And "Technically" usually doesn't have a dash in the middle. The comments above were embedding college names in ways to make them not look like college names. Hence, the "-" to split "technically" emphasize "Tech" immediately after the "Cal" from the previous sentence.
yeah, the legacy option is a big reason to go to Harvard or Stanford instead of MIT or Caltech. the success of your lineage will be automatically secured.
> the success of your lineage will be automatically secured.
At least at Harvard, this is very much incorrect.
The legacy admission rate is 30-something percent iirc. Much higher than the general population, but far from guaranteed or “secured”.
A few other notes:
- just because someone is a legacy and was admitted, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they were admitted because they were a legacy. That percentage is much, much lower.
- I also don’t think that legacies having a higher admission rate is that surprising. There is a certain type of applicant that elite schools prefer. If someone has cracked the code on that type, it’s not that difficult to shape your kid’s environment in such a way that they end up as this type. FWIW, “helicopter mom” type of stuff, while it works sometimes, is definitely not the best way to do this.
- Cal Newport has written two or three books on excelling in high school and how to be a strong applicant to an elite university. They aren’t how-to books (the specifics will change based on context), but he shows healthy ways to be awesome.
- for those looking for a “how-to”, my quick and dirty comments are: send your kid to a good Montessori school, have them do activities like one does in the scouts at a high level (like Eagle Scouts), and play any sport at a competitive level (ideally national or international, but regional is ok for competitive sports). For the last one, there is room to be creative — I met someone whose dad was the national small bore hunting pistol champion several years running. I wonder how competitive the youth division is.
> just because someone is a legacy and was admitted, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they were admitted because they were a legacy. That percentage is much, much lower.
Lower, but I don't know about "much, much".
The baseline acceptance rate is below 4%. Legacy applicants are probably better on average, but the gap between 4% and 30% is enormous.
The rate of applying is low enough that the baseline acceptance rate doesn't tell you anything. With acceptance rates of 4% and 30%, Harvard could be admitting legacies by a lower standard, or a higher standard, or exactly the same standard. If you don't know what the pools are like, you have no way to tell.
Note that if (1) your goal is to admit everyone above a certain quality threshold, and (2) you aren't able to measure quality with perfect accuracy, then the correct thing to do is to hold legacies to a lower standard. Because they have better parents, they regress to a higher mean than random applicants do.
the purpose of Harvard-type monastic institutions and MIT-type land grant engineering schools are /drastically/ different.
the big H isn't even really a school, it's a social mixing program for the future 1%. a way for the sons and daughters of the elite to make friends with the smartest of their generation, to ensure the latter get funding and the former are never unseated.
> the purpose of Harvard-type monastic institutions and MIT-type land grant engineering schools are /drastically/ different.
And the purpose of employment is 'hiring whomever the boss thinks will make the most money for him', without even pretending to provide a public good, yet the same suspects are hand-wringing about how workplaces should be meritocratic.
Likewise, when AA-admissions were killed, those people were also all for meritocracy.
Mayhaps the demand for meritocracy is just a fig leaf. It's never been about fairness, it's about preserving access to power.
I didn't see this amount of bellyaching when race-based affirmative action admissions were eviscerated by SCOTUS. Then, HN was almost unanimous in the opinion that it was a good ruling, because academic meritocracy is a good thing.
Look, I'm European and I just cannot see the issue here. I'm all for government providing excellent public education, but if a private university does admission on whatever metric (unless it's discriminating for illegal, such as race, reasons) so be it?
If somebody's shelling millions funding a university, don't see a problem with enrolling his son.
FWIW, the state is also (indirectly ) paying for this change. Private universities can exempt themselves from this law by not accepting state dollars, but I don't think donors can fill the resulting hole.
> If somebody's shelling millions funding a university, don't see a problem with enrolling his son.
The state shells more. A lot more, and is leveraging that so that mere-multi-million-dollar-donors-offspring don't get an advantage over non-donors (eventually. The lawmaker is cleverly taking a tick-tock ratcheting approach where each law builds on top of the last)
Why? Are these universities facing challenges with funding their humongous endowments? Or is so that every generation of peasants pays the social debt they owe to their betters?
