Looking to the Past to Ban Legacy Admissions | Hacker News Reader

Looking to the Past to Ban Legacy Admissions

insidehighered.com

15 pointsrobg16 comments

On October 25, 1854 sub ordinates of Russian General Pavel Liprandi looked on in horror as a mass of allied cavalry charged positions they had lately taken up in and around an area in the Crimea known as Balaklava. Initially, believing the cavalry men to be intoxicated, the Russian response to this threat was delayed several moments. Regaining their countenance, Russian commanders ordered the enemy cavalry charging towards them destroyed. Russian artillery subsequently opened fire, raining destruction on the enemy cavalry. Les Chasseurs d'Afrique, as shocked and surprised at the developing scene as the Russians, hurriedly organized themselves and rode to the assistance of their bumbling Anglo counterparts, providing cover for the retreating cavalry men.

At the end of it all, the attacking cavalry was devastated. Less than half of the allied cavalry men committed to the initial attack made it back to their lines. Of this number was their commander, a man by the name of James Thomas Brudenell. He returned, and considered himself to have given it 'the old college try', went to his yacht, waiting in Balaklava harbor, and ate a champagne dinner.

This cavalry unit is known to history as the 'Light Brigade'. It was commanded by wealthy men who had purchased commissions that more capable, but less wealthy men could not afford.

We bear witness to the results of our modern day 'Charge of the Light Brigade' daily in our newspapers, on our favorite internet news sites, on our favorite blogs, and via Fox and CNN.

My point is that the current crises will necessitate some rather unpalatable structural changes for the United States. The abandonment of legacy admissions may be one of them.

IMHO the whole concept of legacy admissions (among other things) is distinctly un-American. The USA is all about hard work, perseverance, and talent. This is what has made America great, and it is only through this that America can remain this way.

More and more American society resembles the old European oligarchies of old, the one the people fought so hard to free themselves from. Patents of nobility are gone, but the aristocrats remain all the same.

It saddens me - I've known so many people who had so much raw talent, but never got the help they needed to really excel. I know people who got poor grades in school who could hack circles around me. Yet here I am in college, surrounded by a bunch of pompous idiots who are only here because mommy and daddy could afford to send them to the best tutors, and boost their marks so far beyond what normal, but talented folks get.

Many of the most talented developers I know never got the chance to go to a prestigious school, or even study CS at a formal level. Yet the people around me by and large can't hack their way out of a wet paper bag. The talented, truly obsessive hackers don't get any help from society, but the career-seekers who aren't the least interested in the code they write are. There's no justice.

I'm of the belief that it doesn't really matter for the type of people you are talking about.

If these "lost" people are as talented and ambitious as you claim, they will have no problem succeeding at whatever field in which they choose to apply themselves. If they could "hack circles around [you]," then they will have no problem hacking one of the most peculiar and challenging systems of all, the steps needed to be successful in everyday society.

If they are that capable, then surely putting together a decent college application and getting into a good school or getting a great job would be piece of cake. You might have to bite the bullet and do things like create a resume and apply for jobs or take the SATs, gather the necessary papers, and submit your applications, but sooner or later smart, industrious people will realize that you don't get anywhere by complaining about your situation.

Talented, truly obsessive hackers don't need help from society, because they have the fortitude and resourcefulness to succeed on their own. You can't stop them from learning and working on hard problems. The "career-seekers" can take their safe, well-paid programming jobs at big companies and buy their cookie-cutter house in the suburbs next to all the other "career-seekers," with their white picket fence, 2.5 kids, and a dog. Good for them. But the kinds of hackers you are talking about would not be happy with that kind of lifestyle. They would probably want to be on the bleeding edge, to be a visionary or trendsetter rather than somebody who blindly walks along path paved before them. I believe that if you have a passion as strong as this, the rejection letters from jobs or colleges will lie and fade to ashes, forgotten as you blaze ahead into the life that you forge for yourself.

You would be right, but we've built a system that's stacked against the people I describe. The people I talk about can hack circles around me - but they never got high marks in school (family trouble, learning disability, etc.), and therefore never went to a prestigious college. Many employers' hiring practices are obscenely stacked against coders with no degrees (or even degrees from a "crappier" college).

What you're describing is the precise problem with legacy admissions - the fact that we are judging a person's skill set via the college they went to, and controlling people's futures as a result of our artificial interference with what ought to be a true meritocracy.

If people are objective, and looked at a person's hacking talent instead of whether or not they went to MIT, then I agree - these people can clearly carve a path for themselves despite not going to a prestigious school. But this is not the case.

For the record - the people I'm talking about do work on some insanely cool projects despite the fact that they don't go to well-known colleges, or have degrees at all, but they constantly struggle to be taken seriously. When they walk into an interview (if they're lucky enough to get one) the fact that they come from some podunk college automatically tilts the playing field far away from them.

To try to be objective - I don't think we can really correct people's perception that people from "good schools" perform better. So instead of fighting this false presumption, let's make sure we stack our college student body with truly qualified and talented people.

"As the number of applicants has soared in recent years, premier schools admit as few as 1 in 10 students, a far more selective rate compared with a generation ago. To make room for an academically borderline development case, a top college typically rejects nine other applicants, many of whom might have greater intellectual potential."

http://www.projo.com/education/content/projo_20060917_brown9...

No leg to stand on for private institutions. They are free to set whatever preferences they like. (And they all have them, especially for athletes at schools with sports dynasties, etc.)

I recall Affirmative Action being challenged (Univ of Michigan?) successfully.

Not sure how, qualitatively, race-based admissions is different from letting rich people jump ahead of the line.

One way that race-based admission is different, especially at state universities, is a specific constitutional prohibition (the fourteenth amendment of the federal Constitution) against state action that doesn't provide equal protection of the laws on the basis of race.

Not true. Even private institutions receive millions in government funding. Are they willing to give that up for a few hundred students each year?

It depends on how much they receive from those legacy families.

Just being a "legacy" doesn't entail that one receives a massive boost in admissions. There are a lot of "legacies" out there and they can't all be admitted. The Ivy League legacy whose father sends a $100 check each year only gets a small bump: maybe 50%, or the difference between a 10% vs. 15% chance of admission. It's much more advantageous to come from a brand-name East Coast prep school, which brings the chance of admission, even to Harvard, well north of 50%.

Children of five- and six-figure legacy families are auto-admits, but they have so many advantages that this shouldn't surprise anyone. Most people who complain about academically mediocre "legacy admits" at elite schools are describing students who come from such privileged backgrounds that they would be attending elite schools even if legacy admissions were abolished, because of all the other socioeconomic factors in the admissions process.

What is the evidence that prep school graduates have a base acceptance rate at Harvard above 50 percent? That's not what the matriculation statistics at Exeter

http://www.exeter.edu/documents/Profile_2009_10_7(2).pdf

tend to suggest.

Those statistics show where the students actually go, not where they apply and are accepted. Why do you assume that a baseline admit rate of 50% would imply that 50% of prep-school alums go to Harvard, which is clearly a false implication?

The legacy families aren't one group, pooling their resources, to agitate to keep this perk. Each family acts according to their own interests and at a time of their choosing. Moreover, a family may have made previous donations on the assumption that subsequent generations would get favorable treatment. Those donations can't be pulled back.

By contrast, if such admissions were found to be violating federal law, the government funds could be withheld en masse - current and future pledges all at once - if and until the policy is changed. That's a huge cudgel based on sound principles of punishment - immediate and severe.

Agreed, on your point about other advantages. To my mind that's exactly why schools should be less willing to throw favors to the already advantaged.

You're completely correct on your first point. One point that a lot of people miss about elite colleges is that their true clientele is an entrenched socioeconomic elite. The smart middle-class students are brought in to keep the U.S. upper-crust from falling into aristocratic irrelevance, but the future academics and scientists are definitively not the blue-blooded colleges' clientele. If they were, they wouldn't have to work so hard in high school to get in.

Harvard College (not to pick on Harvard; you can sub in any elite college) is relatively separate from the University, with quite disparate goals and values. The former's an "experience" and the latter is a leading research institution. They have almost nothing in common aside from shared resources. As for elite East Coast colleges, although admissions officials are well-intended, their job is to maintain a system that serves the WASP "old board", and the extracurricular component of admissions, especially legacy admissions, exists for this purpose.

If you think of Ivy League admissions as a reward for hard work in high school, the system's obviously unjust, because the rich kids play by a different set of rules. But if you recognize these colleges and their social purposes for what they are, it's still unfortunate, but not really an injustice worth getting pissed off about. In truth, the "social injustice" preventing middle-class students who supposedly "deserve" admission to Ivy League schools from getting in is extremely mild as far as social injustices go, given the very high quality (Ivy-comparable, sometimes better) of education available at the next 50 or so "runner up" colleges.

All this said, I've come to the conclusion that the brokenness of U.S. undergraduate admissions is probably (paradoxically) a good thing for American society. Many other countries, such as in the E.U., have much better, academics-only, admissions systems. (This is why foreign grad students are shocked by the mediocrity of average Ivy undergrads.) So the bulk of the brilliant minds are concentrated at a few colleges, unlike in the U.S., where they're spread out among a couple hundred. The result of this is that, in Europe, it ends up mattering a lot more where one went to college; whereas in the U.S., it's held to be fairly irrelevant after age 23.

All sorts of politically-popular restrictions have been applied to any institution that takes a single dollar of federal funding -- as project grants, student scholarships, or even student loans that have to be repaid. So there's hardly any fully 'private' institutions left which have the freedom you describe.

Bush's secretary of education is even an advocate of standardized tests for college students, like they have in high school. The federal government doesn't have the constitutional power to impose them, but it can withhold funds from institutions that don't make their students take the tests.

If the bureaucrats have their way, our colleges will one day rival our primary education in quality.

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