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

[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.

By that reasoning, any American or Irishman who complains about any unfairness in his own country must be lying about his motives because he apparently cares more about some triviality than he cares about the Janjaweed raping and murdering noncombatants in Darfur. That's a lot more unfair than all of our first world problems, so clearly the given issue (fairness) is not the actual issue.

Context matters. Media coverage matters. Familiarity matters. Some might regard those as poor excuses for the world mostly ignoring the Janjaweed; the point here is that the inference leap from "I feel that's a poor excuse" to "Your real reason is whatever the hell I say it is, and I say it's because you're a racist!" is not a logical inference leap.

This entire thread is a painful exercise in Whataboutism.

Nope. It isn't about comparing two different systems in two different countries.

Fail, wrong analogy, but nice try. No sorry, not even that. Crap try.

 

[laughing dog]

Way to miss the forest for the trees. ...

Way to shift those goalposts. The discussion was not about the long run.

Excuse me? Shift what goalposts? I didn't set any goalposts; I explained why rb's argument didn't imply what he claimed it did. If you think your or his choice to ignore the long run somehow makes rb's inference correct, show your work.

Here is a relevant quote from the OP

"or 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. "

That is clearly about concurrent substitution not some long-run trade-off.

You need to show your work why you think the OP is about the long run.

 

[Metaphor]

I noticed you didn't use real quotes. Did anyone actually say that?

If somebody on the thread had said those words, I'd have attributed it to them.

Also, your question is too broad to be meaningful. Particularly with any psychological or aptitude test, how much a measure captures X and X alone is completely context dependent. My prior link to the research on Raven's Matrices, often considered one of the most "pure" measures of IQ, illustrates this. If two people being compared both have zero experience with that test then a much larger % of the difference in their scores is a result of general "aptitude" differences, although interest and motivation to take that test in the given testing conditions are still factors. But if one person has taken it twice already, they may score 1/4 standard deviation higher (which is pretty sizable) which could be the exact opposite of the actual difference in the general abilities the test is supposed to measure. IOW, a person who is 1/4 standard deviation higher then another person in the true general aptitudes Raven's is intended to measure will score 1/4 SD lower if that other person has experience taking the Ravens. So, in that comparison 0% of the variance in those people's scores reflect true variance in aptitude.

No: I don't mean variances in difference scores. Your score is not dependent on how you did versus a particular person, but how you did against the population of people who calibrated the test.

In contrast, for people whose true aptitude is already in the top 30th percentile, those who comprise the vast majority of college applicants, training/practice opportunities can make a big difference, boosting them from the 75th vs. 91st percentile scores, which would be the deciding difference at most schools. So, let's say that across the total variance in all SAT scores, just 15% is due to SES related factors tied to paying for test-specific opportunities like tutors, courses, more tests, etc.. And suppose that 2/3 of that 15% was concentrated in the top 30th percentiles of test takers (due to "rich get richer" effects). That means the 1/3 of the variance is due to these testing-specific SES factors, among those students for whom it matters b/c they are applying to college. It means that a sizable % of the time using SAT scores will favor the wrong student.

It means between any comparison of students, the SAT score comparison might lead you to make the wrong conclusion about who has the higher innate ability, but you will still be doing better than chance.

That is, if you take all the possible pairwise comparisons and assume the person with the higher score has the higher ability, you'd be right a lot more than you'd be right by chance alone.

Finally (I know, right), I kept talking about "test-specific SES factors" to distinguish from the huge influence we know SES has on the development of real academic aptitude via determining the quality of teachers, classroom materials, computers at school and home, reduced external stressors, not having to work in high school, etc.. All of those impact the very academic skills that do determine college success. It's a problem, but not a problem to be fixed at college admissions b/c it's too late by then. My arguments about SAT and ACT are not about those SES influences, but about the influence of wealth on paying for opportunities directly about boosting admission tests scores.

Well, yes, I believe the same thing. Higher SES probably results in higher academic aptitude for reasons unrelated to test-taking opportunities. But as you say that isn't the university's problem.

 

[Metaphor]

From evidence presented at the Harvard trial:

View attachment 28588

This is a red herring. This question of the OP is not which policy affects the racial makeup of the student body more. Unless, you want to admit that conservatives are upset that affirmative action means more blacks get to go to college.

I'm upset that affirmative action exists, because you shouldn't discriminate against people in college admissions by race.

Thus, anyone pretending that their real concern is simply more academically qualified students losing slots to less qualified people would be more bothered by the preferences mostly given to whites than by affirmative action. Thus, anyone who bitches about AA while virtually never mentioning legacies is simply a racist who is upset that too many blacks and Hispanics are getting into college.

The preferences are mostly given to whites under ADLC because white people are the majority of the population. The preferences given to blacks under affirmative action are a function of deliberate race discrimination.

It seems to me your conclusion is something you had already formed and the data itself were irrelevant. You don't present any alternatives to your "is a racist" conclusion. For one thing, somebody who is upset about AA but never mentions legacies may do so because they don't know the specific effect of each. Indeed, until a wealth of admissions data was available this year from the Harvard trial, most people were in the dark about the specific numerical effect of each 'route' of non-academic-merit admission.

But, even if you knew the whole time that legacy admissions accounted for more white students missing out than AA admits, you could still be more upset by AA. For example, you could consider that an institution discriminating by race is a worse evil than an institution favouring the children of people who had previously attended, because you think discriminating by race is something that is wrong and has a bad history in a way that a kind of nepotism does not.

 

[Bomb#20]

Nope. It isn't about comparing two different systems in two different countries.

Fail, wrong analogy, but nice try. No sorry, not even that. Crap try.

That's not an argument; that's just gainsaying what the other person said.

 

[Bomb#20]

Excuse me? Shift what goalposts? I didn't set any goalposts; I explained why rb's argument didn't imply what he claimed it did. If you think your or his choice to ignore the long run somehow makes rb's inference correct, show your work.

Here is a relevant quote from the OP

"or 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. "

That is clearly about concurrent substitution not some long-run trade-off.

You need to show your work why you think the OP is about the long run.

Oh for the love of god! You are a smart person; why do you write such dumb comments? Where the bejesus do you imagine you saw me indicate that I "think the OP is about the long run"?

The OP is not about the long run. The OP is not about the short run. The OP is not about any run. The OP is about "This reveals a lack of principled commitment to actual fairness, and a racial ulterior motive by such conservatives." Whether rb was talking about concurrent substitution is entirely irrelevant. The mere circumstance that "some long-run trade-off" isn't anything that occurred to rb when he was composing his OP does not qualify as a reason to take for granted that "such conservatives" are unaware that there's a long-run trade-off! Duh! What rb was or wasn't writing about in the OP is on him; it isn't on the conservatives he's accusing of racism. Being a non-racist does not obligate everyone else to fail to take into account whatever real-world considerations rb happened to fail to take into account in his OP. This is not rocket science.

 

[Derec]

1. Some of them, including here, if pressed, will then say 'ok both are bad', but how many of these either start threads on for example legacy admissions, or advantage mechanisms other than AA, or spend much time criticising them? Hardly at all. The focus is on AA. And usually only quotas to boot, as if that's all AA was.

The reason there aren't many threads on legacies is that the issue is not nearly as controversial. The Leftists, including Leftists here, not only vociferously defend the practice of doling out admissions advantages based on skin color, but, in true NewSpeak fashion, accuse those who disagree of "racism".

2. Quite possibly outside this forum there are some (perhaps Conservatives) that criticise AA but support legacy admissions (and the like).

Note: legacy admissions are not reserved just for white people.

So in both the above cases, the key issues are about (a) double standards, (b) a lack of principled commitment to actual fairness, and possibly in at least some cases (c) the having of an ulterior motive, albeit especially in the latter case, of some Conservatives (which is the group the OP is referring to, not necessarily members here).

What about double standards of those who like ronburgundy want to exclusively talk about white students who are not qualified, but refuse to talk about black students who are not qualified?

 

[Derec]

Substantiate your claim.

What do you mean "substantiate"? I quoted you verbatim!

"Vast majority" is a nebulous claim.

Then why did you make such a nebulous claim?
In any case, white students are not a "vast majority" of students at Harvard by any stretch of the term.
Why don't you just admit you were wrong for once and be done with it?

That is only true in the pedantic sense.

LMAO! You are the pedant here, forever splitting hairs.
But now you want to accuse me of pedantry because I called you out on your blatant falsehoods.

 

[Derec]

When only about 10% of the students are black - altogether, not just black students who were helped by AA - and you complain about how that's oh so many places taken away from more deserving white and Asian kids, you can't turn around and say 14% is "a small fraction", barely enough to warrant talking about.

Some of the 14% are black too.
In any case, basing admissions on race is an injustice. Especially when 80% of black students in Harvard would not be there but for race-based admissions.

Why are you ok with such blatant injustice?

 

[Derec]

To the student who wanted to study at Harvard and now can't, what difference does that make whether he lost his place to a black or white student? None at all.

I fail to understand why that means that it's ok to admit vast majority of black students (~80% based on that graphic I found) because of their skin color and not academic achievement.

The distinction is relevant if your issue is as much about keeping the university a white ghetto like it used to be in the good old days.

Nobody wants to keep universities monochromatic. Well, except for those who champion so-called HBCUs.
Everybody, regardless of race, should be able to apply to any university and be considered for admission without regard to their race. How is that "keeping the university a white ghetto"?

It is not relevant when your issue is the unfairness suffered by a student who should have gotten admitted and wasn't.

Of course it is relevant. Why should one kind of unqualified applicant be exempt from scrutiny just because they are black?

Claiming that the issue is only the latter while (explicitly or implicitly, by choosing to remain silent about the bigger problem) making arguments that only make sense when it's the former is exactly the kind of hypocrisy the OP criticizes.

It's hypocritical to say that 43% of white students being admitted while unqualified is a problem, but calling everybody "racist" who also thinks that ~80% of black students being admitted while unqualified is an even bigger problem.

 

[Derec]

Hispanics - 75% of Hispanics are fully European or predominately European. 75% of 10.8% is 8.1%.

Silly Don! Hispanics, even those of predominately European ancestry, are only considered white when they shoot a black teenager in self defense. For purposes of college admissions and "affirmative action" all hispanics are considered non-white.

Non-Resident Aliens - we do not know the ethnic distribution. There could be many people who can afford it which would be mostly White people of the world.

I don't know the situation at Harvard, but at my alma mater, foreign students were mostly from China.

So we have 43.5% + 8.1% + 1.2% + 4% = 56.8%.

Even THAT would be a small majority, not a VAST majority, as ld claimed.

So for the first one, Hispanic, they may try to claim that even a drop Native American or African will make a White person non-White.

For the purposes of "affirmative action" that is very much true. Even for professors, as this pale-face was considered a "woman of color" by Harvard.


One drop indeed!

Okay, I am willing to CONCEDE that point provided two things: (1) conservatives accept a different non-zero number such as 5% that they have documented justification for instead of 8.1% and then (2) they admit that all the frantic screaming about Elizabeth Warren honestly thinking she was Native American was all partisan politics and that she has to also be non-White by their same logic.

That is not "conservative" logic, but logic of those faux-liberals who want to give special privileges and benefits to those considered non-white and "of color".

 

[Derec]

This is a red herring. This question of the OP is not which policy affects the racial makeup of the student body more. Unless, you want to admit that conservatives are upset that affirmative action means more blacks get to go to college.

Wrong. We do not want admissions to college to be based on race.

Just because there are more white people in the US and therefore a smaller percentage of whites can have a bigger absolute effect than a bigger percentage of blacks does not mean that we should ignore the injustice that is race-based admissions.

And of course it's not either/or. One can scrap legacy admissions AND race-based admissions. Why then are you defending race-based admissions so much?

 

[Bomb#20]

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.

That's not logic. That's a non sequitur. That's you stereotyping people you are prejudiced against. That's you jumping from the fact that others don't make the same judgments as you to the conclusion that their reasons are whatever the hell you feel like making up and imputing to them. That's you taking for granted that a mind that works like yours and a mind that works like the cartoon characters you paint others as are the only two kinds of mind that exist. That's a false dilemma fallacy. You do those a lot. I remember a while back you accused Jason of being racist, along with Libertarians in general, in essence because you couldn't conceive of any reason other than racism for how anyone could value liberty more than equality.

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.

Didn't say they were the same. I'm dismantling the components going into your accusation one at a time.

Also, it is false to assume that donations are always used to create new slots for more students. ...

See posts #158 and #166.

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.

Well, it makes sense if your goal is to construct inflammatory rhetoric rather than a rational analysis.

Also, the court doc estimate of 4% includes all black admits who would not have qualified based upon academic credentials.

Dude, you literally just said it refers to blacks admitted under an affirmative action program.

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.

Uh huh. According to the Harvard Crimson, "The University has implemented two new policies this fall in response to the scandals, according to Scalise. Harvard coaches must now provide materials that admissions officers can later use to verify an applicant’s athletic ability. The Office of General Counsel is also starting regular conflict of interest training for Athletics coaching staff." Sure sounds like academic standards aren't being dialed back for athletes.

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.

So you're using your conclusion as a premise.

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.

Go ahead, stereotype your outgroup some more, keep reminding everyone of your bigotry.

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.

So, you snip away the entire argument, leaving only the initial premise, which you deny; and your counterargument to that premise is to make believe the premise implicitly includes precisely what the text you snipped explicitly said it didn't include. Dude, when you think stuff like "It doesn't require ESP, just logic.", you really need to start taking into account the fact that you are terrible at logic.

Let me draw your attention to the fact that the lawsuit against Harvard is not for phrenology. When you wrote "No it doesn't get to do that, that is why there is a lawsuit against Harvard for their Affirmative Action program.", that was a ridiculous claim on your part. It wasn't true, and you didn't have any reason to think it was true. It was an utter failure to use logic on your part. If Harvard wants to admit on the basis of phrenology, yes, it gets to do that -- there is no law against admitting on the basis of phrenology. If you think I'm wrong, by all means exhibit the law that includes head bumpiness as a forbidden criterion. If Harvard admitted on the basis of phrenology, and someone felt it was unfair, he would have no legal standing to sue over it. The reason there is a lawsuit against Harvard for their Affirmative Action program is precisely because Harvard is not admitting people based on phrenology, but based on something there is a law about.

(At this point I expect you're probably thinking I'm being over-literal now as an underhanded way to backpedal when you caught me being wrong. If that's what you're thinking, that's because you are terrible at logic, because you habitually think the worst of your outgroup as a defense mechanism against subjecting your own beliefs to critical thought, and because you apparently didn't bother to read the text you snipped. The problem appears to be that you read the words "It's a private university. Even if it wants to admit on the basis of bleeding phrenology, it gets to do that.", and you, for reasons best known to yourself, decided I didn't mean exactly what I said. You appear to have decided I meant, not what I said, but "They get to admit on any basis they want.". And so you replied to me as though I'd said "They get to admit on any basis they want."; and then you snipped out the entire rest of my argument, which, if you'd read it and thought logically about it, would have made it perfectly clear to you that I was drawing an explicit contrast between criteria like phrenology that Harvard gets to use or not use as it pleases, and criteria like race where its decisions are answerable to the courts.)

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 doesn't follow. Harvard is operating a racial quota system, illegal under the Bakke decision. (We can tell, because they've been systematically lying about their reasons for turning down Asian applicants.) That being the case, it would be trivially easy for their legacy admissions to be even as much as 100% white, without legacy admission thereby being biased in favor of whites -- all Harvard would need to do is only consider legacy status when comparing one white applicant against another. So every legacy admission would count against their white quota; none would count against their various non-white quotas; it would be biased for "these" whites and biased against "those" whites; but it would be unbiased in favor of or against whites overall.

Be that all as it may, when and if the courts decide to accept the arguments that legacy admission violates the Civil Rights Act, then at that point legacy admissions will move out of the phrenology category and into the race/creed/color category. But that has not happened yet. So the people who object to legacy admissions currently have no legal grounds to force Harvard to do what we want. Harvard currently has a legal right to admit people on the basis of legacy.

And since conservatives are mad at them over the unfairness they don't have a right to engage in, but not mad at them over the unfairness they do have a right to engage in, of course you think that proves they're racist. You have a history of judging people racist for respecting other people's rights.

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.

Well, the rest of them need to stop too. The government has no right to treat non-legacy people as 2nd-class citizens -- that's a blatant Equal Protection violation.

(The private schools should stop too, but that's just citizens moralizing at other citizens. It doesn't carry the weight of a demand that the government follow its own laws.)

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.

I have already shown why this is not evidence those conservatives are racist, back in the section of post #48 that you snipped. Go back, and this time, read it.

 

[Jokodo]

When only about 10% of the students are black - altogether, not just black students who were helped by AA - and you complain about how that's oh so many places taken away from more deserving white and Asian kids, you can't turn around and say 14% is "a small fraction", barely enough to warrant talking about.

Some of the 14% are black too.
In any case, basing admissions on race is an injustice. Especially when 80% of black students in Harvard would not be there but for race-based admissions.

Why are you ok with such blatant injustice?

Who said I was? Can you read what I wrote again? I said, repeatedly, that legacy admissions are a bigger problem, not that they are the only one.

 

[laughing dog]

Excuse me? Shift what goalposts? I didn't set any goalposts; I explained why rb's argument didn't imply what he claimed it did. If you think your or his choice to ignore the long run somehow makes rb's inference correct, show your work.

Here is a relevant quote from the OP

"or 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. "

That is clearly about concurrent substitution not some long-run trade-off.

You need to show your work why you think the OP is about the long run.

Oh for the love of god! You are a smart person; why do you write such dumb comments? Where the bejesus do you imagine you saw me indicate that I "think the OP is about the long run"?

Forgive me, you are the one positing long-run fantasies as rebuttals, not me.

The OP is not about the long run. The OP is not about the short run. The OP is not about any run. The OP is about "This reveals a lack of principled commitment to actual fairness, and a racial ulterior motive by such conservatives." Whether rb was talking about concurrent substitution is entirely irrelevant.

No, it is not. The OP is about a concurrent substitution effect. Your imagined long-run effect is irrelevant to his argument.

The mere circumstance that "some long-run trade-off" isn't anything that occurred to rb when he was composing his OP does not qualify as a reason to take for granted that "such conservatives" are unaware that there's a long-run trade-off! Duh!

First, the unsubstantiated notion that a donor admission that allows a less qualified student to take the place of a more qualified student today but permits a larger number of students (qualified or unqualified) to be admitted 5 to 20 years in the future is a bizarre notion of fairness since it does not address their central point of the unfairness to the current denied more qualified the denied student.

Second, it is up to you to show that this presumed long-run effect does address racial fairness in the long run. Otherwise it is just some story that has no relevance to the discussion.

Third, it is up to you to show that all of people who rb describes make such arguments and have actual data to substantiate their fanciful claims. Otherwise, assuming your theory is accurate for some, it simply carves out a possible exception for some of them.

Fourth, your "explanation" ignores the effects of legacy admissions and athletic scholarships.

 

[laughing dog]

What do you mean "substantiate"? I quoted you verbatim!

No, I asked you to substantiate your claim of "No qualification ("favoring") or similar. He is pretending that it legacies are "de facto" white people, which is false."

Then why did you make such a nebulous claim?
In any case, white students are not a "vast majority" of students at Harvard by any stretch of the term.

That is a true statement for undergraduates. Do you have any data on the total student body (undergraduate and graduate)?
Why don't you just admit you were wrong for once and be done with it?

LMAO! You are the pedant here, forever splitting hairs.
But now you want to accuse me of pedantry because I called you out on your blatant falsehoods.

As is frequently the case, you are badly mistaken.

 

[KeepTalking]

No, it only needs to maintain an average. If you get enough for 2,500 students one year and 1,500 the next but admit 2,000 donor students each year you're ok.

Pay attention - if the school only has room for 2,000 students, it will not admit 2,500 students.

Try addressing the actual issue.

The point is donor money can be used to expand the number of students they can admit.

It can be, but does it necessarily do so? I do not think that is the case. And since it is not, your insistence that donor admits are a benefit to non-donor admits is specious at best.

To the extent that it does donor admits are a very minor issue.

Now you are just handwaving. We have not established the extent to which it expands the number of student that can be admitted, so we cannot say that it is a very minor issue.

He was making the mistake of thinking that it would have to vary the number each year, but all that actually matters is a rolling average, not a year-by-year value.

No, I was not. LD's response was very cogent of the point I was making. It is my contention that the number of students that are accepted has very little to do with how many donor admits there are who have donated enough to cover another student. It has more to do with the size of classes, number of professors teaching those classes, and a host of other factors, the bulk of which are determined before any donor admits are even considered for admittance. Even if your "rolling average" theory has any merit, it certainly is not an immediate benefit, and any donor admits for a given semester will impact the chances of a more qualified student getting into the school that semester. I thought it was those individuals who are more qualified, but are being denied admittance due to someone less qualified being accepted that you cared about, but apparently not.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Try addressing the actual issue.

The point is donor money can be used to expand the number of students they can admit.

It can be, but does it necessarily do so? I do not think that is the case. And since it is not, your insistence that donor admits are a benefit to non-donor admits is specious at best.

The number admitted has grown over the years. Money is fungible. Thus donor admits than bring in more than the cost of growing the system by one are a net benefit to all the students as the school now has more money per student. Donor admits that bring in less are a bad deal and shouldn't happen. If the numbers are equal it's basically neutral but I would favor not admitting them in that case.

He was making the mistake of thinking that it would have to vary the number each year, but all that actually matters is a rolling average, not a year-by-year value.

No, I was not. LD's response was very cogent of the point I was making. It is my contention that the number of students that are accepted has very little to do with how many donor admits there are who have donated enough to cover another student. It has more to do with the size of classes, number of professors teaching those classes, and a host of other factors, the bulk of which are determined before any donor admits are even considered for admittance. Even if your "rolling average" theory has any merit, it certainly is not an immediate benefit, and any donor admits for a given semester will impact the chances of a more qualified student getting into the school that semester. I thought it was those individuals who are more qualified, but are being denied admittance due to someone less qualified being accepted that you cared about, but apparently not.

In any one year you are right. Overall, you are wrong. Donor admits bring in money that can be used for expansion.

 

[KeepTalking]

The number admitted has grown over the years. Money is fungible. Thus donor admits than bring in more than the cost of growing the system by one are a net benefit to all the students as the school now has more money per student. Donor admits that bring in less are a bad deal and shouldn't happen. If the numbers are equal it's basically neutral but I would favor not admitting them in that case.

He was making the mistake of thinking that it would have to vary the number each year, but all that actually matters is a rolling average, not a year-by-year value.

No, I was not. LD's response was very cogent of the point I was making. It is my contention that the number of students that are accepted has very little to do with how many donor admits there are who have donated enough to cover another student. It has more to do with the size of classes, number of professors teaching those classes, and a host of other factors, the bulk of which are determined before any donor admits are even considered for admittance. Even if your "rolling average" theory has any merit, it certainly is not an immediate benefit, and any donor admits for a given semester will impact the chances of a more qualified student getting into the school that semester. I thought it was those individuals who are more qualified, but are being denied admittance due to someone less qualified being accepted that you cared about, but apparently not.

In any one year you are right. Overall, you are wrong. Donor admits bring in money that can be used for expansion.

You talking about donors bringing in money that can be used for expansion, but you never show your work. You need to show us that this happens at the frequency you claim, and that a donor that donates enough for their student and another student will necessarily cause another slot to open up for a deserving student.

Then again, even if you did show that, unless it happens the very same year, you still have a qualified student getting passed over due to the unqualified donor admit. And you think this is just dandy as long as this means another slot (that can potentially be used for another donor admit) will open up some time in the future. There is also the issue that schools like Harvard tend keep their class sizes smaller than they could given the amount of money they take in, in order to make their diplomas more prestigious.

 

[Metaphor]

Harvard rejects 95 per cent of its applicants, most of whom, if successful, would be full-fee paying students. Donors do not 'expand' Harvard because it has never exploited such money to 'expand' its student base, which would diminish its prestige. Part of worldwide 'university rankings' is the amount of money alumni and donors give to a university, a grossly perverse incentive which Harvard is well aware of.

Harvard, like many institutions of higher learning in America, is between two worlds. The heady grip of financial, capitalist success, which legacy admissions serve a large part in, and the more ephemeral pleasures of its diversity religion, which intoxicates its faculty and administrators with religious ecstasy and fuels its affirmative action policies.