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Comment by bedhead | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure there are plenty of dipshit kids who got admitted based on their family's history and donations to the school. I'm also sure that if a couple people meet at Harvard and have a kid, that kid has a way-better-than-average chance of being really smart - smart enough to get into Harvard anyway. The genetic lottery creates a big self-selection bias here. I'd be interested in seeing more stats that could help illuminate what percent of this group (alum, athletes) are dipshits vs genetic lottery winners who are legitimately worthy.

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These kinds of stats are basically impossible to produce while children of alumni get to skip the queue and get in much more easily.

If what you say is true, the problem seems easily fixable -- makes children of alumni enter through the normal channels, and not mention their parents, and if they will get in if they deserve to.

No university would ever do that (effectively anonymize applications) because donations would plummet to almost zero. If there are no perks - one of the big ones being your kids have a good chance of being admitted - what's the point?

No US University. This type of thing doesn't happen in the UK (although I will admit, it wouldn't shock me if a few similar things happen on the quiet).

only 26 percent of the white athletes, legacies, dean’s listers, and faculty children Harvard admitted between 2009 and 2014 would still make the cut based on, say, their grades.

https://slate.com/business/2019/09/harvard-admissions-affirm...

The parents who buy there way in probably had the same done to them. If you have money you are more likely to avoid the poorer middle class kids who got in based on grades so marriages would be between two people who bought there way in because the other students are less likely to socialize over study.

> These kinds of stats are basically impossible to produce while children of alumni get to skip the queue and get in much more easily

Only some schools take into account legacy status, so wouldn't it be possible to do comparisons between schools that do and schools that do not to get those kind of stats? Many students apply to the same school their parents went to even if being the child of alumni does not give them a boost.

Of the top 10 universities in the world, according to US News & World Reports 2018 list, 4 take into account legacy status (Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, and Stanford) [1].

6 do not (MIT, UC Berkeley, Oxford, Caltech, Cambridge, University of Washington).

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/16/top-universities-that-do-not...

The Duke paper addresses this point directly:

"Our model of admissions shows that roughly three quarters of white ALDC admits would have been rejected if they had been treated as white non-ALDCs."

As this article states, there are a lot of non-hyper intelligent people at Harvard. My personal experience with the many people I know from that school back up the assertion that many are there for purely non-intelligence or ability related reasons.

I'd argue genes are negligible here anyway. Just exposure to such elite high-performing family and friends goes a long way to making high-performing people.

The barrier to entry for a lot of people isn't even being good/smart enough -- it's being familiar with or having the resources to navigate the bureaucracy that obfuscates the opportunities which are ostensibly open to "everyone".

I don't know why you're referring to the kids as "dipshit" This article is not about them, it's simply about the admission process not being based solely on intellectual merit. Leave the kids/students out of it.

intelligence is estimated to only be ~50% inherited. the rest is environmental. Based on that... half the legacy admits would be there based on intelligence, the other half would be there based on parental choice of university and might not be qualified.

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