
Harvard University is fighting to keep its admissions process under wraps - Jerry2
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/harvard-university-is-fighting-to-keep-its-secretive-admissions-process-under-wraps-2018-06-28
======
lordnacho
If the emperor were ever naked, this would be it.

Contrast this "trade secret" to a chat with an Oxford don, and you'll find the
don is quite straightforward in admitting they are fallible. Some admits are
duds, and some are hits. Decisions are made based on a small amount of
information, but only the dons decide what happens. They try hard to let in
disadvantaged kids, but it's a crap shoot deciding who has potential and who
doesn't. They rarely care about anything other than academics. (I'm not sure
how they recruit the rowers.)

It's just laughable that an admissions process is a trade secret, and unless
there's a compelling explanation given, I would assume they claim this because
they are being sued by Asians about bias, and giving places to legacies, which
is just as bad for a place that sells itself on excellence.

~~~
naturalgradient
>They try hard to let in disadvantaged kids, but it's a crap shoot deciding
who has potential and who doesn't. They rarely care about anything other than
academics. (I'm not sure how they recruit the rowers.)

They don't try that hard.

Being vaguely involved with the Oxbridge undergrad admissions process in
CS/Math i can tell you there is very little trying. A fuss is being made about
coming from a disadvantaged background but in practice sadly the people
running it only care about one thing: how well you can grind out an answer to
a math olympiad style question in 15 minutes. Yes, extra-curriculars and well-
roundedness don't matter which I think is a good thing because I believe in
focusing on being great at one thing.

What it comes down to nonetheless is preparation and school support, e.g. via
training for math competitions. Saying the interviews are about 'evaluating
the thinking process' of the applicant is a fantasy when most applicants come
from schools where they have been trained to do them for years. Oxbridge are
not forthcoming about this but ultimately they take people who are already
well groomed Math olympiad winners, not raw potential.

It's probably still better than opaquely selecting for race and like-ability
and if this means many math undergrads are Asian, why should that be a
problem? It's still unfair to disadvantaged children and this sucks, but at
least the criteria are clear.

Ps: on your question how they recruit rowers: They let them study land
economy, that's the joke at least.

~~~
lozenge
The questions in the admissions exam and interviews are fairly
straightforward, they are nowhere near any math olympiad level. Math olympiads
normally require a host of advanced techniques, each of which is quite
accessible but never gets taught in schools. Interview questions just need
what gets taught plus some understanding of what a proof is.

~~~
naturalgradient
I am aware, PhD students design and mark these questions, and can interview :)

The point is that if you go to a target school doing Math olympiads throughout
your school life, the admissions exam and interview is a walk in the park. The
applicants who didn't have any of this preparation can still do well but will
fare relatively worse against that group, and I think this is very obvious in
the ultimate intake.

~~~
arethuza
Are those interviews by PhD students in addition to or replacement for
interviews by proper dons?

~~~
naturalgradient
Each applicant receives multiple interviews and I can perform one of these as
a PhD student, and have received the same training any faculty member would
have.

The interview process is relatively standardized, and if my results were to
differ starkly from what more experienced interviewers do they would be
disregarded, and the director of studies for that college would simply not
invite me back to help.

I would add that asking PhD students to do this is not the worst thing because
via supervisions and other teaching efforts, we have a good picture of what
undergrads here need to be able to do. An interview is a like a short
supervision.

~~~
arethuza
Thanks - that actually sounds fairly sensible.

------
fatjokes
Harvard wouldn't be in this mess if they just give up the bullshit myth that
it is at all a meritocracy. They should just have a fixed admissions ratios:

\- X% of seats for children of wealthy alumni, to maintain their alumni and
donor network.

\- Y% of seats based on academic or artistic merit: to maintain their brand.
Sure, throw sports in there if you insist.

\- Z% of seats by pure lottery. This helps Harvard mitigate any population
skew introduced by X% and Y%.

They can tell anybody who doesn't like it to go fuck themselves. No more
pretending to be fair and all that bullshit.

~~~
kornish
Without the perception of meritocracy, I think the brand does slip
significantly and Harvard has created a bigger problem for itself.

As soon as you formally acknowledge that you're letting some people in due to
legacy or lottery, the value of the reputation diminishes because any given
person may have been accepted on lottery. People know who's legacy and who's
not, but the university can't acknowledge it publicly for that reason.

~~~
duxup
Is legacy really a mystery though? I think most people know that is a thing...

~~~
kornish
I'm not saying people don't know who gets in mostly due to legacy. I'm saying
the university can't formally confirm.

~~~
duxup
I really think that kinda ruins the idea that it would tarnish their image if
folks already know. Nobody would think differently if they said it.

~~~
edanm
Maybe, or maybe it's another case of a "common knowledge" phenomenon. Sure,
theoretically everyone knows about legacies, but formally acknowledging it
means you can't pretend not to know for specific purposes.

(E.g. "everyone knows" is an invalid argument for court if someone brings up
discrimination; "they admitted it in a public statement" is a totally valid
argument.)

~~~
kornish
Exactly this (and well-phrased)!

------
wishart_washy
This topic is so endlessly fascinating because it encapsulates debates on
meritocracy, privilege, wealth, and recruiting that have a ripple effect
across a lifetime.

I attended an Ivy and a lot of the stereotypes are true. The varsity athletes
are sharper than you would expect. Because the Ivy League agreed to not give
scholarships to athletes (unlike Stanford), teams have a gentleman's agreement
with admissions to keep a specific average GPA and SAT/ACT score. So for every
gifted athlete that's a dull crayon from Groton you also got a high-achieving
student-athlete. I was a TA, and the varsity athletes were the only ones who
showed up consistently. They had limited time and needed to be efficient with
their schoolwork. The club athletes are the rich parents + boarding school
crowd. I briefly played club lacrosse - these kids were a caricature of what
you would expect. The network effect is real btw.

A running joke at Stanford is that the athletes go to Stanford Community
College.

The briefs in Fisher vs. UT are a great legal primer on the state of
university admissions these days.
[https://www.oyez.org/cases/2015/14-981](https://www.oyez.org/cases/2015/14-981)

~~~
duxup
Not to say they're not sharp.... but I belive at most of those schools there
is a system of automatic scholarships based on income. So while you don't get
a sports scholarship, athletes are still not paying either way. Not to knock
their academics or anything, but the no sports scholarship is just no 'sports'
scholarship.

On another aside, at a lot of schools athlete attendance is recorded by other
students and reported to the coaches, at times even a non mandatory attendance
class is mandatory as far as the coaches see it so at those schools they show
up ;) They might not be as sharp, but they know they have to show up.

------
arethuza
Based upon my experiences in business, quite a lot of the time when someone
says they don't want to share the details of a "soft" process (rather than
engineering or scientific methods) its because they don't actually _have_
anything like a documented repeatable process and they are just using
"judgement" to make the decision - which for something like recruitment or
admissions is likely to be influenced by personal and organisational biases.

------
pcstl
"The school says releasing the information could put it at a competitive
disadvantage"

Likely because people might find their policies unethical, which would stop
them from making choices that maximize the perceived value of a Harvard
degree?

~~~
rueynshard
I doubt it would make much of a dent in their reputation. It is already widely
perceived (whether true or not) that children of important donors, legacies
and other groups get preferential treatment.

~~~
smsm42
It may be worse than that. E.g. the claims in the Asian-American applicants'
lawsuit may be proven right: [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/us/harvard-
asian-admissio...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/us/harvard-asian-
admission.html) and there might be other things like that that are generally
frowned upon.

------
montrose
"Legacy applicants, or students with a parent who attended Harvard, were
accepted to the school at the rate of about 34%, according to data from six
admissions cycles analyzed by an economist hired by the group suing the
school. That’s compared to an admissions rate of about 6% of non-legacy
students, according to an analysis of Harvard data."

~~~
swimfar
And I'm sure some of that is because the children of Harvard graduates tend to
be more qualified (in terms of other application criteria) than the general
population or applicant pool.

If an additional 1000 2.0 students applied to Harvard next year this number
would look even worse. But would the change be meaningful?

That's not to say they don't take legacy into account. But, as presented,
those numbers can be misleading.

~~~
michaelt
If children of graduates are more qualified _naturally_ then why does Harvard
_need_ it to be _policy_ that they take legacy status into account? MIT and
Caltech seem to do fine with legacy-blind admissions.

~~~
usepgp
I would imagine that both MIT and Caltech have a higher acceptance rate for
legacy for this reason. However a side effect of them not keeping track is
that we will never have the breakout of those rates.

~~~
fjsolwmv
That's backwards reasoning.

------
tomcam
I cannot wait for the legal discovery process commences. It’s going to be a
bloodbath, because Harvard has discriminated against Asians far more subtly
and systematically than they did with Jews.

~~~
sonnyblarney
Discrimination against Jews was far more than systematic, it was institutional
and not really a secret. Moreover, an overall overrepresentation of Asians are
admitted, which us completely a different kind of 'bias' than simply not
admitting them at all.

Though I'd disagree with the whole if it, if they went 'strictly SAT' or
something, and suppose 50% of every class was Asian-American, whereupon Asian-
Americans only make up 5% of the overall population of the US thereby meaning
a 10x overrepresentation ... well - that's a problem by any social measure.

So it's far more complicated than simply 'they don't like some people and
don't want them there'.

~~~
YorkshireSeason

       a problem by any social measure.
    

Why is this a problem at all?

Elite universities should admit the best students. Science / truth is and
should be _epistocratic_ , rather than democratic, fair or equal.

If other ethnies cannot educate their children up to Asian standards, then
that's a failure of the other ethnies. Punishing Asians for consistently
raising better children is victim blaming. All the more, so since it's very
easy to raise successful children: study hard & consistently, value education
and do lots of maths.

We should celebrate the Asian focus of intellectual excellence rather than
punish them.

~~~
tomcam
> consistently raising better children

Most of my extended family is Chinese-born. This cohort (educated, upper
middle class and above) definitely raises better test-takers. They are
statistically much less likely to divorce and much less likely to be on public
assistance. I value these traits enormously myself.

It is not clear to me they are better children. Personal anecdata shows that
many of these kids were raised with such obsessive concern with getting into
Ivy League colleges that they are not complete adults, and often don't know
what to do with their lives when they graduate.

~~~
scottlocklin
That's an interesting perspective, but I wonder if the kids who actually get
in based on merits other than test-taking are any better. My anecdata is that
they are not.

~~~
Apocryphon
It's particularly relevant to tech because there is the concern that technical
interviews, poorly structured, are creating a culture that favors admitting
candidates who optimize for passing technical interviews.

------
announcerman
Why would they keep it secret? To stop others from gaming the system or
because the system can't be gamed since its biased from the start?

~~~
generic_user
Harvard is being sued for racial discrimination against Asian Americans in
there admissions policies.

They created set of personality criteria for admissions. The criteria was
entirely subjective, things like 'positive personality', and 'likability'.
Then gave Asians consistently low scores on theses subjective criteria. And
then weighed the criteria high enough to knock them out of positions which
they would have otherwise qualified for if the admissions was based on
standard academic criteria.

Bias and racism is predictable when you choose to abandon Meritocracy based on
objective measurable criteria.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-
enrollme...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollment-
applicants.html)

~~~
intended
What sucks is that bias and racism is also baked into many “objective”
criteria.

Take test scores - just having the right parents will push your sores up on
average.

Having better performance regular ties into wealth and upbringing. No surprise
then that the dominant economic group will hold an advantage is such tests.

The damned intertwined nature of all these issues is what makes it hard to set
up an actual objective measure. Which then brings us back to subjective
decision making.

~~~
moduspol
I think this is the kind of mindset that is being challenged here.

You actually can set up objective criteria for entry to a college. That some
groups perform better than others in no way means they are not objective.

The _unwillingness to accept_ the possibility that objective criteria might
not result in equal outcomes from all groups is the problem. The rabbit hole
of "that can't be objective because it challenges my assumption that all
groups would perform equally" only ends in bad places.

~~~
s73v3r_
That's not the issue. The issue is that the objective for these schools is to
have a diverse student body, not necessarily the "objectively best students
based on the things we decide to measure."

~~~
moduspol
Perhaps--but that wasn't the claim in the comment I was responding to.

And if that's the case, they should be comfortable saying openly that they're
intentionally discriminating against Asian Americans for the good of the
diversity of the student body.

~~~
intended
Iirc the head of one of those schools has already said that they can fill
their class up with valedictorians if they do choose.

If they followed the pure merit route it would be exactly like it is today in
other countries - people would over prepare for the exams and entrance will
depend on who got 0.05% more than another person.

That’s the main draw of the American system- these schools long ago saw that
there would be a problem because of baked in bias and took steps to equalize
it while keeping their own interests constant.

And let’s not ignore the raw ability of the people who are aiming for Harvard
- if a candidate for Harvard doesn’t get in, their safety school is still the
first choice of a massive chunk of college applicants.m

Ps: in this sub thread I was not specifically talking about diversity; but it
is an argument I do make and it is also a short throw from where my previous
comment in this thread.

------
mathattack
Glad that the mention athletics. I used to be surprised that Sports matter so
much. I recall interviewing a not so bright Princeton grad. I was surprised,
given the high esteem I held the school. When he mentioned playing lacrosse, I
asked how much that helped in admissions. He said, “About as much as Football
at Ohio State.”

At least he was honest!

~~~
jdhn
Lacrosse is huge in the Ivy League world. Yes, they have football, but
lacrosse is the big hitter.

------
cncrnd
I used to be anti affirmative action. Then, I met a lot of students at a
similar tier school who were basically shoved there by their parents. Little
original thought or unique qualities, just sent to an expensive private school
and drilled on the SAT like monkeys.

So now I am in support of affirmative action, maybe out of disappointment in
my traditional upbringing classmates.

~~~
legolas2412
You could be in favor of more extra-curriculars, or more 'holistic' criteria.
But why affirmative action? That is an orthogonal issue.

~~~
cncrnd
The main change I would make to affirmative action would be considering
factors like location, family income, etc that better represent a person's
situation. But race, while not perfect, often captures these factors.

They already consider extra curriculars, and those are easily gamed since
everyone knows they're important.

~~~
noobhacker
Since location and family income are perfectly observable variables, shouldn't
we use them directly instead of race?

------
kevintb
It’s fascinating how many of those who defend Harvard eventually make some
comment along the lines of “unimaginative, robotic Asians”. Underneath their
arguments is a racist belief they simply can’t shake.

------
bitwize
I bet some nastythings would be exposed if their admissions policy were
revealed. Like you'd still lose points for being Jewish or a visible minority.

------
pimmen
This is just such a weird world for me as a Swede. Here, the universities are
under the same transparency rules like government agencies, meaning that you
can even ask to go through your professor's inbox if you want (if they work on
classified stuff, they need to keep that stuff separate).

Also, we have laws mandating how you can portion admission policies: 33% from
high school grades, 33% from our version of the SAT and the rest they can
negotiate with the government about what they want to use but it has to be
transparent. You can also freely check the government's website and see, for
every year, on what basis people were admitted for every university program in
the country.

~~~
andromeduck
how are the emails anonymized?

~~~
pimmen
A program and year maps to an entry in a database. There you will see how the
groups were partitioned, what the lowest GPA was in the group for grades, what
the lowest score on the scholastic aptitude test was in the second group and
some information about the other third, depending on the program in question.
You will also see how many were not immediately accepted but put on the
reserve list instead and you can also see the same statistik but for people
without a Swedish national identification number and for women or men. It's
all available in a simple search engine, here's the link (in Swedish):

[https://statistik.uhr.se/](https://statistik.uhr.se/)

------
RickJWagner
One of the greatest minds of our times, Thomas Sowell, words it this way:

"When Jonas Salk applied to selective Townsend Harris High School in New York,
and later to the then-selective City College of New York (CCNY), there might
well have been some other student, not quite as academically qualified, who
could have been admitted instead, on the basis of having overcome greater
handicaps than Jonas Salk had.

But the relevant question is: Would that other student have been equally
likely to create a vaccine that would banish the scourge of polio?"

~~~
StanislavPetrov
>But the relevant question is: Would that other student have been equally
likely to create a vaccine that would banish the scourge of polio?"

We'll never know, because that other student was racially profiled and denied
an opportunity on that basis.

~~~
berbec
True. The horrible truth is that affirmative action cuts both ways; it can
give advantages to under-represented groups, but only at the expense of the
majority. Admissions is a zero-sum game. Every student admitted is a spot not
available to someone else.

It a horrible system, but so is every other system. What you can say for
affirmative action is that it tries to game the system towards those who
generally get screwed over otherwise.

~~~
slivym
Education is a zero sum game for the applicants. But it's not a zero sum game
in total. The university and society as a whole gain a greater benefit from
the student with the higher potential getting the place. All other things
being equal the candidate who is smartest when they apply will maximize the
resultant graduate.

You could formalize it as y=mx+c where C is the candidates current education
level, m is the candidate's innate ability to learn and x is the quality of
the course, and y is the final quality of the candidate after getting the
degree.

All other things are not equal though, and making a judgement only about the C
of each candidate does not maximize y. SATs measure C, affirmative action does
a really crappy job of trying to estimate m.

~~~
cgiles
I like this way of framing it, although I find it questionable whether SATs,
grades, etc measure C exclusively.

Because almost all candidates are the same age when applying, C also carries
information about m, in the sense that the same equation applies to their time
in K-12, so candidates with a high C did so either because they had a high
learning rate (m) or went to a high-quality high school or had a high-quality
environment (x), or some combination.

Thus I would say that SAT score measures mx. C at time t = mx + C at t - 1, or
dC/dt = mx. Schools are interested in m, which is not easily measurable
directly. Affirmative action is a very crude way to look for candidates that
have a high m, low x, and moderate to high C at application time.

My conclusion is that if it were possible, colleges would ideally look for
candidates that performed substantially better on SATs etc than their peers at
each high school, as that would control for x and allow you to estimate m.
Affirmative action, on the other hand, is a cruder but partially functional
way to do this, as it uses race as a bad proxy for x.

------
rjkennedy98
Whatever the issues with trying to admit a diverse class, the fact that
American universities still give privileges to legacy students is an outrage.

------
guard0g
I'd venture to say that this is just the start of the coming race wars. As the
American demographic increasingly turns brown, there could be significant
social upheaval versus the "status quo."

~~~
chickenfries
> the coming race wars

Well, that's not something I'm used to hearing, besides from people like
Richard Spencer or other white nationalists. Care to elaborate on why you
think race wars are imminent? Somehow I don't see them happening over Harvard
admissions...

~~~
turtlecloud
Harvard admissions is just the tip of the iceberg. Balkanization of the USA is
evident. Which multi ethnic societies in history have done well?

Is this a globalist agenda pushed by elite ruling class? Can they disintegrate
our tribal tendencies and replace them with global values?

------
DeadReckoning
I support affirmative action but not people lying that they're unbiased.

------
imgabe
Should trade secrets even apply to an organization that is supposed to be a
non-profit? What are they even competing against?

~~~
fjsolwmv
Why not? Nonprofit just means no one is a capital shareholder taking profit.
It means nothing about the mission, values, or economic rights of the
organization. The NFL is a nonprofit.

------
kapauldo
It's a private institution. So long as it doesn't accept public money or break
any discrimination laws, it should be allowed to keep its admission process
private. Does anyone honestly think George bush was admitted because of his
grades? Let's find something meaningful to be outraged about. We are never
going to win this one and it's not worth fighting.

~~~
BigChiefSmokem
Financial aid (FAFSA) is a federal program (meaning public tax dollars are
used to keep it running) that channels a lot of money to all schools,
including the Ivy League.

I'd argue in a court of law that assistance to their student body should be
cut immediately if they don't open up their record and policy books. We can
proceed from there.

