On "meritocracy."
November 18, 2021 6:32 AM Subscribe

Turns out, Harvard students aren’t that smart after all. 43% of Harvard’s white students are either recruited athletes, legacy students, on the dean’s interest list (meaning their parents have donated to the school) or children of faculty and staff. The kicker? Roughly three-quarters of these applicants would have been rejected if it weren’t for having rich or Harvard-connected parents or being an athlete. This dynamic is inherently racialized, with almost 70% of all legacy applicants at Harvard being white. A white person’s chances of being admitted increased seven times if they had family who donated to Harvard. Meanwhile, African American, Asian American and Hispanic students make up less than 16% of students who are children of faculty and staff. (SL Grauniad) (archived link)
posted by Lyme Drop (161 comments total) 57 users marked this as a favorite

So I work in the sciences, and I'm probably not the target for this article, but genuine question: is this news to anyone?
posted by Alex404 at 6:59 AM on November 18, 2021 [81 favorites]

This is my surprised face.

On a slight tangent, I have long believed that part of the right wing/libertarian backlash against so-called "Critical Race Theory" is because, if US society is and has been systematically biased against people of color, then white males' claims of "meritocracy" are nonsense. Well, more obviously nonsense.

There's no "meritocracy" if one is ahead in a rigged game, and so their claims that they deserve an outsized portion of society's resources have no validity. Well, more obviously no validity.
posted by Gelatin at 7:00 AM on November 18, 2021 [58 favorites]

This fits in so well with an article I was reading the other day, "The Myth of the Classically Educated Elite."
posted by mittens at 7:01 AM on November 18, 2021 [27 favorites]

Ooh ooh ooh, now do Yale!
posted by chavenet at 7:16 AM on November 18, 2021 [30 favorites]

Ooh ooh ooh, now do Yale!

George W Bush was elected to the United States presidency by the Supreme Court in 2000, and traveled the world as history's most visibly stupid Yale grad. Yale is done.
posted by eustatic at 7:21 AM on November 18, 2021 [50 favorites]

I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
posted by deadaluspark at 7:22 AM on November 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

One deleted; please skip arguing with the trollish headline of "not that smart"; that isn't the key takeaway from the study, it's something a Guardian headline writer introduced for clickbait purposes, and arguing with it is a huge derail from the core point about the racist system in play here. The study found something that is probably not surprising to most Mefites (a huge admissions advantage for white applicants). Please avoid expressing your worldly non-surprise about racist systems in terms that sound like rationalizing or endorsing those systems.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 7:23 AM on November 18, 2021 [47 favorites]

JFK's very revealing harvard essay
posted by lalochezia at 7:32 AM on November 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

This fits in so well with an article I was reading the other day, "The Myth of the Classically Educated Elite."

I've only read the first half so far, but this instantly sold me on the author:

I went to Stanford and quickly discovered I had much more in the way of education than almost all of my classmates, who seemed more or less unmoored from the Western tradition and certainly hadn’t read any more of the Great Books than I had. I commenced a life of active alcoholism and didn’t attend class for four years. For me, college involved absolutely no learning, so I cannot speak to what is taught there.
posted by rory at 7:32 AM on November 18, 2021 [27 favorites]

The original paper, http://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/legacyathlete.pdf
posted by SunSnork at 7:33 AM on November 18, 2021 [5 favorites]

I went to a different "elite" university (University of Chicago) and one weird effect of that is seeing some of the worst, most mediocre people I knew as an undergrad in positions of power and authority. A lot of people there (and this is a university who touts their intellectual rigor) are simply not that bright.
posted by an octopus IRL at 7:33 AM on November 18, 2021 [27 favorites]

(I should add that plenty of people at the U of C are great and/or smart! And there are lots of people who worked hard to get there, although I was not one of them -- I believe my admission was a mere accident of fortunate birth and geography -- but I feel like the worst people there are some of the most conventionally successful)
posted by an octopus IRL at 7:35 AM on November 18, 2021 [7 favorites]

This isn't news to me, but it's interesting to see statistics on it.
posted by MillMan at 7:38 AM on November 18, 2021 [8 favorites]

That's the real crux of the issue here. None of us is surprised by it, but having the concrete evidence is at least helpful in proving it needs to change.
posted by deadaluspark at 7:39 AM on November 18, 2021 [20 favorites]

Knowing that something is true and knowing something is true because you have data proving it are two entirely different things. There's no point in dismissing science on things "already known" because you "already knew them" unless you only want to declare yourself a smartypants.
posted by tiny frying pan at 7:39 AM on November 18, 2021 [70 favorites]

I was told that there was a period, maybe in the 20s or before, where it was a fashion at Harvard and elite universities for students to pay servants to go to class for them, so they could do leisure? I wonder if that's true.

Uhm, rich students paying people to write research papers for them is totally still a thing. I'd wager at least some of them are clever enough to hire a doppelganger look-alike to go to class for them. (Actually, if the hired person always goes to class and the real person is never revealed, they might not even need to look like them.)
posted by deadaluspark at 7:40 AM on November 18, 2021 [9 favorites]

I suppose what is new about this analysis is its attempt to focus (despite the headline) on the racist nature of the unfair treatment. I hope we can center that, and not make the same old complaints about rich people.

who cares about the rich people, maybe we should focus on opportunities we are losing when our country's talent is suppressed.

Here's what should have been the focus of the headline:::

Here’s the thing– Harvard is insanely competitive. The admittance rate for the class of 2025 was 3.43%, the lowest rate in the school’s history, in a year that saw an unprecedented surge in applications. But as more and more comes to light about Harvard’s admissions process, it’s clear that the school’s competitiveness is not just based on academic strength or great test scores

and, just to bring it back to Yale and the 2000 election, that decision was based on a process that suppressed the black vote; and yet, the Democratic party shied away from the racism inherent in the process in that moment
posted by eustatic at 7:41 AM on November 18, 2021 [18 favorites]

Just shows that Harvard (and other "elite" universities who admit legacies at such high rates) is basically in the same boat as USC. There are really only two kinds of students at places like this. Brilliant poor/middle class kids, and stupid rich kids.
posted by tclark at 7:42 AM on November 18, 2021 [9 favorites]

I think what is unclear here, but clear to me, that the USA wants Harvard to reward more, maybe many more, of the Brilliant poor/middle class kids
posted by eustatic at 7:45 AM on November 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

Insider view: The tyranny of merit 8m50s from Michael Sandel. tl;dr: Merit = luck. Elitism shits the bed we all lie in. $$$ is not the only valuable.
posted by BobTheScientist at 7:48 AM on November 18, 2021 [3 favorites]

I went to a top ten school twenty five years ago and almost everyone I knew was brilliant. Now I’m wondering if I was the stupid rich kid (clearly coming from a family that didn’t qualify for financial aid I was the pigeon at the poker table).
posted by bq at 7:50 AM on November 18, 2021 [6 favorites]

So if a huge proportion of the white students are in these prioritized groups, but the incoming class isn't really disproportionately white, then it follows that the big losers here the white kids who aren't legacies/donors/athletes?
posted by kickingtheground at 7:55 AM on November 18, 2021 [14 favorites]

Access to the aristocracy is part of the reason for going to Harvard. These kids are not there to be taught; they are part of the lesson plan.
posted by interogative mood at 8:02 AM on November 18, 2021 [75 favorites]

No, I don’t think they’re the biggest losers. It is fair to point out that the intersection of white, rich and well-connected is the sweet spot and that plenty of smart white kids aren’t part of that club. But they aren’t the biggest losers, no, in my opinion. I think having a self-perpetuating ruling class makes the whole country the biggest loser.

But, as has just been remarked, that’s why people go there: not just to get a first rate education, but to be initiated into the ruling class. This will make Harvard admissions policies extremely difficult to reform.

Ultimately, I don’t know what to do about it besides support affirmative action, support smart kids from all backgrounds who choose to look elsewhere, and withhold automatic admiration for people with Ivy degrees.
posted by ducky l'orange at 8:06 AM on November 18, 2021 [5 favorites]

the big losers here [are] the white kids who aren't legacies/donors/athletes

I mean, other than all the Black and brown kids with Harvard chops whose spots are being taken by white kids who are legacies or children of faculty and staff, sure.
posted by Lyme Drop at 8:06 AM on November 18, 2021 [21 favorites]

This is less an issue at Harvard (endowment: $53B) but recruiting athletes is also a way to have "needs-blind" admission while still prioritizing people who'll pay full price to attend.
posted by ethand at 8:07 AM on November 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

"(Actually, if the hired person always goes to class and the real person is never revealed, they might not even need to look like them.)"

Gattaca, but make it Harvard
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:10 AM on November 18, 2021 [23 favorites]

One interesting thing is that Harvard Extension is a pure meritocracy. Harvard Extension is an "earn your way in" program where you pass three Harvard classes with a B or better, including a difficult writing class, and you are in. Harvard Extension students take the same classes, with the same students and professors as the regularly admitted students.

The only drawback is that when you graduate, even having studied a hard science, your degree is listed on the diploma as a "Bachelor of Liberal Arts in Extension Studies".
posted by Xoc at 8:14 AM on November 18, 2021 [17 favorites]

Always good to have more support for my long-held positions that 1) the continued existence of legacy admissions obviates any argument against affirmative action and 2) Harvard alums as a group are shockingly underwhelming. Also, I confess that this makes my teenage self feel slightly better about not getting into Harvard!
posted by sinfony at 8:22 AM on November 18, 2021 [10 favorites]

I am totally in favor of eliminating legacy and athletic preferences. (Donors is more complicated: Selling off a few seats for a few million each to be used for financial aid might be worth it.) As noted, these preferences disproportionately help white applicants, because applicants in those categories are disproportionately white. From the cited article: "...a white typical applicant with a 10% chance of admission would see a five-fold increase in admissions likelihood if they were a legacy; more than a seven-fold increase if they were on the dean’s interest list; and that they would be admitted with near certainty if they were a recruited athlete."

But the Harvard admissions office also applies racial preferences in support of Black and Hispanic applicants. From the same article: "However, the increase in diversity resulting from the elimination of legacy and athlete preferences pales in comparison to the diversity benefits stemming from racial preferences. We show that eliminating legacy and athlete preferences and racial preferences would result in a 69% and 42% decline in African American and Hispanic admits, respectively."

That result does not, in itself, support the elimination of racial preferences, and of course there's the underlying question of the historical and social causes why disadvantaged minorities are underrepresented and would be even more so without racial preferences, and whether the general academic measures used for admissions are appropriate. But "Harvard discriminates in favor of rich white kids," though true, is only one part of the story.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 8:30 AM on November 18, 2021 [4 favorites]

The idea of the Ivies being meritocracies is relatively recent. It was only in the 50s and 60s that they started reinventing themselves as the place where smart students go. Their traditional role was as a finishing school for the children of the wealthy elite. The dirty secret is that it's still their primary function.

I connected with Harvard as an adult, and definitely went through a period of shock and dismay at how broken it is - even more so than the state school I attended because there's zero incentive to improve any of their stupid institutions.

They are filthy rich. So they draw some of the most high-achieving academics. So they gain a reputation. So they draw more high-achieving academics. Ad infinitum.

Still I'd say my stereotype of a Harvard undergrad isn't so much a stuck-up rich kid as it is a high-octane ambitious workaholic who has received so much institutional validation that they absolutely believe they can do anything.
posted by xthlc at 8:33 AM on November 18, 2021 [61 favorites]

Brilliant poor/middle class kids, and stupid rich kids.

A competitive school's reputation rests on the achievement of the former, of whom much of is demanded "because we gave you a scholarship/financial aid/whatever" or because those crippling loans you take out will haunt you for the rest of your life unless you are very, very careful. The latter will reap all the rewards to their reputation and it won't matter because, in the grand scheme, those kids can't fail, at least not in any way that means anything

The upside/downside to being a financial aid kid at a fancy boarding school is that you figure this out at about age 15, well before you watch your rich C-average classmates get into your first-pick school because they are legacies, while you get rejected because you're "not competitive enough"

Not that I'm still bitter or anything.
posted by thivaia at 8:34 AM on November 18, 2021 [33 favorites]

I would love it if someone could compare, say, a 1L contracts class between a good state school and Harvard, especially if both classes are using the same casebook. The amount of material covered, the quality of instruction, the difficulty of the exam. Is there any way in which a Harvard law grad is actually better qualified, not in innate ability but education? I'm honestly curious what the differences are.

I cannot speak to this exact comparison, but I have taught at both a decent state law school and a much more highly ranked state law school, and there is a significant, noticeable difference between the students I've taught. As best I can tell, and not surprisingly, that difference is largely attributable to differences in educational opportunities leading up to law school. There were plenty of very bright students at the lower-ranked school who clearly had never been taught how to research or write, for example.

More broadly, classes at lower-ranked schools tend to more strongly emphasize nuts-and-bolts, bar-passage-focused instruction than at higher-ranked schools. 1L contracts at the University of Chicago spends a lot of time on how the theory of law and economics relates to contract law; up the road at DePaul it likely spends more time on the elements of a claim for breach of contract.

Quality of instruction might ultimately not be that different. Harvard, for instance, has a bunch of lunatics on faculty, and most law schools have loads of professors who just don't care about teaching. The market for law professors has gotten very competitive over the last 15 years or so, meaning a lot of really excellent people entering the academy at schools across the rankings.

To relate this more directly to the OP, mostly this doesn't matter because if you go to a top law school you can pretty easily get one of a range of very good jobs in the law, and if you go to a low-ranked school it doesn't matter how smart you are and how good your professors were, it will always be more difficult to find work and to advance. The field is wholly obsessed with "prestige."
posted by sinfony at 8:36 AM on November 18, 2021 [27 favorites]

The upside/downside to being a financial aid kid at a fancy boarding school is that you figure this out at about age 15, well before you watch your rich C-average classmates get into your first-pick school because they are legacies, while you get rejected because you're "not competitive enough"

....When I was about 15, my grandfather took me aside and offered to pay my way to attend the private school which he had attended himself, and which a couple of my uncles also attended. I said no because I was uneasy about leaving my friends, and now and then since I've wondered if that was a mistake.

With this, you have convinced me it was not a mistake, and I thank you.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:37 AM on November 18, 2021 [12 favorites]

Uhm, rich students paying people to write research papers for them is totally still a thing.

Yes, of course. I was interested by the idea that it was like an open secret for the foppish class to do it in that time period. I think the idea that elite schools reinvented themselves as places of meritocracy in the 50s is very good context, though.
posted by little onion at 8:40 AM on November 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

To echo: I think that we all knew it was like that to some extent, but maybe not to that extent. I got a bit more out of that LA Review of Books article, which neatly dissected the so-called classical education and its relevance and/or lack thereof.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:43 AM on November 18, 2021

A friend of mine has taught and graded at two elite universities and one solid, but not-elite. His description is that at the elite universities, they aren't "smarter" (or more advanced in their education). It's just that the bottom half of C & D students aren't there. Grade inflation was an issue - a A- at the elite university usually would have been a B+ at the merely good university.

But as for the overall social issue: I've spent the last 20 years thinking about university admissions, on and off and in the context of studying social structure and inequality - and I've compared debates in the UK (where class is the number one issue) and the US (where it's usually about race). But overall, it seems that worrying about admissions to elite universities is like re-arranging chairs on the Titanic. It doesn't deal with the fundamental issue that access to prestigious and/or powerful positions in society are restricted and funneled to the graduates of these institutions. Rather than tweaking admissions, we need to break down the whole system to create one where which institution you were educated at matters less than what you did there and what you learned and did after.

I'd like to think my home country (Canada) does it right - even our most highly ranked universities are not very selective, partly because they are massive (e.g., 60,000+ students). But really we have similar issue - our elites just send their children off to prestigious American and/or UK universities to get all the right connections.

On another point: I'm not sure to what extent the law schools at elite universities can be compared to the undergraduate. I can say that for the academic graduate programs (Masters, PhDs) admissions are very different: admission rates are higher (due to massive self-selection out) and obviously, there are no legacy, athlete or donor admissions. There is a bit of a bias in reference letters (students who worked with well-known academic will do better than those who didn't have that chance), but fields are also very small and so someone can be an important academic in a sub-field while teaching at a relatively low-ranked university or college.
posted by jb at 8:49 AM on November 18, 2021 [12 favorites]

So firstly, apologies if my first comment encouraged a bunch of glib responses to the article, but as a not-American I'm genuinely interested in what the Harvard/Ivy League label still means to people.

In my experience, evaluation mechanisms can usually get you about the top 20% of applicants, applications, academic papers... whatever. If you've got far fewer spots than that, then after that point selection comes down to luck, or things that aren't ostensibly part of the selection process, like race, institutional background, legacy, etc. So when I interact with people who got an education from an Ivy League school, my thoughts are usually i) they got a good education, and ii) they are very privileged and/or lucky. I would never expect them to be better than people from any of the myriad other good schools in the US. The only way to tell that is to read their work, or work with them. I guess some people also just have a pseudo-religious belief in the power of competition/meritocracy?

Anyway, I appreciate a lot of the context and links that people are adding in this thread.
posted by Alex404 at 8:49 AM on November 18, 2021 [4 favorites]

Still I'd say my stereotype of a Harvard undergrad isn't so much a stuck-up rich kid as it is a high-octane ambitious workaholic who has received so much institutional validation that they absolutely believe they can do anything.

What's doubly frustrating is that the market often buys into the aura of meritocracy from these institutions. I worked for a FAANG-adjacent company as it grew from 100+ to over 4k employees. Shortly before I left, we were still hiring like crazy and a lot of people wanted to work for us. We were told behind closed doors to not even consider candidates who weren't from an Ivy, qualifications be damned. Somehow Ivy people were just inherently "better" than people like no-name state school me who had, despite being lesser human beings, somehow managed to help it grow into the behemoth that it became.
posted by treepour at 8:53 AM on November 18, 2021 [28 favorites]

Uhm, rich students paying people to write research papers for them is totally still a thing.

True, but they don't pay as well as rich international grad students.

(Hey, sometimes you're a broke twenty-six year old in a college town and you have to pay the rent)
posted by thivaia at 8:54 AM on November 18, 2021 [10 favorites]

I can hope that not reflexively paying extra for Harvard grads in an intelligence test for employers. Or it might be that connections are worth that much.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 9:01 AM on November 18, 2021

I would never expect them to be better than people from any of the myriad other good schools in the US. The only way to tell that is to read their work, or work with them. I guess some people also just have a pseudo-religious belief in the power of competition/meritocracy?

The social issue usually has to do with non-academic career opportunities. Many private firms, consultancy companies, media companies and also political organizations (and maybe even government departments?) will only recruit from elite universities, whether that's the Ivies and their similar counterparts in the US, or Oxbridge in the UK. I went to graduate school with people who had attended elite institutions for their undergraduate degrees - and though we were academically very similar (as judged by our work in the same or similar graduate departments), their post-undergraduate career opportunities were profoundly different.

The is one very good (or terrible, depending on your perspective) reason that financial institutions recruit heavily from elite universities. My friend taught several History students at an elite university who were subsequently recruited to the financial sector. He asked them if they had an interest in finance, and they generally said, no, but they were being offered such high salaries they couldn't justify not doing it. My friend finally asked a former financial bigwig why - after all, they were good students, but their expertise was in History (and a very text/writing heavy form of history curriculum at that), not finance, economics or even quantitative thinking. The former financial guy said that what the students knew wasn't what mattered - they hired people with PhDs in physics to do the fancy maths stuff. The students from the elite universities were hired for who they knew - they much more likely to know someone who would be looking for wealth management services in the future (the big money maker for banks, etc.) and the fact that they went to university with these wealthy people would attract them to this institution. In the meantime, the institution lured them in with very high salaries and set them up as stock traders, etc. (where really, it's just luck and they couldn't do much damage).

My friend thought this was awful - not because the kids were making good money or because that institution was using them so cynically. But because they were bright students and becoming experts in things like international relations, social policy, etc. and would be assets in other positions - but all that talent was just being parked in the City/Wall Street to make more money for rich people through their connections.
posted by jb at 9:06 AM on November 18, 2021 [69 favorites]

as a not-American I'm genuinely interested in what the Harvard/Ivy League label still means to people.

Sadly, a guarantee of or huge leg up at least on employment in many cases.
posted by corb at 9:06 AM on November 18, 2021 [6 favorites]

To the wealthy, aristocratic elite who operate Harvard and use it and the other Ivies as a class marker, coming from wealth and/or a Harvard family is merit. The Purpose of a System is What It Does.
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:06 AM on November 18, 2021 [20 favorites]

What's doubly frustrating is that the market often buys into the aura of meritocracy from these institutions. I worked for a FAANG-adjacent company as it grew from 100+ to over 4k employees. Shortly before I left, we were still hiring like crazy and a lot of people wanted to work for us. We were told behind closed doors to not even consider candidates who weren't from an Ivy, qualifications be damned. Somehow Ivy people were just inherently "better" than people like no-name state school me who had, despite being lesser human beings, somehow managed to help it grow into the behemoth that it became.

What's super odd about that is that Ivies aren't exactly known for their computer science or engineering. Preferring Dartmouth or Brown over Caltech, Berkeley, or Carnegie Mellon is just crazy sauce.
posted by leotrotsky at 9:09 AM on November 18, 2021 [24 favorites]

I should say that while admission to PhDs at elite universities are quite different to undergraduate admissions, the academic job opportunities are still better (for all the same dumb reasons of thinking that the programs are "harder" or the students are "better" with no evidence whatsoever). Someone I know won an award for the best PhD thesis written in her sub-field that year, and never got a nibble on the job market. The job-market in that particular field (English) has been dire for a long time, but the fact that she did her PhD at a non-prestigious university also hurt her a lot.
posted by jb at 9:10 AM on November 18, 2021 [4 favorites]

I want to see a metric that normalizes these institutions by its selectivity. Maybe they actually do a worse job teaching students than some random university — but because of their student population it looks like they do better.
posted by interogative mood at 9:11 AM on November 18, 2021 [3 favorites]

I should say that while admission to PhDs at elite universities are quite different to undergraduate admissions, the academic job opportunities are still better (for all the same dumb reasons of thinking that the programs are "harder" or the students are "better" with no evidence whatsoever). Someone I know won an award for the best PhD thesis written in her sub-field that year, and never got a nibble on the job market. The job-market in that particular field (English) has been dire for a long time, but the fact that she did her PhD at a non-prestigious university also hurt her a lot.

Right but rankings vary wildly within disciplines. In philosophy, for example, Pitt carries a lot more weight than somewhere like Dartmouth, despite the latter being an Ivy. Everyone in CS knows that University of Illinois has a great program, etc.
posted by leotrotsky at 9:13 AM on November 18, 2021 [6 favorites]

What's super odd about that is that Ivies aren't exactly known for their computer science or engineering. Preferring Dartmouth or Brown over Caltech, Berkeley, or Carnegie Mellon is just crazy sauce.

It makes perfect sense if you’re trying to buy your way into the social networks of VCs so that you can eventually get yourself bought out for an exorbitant amount of money. That is to say, it makes perfect sense if you’re trying to perpetuate a cycle of wealth accumulation, in which competency and useful product are just window dressing, which I think is a familiar story.
posted by mhoye at 9:26 AM on November 18, 2021 [21 favorites]

Speaking of meritocratic institutions, did anyone catch this Twitter thread?

This guy tears the Navy Seals promotions process to shreds, and also defames a sitting member of Congress. Not sure if it's true of course, but the concept is the same.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:31 AM on November 18, 2021 [10 favorites]

Might this also apply to MIT?

I'm just wondering because MIT graduates seem to not be 'stupid' but do have the hyper myopic worldview of 'How can this make me the most money?' (or you can substitute Money for influence which eventually leads to money).. and that mindset leads to damaging outcomes like the entirety of Facebook.

Just wondering.
posted by Faintdreams at 9:34 AM on November 18, 2021 [4 favorites]

why should I care about 'meritocracy' in a teaching institution anyway? meritocracy is almost always a smoke screen for perpetuating the status quo, as evident here.
posted by AlbertCalavicci at 9:43 AM on November 18, 2021 [3 favorites]

MIT gets all the Ivy glow up as well. As an undergrad I got beaten to shreds there and did ok, but not fantastic, but having those 3 letters on my resume has helped more than you can imagine.

And boy did Wall Street raid our graduating classes, but I suspect more for the math ability than the connections.

(MIT was much better about legacies and not recruiting for athletics at least)
posted by drewbage1847 at 9:43 AM on November 18, 2021 [8 favorites]

I thought this quirk of Harvard admissions was better known, albeit not in the UK. To me, it's interesting that it's in the Guardian because Oxbridge doesn't favour legacies, athletes or donors in its undergraduate admissions process. It favours a certain kind of academic 'intelligence' which prestigious schools such as Eton target but that's not quite the same thing.
posted by plonkee at 9:45 AM on November 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

It makes perfect sense if you’re trying to buy your way into the social networks of VCs so that you can eventually get yourself bought out for an exorbitant amount of money. That is to say, it makes perfect sense if you’re trying to perpetuate a cycle of wealth accumulation, in which competency and useful product are just window dressing, which I think is a familiar story.

If you're FAANG adjacent, why would you care about VCs any more? Presumably not only do you have access to public markets, you've got plenty of other folks looking to give you cash.
posted by leotrotsky at 9:45 AM on November 18, 2021

What's super odd about that is that Ivies aren't exactly known for their computer science or engineering. Preferring Dartmouth or Brown over Caltech, Berkeley, or Carnegie Mellon is just crazy sauce.

Well Silicon Valley does tend to put crazy sauce on everything. You can find it in company-branded bottles on the tables in all of the fancy employee cafeterias. But, seriously, I couldn't agree more and that's one of the many red flags that told me it was time to move on
posted by treepour at 9:54 AM on November 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

This refers to 1870, but gives you an idea of the times.

"The ignorance and general incompetency of the average graduate of American medical schools, at the time when he receives the degree which turns him loose upon the community, is something horrible to contemplate," lamented Charles Eliot in his first report as president of Harvard in 1870. Eliot set out to reform the medical school, emphasizing scientific training, critical thinking and "learning by doing."

But when Eliot recommended written examinations as a requirement for graduation, a Harvard professor of surgery vehemently objected, protesting that more than half of Harvard's medical students could barely write.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 9:58 AM on November 18, 2021 [6 favorites]

Roughly three-quarters of these applicants would have been rejected if it weren’t for having rich or Harvard-connected parents or being an athlete.

Only three quarters?

If you take a given year's Harvard admissions results and re-run them, a lot of the people who actually got admitted would not be re-admitted because there's so much noise in the system and the base rate is sub 5%.
posted by grobstein at 10:00 AM on November 18, 2021 [7 favorites]

Oxbridge doesn't favour legacies, athletes or donors in its undergraduate admissions process. It favours a certain kind of academic 'intelligence' which prestigious schools such as Eton target but that's not quite the same thing.

I've have literally sat and listened to an Oxbridge professor discuss their interview and admissions process. They may not care about legacies in terms of did your parents attend, but they are more likely to admit a student who comes from a secondary school which has had previous "successful students", so there is an active school-based legacy system. The interview process itself is deeply problematic and subject to homophily bias - professors admit students who remind them of themselves. Due to the league tables among colleges, there is also a strong emphasis on admitting students who would be pretty well guaranteed to get a 2.1, rather than a student who may be very talented but less prepared or more likely to have challenges (maybe because they are from a working class background, have dependent family, disabilities or have other challenges) who might get a first but who also might get a 3rd class degree. For that reason, "weird" students who think a bit differently are at a disadvantage - they want someone who can write solid, predictable, in-the-box exams, and anyone who deviates is risky and thus not a good candidate. (Which is terrible for developing new ideas).

Less prestigious Oxbridge colleges also perpetuate discrimination against working class or non-traditional students. Colleges like Fitzwilliam at Cambridge used to be known for being more comfortable for working class students (and I know people who applied there because of that in the 1960s-1980s), but these days, they would rather admit the students who were "pooled" from the more prestigious colleges than those who apply to them directly.

There are just as many issues with Oxbridge admissions as elite US admissions - they are different issues, but no less problematic. I don't have any experience with other UK elite universities (like the Russell Group), but Oxbridge do stand somewhat on their own in the social hierarchy of education, at least in England.
posted by jb at 10:05 AM on November 18, 2021 [17 favorites]

What's super odd about that is that Ivies aren't exactly known for their computer science or engineering. Preferring Dartmouth or Brown over Caltech, Berkeley, or Carnegie Mellon is just crazy sauce.

This isn't completely true. Princeton has some very strong engineering programs (and their computer science program is top-10, which is something you can't say for Caltech). Cornell has a strong engineering school as well. Columbia has some very strong departments, too.
posted by mr_roboto at 10:05 AM on November 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

On a recent episode of Succession, Kendall Roy revealed that he went to Harvard. That's a pretty strong indictment right there.
posted by Ber at 10:09 AM on November 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

The experience of being exposed (as a graduate student) to both Oxbridge and the Ivy League has convinced me that the problem is having elite universities in the first place. It sets up a hierarchy that is unhealthy for education and for society.

Also, meritocracy is a BAD thing, because it's still an 'ocracy, and every person deserves to have a good quality of life simply by being human, regardless of merit or talent. I've heard (and agree with) all the people who have been pointing out that during the pandemic, most of the actually essential workers (caregivers, truckers, meat-processing workers, grocery store clerks) are underpaid and severely undervalued. But even if they weren't essential - or they couldn't work at all - they should be valued.

Yes, I was converted by Michael Young. I need to reread it sometime.
posted by jb at 10:11 AM on November 18, 2021 [12 favorites]

I'm just wondering because MIT graduates seem to not be 'stupid' but do have the hyper myopic worldview of 'How can this make me the most money?' (or you can substitute Money for influence which eventually leads to money).

Maybe it's an age thing? My grandfather was an MIT grad, and initially made his living as a metallurgist - he was part of the team that helped to develop titanium. But in short order he packed it in to go into teaching - he founded the metallurgy department at U-Conn - and then packed it in even further to grow cranberries; I didn't even know about the science stuff for a long time and spent the first half of my childhood telling people that my grandpa was a farmer. I'm still surprised when people bring the metallurgy stuff up; my boss found one of his old publications being sold used on Amazon and bought it, and showed it to me when he got it all "hey, isn't this your grandfather?"

"....Holy crap, my grandfather wrote a book?"
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:12 AM on November 18, 2021 [13 favorites]

(MIT was much better about legacies and not recruiting for athletics at least)

Harvard pretty much admits that getting in is the easy part. MIT, not so much. Admitting 18 year olds to MIT who are not ready for MIT guarantees that the 'tute will chew them up and spit them out (with student debt to boot). So no jocks, no legacies and also not much recruitment from underrepresented communities.
posted by ocschwar at 10:14 AM on November 18, 2021 [7 favorites]

I'm just wondering because MIT graduates seem to not be 'stupid' but do have the hyper myopic worldview of 'How can this make me the most money?' (

You try to repay MIT student loans without a mercenary attitude. I did, and it involved living in group apartments until I was in my late 20s, and for most of those years I didn't even have a bed. I just put a sheet down on the floor, add a pillow, wrapped myself in a blanker and stayed out of that room for the rest of the day.
posted by ocschwar at 10:18 AM on November 18, 2021 [5 favorites]

Just for fun, here's the Harvard Entrance Exam for 1899.
posted by BWA at 10:29 AM on November 18, 2021 [8 favorites]

You might think that this news would be of interest to the people who are so very angry about affirmative action in higher education because it discriminates against their children in favor of minorities. But, no. They'll identify with the parents of the white/wealthy admissions kids, even if they themselves are not white or wealthy. They think this is meritocracy, because they equate wealth with merit.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 10:32 AM on November 18, 2021 [8 favorites]

My grandfather sent my dad to Brown with the express purpose of having him meet a girl from a better family. Since my dad married the girl next door instead, my grandfather tried to get me to go to Brown as a legacy admit (I had a decent, though Canadian, private school education), but I rebelled (which was probably stupid, but there you go.)

The irony is that the wealth that was attempting to fund all of that was gained by my GI Bill middle management grandfather, who got company stock and managed it very well during his definitely solid but somewhat middling career. Saver, not a spender.

The research/PhD-holding side of the family ended up in good shape as well, but not as wealthy.

one weird effect of that is seeing some of the worst, most mediocre people I knew as an undergrad in positions of power and authority

I went to the same high school as David Frum, and it's probably where he started to learn rhetoric. But on a positive note, it also graduated Lawrence Hill. At the time I attended it was partly provincially funded as a semi-private school (which was removed by the NDP under Bob Rae) and not anywhere near as expensive as it is now. Entrance then was supposedly blind - basically a mini-SAT and an essay with no interviewing - but there was a huge selection bias.
posted by warriorqueen at 10:34 AM on November 18, 2021 [3 favorites]

Even though many of us know this qualitatively, the estimated numbers are often shockingly high. I remember this from a previous go-round on this topic, where I hadn't quite realized just how rich the students were -- 1 out of 6 from the top 1%, almost half from the top 5%.

(Also, some meta-elitism: while trying to find if that previous study had been discussed on MF, a search for "Harvard" finds nearly 1000 posts here, much more than any other university I tried. Most references are not to the school per se, but listing someone's affiliation, which seemed much more likely to be included in a post if it was Harvard.)
posted by chortly at 10:36 AM on November 18, 2021 [5 favorites]

I believe meritocracy is a good thing. It's just that meritocracy is never what it says it is.

Getting into college based on SAT scores. That favors those who can afford to take courses to improve their SAT scores. (And a kajillion other advantages from better teaching). A meritocracy would actually look at what it took for the student to get a particular SAT score.

When I was an undergraduate my school put forward extended library books loans for students above a certain GPA. This was put forward as meritocracy. My GPA had built in two part time jobs, one overnight as a motel clerk that had me falling asleep in class.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 10:38 AM on November 18, 2021 [4 favorites]

You might think that this news would be of interest to the people who are so very angry about affirmative action in higher education because it discriminates against their children in favor of minorities.

The most vocal critics of racial preferences in Ivy admissions have been POC. We’re still waiting to see whether the discrimination suit pursued on behalf of Asian applicants to Harvard will be heard by the Supreme Court.
posted by mr_roboto at 10:40 AM on November 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

Preferring Dartmouth or Brown over Caltech, Berkeley, or Carnegie Mellon is just crazy sauce.

Or Stanford!
posted by tavella at 10:45 AM on November 18, 2021

Getting into college based on SAT scores. That favors those who can afford to take courses to improve their SAT scores.

Yes, SAT scores mirror socioeconomic status. But they're less subject to gaming than essay writing, internships, etc. If you're a smart kid who tests well (and being smart and testing well differ, but are correlated) from a lousy school with no record of sending students to selective colleges, dropping the SAT will harm you.

"No one likes the SAT. It’s still the fairest thing about admissions.
Eliminating standardized testing would remove the one admissions criterion that can prevent fraud and increase social mobility."

"A worried one-percenter who didn’t want to resort to crime might instead campaign to remove standardized tests from the admissions process. This would increase the importance of extracurricular activities, interviews and athletics, and wealth provides many more options for gaming these squishy metrics."
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 10:46 AM on November 18, 2021 [14 favorites]

The most vocal critics of racial preferences in Ivy admissions have been POC.

Yep. And here's an instance where lumping everybody not white into one label is not really helping. The right has been very successful at pitting Asian-Americans against Blacks and Latinos on this issue. Funny that none of these lawsuits target the equally discriminatory legacy admissions process.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 10:49 AM on November 18, 2021 [11 favorites]

FAANG-adjacent company as it grew from 100+ to over 4k employees. Shortly before I left, we were still hiring like crazy and a lot of people wanted to work for us. We were told behind closed doors to not even consider candidates who weren't from an Ivy, qualifications be damned.

Here at an actual FAANG about half of my team has no degree at all, despite an exec request to review all hiring decisions without one. My LinkedIn network only lists two people at any Ivies at all that I'm connected to here. As leo mentions, the Ivies aren't particularly renowned in tech. And while there are elite CS universities, most of my degreed colleagues come from flagship state schools. There's just more of us and you can't be that choosy if you want to double the department size every year to match the size of the opportunity.
posted by pwnguin at 10:53 AM on November 18, 2021 [11 favorites]

Legacy admissions are totally problematic. But the idea that "smart" is a thing and that the Harvard College student body is not as "smart" as one might think is also pretty silly. The graduation rate at Harvard is something like 98%, so basically everyone admitted has the skills they need to succeed there. And, of course, a huge percentage of people who weren't admitted also have those skills. I interviewed candidates for a few years and had some really good ones and none of them got in.

I think a lot of the admissions have something to do with luck. I think something that might have helped me is coming from a state without a lot of applicants. Having students from mountain states instead of just New England and New York is a kind of diversity I think they probably wanted.

Anyhow, the problem with legacy and rich kid admissions is that in perpetuates a class hierarchy. I think they lump in athletic admissions because they boost some minorities and this is a way to distract from the real issue. Being a great athlete is a skill and it shows hard work. Unlike being born to a Harvard grad, it is an actual achievement. Excelling at other non-academic pursuits like being an amazing musician, can also help people get in to Harvard.

In short, I don't think legacies necessarily diminish the student body that much because most of then are quite capable of being there, even if they wouldn't have gotten in otherwise. But they are taking spots from deserving students, particularly Asian ones.
posted by snofoam at 10:59 AM on November 18, 2021 [6 favorites]

The most vocal critics of racial preferences in Ivy admissions have been POC.

Yeah, Asians have legit issues with discrimination, but often/usually these cases are instigated/supported by anti-affirmative action white people. At least, that's my understanding.
posted by snofoam at 11:03 AM on November 18, 2021

I am not anti-SAT scores. I believe they need to be judged in context. I would ask whether the prospective student took SAT classes and mark down for that. I would look at the SAT scores relative to others in the same high school. This is not because it is not meritorious to have a good SAT score, the work that went into it is the true measure.

It's why I don't like the Olympic. Wealthy countries can put those athletes through scientific training with a hundred extra advantages. I'll always root for the kid who had to run marathons in street shoes.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 11:07 AM on November 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

The most vocal critics of racial preferences in Ivy admissions have been POC.

Yeah, no. I will refrain from characterizing the POC who have been plaintiffs in those lawsuits, but the idea that they have represented the most vocal critics generally is beyond absurd. We only have the cases with the POC plaintiffs because Grutter v. Bollinger went in favor of the universities.
posted by praemunire at 11:08 AM on November 18, 2021 [7 favorites]

(Also, I must say that this is one of those cases where "POC" obscures more than it reveals. The POC being referred to are Asian-Americans.)
posted by praemunire at 11:09 AM on November 18, 2021 [3 favorites]

The POC being referred to are Asian-Americans.

And they don’t count?
posted by mr_roboto at 11:21 AM on November 18, 2021

And they don’t count?

In this case, the use of "POC" rather than more specifically identifying the group involved functions as a rhetorical device to suggest that even the racial groups that are the most common "beneficiaries" of any use of race in a holistic admissions model oppose it. Let's be grownups here.
posted by praemunire at 11:39 AM on November 18, 2021 [9 favorites]

Knowing that something is true and knowing something is true because you have data proving it are two entirely different things.

I think the bigger misapprehension is that having the data has much to do with things changing.
posted by sock poppet at 11:40 AM on November 18, 2021 [6 favorites]

The only drawback is that when you graduate, even having studied a hard science, your degree is listed on the diploma as a "Bachelor of Liberal Arts in Extension Studies".
---
I would love it if someone could compare, say, a 1L contracts class between a good state school and Harvard, especially if both classes are using the same casebook. The amount of material covered, the quality of instruction, the difficulty of the exam.

It was I think a few years ago that Wharton, the business school of UPenn, began to offer the entirety of their MBA curriculum for free, online (I don't know if they're still doing this). And the popular reaction, among people who follow and care about this sort of thing, seemed to be quite positive and praising of Wharton/UPenn for increasing access, being so generous, etc.

But that always struck me as a strange and far too charitable read, because the actually newsworthy item there was Wharton/UPenn admitting that the content comprising their MBA curriculum--ostensibly the things you're paying to attend and learn--is literally worth a zero amount of money. How else to read this move of giving it away for free?

But then you look at the tuition for the MBA program, and you start maybe getting a little clarity on what it is you're really paying for there.
posted by obliterati at 12:13 PM on November 18, 2021 [16 favorites]

I like that the first author of this paper is from Duke. When I was a TA at Duke, we were explicitly told that certain students were "Foundation Fellows" and....we should make sure that the grades we recorded for them should reflect that.
posted by hydropsyche at 12:15 PM on November 18, 2021 [7 favorites]

My impression is that getting in is the ONLY hard thing about Harvard . They do not want to admit to the possibility that they made a mistake and will bend over backwards with accommodations to ensure you graduate.

That's basically the case with all elite universities, yeah. Part of it has to do with playing the rankings game, where a common input "metric" used is 4- and 6-year graduation rates.
posted by obliterati at 12:17 PM on November 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

The most vocal critics of racial preferences in Ivy admissions have been POC.

This seems an odd and silly way to frame the issue. All the major affirmative-action university admissions cases that have reached the Supreme Court (DeFunis, Bakke, Grutter, Gratz, Fisher) have featured white plaintiffs claiming they were denied admission because of affirmative action. The fact that the recent culture-war maneuver involves having Asian-Americans bring the claim doesn't seem to me to establish that POC are the biggest critics.
posted by sinfony at 12:17 PM on November 18, 2021 [14 favorites]

It's not odd or absurd, it's exactly what the fascist right and insane media spotlight want people less in the know to believe is going on. Not everyone on here knows these social issues inside and out.

Some East Asian Americans do have a valid claim specific to how they as a marginalized group are exploited by these systems. It happens that these days the right wing is manipulating that claim into a wedge issue, and/but even if they weren't actively doing that, racist structures have long existed to do so to thwart PoC solidarity.
posted by polymodus at 12:24 PM on November 18, 2021 [4 favorites]

In September of 1990, I met a group of four Freshmen at Harvard. They referred to themselves as the AGMIs -- as in, "Athletics Got Me In."

They were honestly a little disillusioned, because they agreed that they were the dumbest people in every one of their classes, but all thought they had been admitted competitively on their own merits. One of them went to high school with a friend of mine, at a very good private school, and I wouldn't have considered him dumb. They were pretty sad when they realized they'd just been swept in because each was a star at a different sport (hockey, tennis, and I forget the two others).
posted by wenestvedt at 12:33 PM on November 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

Harvard Extension students take the same classes, with the same students and professors as the regularly admitted students.

BTW, this isn't accurate. Harvard College undergrads rarely, if ever, take Extension school classes for undergrad credit, and Extension School undergrads don't take College courses. The student populations are also quite different. The vast majority of College undergrads are in the classical 18-22-year-old demographic, going to school full-time and living on campus; my anecdotal impression of Extension students is that they're professionals or retirees. The academic standards are not the same at all (speaking as someone who's been an instructor in both) and honestly I'd be a little troubled by a (recent graduate) job applicant who'd gotten a B.A. in Extension or whatever they're calling it these days. It's such an odd thing to do, I'd hope they'd have an interesting story to explain it.

Anyway, to get back to the relevant point, the Extension School's not "meritocratic," but it is still an excellent and useful institution, especially the last couple of years when it's been able to offer regular courses online, making it possible for students outside the Cambridge area to attend.
posted by praemunire at 12:35 PM on November 18, 2021 [10 favorites]

warriorqueen: My grandfather sent my dad to Brown with the express purpose of having him meet a girl from a better family.

My grandfather, ruined in business in the Great Depression, was chauffeur and mechanic to a wealthy Midwestern family. When my dad was in high school, the family patriarch offered to send him to Yale. Note, it wasn't "pay his way if he got in," but "send" -- like he could write a letter to Yale and they would look at this gangly kid's application form and just do it.

(Instead Dad chose a small, Catholic school in the Minnesota farm country, and he did well there, and never groused about not being a Yale Man. Heck, I didn't even know about this until just a few years ago.)

My mind always boggled at the notion of just offering that to someone from a family that couldn't afford tuition -- but now I see that several of the Ivies will cover tuition (though not room & board) with all grants for students whose families earn less than a particular threshold. *boggle*
posted by wenestvedt at 12:46 PM on November 18, 2021 [3 favorites]

My husband is a graduate of a certain Ivy League university, and has been very successful and given them lots of dough. They are clearly grooming us to send our kids to the school so that they can secure more of that sweet sweet money. We are talking tens of millions of dollars with an estate bequest that could ge even greater than that (which is a whole other story). This is a school with a less than 4% admit rate. We were told that our son, who had like a 3.0 (and is a decent football player) would be admitted if he maintained the 3.0 and got a 1400 on his SAT. I shit you not. It is so much worse than anyone could even imagine. Varsity Blues isn't even the tip of the iceberg. Plus: they already have SO much money, they could provide thousands more young people with an Ivy League education. But the folks with privilege protect it fiercely.
posted by Blogwardo at 12:47 PM on November 18, 2021 [22 favorites]

Tangentially related, c.f Yale and The University of Chicago ...

Once upon a time I knew a guy -- white, middlish class, inspiringly charming rural upbringing -- who was finishing up undergrad at UofC, on some level of scholarship, then went on to Yale Law on one of those "Career Options Assistance Program" loan-forgiveness schemes.

Last I heard he was in a senior position at Facebook.

Burn it all down.
posted by myotahapea at 1:04 PM on November 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

As mentioned earlier, Harvard's endowment fund is now north of $50 billion.

Nice to see this in the Crimson at least... Op Ed: Harvard’s Endowment Gains are Not Something to Celebrate

The Harvard Management Company returned 33.6 percent on its investments in fiscal year 2021, increasing Harvard’s endowment to its unprecedented total of $53.2 billion. While many celebrated these "tremendous returns," such gloating about the endowment’s financial success is an insult to the University’s consistently underpaid employees and ignores the harms incurred by Harvard’s unethical investing. This ostentatious praise for the endowment’s growth (which was already larger than half the world’s economies) is not only in poor taste, but also morally wrong.

Despite this monumental financial gain of over $11 billion this past year, the University continues to lower its budget allocated for essential workers, citing "continued financial pressure" due to the pandemic. Before the semester began, Harvard’s proposed new dining schedules threatened to cut the number of full-time dining employees by 20 percent, limiting their access to employee benefits and increasing their financial strain after an already trying year.

posted by gwint at 1:05 PM on November 18, 2021 [21 favorites]

Another anecdote, albeit from 3 decades ago. My coach at a highly competitive liberal arts college was explaining how each sport got a certain number of admits. "The admissions department takes whoever we want, as long as they are qualified. And almost everyone who applies here is qualified, so it's not an issue ... well, except for hockey."
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 1:05 PM on November 18, 2021 [8 favorites]

> the big losers here [are] the white kids who aren't legacies/donors/athletes

> I mean, other than all the Black and brown kids with Harvard chops whose spots are being taken by white kids who are legacies or children of faculty and staff, sure.

lol. Asian-Americans admitted to Harvard earned an average SAT score of 767 across all sections... By comparison, white admits earned an average score of 745 across all sections, Hispanic-American admits earned an average of 718, Native-American and Native-Hawaiian admits an average of 712, and African-American admits an average of 704.
posted by Borborygmus at 1:06 PM on November 18, 2021

Can we not bag on Asian Americans in particular -- and fight generally among POC -- here? Don't lose sight of the important theme: Harvard sucks.

(I spent three semesters at Tufts, where many parties devolved into drunken mutterings about how everyone's grades & SAT scores were just as good at the kids at Harvard. I bailed.)
posted by wenestvedt at 1:17 PM on November 18, 2021 [6 favorites]

Can we not bag on Asian Americans in particular -- and fight generally among POC -- here?

The classic white supremacy strategy of setting one or two racial groups against the others to fight for the scraps is clearly and depressingly evident in the recent lawsuits.

Plus: they already have SO much money, they could provide thousands more young people with an Ivy League education.

It's your family's money, but, as you recognize this, might I gently suggest that you consider directing future donations to a less wealthy school doing equally worthy work?
posted by praemunire at 1:29 PM on November 18, 2021 [13 favorites]

Blogwardo: Plus: they already have SO much money, they could provide thousands more young people with an Ivy League education.

praemunire: It's your family's money, but, as you recognize this, might I gently suggest that you consider directing future donations to a less wealthy school doing equally worthy work?

Let me tell you about another Boston-area school, Olin College of Engineering. They are recently founded, pay half of every student's tuition from their foundation, and every single graduate I've met has been absolutely fucking incredible. Like not just smart engineers, but genuinely thoughtful and emotionally intelligent people who have their priorities straight. Most recently alumni in the news? Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower. They are a recruiter's best-kept secret.

Give them your money before their foundation runs out.
posted by xthlc at 2:01 PM on November 18, 2021 [28 favorites]

My mid-90s graduating class had the lowest number of Black students in many years and this was in many ways a bummer. Some of them had been the only, or one of just a few, Black kids in their high school and were looking forward to being able to hang out with other Black students, but we’re surprised when there were so few. Also, the cohort was very skewed towards women, which was a big disappointment for some of the women. (Which is not to say that everyone wanted to date within their race or that everyone was heterosexual, of course.)

Reducing the number of legacy and donation driven admissions could help increase diversity in ways that people are interacting with a more diverse crowd, but also have a critical mass of people they identify with and can help each other navigate a predominantly white institution.
posted by snofoam at 2:08 PM on November 18, 2021 [4 favorites]

I believe there is a MeFite who is an Olin grad, and my former employers (SBRA architects) did some of the buildings.

It seems like a really good school, in a lot of different dimensions.
posted by wenestvedt at 2:21 PM on November 18, 2021

I'm not American, but I've written Harvard entrance essays for kids who got in. It was extremely clear from the process that Harvard wanted some surface level diversity, which let to the extremely weird phenomenon of kids from wealthy anglicised non-white families emphasising marginalised identities that certainly weren't a major part of how they saw themselves. (These kids were all great, and they all deserve the world, to be clear. We were just playing the game, and good for them, and good for their parents who told me to play it.) People talk a lot about SATS being unfair, but I'm a good SAT tutor, and I can't add more than about 10%. Meanwhile, third parties are allowed to literally write the essays - I think of myself as cynical, but this was the most blazingly unfair and unjust process I'd ever heard of.

My understanding of the numbers is that the Harvard incoming class of 2021 matches the demographics of the US population almost exactly, w/r/t white and black students, but has more Asian and fewer Hispanic students. It does seem deeply misleading for the article not to mention that at all.
posted by wattle at 2:22 PM on November 18, 2021 [13 favorites]

Once upon a time I knew a guy -- white, middlish class, inspiringly charming rural upbringing -- who was finishing up undergrad at UofC, on some level of scholarship, then went on to Yale Law on one of those "Career Options Assistance Program" loan-forgiveness schemes.

Last I heard he was in a senior position at Facebook.

Burn it all down.

Whats the issue here?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 2:26 PM on November 18, 2021 [3 favorites]

praemunire, just to add a little more color about the extension school, they've been doing distance education for at least 15 years. I worked at the 53 Church Street computer lab back then and they had invested a lot in a classroom in the basement for broadcasting those courses. It was a broadly diverse mix of people who took courses there at the time.

Anyways, at least 15 years ago, this really was a situation where the fact that the standards were a little lower was lost in the inherent unreliability of a college application as an indicator of future potential. The majority of these kids seemed the same as everyone else once there (although the athletes obviously had a major time commitment to deal with, but a lot of businesses look to hire the athletes because they have some indication that they will work hard and be team players).
posted by ecreeves at 2:34 PM on November 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

The idea of the Ivies being meritocracies is relatively recent. It was only in the 50s and 60s that they started reinventing themselves as the place where smart students go. Their traditional role was as a finishing school for the children of the wealthy elite. The dirty secret is that it's still their primary function.

I guess this is where I post this article from LIFE magazine's Jun 7, 1937 issue titled THE TUTORING SCHOOL HELPS RICH, LAZY STUDENTS PASS EXAMINATIONS about my grandfather Harold and his chimpanzee.
posted by nicwolff at 3:17 PM on November 18, 2021 [17 favorites]

At my Ivy, a lot of the athletes were also legacies. Lacrosse, Crew, etc. I believe part of the reason for that is there is tremendous competition among legacies, so if you happen to be skilled in a sport, it's an extra edge. Hence, many legacy parents spend a lot of time and money making sure their kid can row good and stuff.
posted by chaz at 3:38 PM on November 18, 2021 [3 favorites]

"I would love it if someone could compare, say, a 1L contracts class between a good state school and Harvard, especially if both classes are using the same casebook. The amount of material covered, the quality of instruction, the difficulty of the exam."

I can! I went to a top-10 private law school, and my brother who is two years younger went to a flagship Midwestern state U for law school. We actually had the same constitutional law professor, because my professor was doing a visiting year at his school when he was a 1L. So, yeah, basically, the curriculum was exactly the same. There were somewhat different emphases in places. The big differences were that where I went, students were expected to attend donor events and schmooze; there was a lot less of that at my brother's school. AND the networks of graduates; it was an easier in for Washington and NYC law firms from my school, and they placed more clerks with federal judges. (This, however, did not work out in my favor, as I went to law school on the east coast KNOWING I wanted to go back to the Midwest, where my law school had very little in the way of alumni network. My brother's Midwestern network was a heck of a lot stronger than mine, because alumni from his school mostly stayed in the Midwest. )

The highest-achieving (and sometimes highest-earning) lawyers I know, 20 years later, went to a diversity of schools (Michigan, Boston University, John Marshall, Drake). I haven't noticed a ton of correlation between someone's law school and the quality of their work as a lawyer.

"A friend of mine has taught and graded at two elite universities and one solid, but not-elite. His description is that at the elite universities, they aren't "smarter" (or more advanced in their education). It's just that the bottom half of C & D students aren't there."

Yeah, when I went to college there was a popular statistic people liked to quote, which was something like, "There are more students at OSU with perfect SAT scores than there are at Harvard." Because there are 50,000 undergrads at OSU and 5,000 at Harvard. I think at a school the size of OSU you can EASILY find 5,000 students who could be at Harvard. But you're also going to have a much bigger diversity of achievement/skill because it's just a way larger pool of people.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 3:46 PM on November 18, 2021 [10 favorites]

I taught at a bunch of ivy's and got a doctorate from one of them and the main thing is that like, the median student was pretty good, likely at what you would find at any good university, but the best student was just incredible. Everyone else was pretty unexceptional, except for the athletes, who were overwhelmingly mediocre white dudes. There was also the veteran who went back to school after serving, they were also very good and engaged.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 3:52 PM on November 18, 2021 [5 favorites]

praemunire: It's your family's money, but, as you recognize this, might I gently suggest that you consider directing future donations to a less wealthy school doing equally worthy work?

I used to pay "class dues" to my undergrad Ivy, because was presented as a sort of box-checking thing that one simply does.

When I got to a point that I could think about philanthropy (and I mean think about it at all -- I'm not able to give on some massive scale) -- I not only didn't scale up my donations to my alma mater, I stopped even checking the "class dues" box.

Tons of nonprofits need donations. Not many of them are less deserving than an Ivy League school.
posted by gurple at 3:55 PM on November 18, 2021 [8 favorites]

A couple "how the sausage is made" moments that I encountered about from my time in academia, one was that our STEM faculty keenly noticed all their "brightest" students were going to Wall Street to become quants. I don't think the faculty itself was left-wing enough to admit that the system is set up this way.

The other example, perhaps less common in other departments, was that as TAs, the undergrads were in a sense precious goods. In my department we didn't actually do very much teaching, we were more like homework graders and lab TAs. The superficial rationale was that teaching was so important that it was a task best left to professors because inexperienced TAs could mess up an undergrad's expensive education or something. Okay??? So that was really different, because in contrast as an undergrad in the UC system all the GSI's had nontrivial teaching workloads.

Overall I think examples like these point to how problematically higher education institutions exist in their function of serving the interests of elitism and capitalism.
posted by polymodus at 4:10 PM on November 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

is this news to anyone?

"Mr. Mayhew went into his Study and bid me follow him. There Child, said he is a dictionary, there a Grammar, and there Paper, Pen, and Ink, and you may take your own time. This was joyful news to me and I then thought my Admission safe. The Latin was soon made, and I was declared Admitted…I was as light when I came home as I had been heavy when I went."

-John Adams.
posted by clavdivs at 4:20 PM on November 18, 2021 [5 favorites]

About 15 years ago, when my son was in high school, we were at a film festival in Breckenridge. At a producer's round table, it came out that all these guys (and they were guys) went to Yale. A writer asked a very basic question: How do you get your script read if you don't know (them). The answer was telling, because they just looked at each other, and said you can't. You have to find a way into the club, through people they already know. They were clearly sharp people, but had zero self-awareness about what they were saying. It was there job to NOT read material from unknowns. The gatekeeping was very disheartening. And people wonder why there is so much crap that gets made.
posted by Carmody'sPrize at 4:30 PM on November 18, 2021 [18 favorites]

The Guardian article was light on detail and the abstract just says that removing the ALDC preferences would significantly alter the racial distribution of admitted students away from whites.

It’s not immediately obvious to me why eliminating these preferences would automatically change the racial distribution. Just because whites are overrepresented in the ALDC group doesn’t means the group that takes their place would automatically be more diverse, does it? I’d be interested is more detail on that point.

On a personal level, in my experience Ivy League lawyers aren’t any better than non-Ivy League lawyers and I prefer the latter due too reverse snobbery. And given that the system isn’t gonna be dismantled any time soon, I’m on board with anything that makes those Golden Tickets more widely available.
posted by lumpy at 4:47 PM on November 18, 2021

Wow, Carmody'sPrize, that is gross. I'm surprised that they were that open about the gatekeeping.
posted by rogerroger at 4:58 PM on November 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

Just speaking for myself, my stereotype of people who attend Ivy Leagues isn't that they're elite or smart, just that they're rich or got lucky in some way. Maybe it's wrong to think less of somebody for what school they went to, but I mostly meet that sort of person fictionally.
posted by GoblinHoney at 5:09 PM on November 18, 2021

The rest well duh but Harvard has athletes?
posted by geoff. at 5:38 PM on November 18, 2021 [3 favorites]

Whoa, headline changed while I read -- it's jamais vu all over again!
posted by y2karl at 6:03 PM on November 18, 2021

It’s like what my high school Latin teacher always said: “You can always tell a Harvard man, but you can’t tell him much”
posted by Ranucci at 6:25 PM on November 18, 2021 [5 favorites]

My impression is that getting in is the ONLY hard thing about Harvard . They do not want to admit to the possibility that they made a mistake and will bend over backwards with accommodations to ensure you graduate.

That’s what I observed working in admin at an Ivy. It was a stark contrast to the sink-or-swim approach of my own instructors at Giant Impersonal State U. It wasn’t that the Ivy didn’t expect the students to learn anything, but they were great at making sure none of them had to struggle too hard before setting them up with whatever help they needed.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:47 PM on November 18, 2021 [7 favorites]

Modest derail: I attended the University of Bristol (England) for a one-year MA program in late Middle English literature. After the mid-year exams we talked with one of our teachers, and asked flat-out, how were we chosen for this program? There were about four of us, total, and so we had this vibe that the program was elite, selection was highly competitive, we were especially smart, or showed potential as scholars. The response was that we were the ones who could pay for the tuition.

We spent the next few hours drinking ourselves into another dimension. Not the most mature response but then again, that bubble was loud when it was burst.
posted by datawrangler at 6:51 PM on November 18, 2021 [10 favorites]

What I forgot to add in my previous comment is that that strategy makes perfect sense from a fiscal point of view. The rosy memories of alumni are a major revenue stream.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:55 PM on November 18, 2021

I attended the University of Bristol (England) for a one-year MA program in late Middle English literature. After the mid-year exams we talked with one of our teachers, and asked flat-out, how were we chosen for this program? There were about four of us, total, and so we had this vibe that the program was elite, selection was highly competitive, we were especially smart, or showed potential as scholars. The response was that we were the ones who could pay for the tuition.

Terminal masters' degrees in the humanities in England are pretty much all like this. They prey on people who either (a) have enough money that they can just spend a year having fun reading stuff or (b) are sufficiently clueless that they don't realize that these degrees are largely meaningless. People who have (recognized!) potential as scholars are on a completely different track, in the UK or in the US.

Honestly, it sounds like a fun way to spend a year if you have the resources, but I worry about the folks in group (b).
posted by praemunire at 7:02 PM on November 18, 2021 [7 favorites]

My impression is that getting in is the ONLY hard thing about Harvard

A friend of my older son gave us a long tour around Dartmouth a couple of years ago, and made a similar observation.
posted by wenestvedt at 7:21 PM on November 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

Wharton/UPenn admitting that the content comprising their MBA curriculum--ostensibly the things you're paying to attend and learn--is literally worth a zero amount of money. How else to read this move of giving it away for free?

To an extent, you could model this as a signal, either that the in-person experience is so valuable they're willing to give away the lectures and reading for free, or perhaps a "yesterday's news is today's fish'n'chips" demonstration that they're so committed to and good at improving their courses that they can give away last year's course materials.

An alternative theory: an indirect attack on the hundreds of other schools. Why pay 40k a year to listen to a middling professor of business at Kansas University, when you can get Wharton for free?

More realistically, you are correct in your original conclusion: the content is not that valuable. So, students are paying for access to other students of means, and perhaps a rigorous selection process, rather than a particularly transformative lecture or project. And in that case, open courseware is a branding exercise; everyone who can't afford to or get selected into the program is now (more) aware of the school's pull. Maybe you hire that faculty member for a consulting gig, or at the very least, hire one of their recommended alumni.
posted by pwnguin at 7:56 PM on November 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

Modest derail:

Another derail: I know a family that's well enough off that when their daughter turned 18, they treated her to a vacation across the Atlantic at the end of which, at her request, they hired one of the world's foremost James Joyce scholars to spend a day giving her a close reading of his works.

As someone who flirted with homelessness as a teenager, I don't resent this in the slightest. If you're a rich kid and this is how you want to spend your parents' money, knock yourself out. If you raised a kid to ask for something like this, you've done some things right. A "world's foremost James Joyce scholar" can only exist if he or she is sponsored into existence, and I'd rather such a creature exist in a world that is forever beyond my financial reach than not have such a creature exist at all. Unequal access to the time and attention of a James Joyce scholar is really not much of an injustice.

That also sums up my attitude about Harvard. I'd rather it be a finishing school for the very rich, with no pretense of accessibility by the lower classes, than have Harvard send the lower middle class some number of admission tickets, and then have those admission tickets used as a pretext to justify a whole lot of far worse injustice. The issue is that unequal access to a college education translates to unequal access to dental care. THAT is the real problem. If Harvard alums had to wait in the same dentist waiting rooms as MIT alums like myself, along with the campus janitors and sanitation truck drivers that enable our existence, we'd all be in a much better world.
posted by ocschwar at 8:10 PM on November 18, 2021 [17 favorites]

Wharton/UPenn admitting that the content comprising their MBA curriculum--ostensibly the things you're paying to attend and learn--is literally worth a zero amount of money. How else to read this move of giving it away for free?

They're not giving it away. Wharton does three different things: 1. present the curriculum. 2. support you actively enough to give you a chance to learn the curriculum, and 3. certify that you've learned it (if you did.)

Assuming the curriculum is worth an MBA, it's difficult enough to make you throw your hands up and admit you need some attention from instructors in order to slog through it, and so posting it online makes sense.
posted by ocschwar at 8:14 PM on November 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

My experience in a STEM field was that nearly all the people in "top" postdocs/graduate programs had gone to the same handful of Ivy+ undergrads, and all knew each other and only wanted to collaborate with each other. People who get their PhD from Harvard or Stanford go on to fill faculty slots at Kansas State and the reverse (in my field at least) never happens. Were these people that much smarter than everyone else? I don't know. In my area so much depends on the quality of collaborations you have it was hard to tell. They certainly thought they were.

It was certainly interesting talking to these people because although I grew up with a great many advantages, my parents didn't understand the US admissions system at all, so I never did SAT tutoring or hired someone to "help me" with my essay or specifically chose a niche, expensive sport/voluntourism opportunity that would make me seem more interesting to admissions committees. This isn't to say I was so much more virtuous than anyone else, I just didn't realize these were the done things.

Knowing plenty of people who transitioned out of academia it seemed like the main value they got from their degree was that it was a safety net in a way - "he graduated from Stanford, how stupid could he possibly be?". It gets you the benefit of the doubt that other people do not get. And the whole system very effectively launders America's existing class & race structure as being based on "merit". It's especially effective for the people who, but for legacy/being on the regatta team/a big donation, otherwise probably wouldn't have gotten in. The easiest person to fool is always yourself.
posted by threementholsandafuneral at 4:27 AM on November 19, 2021 [4 favorites]

My experience in a STEM field was that nearly all the people in "top" postdocs/graduate programs had gone to the same handful of Ivy+ undergrads, and all knew each other and only wanted to collaborate with each other. People who get their PhD from Harvard or Stanford go on to fill faculty slots at Kansas State and the reverse (in my field at least) never happens. Were these people that much smarter than everyone else? I don't know. In my area so much depends on the quality of collaborations you have it was hard to tell. They certainly thought they were.

Not in STEM but there are a number of things going on here. One is that, in my personal experience, only the top PhD programs were willing to admit people with less than stellar records with less than stellar undergraduate institutions. Top programs can take a risk on someone like me, lower ranked ones would never.

I have a PhD from a top 5 department in my field and knocked on the door of the satellite campus near where I live and was basically ignored. Lower ranked/smaller schools know the socialization that goes on at top programs and how they view research, and know that if they hire one of these people, they may be unhappy. I've only ever gotten far in the interview process at top institutions. Lower ranked schools don't think I would stay or that I would be unhappy.

The other thing is that having a PhD from a recognizable institution really matters much more for the private sector. There's an incentive for potential PhD students to go to a big name Ivy university even if their department is lower ranked, because that name gets them in the door at places in the private sector.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:53 AM on November 19, 2021 [4 favorites]

There is so much truth in these comments. I retired (two years ago) from a highly regarded state school where there was a big push to implement terminal masters programs. Some of these were in STEM fields, others were in humanities (like linguistics). If you, your child or anyone you know thinks they would benefit from paying for a masters program make sure they know that (most of) these are just money makers for the institution. Faculty don't want to teach these students or invest in them by bringing them into their lab to do research. Look very closely at where the students who finish these programs end up. Two years before I retired the university started a masters for students to learn things like HOW TO USE EXCEL and one of the arguments for this masters was that ivy league institutions had similar programs. I was outraged but money won.
posted by bluesky43 at 7:48 AM on November 19, 2021 [4 favorites]

My impression is that getting in is the ONLY hard thing about Harvard .

This was not at all my personal experience. I found Harvard very competitive and a pretty tough, cold environment to persist in. I think part of the issue is that even among students accepted based on academics, there is a huge divide in how well a typical public high school prepares you for Harvard versus something like Thomas Jefferson or Stuyvesant, and there are a LOT of people in that second category. The year I started, I found out that Stuy -- a single high school, which I had never heard of before college -- sent four times as many people to Harvard as my entire state.

I think it's true that there are a lot of fail-safes against flunking out, but a lot of that is cosmetic and, as folks have mentioned, is aimed at juicing the stats: you'll be pressured into an easier course of study, allowed/encouraged to take indefinite leave instead of being expelled or flunking out, etc. These systems also tend to fail exactly the students who need it the most -- the one person I knew fairly well who dropped out, not coincidentally, had the least privilege coming in and felt the most alienated from the rest of the student body when they were there. This is a shame because, if I'm remembering right, when you control for other factors, the people who actually benefit from going to Ivies over a state school in terms of future earnings are exactly the ones who don't come from money and privilege.
posted by en forme de poire at 9:34 AM on November 19, 2021 [14 favorites]

My friend thought this was awful - not because the kids were making good money or because that institution was using them so cynically. But because they were bright students and becoming experts in things like international relations, social policy, etc. and would be assets in other positions - but all that talent was just being parked in the City/Wall Street to make more money for rich people through their connections.
--
A couple "how the sausage is made" moments that I encountered about from my time in academia, one was that our STEM faculty keenly noticed all their "brightest" students were going to Wall Street to become quants.

A thing I think about a lot is that "smart" and "high-achieving" are, by themselves, morally neutral traits. The three top students from my private high school all went to Ivies (Yale and Princeton), and they are now: a partner at a particularly evil law firm, a general manager at a particularly evil tech company, and a private equity guy. Maybe that's just where they had dreamed of ending up ever since they were small children, but it does seem to me that a big part of what these schools often do is funnel students into lives that don't involve using their talents to address any of the world’s numerous real and urgent problems, and this seems like a terrible waste.
posted by naoko at 11:01 AM on November 19, 2021 [12 favorites]

Yeah, at some point during my MS education coursework it clicked for me that legacy admissions are literally just affirmative action for white people, especially at the most "elite" universities since they're the likeliest ones to have had explicitly racist admissions policies up through at least the mid 1940s (or later).
posted by augustimagination at 1:22 PM on November 19, 2021

I often tell people that probably the most important turning point in my life was getting accepted, on scholarship, to the sort of small private boarding school where the college counselor was on a first-name basis with the admission directors to all the best colleges -- and in fact I got into The University of Chicago when the admissions director at the time called up my college counselor and said, more or less, we have this one last spot this year and your guy is on the bubble, should we let him in or not? (She said yes, they should. They did.)

Another anecdote that I tell people is that during the interview for my first job out of college, the editor who became my boss noted that I had a philosophy degree from the University of Chicago, which she found particularly impressive. I, who had attended maybe 20% of my college classes because I was busy editing the school newspaper, and who became a philosophy major because it just happened to be the concentration whose classes had interested me the most, thus becoming the concentration that would allow me to graduate on time, nodded in agreement that, why, yes, yes it was.

It's deeply inaccurate to call what we have going a meritocracy. I will note, however, that in my own personal experience, once I was in the club, I was in -- none of the people who would become my "network" (i.e., my high school and college classmates, the educators who taught us, and the vast alumni host of both educational institutions I accessed after) asked how I got there. Some of that no doubt was due to me being a straight white dude who picked up the social cues real fast. But I think a not insignificant part of it is that elite schools, for those who get in, are a bit like the Privilege Foreign Legion. Whatever you were before, you're one of us now. And that certainly is an interesting dynamic.
posted by jscalzi at 1:22 PM on November 19, 2021 [23 favorites]

Maybe that's just where they had dreamed of ending up ever since they were small children, but it does seem to me that a big part of what these schools often do is funnel students into lives that don't involve using their talents to address any of the world’s numerous real and urgent problems, and this seems like a terrible waste.

Yeah, this is a giant problem. This survey says that even among those who graduated in 2020, 23% of Harvard seniors went into finance, 22% into consulting, and 18% into tech.

These numbers are both not surprising and yet still shocking to me. I didn’t even know what consulting was when I started (honestly, I kind of still don’t). I certainly don’t think a lot of teenagers start college yearning to be a management consultant. It’s acculturation. Part of it is that people get sucked in because it provides a path with good money/prestige and clear expectations and it seems like what people are supposed to do. But another part of it is actively driven by the university in terms of what opportunities they solicit for students, which is something that could maybe change. There’s a fascinating article about it here.
posted by en forme de poire at 1:51 PM on November 19, 2021 [8 favorites]

Sure it could change, but isn’t there an inherent incentive for schools to encourage students to pursue highly compensated professions so they can make larger donations?
posted by bq at 2:18 PM on November 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

I certainly don’t think a lot of teenagers start college yearning to be a management consultant. It’s acculturation.

Is it the schools, though? If you grow up with sufficient wealth and privilege, but not enough that it requires no effort on your part to maintain, taking a job which will not continue to supply them (or not marrying someone with a job that does) ends up being deeply unattractive to many when the rubber actually hits the road. The Ivies don't need to tell their students that. Now, could they do more active steering away? Of course. I have a whole speech in my back pocket about "how your rich ass should act if you really want to be a public interest lawyer," but the world is not yet ready.
posted by praemunire at 3:57 PM on November 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

College isn’t easy. Lots of people struggle especially freshman and Harvard isn’t unique in that regard. My impression is that Harvard isn’t particularly harder than other schools and they also have a lot more services and accommodations for students than you might find vs other places.
posted by interogative mood at 6:01 PM on November 19, 2021 [3 favorites]

Is it the schools, though?

Yes, I think part of it definitely is -- the article I linked in that comment goes into more detail. I'll just quote them directly because this rang true to me: "We do not deny the influence of class background on students’ career aspirations. However, we think it is imperative to recognize that campus environments, or university fields of power, have a large, independent role in the production and reproduction of social inequality. We have shown that students on the same campus narrow their aspirations to a select few careers, even though these students come from diverse backgrounds. Ignoring or downplaying universities’ influential capacity limits our ability to explain social inequality."

College isn’t easy. Lots of people struggle especially freshman and Harvard isn’t unique in that regard. My impression is that Harvard isn’t particularly harder than other schools and they also have a lot more services and accommodations for students than you might find vs other places.

Based on my experiences in undergrad as well as at other academic institutions, I definitely still disagree with the idea that Harvard is not particularly academically challenging or competitive compared to college in general. I do agree that Harvard spends a lot of resources making sure their graduation statistics are high, with the caveats I already stated in my last comment (this effort isn't evenly distributed; marginalized people are still more likely to fall through the cracks).

My mind always boggled at the notion of just offering that to someone from a family that couldn't afford tuition -- but now I see that several of the Ivies will cover tuition (though not room & board) with all grants for students whose families earn less than a particular threshold.

These thresholds are high, too -- I think a family income of $140,000 or less at Princeton now means you don't pay any tuition, and a family income of $65,000 or less means you don't pay tuition or room and board.

While access to Ivies does appear to "help" people who aren't from rich families in terms of future earnings (and they can be cheaper than a state school, if you're lucky enough to get in), I do feel like I have to mention that it can also be profoundly alienating to be suddenly, constantly confronted with that much wealth and privilege. The default assumption that all students are wealthy is an added source of stress for students from lower-income families, which can manifest in lots of small and large ways.
posted by en forme de poire at 11:43 PM on November 19, 2021 [11 favorites]

My wife once failed a student in her course when she was teaching at Dartmouth and several of her colleagues congratulated her for her bravery. It involved her having to have meetings all the way up to the Dean to justify it. This is why I found George W Bush's C average at Yale terrifying.
posted by srboisvert at 2:21 AM on November 20, 2021 [15 favorites]

The American admissions system is nuts. In Ireland, the Leaving Cert is pretty brutal, as is the points system administered by the CAO, but at least the whole process is centralised and anonymous. Working class kids have structural disadvantages, as everywhere, but if you get the points from your exam results, you get the college, and you get the course.
posted by kersplunk at 8:06 AM on November 20, 2021 [2 favorites]

I'm just wondering because MIT graduates seem to not be 'stupid' but do have the hyper myopic worldview of 'How can this make me the most money?'

MIT is haunted by the failure of the Route 128 crowd to dominate the computer industry.
posted by rhizome at 11:39 AM on November 20, 2021 [2 favorites]

We have shown that students on the same campus narrow their aspirations to a select few careers, even though these students come from diverse backgrounds. Ignoring or downplaying universities’ influential capacity limits our ability to explain social inequality.

If you survey entering 1Ls at top law schools, who are themselves generally a subset of the privileged at the top universities, you will find a substantial interest in public interest careers, and I would say that such careers are perceived as prestigious. (This after exposure to top undergrads, for most.) The dropoff later is enormous, and, while there are unquestionably aspects of the recruiting process that affect where people sort themselves, in the end, most well-off kids want to stay that way. All the rah-rahing in the world doesn't change that you can't spend $75,000 on your wedding on an AAG's salary.

Based on my experiences in undergrad as well as at other academic institutions, I definitely still disagree with the idea that Harvard is not particularly academically challenging or competitive compared to college in general.

I went to the other one, but was a TF at Harvard, and I agree with this. There's a softer bottom if you choose to be indifferent to grades because you're going to be hired to play golf with your lax bros anyway. If you care, it can get ridiculously hard.
posted by praemunire at 2:11 PM on November 20, 2021 [2 favorites]

If you care, it can get ridiculously hard.

But is it harder than other universities? My friend who has graded at both elite and non-elite universities would say no - the expectations at many non-elite universities are just as high. It matters because people who don't know this (e.g., hiring managers) might think an A average at State U (or Directional State U) = a B average at Ivy-clad U.

I went to a (very) non-elite university for my undergraduate, and was a TF at an elite university. What I saw was that sometimes the expectations were a bit higher at the elite uni: longer readings for a humanities class, for example (though the students were more likely to finish them if they were the same length as my undergraduate uni). But the assignments were usually of the same difficulty and the performance was the same for letter grades - except where grade inflation meant the elite uni gave out higher grades.

Grade Inflation wasn't on a linear scale - an A was the same, but a few A- papers would have been B+ elsewhere, and lots of B+ papers might have had Bs at my undergraduate uni, and B- papers would definitely have been C, but we were under pressure not to give anything below B- (and had to argue for those). Overall, there were more people capable of writing A/A- papers (1/3 - 1/2 of the class, instead of the 1/10 or less at other places) - but those papers they wrote weren't better than A papers elsewhere (just more numerous).

Everywhere, if you care about grades, it can be ridiculously hard. My friend mentioned above (who has taught at three different universities of varying status) went to an undergraduate university that wasn't elite but had really tough standards - and he was regularly working 80-100 hour weeks to keep an A average as an undergraduate. At my undergraduate uni, I would start my papers several weeks before they were due; we had a "Reading Week" in February which was kind of like Spring Break in the US, and I never took that week off - I would use that time to spend full days in the library without the interruption of classes.

There may be universities or colleges with much different expectations (the Greendale Colleges of the world, though I haven't encountered them), but overall, I might argue that students at non-elite universities will often work harder for the same grades - not because the expectations are higher (they are about the same), but because students are expected to do that while also balancing commuting, working long hours at paid employment to support themselves, helping families at home, etc.

(I realise that many non-elite universities also have students who don't have to commute or work long hours, and even have that luxury of a place on campus with food they can afford, but these seemed like amazing things coming from my Canadian commuter university. The first time I saw an all-you-can-eat dining hall, I felt like a medieval peasant who woke up in the land of Cockaigne.)
posted by jb at 4:50 PM on November 20, 2021 [4 favorites]

It isn’t harder at Harvard. 98% of people who go to Harvard graduate — that’s one of the highest in the world, even higher than in the rest of the Ivy League. It is easier when you challenge yourself at Harvard because they have better facilities and more support for students.
posted by interogative mood at 7:25 PM on November 20, 2021

I'm curious whether you're basing this off anything other than that one number. The graduation rate at MIT and Caltech is 93%; at U Chicago, it's 94%. Does this mean those schools are academically easier or less competitive than, say, Northeastern, with an 85% graduation rate, or UVM, with a 74% graduation rate, or UC Merced, with a 66% graduation rate? Would you similarly say that the only hard part about going to MIT, Caltech, or U of C is getting in? If so, I think we're probably talking about different things.
posted by en forme de poire at 8:46 AM on November 21, 2021 [1 favorite]

Yes MIT is much easier once you are in vs UC Merced. Better study groups, better library, better tutors/ support, and higher quality instructors. Financial aid is such that most students can focus on their academics without having to work a second job, or if they have a diving job they are working part time: fewer hours. Contrast that with the experience of a typical UC Merced student.
posted by interogative mood at 1:13 PM on November 21, 2021 [2 favorites]

Well, I certainly agree that Merced has less resources per undergraduate than MIT and that the typical Merced student is more likely to face non-academic barriers to success, especially financial ones, that the typical MIT student won’t.
posted by en forme de poire at 2:28 PM on November 21, 2021 [2 favorites]

For undergrad you also have better instructors and TA’s at places like Harvard and MIT. With professional programs like EE there are national accreditation standards — the core material students are expected to master is the same between MIT or Merced. All the students have to climb the same mountain — the ones at MIT get better equipment and better guides; then they want to claim it was harder for them. It wasn’t.
posted by interogative mood at 3:21 PM on November 21, 2021 [2 favorites]

For undergrad you also have better instructors and TA’s at places like Harvard and MIT.

Oh, I seriously doubt that. A lot of less elite universities put more effort into teaching graduate students how to teach, at least in the humanities. Whereas there was absolutely NO teaching guidance offered to me when I was a teaching fellow at an Ivy. I was objectively a much worse TA than the TAs I had in undergraduate (who were both better trained and more experienced). My friends in the sciences taught with even less preparation - they were thrown in as TAs in the first year (not third), but that was actually par for the course at my undergrad uni, too.

The professors were a mixed lot - some were talented, natural teachers, but overall, there was less attention paid to pedagogy as a skill in itself. Because it wasn't very research focused, my undergraduate uni had much less well prepared students, but very good instructors.

No one is saying that going to an elite university would be a bad experience. If you're a dedicated student, being in a room where dedicated students are about 1/2 the class (or more, depending on the course) is a real asset, compared to being the only person who did the readings. The professors are more likely to be tenured/tenure-track (and thus more stable in both their income and in their ability to create relationships with students), and the teaching assistants will have better pay and often a lighter teaching load. Anyone who can get accepted into an elite university will likely have a better experience than they would elsewhere (with some exceptions).

But there is also this mythos among the undergraduate students - and even some of the professors who haven't been around other universities - that they are night and day different from high achieving students at non-elite universities, that there is some special spark that they have - and the universities certainly promote that mythos (because it's good for them). But I've been in both places, read undergraduate papers and graduate papers in both elite and non-elite universities, and comparing like-for-like (e.g., A- student to A- student), they aren't significantly different. It's just that you'll have more A-/A students at an elite university than a non-elite - and also some who maybe could be bright but can't be arsed students. (The last class I taught as a teaching fellow at an Ivy had three plagiarized papers, out of 17 students.)
posted by jb at 4:37 PM on November 21, 2021 [8 favorites]

Yes MIT is much easier once you are in vs UC Merced.

Really? Whatever happened to "Look at the person to your left; look at the person to your right -- one of you three will not graduate from this Institute"?
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 1:17 AM on November 22, 2021

Note that the difference in supports, including financial supports to make university affordable for an entire degree program as well as academic supports and mental health supports, can mean that a school with a better graduation rate can still be higher workload or tougher classes. I don’t have enough knowledge to compare MIT to UC Merced specifically, but at least prior to 2015, MIT did have a higher than average student suicide rate:

At MIT, the suicide rate over the past decade was 10.2 per 100,000 students — undergraduates and graduates — according to a Globe review of public records and university and media reports. That was a slight decline from the previous decade but was higher than the national average among colleges of between 6.5 and 7.5 suicides per 100,000 students, according to three major studies that looked at both undergraduates and graduates from 1980 to 2009.

In an interview, Barnhart pointed out that MIT’s suicide rate among undergraduates has declined, particularly since the early 2000s. Between 1994 and 2005, the rate for undergraduates was 18.7, but it fell to 12.6 for that group over the past decade.

posted by eviemath at 2:00 AM on November 22, 2021 [1 favorite]

(The article I linked perhaps answers your question, Harvey Kilobit, though I don’t think that MIT ever actually had a graduation rate as low as 67%. Some individual courses certainly would have had a 33% failure rate - that’s not uncommon for a traditional, old school intro calculus course for example. Perhaps that’s what you’re thinking of?)
posted by eviemath at 2:05 AM on November 22, 2021

Really? Whatever happened to "Look at the person to your left; look at the person to your right -- one of you three will not graduate from this Institute"?

That one person got rejected and is not at Kiliian Court to hear it. And that's a good thing.

(The article I linked perhaps answers your question, Harvey Kilobit, though I don’t think that MIT ever actually had a graduation rate as low as 67%. Some individual courses certainly would have had a 33% failure rate - that’s not uncommon for a traditional, old school intro calculus course for example. Perhaps that’s what you’re thinking of?)

I heard that cliche as a freshman in 1993. It was hyperbole, no doubt. But with tuition and student debt skyrocketing, it became borderline criminal. So admissions got more stringent, and support for students who are admitted improved, and the failure rate declined along with the suicide rate.
posted by ocschwar at 7:32 AM on November 22, 2021 [2 favorites]

Harvey Kilobit: Whatever happened to "Look at the person to your left; look at the person to your right -- one of you three will not graduate from this Institute"?

I work at a .edu -- not an Ivy, of course -- but that attitude is a thing of the past at every school. The whole deal is about student retention now: the schools understand what businesses have known for years about new customer acquisition.

The effort -- both time and money -- of recruiting and selecting and onboarding a student can only be spread across four years of tuition. (Donations from alumni get counted by the Development Office, and they're never going to thank the rest of the faculty & staff for giving them bodies to work with!) You'd be a fool to risk wasting all that on a student who leaves before the end, so you want to lock those kids in.

Furthermore, many schools -- including the one where I work, who decided this in 2006 -- believe it's morally wrong to saddle students with five figures in non-dischargeable debt and then turn them out into the world with diminished expectations, no degree, and a 90-day window before the loan payments kick in. So we don't want to accept students in the first place who won't make it through, and we do a lot of extra work to support the ones that we do take. For starters, we shrank our class size by ten percent in 2006, trimming off the bottom tranche of students who were least likely to succeed -- and our retention rate rose every year thereafter. (Cf. Army recruiters and "America's all-volunteer military," who have had to drop their standards of late because they are more about intake than eventual outcomes.)

By contrast, In The Olden Days (i.e. maybe through the late 1990s), the Admissions staff would stand among the new students on move-in weekend with a stack of papers, calling accepted students who had declined to attend, and asking if maybe they were still interested and to come down that very day with a check and an overnight bag to start their college career. These were not going to be your top tier of recruits, but there were beds to fill!
posted by wenestvedt at 7:52 AM on November 22, 2021 [2 favorites]

I echo what jb and wenestvedt said. I got my PhD at a Pseudo Ivy and now teach at an access institution. Unlike the examples above, we admit everyone with a high school diploma, so we do have higher attrition than most schools. And in contrast with the students I taught while in grad school, most of our students work 30 hours a week and have family responsibilities, which also contributes to the attrition. But, we faculty are hired entirely for our ability to teach and mentor those students. That is our job, and we take it really seriously. Students are taught directly by us, not TAs. You will not find more highly skilled, committed, or innovative teachers anywhere than those at primarily undergraduate institutions.

When my friends ask my advice about their kids' college plans, I tell them that in terms of teaching and connections with faculty their kids are much better off at a school like mine or Georgia College than at the University of Georgia, and far better off than my poor former students at Duke. It's simply a fact that we teach better and spend a lot more time in one on one tutoring and mentoring with all of our students. There are of course other benefits of attending a large research university, but quality of teaching is not one of them.
posted by hydropsyche at 8:18 AM on November 22, 2021 [7 favorites]

And on the gripping hand, equality of teaching and equality of opportunity are very much not the same.

One of my kids was interested in Dartmouth. They have such a huge endowment that they will effectively cover your extra study abroad fees (cite). Financial aid packages at most other schools decidedly do not. They run shuttle buses to New York and Boston daily, and have had Yo Yo Ma play on campus, and own a mountain, and whatnot.

My school does not own a mountain. :7)
posted by wenestvedt at 8:33 AM on November 22, 2021 [2 favorites]

Really? Whatever happened to "Look at the person to your left; look at the person to your right -- one of you three will not graduate from this Institute"?

That is the reality at UC Merced where 65% graduate while at Harvard 98% graduate, at MIT is it 95%.
posted by interogative mood at 9:31 AM on November 22, 2021

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