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Comment by crhulls | Hacker News Reader

I’m glad affirmative action was shot down. I hope legacy goes away too.

While legacy admissions might not be a judicial issue, what about legislation that says no federal funding will be provided to institutions who use special standards for legacy applicants?

If you are a private institution and want these programs, that is your legal right (since it likely does not cross legal lines around protected classes), but the taxpayer shouldn’t subsidize it.

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You may cheer for affirmative action's demise, but it will result in less opportunity for minorities, and less diversity in post-secondary institutions (which means less diversity in fields requiring advanced degrees) so consider that before you dance.

Why would that affect us? Why would less diversity mean anything? You can say this but would it actually affect anything?

On the off chance that this is a genuine question, try asking GPT4.

Why don't you tell us, because it just seems like hand waving at the moment.

I just asked it right now. It wrote me a 500-word essay with multiple important bullet points, each of which is probably a 300-500 word essay on its own. This is simply not a twitter-length topic. If you're really interested go educate yourself. If you're not, quit wasting both our time.

Thats ok, I know why you're defelecting.

Define "us" in this question.

"Diversity" isn't an abstract number we try to grow, it's a word to describe human beings who are extremely capable of doing a thing that they're not allowed to do because of the shade of their skin tone or what side of the tracks they grew up on. You want diversity because living in a world where people get to do what they want is a better world than any alternative.

You also want diversity because you want the best people for a given situation, and the odds it's actually a bunch of rich white kids that are the best at being doctors and lawyers and whatnot is basically zero.

But I agree with my sibling commenter; ChatGPT will give you the best form of this argument, better than anything I can write.

I know the argument, the more people the higher the probability for something good or exceptional. But I havent really seen many examples of that in reality. We've got a lot more diversity in the system, but the people that rise to the top are still the same types of people, not the ones that were being advantaged by the old rules that were struck down by the Supreme Court.

Consider that every Fortune 100 company has a DEI initiative and some kind of DEI officer (dedicated, full-time role). There are so many benefits to diversity, that it's ubiquitous at the top companies.

I won't really be able to explain all of this here, but I do need you to understand that what you're arguing for is to allow more people to be oppressed because of their skin tone. I know that's not what you want, that's not what anyone wants.

Congress is completely dysfunctional and can no longer pass transformative laws of any kind.

Agreed, but we still need to envision what good legislation would look like and it does occasionally happen.

This kind of idealism is nice, but the truth is that the American government isn’t a computer we can program with just and elegant code. It’s a vending machine we have to pound on and shake until it dispenses not the just outcome we asked for, but whatever imperfect scraps it will give us.

Affirmative action may not have been an elegant way to counterbalance legacy admissions or compensate people who had been wronged, but it was the only thing that came out when we shook the vending machine, and now people have thrown it in the trash and are acting like something better is going to happen.

Unelected and unaccountable people who were appointed for the express purpose of entrenching established wealth and power threw it in the trash.

I think the last pieces of major legislation—laws that involved a regulatory effort* and not just shoveling money around—were in 2010. Dodd-Frank and the ACA. That’s six Congresses ago.

* or deregulatory, I’m not trying to make a partisan point

Harvard has a $53 billion endowment, I doubt they care about federal funding.

Yes, they care more about legacy admits than federal funding. And probably only legacy admits for the whales. How many "rich" people brag about giving $1MM to their college, but for the elite colleges even such a big number is an immeasurably small amount.

The richer you are, the more you demand the government's largesse. The idea they would need to drawdown on their own wealth would probably infuriate Harvard's administrators.

I believe the accounting algorithm is something to the effect of "if my_money < all_the_money then take_more_money".

They very very much care about federal funding. At a perpetual safe withdrawal rate of 2% $53 billion generates $1 billion a year to spend. Federal research grants alone total more than $500M, and federal funding includes much more than just research grants.

A dozen or so years back there was an effort by many universities, including Harvard, to keep military recruiters off campus. When the courts ruled that this would endanger federal funding Harvard, like all the others, folded like a cheap suit.

> A dozen or so years back there was an effort by many universities, including Harvard, to keep military recruiters off campus.

I’m surprised to hear that. I know objection to it went back to the Vietnam war, but didn’t realize there might have been a recent episode.

Walt Rostow notoriously set troop levels from his office at MIT when he was “on leave” to work in the White House. That ended up causing the complete banishment of military research from MIT. Absolutely no exceptions, I mean, except that overtly military work can be done by MITRE and Lincoln labs (cough completely owned by MIT), ICBM navigation at Draper, the AI Lab and LCS sharing a building with the CIA for a long time, DARPA funding all over the place, whole departments essentially entirely funded by the Navy and the Air Force, and a continual revolving door between the pentagon and some departments.

Harvard still has ROTC students…but they have to get up even earlier and drag themselves over to MIT for early morning drills. I didn’t feel sorry for them; Harvard students don’t have to pull all nighters every week.

As I recall there were two more efforts after that—-one around Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the last one centered around the war in Iraq.

MIT’s endowment is half that (but it’s a much smaller institution) and still the bulk of its revenues are from the US government. It’s basically a huge research lab with a small school bolted on.

How small? Well last time I looked (2018) tuition was 14% of revenue. TBF spending on education (i.e. everything spent on students except for expenses of undergraduate and graduate students working on faculty research projects) was 16% of expenses. With their grant overhead (north of 70% iirc) they could cut tuition, but why bother? Break even is apparently fine. At least they don’t do legacies.

BTW I first looked at these numbers when I was an undergrad in the early 80s and that 14%/16% level has been fairly consistent for the last 40 years.

MIT grant overhead is definitely less than north of 70%. https://ras.mit.edu/facilities-and-administrative-fa-rates says 59%.

Thanks

Plenty of Harvard students take out federal loans to attend. Plenty of professors accept federal grants for their research. While a few alumni donors might give a large amount of cash, the school also likes to brag that 1/6 students receives a Pell grant. The decision might go one way or the other but its outcome is not obvious.

If legacies go away, their endowments might too.

And there we have it. The part they don't want to say. That you can bribe your way into the school.

Ivys get a stupid amount of money from the feds, most Harvard PHD students are funded by federal money, and the university gets ~20-50k a year for each one of them. Just look at https://www.research.gov/grfp/AwardeeList.do;jsessionid=DA66... for a (small) exemple.

If you don't think Harvard cares about federal funding, you don't know how money in higher education works.

Nearly all of that endowment is tied up in long-term investments and funds. It's not liquid.

Their cash flows and run rate are made up of a HUGE percentage of federal funds. Government grants and loans, research grants, and special programs. A large percentage of professors spend a large percentage of their time applying for federal money. That's where their operating budgets come from.

Harvard has according to their own estimates about $5.4B expenses per year. Their endowment would last about 10 years. Their goal to become completely financially independent (assuming an average annual return of 5% on their assets) would require an endowment just about twice that size.

Legislative actions cannot be effective in this way. Any metric the government specifies can be worked around. Harvard can say outwardly they don't prefer legacy students but they can just pad any of the subjective measurements they use like "likability" or "personality" in their favor. As long as it's not something they blatant write to each other in subpoena-able communications it would be very difficult to notice and prove they are purposely favoring whatever trait they want in students.

Because many of our laws don't make sense when you view them from the lens of "for the good of everyone."

Why would legislatures pass a law that has the potential to be both unpopular AND bite the hand that feeds them?

Who wants that? Normal people? Whose paycheck do they sign again?

It might bite some influential people, but this is a generally popular move. I have never met anyone defend this use of my tax dollars. Would you care to be the first to explain why I am paying for the children of well connected parents to get a leg up in university admission?

From what quarters would this be unpopular? Obviously beneficiaries of this wouldn’t like it, but I bet it would be something with bipartisan middle class support.

It might help if you thought of affirmative action as not only righting a wrong, but also partial compensation for stealing the lives and labor of enslaved people for profit. That theft has never been repaid. Furthermore, Jim Crow, segregation, and myriad other racist policies and practices prevented black Americans from being able to meaningfully advance, while white America thrived on the wealth created by stolen labor.

Republicans like to think that affirmative action is about collective guilt. It’s not. As a white person, I don’t feel guilty about slavery. But, I do recognize a monumental theft which the victims were never compensated for, and which continues to shape our society.

Edit: changed “in contrast” to “furthermore”

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