laudable and necessary. The fact that we've allowed insincere corporate assholes to carry a banner on these issues is a travesty... because, while they don't know it, a lot of the right-ish populists are motivated by justified anger at the corporate system... and for us on the left to say that they're actually motivated by "anti-woke" racism does no good for anyone.
Thank you for this. I’ve tried explaining this to many of my peers and family but even now, this viewpoint is considered bigoted by many, at least in major metro areas on the west coast. I think part of the problem is people are responding to the messenger (the right) rather than the message.
It's 43%. You can do a web search. It came up in legal discovery for a perfectly reasonable discrimination law suit.
It distorts things a lot.
* Coveted non-ALDC slots are that much more limited and exclusive. Harvard looks harder to get into.
* Since close to half of the white slots are pre-stuffed, that makes the remaining ones that much harder to get into. That, in turn, leads to extreme affirmative action and no slots for Asians.
There is some amount of meritocratic admissions as well, but you can't look at this as an accident.