Princeton and Harvard admit, for the most part, people who already excelled significantly in high school. Such excellence is already indicative of ability.
Ideally our fixation would be on a hypothetical institution that admits people entirely at random, and through some means (whether authoritarian, or montessori, waldorf, immersion, etc.) shows that beyond a reasonable doubt the school itself has improved the persons educational prospects.
You'd think by now, some sort of Google-like data driven school would've emerged by now for K-12 and higher ed.
How many people do genuinely care about this? People go to top schools in order to improve their life prospects, not necessarily to get the best education (but they get that too anyway).
(I’ll see if I can dig up the research later when I have more time and link to it).
Edit:
"we find that students who attended more selective colleges earned about the same as students of seemingly comparable ability who attended less selective schools. Children from low-income families, however, earned more if they attended selective colleges."
https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/117/4/1491/187...
However as a civilization it's important that a school like the one I'm hypothesizing exists because selection bias is not really sustainable, nor does it help those who genuinely want to improve but are otherwise not particularly able.
I also imagine if a "performance school" actually existed its influence would extend far beyond traditional education. It would prove that there's some means in which people can learn optimally. Presumably that mechanism would spread to all industries and we all would be better for it.
> Ideally our fixation would be on a hypothetical institution that admits people entirely at random, and through some means (whether authoritarian, or montessori, waldorf, immersion, etc.) shows that beyond a reasonable doubt the school itself has improved the persons educational prospects.
This view of higher education as training students or increasing the socioeconomic prospects of students is fairly new and it's not working. The former view is better. College should be for academically gifted high school graduates.
At the same time, a college degree should not be required to get a good entry-level job.
For example, I had very poor grades in high school (would not have been described as academically gifted) and used state funds to go to undergrad to study science. Ended up just being a late bloomer, graduated summa cum laude with a degree in chemistry and went on to get a PhD in theoretical chemistry. Higher education shouldn't be restricted to just students who appear gifted, but should be available to anyone who wants to put in the work.
I agree that college should not be a requirement for good entry-level jobs, however, I don't think that college admission in general (there will always be elite private institutions) should be heavily restricted based on my personal experience.
Edit due to sibling comment: I did poorly on the math placement test for college as well and had to take remedial math courses. I ended up minoring in math and taking some graduate level courses in numerical analysis during undergrad. So the idea that colleges shouldn't have remedial classes is ridiculous.
I’d argue the idea of college being vocational is not very new. The Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862 was, in part, a way for training people to better integrate into a more industrialized economy.
“to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.”
I had a low GPA in high school and a high one in college.
It's not a challenge intellectually, it's a challenge to your work ethic and discipline as well as (very important) social skills, none of which I had in high school.
So, what you're saying is false. Because when you say academically gifted, I picture fast learners or creative minds, not the hardest of the hard workers.
The things you're saying are contradictory. If all the good people go to college then college will always be required to get a good entry level job by definition. Why would any employer give someone a "good" job if they didn't go to a "good" college that has all of the "good" students?
* the low performer will be left behind, because the course moves too quickly or sets the bar beyond their abilities
* the class will have to be dumbed down so that the low performer can participate, which means that the high performers haven't realized their full potential
That said, I take your general point about Ivy Leagues and I am curious to know if we can come up with an objective way of comparing them to other schools. As a prerequisite, you would need a way to measure someone's ability before and after admission.
Ability to do what exactly? Your premise is based on this idea of "performance" as if it that is easily measurable or is some innate quality of a person. Performance is a function of the system itself though.
Speaking from the perspective of someone in the United States: I didn't "perform well enough" in middle school and so got ignored by staff and counselors in high school, so then "underperformed" there as well.
I got lucky and had a peer mentor me and help me figure out the importance of education. I went to community college and transferred to a top tier public university and went on to get a Master's degree, and now I am a high earning, tax paying, productive member of society. Could just be another "underperformer", but I lucked out and received someone else's empathy.
We should be seeking to build a system that works for a variety of learner's, a variety of life situations, and a variety of subjects. We certainly have the technology and we understand that it isn't as simple as "high performers" and "low performers".
From my recollection in general what happens is that there's a certain ratio in which low performers and high performers interact. If the ratio is stacked towards high performers in general the low performers end up doing significantly better than they would've if they were in a group consisting of people entirely like them.
This would suggest that societally there's some ratio that's optimal such that we intentionally put in "low performers" as a mechanism to raise their performance. As long as this is done very carefully it simultaneously increases the performance of low performers and maintains the potential of high performers.
Conversely if you have too many low performers and put in a high performer, not only is their potential not met, but it's generally detrimental.
In other words there's a sort of "force" pulling everyone to the mean. The "dilution" that results from adding high or low performers to an otherwise low or high performing group depends on how high or low they are and the group itself. With data this can be optimized such that low performers exceed their potential. Given the rate of change for low performers vastly exceeds high performers inherently, this is the societally optimal outcome.
That being said K-12 education isn't like higher ed is that it's lower level (intellectually).
http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/108013/chapters/What-...
> Do students differ in talents and achievement? They do. But when those observed differences are reinforced by track placement and grouping practices, and children then internalize those differences, learning opportunities become limited for all but the elite student. The talents of late bloomers go undiscovered, and the rewards of hard work and diligent study are never realized.
> As our school district began its detracking reform, we began to pay attention to our language. Language shapes our thinking and our beliefs. We began with the word "ability" and made a conscious effort to replace it with "achievement." Thus, we write about, study, and talk about students who are lower achievers or higher achievers. Achievement is a measurable construct that describes what a student knows at a given point in time; ability implies an innate quality that cannot change and that limits success. As we made this commitment personally, we shared it with our faculty. Our language began to change, and so did the way we viewed students. Discussions about the labels placed on students and the beliefs they represent can help a faculty that is embarking on a detracking reform question constructs and practices that they have taken for granted. Being conscious of our own language can help us understand how deeply ingrained the culture of student sorting is. Language awareness is also likely to help uncover other justifications for tracking.
> Both students and adults mistake labels such as "gifted," "honors student," "average," "remedial," "LD" and "MMR" for certification of overall ability or worth. These labels teach students that if the school does not identify them as capable in earlier grades, they should not expect to do well later. Everyone without the "gifted" label has the de facto label of "not gifted." The resource classroom is a low status place and students who go there are low status students. The result of all this is that most students have needlessly low self-concepts and schools have low expectations. Few students or teachers can defy those identities and expectations. These labeling effects permeate the entire school and social culture.
Some people are there to just get a piece of paper that shows they graduated from a top school, regardless if their GPA was a A or a C; and that school name on that piece of paper could still open doors a lesser school might not.
It's kind of like FAANG. You could have an engineer with FAANG on their resume who otherwise did relatively unremarkable work. Another person has only no-name companies but has accomplished a lot. Yet the FAANG alumni is the one who will have recruiters and employers groveling to hire them, not the other guy.
Typically kids are learning a series of loosely related concepts that require different skillsets to process. If for one person integrals are intuitive but vectors are not, while for another vectors are intuitive while integrals are not, both would average roughly the same rate of learning, but you are still faced with the same dilemma - either you're slowing down to make sure the one student gets the concept they struggle with at the expense of the one who wasn't struggling or you move ahead quickly at the expense of the straggler. Both students would appear to be equal performers but that doesn't mean it made sense to group them together. While perhaps classes could be designed to have good correlation between concepts, you certainly couldn't do so for a well rounded education - there is absolutely no reason to believe someone who learns mathematical concepts quickly would also pick up literary concepts quickly. There may be small populations who do learn everything quickly and others that learn everything slowly, but certainly the overwhelming majority of the population would fall in-between.
If you talk to the admissions department of every top school, they will all admit that they reject a large number of perfectly capable students.
So why don't they try to expand their programs and increase their acceptance numbers? I can only guess. Scared of change. Politics as well, I imagine. Afraid of not appearing selective, pissing off alumni, that sort of thing. [1]
It's depressing to me how hard it is to get into a top school these days. I bet many of us who went to an amazing school 10-20 years ago would be unable to afford or get into that school today. If you wanted to get into MIT 40-50 years ago, and you were capable, you were pretty much guaranteed a space.
Something has to change, or extreme class divides will just keep on growing, and meritocracy will become a distant memory.
[1]: A notable exception being Georgia Tech's OMSCS program. They basically admit anyone who wants to get in, and offer the program at cost, so 7k for the entire thing. Graduating is another matter entirely - it's very difficult. The goal of the program is specifically to offer a high quality education to anyone who wants it. It's been an interesting experiment, and shows what is possible.
I've been to college, and while there is value there, it's mostly not in the education. Virtually everything important I've learned that is directly applicable to my life and career I either learned in elementary school, learned through experience, or learned myself.
The value in college, at least for me, was its environment, social network, and opportunity network. People underestimate how valuable these things are, and similarly fail to realize just how bad the internet is at all three. Online education is stunningly comprehensive, but the internet is a terrible learning environment, just as it is a terrible social and opportunity environment.
The goal of modern society should be to realize that the qualities which make colleges so good at these things are not fundamentally connected to their curriculum, and can be incorporated into society at large. There is no reason why we couldn't create districts in cities which have the same learning, social, and professional qualities for young people as a university. For certain professions we arguably already do, and that is with literally no coordinated effort to create them.
Imagine if we actually tried.
I work at a school and we are pretty much tapped out for space, so we wouldn't really be able to add more classrooms even if we wanted to.
Princeton spends roughly $270,000 per student (see footnote). I'm sure some of that goes into research as well, but it's a relatively small fraction, since Princeton prides itself as being a teaching university. I suspect that you can build a more successful university by paying students $100,000 a year, hiring grad students to teach, and paying for modest facilities.
(742,123,000/.33)/ 8,374 = 268552 https://profile.princeton.edu/finances https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princeton_University
They do take undergraduate teaching much more seriously than most of their peer institutions--much less instruction is relegated to graduate students. But they hire and promote for research, at least in the departments I'm familiar with.
A) Innovative teacher decides to go out on his own
B) 20 parents like what he has to say and want to enroll their kids
C) Existing tax money pay the per-student rate for the 20 enrolled to participate
D) Program is successful, more parents and students want to enroll. New teachers are hired and trained on the approach, bigger building is leased.
E) Schools that see students departing start to wonder what's going on and hire the teacher to train their staff on his methods so they can see if it can be adopted into the program.
This is how everything should work, but the nature of our mostly centrally controlled schools simply doesn't allow for it.
"Move fast and break things" is great when your worst-case scenario is your parents letting you move in while you clean up after your failed startup. It's got a lot more downside when it's an experiment with the development of real humans.
It's all "selection bias"? Now that's a hot take.
You seem to be laboring under the assumption that elite schools exist as some kind of public service to improve the prospects of average, or randomly selected students. They aren't. They are elite schools, in both good and bad senses. You might as well start comparing the luggage compartments of top fuel dragsters with sedans.
I agree that everyone should get opportunities regardless of affordability (ex: international talent), but having non-intelligent agents in control by gaming the system is very dangerous (as seen in politics).
I think ethics matter more in the long run, maybe that should be a factor for university screening. We have too many intelligent people doing harm in the world (ex: ad business)
This is subjective and not a universal truth. I wouldn't want that at all, nor would I consider that ideal. My ideal is keep everything the way it is, just bring other institutions up to the level of ivy leagues (since we're talking ideals and not practical options).
However at the differences at the top 5 or even 10% are marginal at best, and even the top 5% represent a more than magnitude of students than have slots at elite schools.
If you come from a lower income background such as myself college is needed since you need to surround yourself with better people.
Then analyze their careers after college -- this should tell you whether the education of that specific university contributed or not to the student's prospects.
Its not a flawless proposition. But it does mean that those students who spend years and go heavily into debt pursuing higher education wouldn't then be force to compete only for the highest paying jobs that will cover their loans. Upset that the greatest minds in our generation work in advertising? Wondering why more highly education people aren't willing to take teaching positions or devote themselves to societal service? Here's your fix.
Not to mention that as you go lower in rank, yes, there are fewer good students. This is pretty much inherently true (not to say that lower ranked schools don't have good students, which is not true at all, but as a percentage yes it will decrease drastically).
Basketball teams do not pick the shortest, weakest players just so they can prove random internet commenters they are the best at turning regular unfit humans into Michael Jordan. They can just pick Michael Jordan.
I do agree though there is a lot of wasted talent and effort.
Edit: Also exacerbated by more applicants this year, I suppose due to reduced entry requirements, again due to COVID.
Low admittance rate is a plus for most college rankings so institutions are incentivized to engage in efforts to increase the size at the top of the funnel.
Disclaimer: Princeton alumnus.
From the graph in the article, that is also in decline, but not as sharp (except the outlier of this year, which is caused by other factors).
Just like how you never hear people in countries with great broadband access complain about usage caps. That's a purely US (or other country) phenomenon when you have shitty supply of broadband. Increase the supply, competition, and problem solved.
Secondly, a question for those who feel that colleges have a duty to "shape our future generation leaders who should look like the people they represent". Tell me, for all the mental contortions, evaluations, interviews, processes to make flawed judgement calls on whether people "contribute by their diversity" to the student body, how different an outcome does that achieve over just using an objective test, and then admitting everyone above a certain bar?
These colleges receive enough applicants to admit 3-4 classes worth of valedictorians. Yet they seem to think their admissions scrutiny and processes make their classes a much better place than if they had a simpler process. Is that true? Judge people on skill and talent, for every type of academic program a university offers. Simple rules and processes allow people do creative things. Contorted rules and processes incentivize people to do stupid things. Like having 17 year olds compete in an essay contest to see who is the most disadvantaged and worthy therefore of admissions.
I don't think they've tried serious alternatives, yet they believe these complicated admissions systems to be correct. And you look to other countries that have purely exam-based admissions, yet they are not producing classes full of socially inept, non-contributing, non-leaders.
Maybe it's worth a rethink. Or some new kinds of institutions.
Yes, we do. We really do.
There are a surprisingly high number of marginal admits at elite schools who slow down the education of the really smart students (at times).
Some of these marginal admits are there for what is deemed a good reason (e.g., recruited athlete), but others are just filling in the class. These folks are what I call “look alikes”, because they all look alike academically/intellectually — they study hard, jump through hoops skillfully, but are largely incapable of individual initiative or independent thought. A very small number of these folks transition into interesting thinkers while at school, but most don’t.
The really smart kids often go into the smart majors that have early hard courses that weed out the weaker students, and these weaker students find themselves in majors that cater to students who are not at the top of the intellectual ladder at their given school.
As a simple example, how many math departments at elite schools are complaining that they have too many really good students such that they can’t handle the load in upper division classes. The answer rounds to zero.
> Contorted rules and processes incentivize people to do stupid things. Like having 17 year olds compete in an essay contest to see who is the most disadvantaged
If you think this is how the vast majority of elite school admits get in, then you are woefully mistaken.
There was a recent article suggesting that Stanford should just replicate itself in multiple states. My own preferred route would be bottom-up: Start by bolstering the community and technical colleges, then the regional public colleges, and finally large state universities.
The "elite" private colleges have a dilemma, which is that they have to basically curate their student populations, because any simplistic admission filter will turn the college into a freak show and destroy its own brand. A college that consists of nothing but valedictorian concertmaster robotic-club-leaders, concentrated in three or four "hot" majors, would even have a hard time retaining faculty.
I propose letting them do exactly that -- a decade of no-holds-barred private college admissions -- and then figure out what we want to do about higher education.
Exclusive educational institutions like Princeton are inherently a scarce good.
That's a weird phrase / way to respond to someone just stating an idea, isn't it?
Who has the most advantages to succeed in that kind of environment? The rich. Because they have the most resources and likely the most well raised and educated kids.
A record high number of applications is, of course, an achievement in terms of encouraging those applications.
> There are some departments in institutions (think CS) who, in the face of exploding enrollments, have made every effort to scale their courses to accommodate as many students who are capable as possible
I would be very surprised if they could do this without lowering the standard of the education provided to each student.
If I were a teenager trying to get into a top school these days, my anxiety would be through the roof. Can't imagine the extracurricular work you have to put in now.
If I knew a teenager in this situation, I'd emphasize that there is a large "quasi-random" component to admission to these types of school.
What I mean is that the number of incredibly talented applicants _rejected_ by Princeton and Harvard is probably as large as the number of admissions.
I know someone who is _tenured_ in the physics department @ a HYPS school. He was an undergrad (and grad student) @ Harvard. He once told me that if he applied as an undergraduate today, he'd probably have a 50/50 shot at getting in.
While the task is daunting, it’s not quite as bad as you think when well over half of the applications are almost instant rejections.
> If I were a teenager trying to get into a top school these days, my anxiety would be through the roof. Can't imagine the extracurricular work you have to put in now.
It’s quality not quantity. So many people miss this point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education
basically, people educate themselves because it looks good, not because you learn usefull stuff. Thoughts?
I think PG said something similar with respect to the chance of getting accepted to YC. Or maybe it wasn't PG and I'm thinking of this: https://medium.com/@robhunter/your-chances-of-getting-into-y...
For elite colleges that will attract more applications and will have fewer admitted-but-does-not-come applicants, 4% is not that low.
If the marginal cost of an extra application is lowering (say, because we went from typewriting & mailing everything to copy-pasting & online applications), the number of applications per applicant will go up and thus the admission rate will go down.
So my question is, what is the larger context of applicants this year? Has a year of COVID sequestration altered the numbers? Are elite schools admitting fewer students? Has the total number of applications gone up? Is each student sending out more applications? Are kids applying to more elite schools than in years past?
One bare statistic really doesn't tell a useful story.
You essentially study for two years post high-school to take a competitive exam, your ranking in this exam determines where you can go (first place chooses, then the second place gets to pick etc.) You suffer for two years but at the end it's based mostly on merit.
Obviously it's not entirely based on merit as privileged kids have a huge head start but you at least get a chance to catch up during those two years.
1- You learn a lot of useless subjects!! I'm a software engineer now but I studied organic chemistry for two freaking years!! And I don't plan to use that knowledge (most of which I totally forgot) anywhere in the future. Something that I wouldn't have picked if I was studying CS in the US.
2- You're using the same filter for everyone, and people can have different type of intelligence which can go unnoticed via such program.
3- You don't get to chose the thing you love if you don't rank well! Actually you may end up with something that you hate, because that's what's left! And you only know this after you spent two years of your life!
4- It's mostly about hard work and luck!!
5- You get out with almost only theoretical skills in the first two years. A good thing if you're looking to continue in the research track afterword but a bit of disadvantage (compared to people who used those two years to master the required skill for the job market).
Personal interests? Projects? Nope. It's all a waste of time compared to min-maxing points for the admission test.
I'm not American (Canada), and I beat myself up over not applying in the US, because of intangibles like "networking" and "small class sizes". Now I'm glad I didn't, this seems fucked up.
Why haven't they expanded their number of students in proportion to population growth? Why shouldn't their product be available to more people? Yeah, small class size? BS. They've mastered the art of large lectures and small sections.
They enjoy government subsidies: tax exemptions on endowment profits and revenue streams. That's because they're considered educational institutions serving the common good. Maybe those tax exemptions should be scaled back for institutions that don't scale up with population.
So, Ivy League, make like Cal and other public universities: Make it your mission to educate lots of people. Quit bragging about your selectivity.
</rant>
That said, over the long term, the number of Hail Mary applications is most likely the bulk of the gradual increase in applications. There are a very large number of applications to elite schools that effectively zero chance of being accepted, and that number seems to be increasing over time.
To be fair, I do think that the overall quality of admitted student is increasing as well, but the improvements are largely seen in the marginal admits rather than the core admits.
On-campus education is a good that has been underproduced... this is excess demand. Maybe we'll be graduating fewer doctors, nurses, and such than expected over the coming decade
Or maybe there are just a lot more “reach school” applications.
I agree that the overall applicant pool is improving, but it is not improving nearly as much as the admissions numbers alone suggest. The number of applications from applicants who are very unlikely to be admitted are increasing substantially.
The logic being that these universities are essentially providers of a “Veblen Good” (elite, exclusive status in society) and should be taxed as such.
I am curious what kind of students are getting accepted.
One thing I would note is that some schools 'manage' their acceptances in order to keep their yield numbers looking good. That is, they may have determined that your child was overqualified for their school and very unlikely to come. They'd rather reject/wait-list applicants like this because then their yield numbers (percent of accepted students who matriculate) look better.
I’m sorry about your kid’s rejection letter. Larger societal trends aside, that’s not a fun experience.
Two more interesting metrics would be:
* how many applicants admitted actually enroll (and not go to some other college)
* related, bu what is the "rank" of the last admitted applicant: how far do they need to reach to fill their spots?
Can't imagine what it'll look like in two or three years.
This will allow the faculty to teach the upper class courses at an appropriate level in terms of difficulty and level of engagement with students (versus classroom management and handling weak students).
Ideally what colleges should do is to use a standardized test and go strictly by the results of the standardized test. Standardized tests are not perfect, but if there are flaws in standardized tests then fix them, because it is better than the alternatives. The advantage for students would be predictability and being in control of their own destiny. Students would not have to apply to 12 to 15 colleges, instead the would apply to 2 to 3. The benefits for colleges would be better predictability as well. Today colleges use complex mathematical models to predict who is likely to accept their admission offers. Then they use "yield protection" to avoid admitting highly qualified students who are unlikely to accept admission offers. It is complicated.
Colleges can use complex data analysis to guess which students are likely to accept but hapless students can’t run data analysis to determine which colleges are likely to accept. Colleges, especially public ones, ought to minimize the guesswork and use more objective criteria to admit students. Students need to be able to control their own destiny through hard work. That’s only possible if guesswork and data analytics and so on is minimized.
Other countries such as UK use test scores for college admissions. At one time the US too used scores. But US colleges introduced subjective criteria ("holistic reviews") because far too many Jewish people were getting admitted when they used objective criteria. (Not kidding, see https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/histor... ).
Even public universities perform complex gymnastics to decide which 4.0 GPA student to admit. Even when two students have taken the exact same courses (including AP courses) and have the same GPA, colleges do not consider them the same. (See here https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-04-12/covid-co... )
Excerpts:
UC admissions directors stressed that they evaluated students in the context of their own schools and communities to assess how much they challenged themselves and took advantage of available opportunities. A student who took all six AP classes offered at her school might be more impressive than the one who took six at a school that offered twice as many. A campus might admit a student with a 4.0 GPA who ranked at the top of an underserved school over one with a higher GPA but lower class rank at a more high-achieving school.
So basically it is better to be a bright student in a dumb school than to be a bright student in a bright school. This is messed up. Students shouldn't have to do these calculations and move to areas with dumb schools to improve their chances. We need to bring back objectivity and predictability back to college admissions.
THE FOLLOWING IS MADE UP AND IS NOT ADMISSIONS ADVICE: The consultant says "Harvard, help rebuild a clinic in El Salvador, but Yale, tutor poor kids in Oakland instead, be sure it's Oakland, the admissions committee has never heard of Richmond."
Also geography. I'm sure that Princeton could fill their entire incoming class with students from one or two zip codes on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, for example. They don't want to do that, so they must specifically spread out admissions.
Considering the school: Suppose a kid from let's say Gunn High School in Palo Alto, whose parents are a surgeon and a Stanford professor, takes only two AP classes. Hmm, maybe just a doofus who will bust out of Princeton within the first year.
The academic reputation of these schools is disproportionately from that remainder group.
The rest of the world just has an exam system. Interesting way of comparing the systems.
Legacy certainly gives you an advantage, but I think people also discount the fact that if you are the child of an Ivy grad, you are perhaps more likely to go to a top-tier school of your own merits as well.
I say that as an obviously biased Harvard legacy, who also got into other Ivies without legacy, had a 1600 SAT, etc. We never donated anything and I never intend to, we were on financial aid, but my dad did happen to go, and I'm sure it did give me an advantage. I am less sure that there is no chance I would have gotten in without it.
People think legacies are guaranteed admits, and they are not. Legacies get rejected very often (e.g., ~67% at Harvard).
There are many advantages to having a parent who is an alum:
1. Probably smart.
2. Probably knows something about how to get in via academics and extracurriculars.
3. Might be a gifted athlete who was recruited and knows how to share these gifts with their child.
4. Might understand some of the fundamental rigors of an elite education and shares that with their child regardless of where said child actually attends school (interestingly, an elite kid with great pedigree at a shitty school has a huge advantage in admissions).
Add some or all of these things together, and you get a high school kid who will probably have an above average application and should probably get accepted more often than the general population.
While there are some legacy admits who are accepted on the margin and would not have gotten in without being a legacy, I think the number of these folks is relatively small. The overall legacy applicant pool is very strong.
It would really be much better if lots of activities could be decoupled from universities instead of making them mini-nations where people live, find friends, do extracurriculares and everything else.
In the US, this just isn’t the case.
Elite schools produce a lot of elite people because many of the students were already running around in elite circles before they entered the school. They were going to succeed regardless of where they went to school.
Folks from low-SES can achieve wild success through a state school just as much as an elite school. The hard part is putting together the skill set (work habits, study skills, communication skills, social skills, etc.) that leads to wild success when one was not born into it.
Where in the world do you get that idea? I challenge you to provide a good source for the claim that the AA students are either affluent OR politically connected.
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674976894
Excerpt: "tiny fraction" of low-income black American teenagers who attend private schools "produces about half of low-income black students at Ivy League colleges."
Anecdotally, looking at who attended Ivies where I grew up, this seems to be true.
I think they worry that Black students from actually Black, and often poor, school districts will not jive well with so many silver spoon swallowers. They want people more accustomed to bougie New England & NYC culture.
But I judging how the things are going I am sure this is going to get fixed soon. The colleges will ask you to do a DNA test to determine the purity of your black heritage and a proof of slave ancestors. Hooray, intersectionality.
I guess the hours of training don't count.
> mainly affluent politically connected blacks and latinos
I'd be curious to see stats on the number of kids of Brazilian/Mexican and Nigerian millionaires (in US dollars).
The sports these sorts of schools focus on are crew, polo, squash - those are designed to help Brahmins [0]
