4 X more "unqualified" white students admitted to Harvard than black students

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Another variable, though, is that different races may apply to different numbers and types of schools on average. I believe this impacts acceptance/rejection rates.

Type would matter, but number of schools would only impact acceptance rates when measured at the aggregate level where you ask if a student was accepted anywhere they applied. It's a rare stat that isn't collected b/c it can't be collected by schools, but only by researchers who directly contact students to ask if they got accepted any place they applied. It's not even the "average acceptance rate of groups across schools", which uses acceptance rates at individual schools as the unit of measurement. Although it is true black students would be better served by applying more places, even though that is yet another SES issue b/c applications cost $.

It's obvious it affects acceptance in aggregate but when you see internet memes and propaganda they usually don't drill down to this technical level.

I went to school a long time ago. I seem to remember schools being aware or asking about other schools. Maybe I remembered wrong or it's different now.

Perhaps, there's also a difference culturally for early admissions or whatever you call it when you lock yourself in if accepted.

 

[Metaphor]

I think there is more going on here as well. Probably would not change the conclusions of ron but it would explain different trends we see.

For example, some people are hiring others to take the tests for them. It is unknown how many, but probably it's more rich people doing it than poor people.

Some cultures on average probably take the test more as a variable, eg. Asians. Those persons probably on average also apply to more colleges and more elite colleges out of them.

African Americans being on average lesser SES, probably are taking the tests much less. But African Americans may not be applying to the same schools as Asians and Whites on average since there are a number of traditionally African American schools such as Moorehouse. Those schools also have different criteria for admissions than most elite schools.

Yeah, one of my posts mentions that number of test attempts is highly variable by race and SES (b/c it costs $), plus number of test attempts predicts steady increases in scores, raising a person 12 percentile rankings from first to fourth attempt (on average). That's a huge difference, that would be the difference between acceptance and rejection much of the time.

If you are talking about this, it does not mention SES at all:
https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/5195-Multiple-Testers.pdf

You also neglect to mention that part of the repeat effect is because multiple testers have taken their first test earlier in high school, and will have covered more material in school and will be chronologically older by the time they take their later tests.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

For legacy/donor preference admissions, how many more disadvantaged students are able to attend university because of this donor cash funding scholarships?

Why would legacy be relevant? I agree about donor--so long as the school gains enough to fund an additional position donor admissions do no harm so long as they aren't too numerous. I would like to see the rest of the preferences gone and donor required to be more than the all-in cost of another seat in class.

 

[repoman]

So Democrats are directly saying screw whites and republicans and saying (if you are not dazzled by religion or other flack) screw poor people.

So the intersection of the Venn diagram, poor whites, have no redress.

 

[Trausti]

For legacy/donor preference admissions, how many more disadvantaged students are able to attend university because of this donor cash funding scholarships?

Why would legacy be relevant? I agree about donor--so long as the school gains enough to fund an additional position donor admissions do no harm so long as they aren't too numerous. I would like to see the rest of the preferences gone and donor required to be more than the all-in cost of another seat in class.

I see legacy and donor admissions as one and the same. The study referenced by the OP likewise - "we examine the preferences Harvard gives for recruited athletes, legacies, those on the dean’s interest list, and children of faculty and staff." If children of alumni can't get admitted, the alumni will put away their checkbooks.

 

[Trausti]

So Democrats are directly saying screw whites and republicans and saying (if you are not dazzled by religion or other flack) screw poor people.

So the intersection of the Venn diagram, poor whites, have no redress.

Well, yeah. E.g., preference for athletics admission is only bad when it benefits White students.

 

[repoman]

wrong thread

 

[Bomb#20]

A study found that 43% of white students admitted to Harvard were admitted for reasons other than academic qualifications, such as legacy, $ donors, and children of faculty. 75% of them would not have been admitted based upon their academic credentials...or 16% of all students being whites given preferential treatment and taking seats from more academically qualified students.

Court documents from the lawsuits about Harvard affirmative action policies show that about 4% of Harvard's students are black students admitted due to affirmative action preferences...

IOW, for every black student admitted because of affirmative action and thus "took the seat from a more qualified student" (to use standard rhetoric), there are 4 white students who took a seat from a more qualified student.

Yet, conservatives who claim to only to care about fairness, focus almost exclusively on the non-whites admitted by affirmative action. This reveals a lack of principled commitment to actual fairness, and a racial ulterior motive by such conservatives.

With all due respect to your ESP powers, there are factors you aren't taking into account in your "revelation" about your outgroup's motives.

First and most obviously, a donor-based admission brings in enough money to create a new seat, so the kid isn't taking anyone's seat away.

Second, you aren't doing an apples-to-apples calculation, since Harvard has been known to hire non-white faculty and since "reasons other than academic qualifications" includes athletics. You're counting athletes and the children of faculty toward the white total but excluding them from the black total in order to get that 16%-to-4% ratio.

Third, affirmative action is a lot more famous than legacy/donor/nepotism admissions. Those conservatives' almost exclusively focus on affirmative action has to at least to some extent reflect simple familiarity and media coverage.

And fourth, it's Harvard. It's a private university. Even if it wants to admit on the basis of bleeding phrenology, it gets to do that. It's none of conservatives' business whether Harvard's admissions office likes bumpy skulls. The one set of admissions considerations that make themselves conservatives' business is "race, creed, or color" and the rest of the list of protected classifications imposed on Harvard by law. When Harvard is ordered by duly enacted federal law not to discriminate by race, and does so anyway, it's breaking the law. When the government turns a blind eye, and when it actively incentivizes Harvard to break the law, and when it issues court rulings saying discriminating against white people doesn't count as discriminating by race, creed, or color, that's not Harvard discriminating; that's the government discriminating. And the government isn't a private university. The government doesn't get a "Who cares? It's just a private club." get-out-of-obligations-free-card. When the government doesn't treat whites and blacks equally, even though the Constitution explicitly requires it to, that means rule-of-law has been flushed down the toilet. I'd expect conservatives to have a problem with that. Even ones who care only about fairness -- because unfairness by the government is a hell of a lot more important than unfairness by a private organization.

 

[ruby sparks]

The point here is that the given issue (fairness) is not the actual issue. If it were, those concerned would be concerned about unfairnesses, but they more or less turn a blind eye to some and not others. 'Reflecting media coverage' seems like a poor excuse. 'Familiarity' even less so.

 

[ruby sparks]

So Democrats are directly saying screw whites and republicans and saying (if you are not dazzled by religion or other flack) screw poor people.

So the intersection of the Venn diagram, poor whites, have no redress.

To some extent, yes, poor whites arguably do not have enough advocates about this. That's how I see it.

 

[laughing dog]

For legacy/donor preference admissions, how many more disadvantaged students are able to attend university because of this donor cash funding scholarships?

Why would legacy be relevant? I agree about donor--so long as the school gains enough to fund an additional position donor admissions do no harm so long as they aren't too numerous. I would like to see the rest of the preferences gone and donor required to be more than the all-in cost of another seat in class.

I see legacy and donor admissions as one and the same. The study referenced by the OP likewise - "we examine the preferences Harvard gives for recruited athletes, legacies, those on the dean’s interest list, and children of faculty and staff." If children of alumni can't get admitted, the alumni will put away their checkbooks.

So, it is not an issue of admitting the most "qualified" students after all for you.

 

[laughing dog]

First and most obviously, a donor-based admission brings in enough money to create a new seat, so the kid isn't taking anyone's seat away.

There are plenty of flaws in that argument. First, I don't know about Harvard, but in most physically defined universities, there is an actual limit to the number of students. Second, there is no guarantee that the "added" seat (if there is one) will go to a more academically qualified student. Third, there is no guarantee that donor money is sufficient to fund another "seat" or that the donated funds will be used to add seats.

 

[Trausti]

I see legacy and donor admissions as one and the same. The study referenced by the OP likewise - "we examine the preferences Harvard gives for recruited athletes, legacies, those on the dean’s interest list, and children of faculty and staff." If children of alumni can't get admitted, the alumni will put away their checkbooks.

So, it is not an issue of admitting the most "qualified" students after all for you.

No. I posed the question of how many disadvantaged students benefit from alumni donations.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

There is a specific claim on the table that all the legacy admissions are helping to put extra students into the college, but no one is saying how this works or how many students are benefited by legacy admissions. When people ask, it's like "Oh you are supposed to be the one that knows because you are against legacy admissions!!!11" When I received federal financial aid to go to college, I kind of don't remember there being a specific here's-some-money-from-the-college thing. On the other hand, I can imagine that a person who donates a building is pretty fucking helpful to the college. That's an individual, though, that may not be reflective of ordinary legacies or donations...meaning, such person might not even request descendants to be admitted. On the third hand, my friend's parents donated to Harvard--both alumni--he didn't get in. So, this seems to indicate to me that legacy admissions and donations are not exactly the same thing with an extremely diverse amount one can donate. So, really, it sounds like the burden is on Trausti to explain himself better.

 

[ronburgundy]

I think there is more going on here as well. Probably would not change the conclusions of ron but it would explain different trends we see.

For example, some people are hiring others to take the tests for them. It is unknown how many, but probably it's more rich people doing it than poor people.

Some cultures on average probably take the test more as a variable, eg. Asians. Those persons probably on average also apply to more colleges and more elite colleges out of them.

African Americans being on average lesser SES, probably are taking the tests much less. But African Americans may not be applying to the same schools as Asians and Whites on average since there are a number of traditionally African American schools such as Moorehouse. Those schools also have different criteria for admissions than most elite schools.

Yeah, one of my posts mentions that number of test attempts is highly variable by race and SES (b/c it costs $), plus number of test attempts predicts steady increases in scores, raising a person 12 percentile rankings from first to fourth attempt (on average). That's a huge difference, that would be the difference between acceptance and rejection much of the time.

If you are talking about this, it does not mention SES at all:
https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/5195-Multiple-Testers.pdf

Right at the top of the second column it states that among students with family income below $36k, a higher percentage take it once than take it twice, while for those above $60k a higher % take it twice than once.

You also neglect to mention that part of the repeat effect is because multiple testers have taken their first test earlier in high school, and will have covered more material in school and will be chronologically older by the time they take their later tests.

"most students take it for the first time in the spring of their junior year and possibly retake it in the fall of their senior year."


IOW, about 1 single semester between testings. And even if that can massively increase test scores, then that alone proves Trautsi wrong that scores are a measure of stable IQ that cannot be improved by more learning opportunities. Trautsi's arguments requires that there is nothing a student can do or anyone can do for them to improve their score. Any such effect means that wealth is an advantage. Plus, there is a large literature on "The testing effect" showing that testing by itself w/o opportunity to learn and study in between improves test performance, often more than studying. In fact, even on the Raven's Progressive Matrices, the gold standard IQ test b/c it is so hard to study for, shows a score increase of 1/2 a standard deviation from 1st to 3rd time taking it (that corresponds to an increase of 70th to 90th percentile on the SAT). That's why research generally considers IQ tests as invalid for comparisons when comparing people who have differing experience with the particular test. Plus there the all the literature on how performing a cognitive task under similar contexts better prepares you for optimal performance in that context.

The claim that taking the SAT or ACT multiple times doesn't improve scores requires rejecting some of the more basic and established facts in cognitive science.

Plus, the meta-analysis showed huge 16 percentile ranking increases due to coaching on SAT are in controlled experiments with nothing by a coaching session differing between randomly assigned groups.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I see legacy and donor admissions as one and the same. The study referenced by the OP likewise - "we examine the preferences Harvard gives for recruited athletes, legacies, those on the dean’s interest list, and children of faculty and staff." If children of alumni can't get admitted, the alumni will put away their checkbooks.

So, it is not an issue of admitting the most "qualified" students after all for you.

If admitting the less qualified brings in enough money to pay for another position nobody is losing out.

I question whether the alumni admissions are of that much benefit, though.

 

[KeepTalking]

I see legacy and donor admissions as one and the same. The study referenced by the OP likewise - "we examine the preferences Harvard gives for recruited athletes, legacies, those on the dean’s interest list, and children of faculty and staff." If children of alumni can't get admitted, the alumni will put away their checkbooks.

So, it is not an issue of admitting the most "qualified" students after all for you.

If admitting the less qualified brings in enough money to pay for another position nobody is losing out.

That only holds true if the number of students accepted varies based upon the amount of donations received. If a school has room for 2,000 students before your parents donated enough to pay the tuition for another student, and still only has room for 2,000 students after the donation that got you in the door, then someone more qualified is losing out when your parents bought your seat with their donation.

 

[Trausti]

If admitting the less qualified brings in enough money to pay for another position nobody is losing out.

That only holds true if the number of students accepted varies based upon the amount of donations received. If a school has room for 2,000 students before your parents donated enough to pay the tuition for another student, and still only has room for 2,000 students after the donation that got you in the door, then someone more qualified is losing out when your parents bought your seat with their donation.

Well, what about the person who’s qualified but can’t afford it?

 

[KeepTalking]

If admitting the less qualified brings in enough money to pay for another position nobody is losing out.

That only holds true if the number of students accepted varies based upon the amount of donations received. If a school has room for 2,000 students before your parents donated enough to pay the tuition for another student, and still only has room for 2,000 students after the donation that got you in the door, then someone more qualified is losing out when your parents bought your seat with their donation.

Well, what about the person who’s qualified but can’t afford it?

You brought them up, perhaps you should tell me about them.

 

[ronburgundy]

A study found that 43% of white students admitted to Harvard were admitted for reasons other than academic qualifications, such as legacy, $ donors, and children of faculty. 75% of them would not have been admitted based upon their academic credentials...or 16% of all students being whites given preferential treatment and taking seats from more academically qualified students.

Court documents from the lawsuits about Harvard affirmative action policies show that about 4% of Harvard's students are black students admitted due to affirmative action preferences...

IOW, for every black student admitted because of affirmative action and thus "took the seat from a more qualified student" (to use standard rhetoric), there are 4 white students who took a seat from a more qualified student.

Yet, conservatives who claim to only to care about fairness, focus almost exclusively on the non-whites admitted by affirmative action. This reveals a lack of principled commitment to actual fairness, and a racial ulterior motive by such conservatives.

With all due respect to your ESP powers, there are factors you aren't taking into account in your "revelation" about your outgroup's motives.

It doesn't require ESP, just logic. More seats at Harvard are taken from academically deserving whites by other whites, yet conservatives only focus on the minority of seats taken from them by blacks and latinos. That demonstrates a lack of real concern for a fairness principle and a level of outrage triggered by the race of the people getting those seats.

First and most obviously, a donor-based admission brings in enough money to create a new seat, so the kid isn't taking anyone's seat away.

That has been covered. Legacy are not donors, they are separate, and legacy admits far outnumber donor admits. Also, it is false to assume that donations are always used to create new slots for more students. They often go to things like paying renovating athletic team locker rooms or some unnecessary beautification effort that doesn't expand resources to increase enrollment.

Second, you aren't doing an apples-to-apples calculation, since Harvard has been known to hire non-white faculty and since "reasons other than academic qualifications" includes athletics. You're counting athletes and the children of faculty toward the white total but excluding them from the black total in order to get that 16%-to-4% ratio.

The quotes on "unqualified" in the thread title and OP refer to standard rhetoric of affirmative action proponents. The 4% refers to blacks admitted under that program that would not have likely qualified under purely academic credentials. Conservatives don't complain about legacy admits, and the point of the OP is that the non-white group they do complain about is a smaller source of "more qualified" applicants being rejected than the group they ignore who are overwhelmingly white. Thus, it makes sense to compare the Affirmative Action admits to the largest group who takes most of the seats from more academically qualified applicants, white ALDCs.

Also, the court doc estimate of 4% includes all black admits who would not have qualified based upon academic credentials. AA students and black ALDC students are overlapping groups that comprise the 4%, and the vast majority of the 4% would be AA. Harvard has very few black alumni old and rich enough to have college age kids they could afford to sent to Harvard. Also, Harvard still has few tenured black faculty (about 2-3%). And many of those were within the past several years and thus are too young to have college age kids. Having kids in your 20's is not a viable route to tenure at Harvard. As for Athlete's, Harvard does not offer any athletic scholarships specifically b/c they do not admit anyone under the notion that athletics is part of their requirement for admission. They put minimal effort into competitive major team sports ($100k coach salaries), so they aren't likely giving admission to lot's of unqualified athlete's. Plus, their athletes are overwhelmingly white. Not only are only 3 of their 13 women's basketball players black (and none are starters), but their rowing team has 80 athletes with only 2 black women, and their sailing team has not a single black member but a bigger roster than their men's basketball team.

Third, affirmative action is a lot more famous than legacy/donor/nepotism admissions. Those conservatives' almost exclusively focus on affirmative action has to at least to some extent reflect simple familiarity and media coverage.

Affirmative action is more famous precisely b/c racist conservatives made it more famous by exclusively ranting about the claimed injustice of it and ignoring the far more prevalent injustice of legacy admits. Legacy admits are widely known about, but they aren't news b/c conservatives don't mind when a deserving white student's seat is taken by another white person, who as a bonus is likely rich and thus has more inherent value according the conservative dogma that unequal wealth outcomes reflect innate merit.

And fourth, it's Harvard. It's a private university. Even if it wants to admit on the basis of bleeding phrenology, it gets to do that.

No it doesn't get to do that, that is why there is a lawsuit against Harvard for their Affirmative Action program. They and most private colleges receive various types of federal funds via subsidized loans, research grants, etc.. There are also legal arguments that it violates the Civil Rights Act since most private schools used to exclude non-whites making current legacy admits are inherently biased in favor of whites. That puts them under government jurisdiction regarding such matters. And Harvard is just the focus of this study b/c of the lawsuit. There are dozens of public Universities still doing it, and many many more used to do it until recently pressured by leftist and liberals to stop. Conservatives regularly complain about affirmative action, even at private colleges and have done so repeatedly on this board about Harvard in particular in relation to the lawsuit.