
Legacy and Athlete Preferences at Harvard (2019) - Geekette
https://www.nber.org/papers/w26316.pdf
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dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21037400](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21037400)

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Udik
A dupe from 9 months ago?

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dang
Of course, this is standard moderation.

 _When a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we bury
reposts as duplicates._

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

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usaar333
ALDC (or at least LDC) preferences remain the most unjust (elitist) aspects of
college admissions. Sadly, there seems to be limited political pressure to ban
them (by which I mean extending various civil rights acts to ban institutions
receiving federal funding from preferring LDC status).

A cynic would even point out that Ivy League schools heavily use race-based
affirmative action to change the narrative and appear diverse. Sadly, no one
looks at how poorly they look in terms of socio-economic diversity - typically
around 15% of students receive Pell Grants compared to 30% at the top UCs that
don't practice LDC preferences ([https://www.usnews.com/best-
colleges/rankings/national-unive...](https://www.usnews.com/best-
colleges/rankings/national-universities/economic-diversity-among-top-ranked-
schools))

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ck425
I was shocked when I first learned what legacy students were. Everyone talks
about the uk bring super classist but legacy students would never fly over
here. The US seems to have some seriously blatant classism. The other obvious
one is the teeth obsession.

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war1025
> The US seems to have some seriously blatant classism.

We just like to dress it up and call it "Meritocracy". Nevermind that your
merits are that you were born into a wealthy, well-connected family.

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AnthonyMouse
Anybody who calls legacy admissions "meritocracy" is just lying. Proponents of
meritocracy take it as a design goal, not a normative description of all
existing systems. If you want meritocracy then you want to get rid of legacy
admissions.

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deogeo
It's illuminating to also compare Harvard demographics vs the US. Sorted by
most to least represented:

    
    
        Jewish: 14.0% vs 2.6% (5.38x)
        Asian American: 25.3% vs 5.3% (4.77x)
        Native Hawaiian: 0.6% vs 0.2% (3.00x)
        Native American: 1.8% vs 0.7% (2.57x)
        African American: 14.3% vs 12.7% (1.13x)
        Hispanic or Latino: 12.2% vs 17.6% (0.69x)
        non-Jewish white: 33.0% vs 58.9% (0.56x)
    

Sources:

[https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-
statistics](https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics) from
2019

[https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-
undergraduat...](https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-
undergraduates/)

[https://features.thecrimson.com/2016/freshman-
survey/lifesty...](https://features.thecrimson.com/2016/freshman-
survey/lifestyle/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews),
upper estimate used

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derefr
Is there a reason to compare the demographics to those _of the US_ , when many
Harvard students aren’t US citizens?

I have a feeling the stats make a bit more sense if you just assume Harvard is
country-of-origin blind, and so compare Harvard admissions to the racial make-
up of the entire global population (perhaps weighted by how much of each
country’s population declares intent to attend a university.)

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Rebelgecko
The "Asian American" stat presumably doesn't include international students
(just like "African American" wouldn't include someone from Africa)

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TulliusCicero
Oh, it might well do that. It's a somewhat common American tic to use "African
American" to mean "black" even when talking about people who are definitely
not American.

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JumpCrisscross
Always found the combination of non-profit status and legacy or donor-enhanced
admissions to be odd bedfellows.

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murgindrag
What's interesting are the odds of non-ALDC whites being admitted.

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catalogia
> ALDC

What does this mean? Athlete, legacy, donor, ...C? Celebrity?

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arcticbull
Based on my research the term “ALDC” refers to “recruited Athletes, Legacies,
those on the Dean’s interest list, and Children of faculty and staff.”

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renewiltord
Amused by "based on my research" being "I read the linked abstract". Not
hating, just amused at what appears to be a euphemistic response.

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catalogia
Sorry, the original title of the post used the word "Staff" so I suppose I was
primed for "ALD - Staff" and missed "ALD - [Children of] Staff"

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pcurve
I hate to say stuff like this, but the more I learn about Harvard, the more I
think it exists to sustain itself so that it can serve the interest of
handful. Education is just a byproduct.

~~~
mennis16
I'm no defender of Harvard but I can guarantee you that most "elite" schools
do this, including the whole Ivy league- and there are definitely other Ivies
that are worse offenders. Harvard is just in the spotlight. Not that this
changes the criticism of Harvard necessarily, but there are system-wide
problems here.

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mennis16
I have a question about the abstract for anyone that looked deeper at the
paper- does the following statement take into account rejected student stats
or only those of accepted students? Because it seems plausible to me that
white students "on the cusp" are more likely to get rejected to "make room"
for ALDCs. Meaning that removing this preference may actually benefit a
typical white applicant more than others. I could of course also imagine that
not being the case though.

"Removing preferences for athletes and legacies would significantly alter the
racial distribution of admitted students, with the share of white admits
falling and all other groups rising or remaining unchanged."

I do recall the popular line about how everyone at orientation could be
replaced with a new cohort that has similar academic profile, which implies
that there is quite a bit of judgement call going on.

Overall, it is unsurprising yet disappointing that they estimate ~3/4 of ALDCs
would not get admitted without that status. This system is probably a big
reason that most elite schools have ~15% of their students from the top 1%,
while MIT is closer to 5%. MIT definitely does not do legacies and of course
gives little weight to athletics. I am not sure about children of faculty
though.

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cameldrv
The numbers wind up pretty grim. 43% of white students are legacy or athletic,
3/4 of those are otherwise inadmissible, so that's 32% of white students ALDC
and inadmissible otherwise. Harvard is 44% white, so it's 30% (academically)
competitively chosen white. That compares to 58% of the overall college
population in the U.S.

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mennis16
But at whose expense are ALDCs chosen? I suppose we cannot know, but are there
rejected non-ALDC white students that could fill those spots who the model
would consider deserving to be there? FWIW MIT is ~40% white without AL(DC?)
[0], so that is closer to H's current distribution.

The whole admissions situation is of course an opaque, handwavy, crapshoot.
But I am just curious in practice what would happen to the distribution if
Harvard decided to drop say legacy status.

[0]
[https://mitadmissions.org/apply/process/profile/](https://mitadmissions.org/apply/process/profile/)

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cameldrv
I can't really say except that obviously non-ALDC white students are a much
smaller proportion of Harvard's class than undergraduate students overall. My
guess is that they have target numbers for diversity. Since the overwhelming
majority the ALDCs are, due to economic and historical factors, white, it is
quite difficult to get into Harvard if you're white and your parents didn't go
to Harvard, dont' work at Harvard, aren't rich enough to make a big donation,
or aren't moderately wealthy and savvy enough to get you into some obscure
Harvardy sport like rowing.

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medee
Another interesting stat- 55% of Harvard graduate students are Jewish.

[https://www.hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/harvard-
uni...](https://www.hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/harvard-university)

~~~
anticonformist
That number is wildly inaccurate but even so, it's no doubt very different
from the bad old days:

 _Certain private universities, most notably Harvard, introduced policies
which effectively placed a quota on the number of Jews admitted to the
university. According to historian David Oshinsky, on writing about Jonas
Salk, "Most of the surrounding medical schools (Cornell, Columbia,
Pennsylvania, and Yale) had rigid quotas in place. In 1935 Yale accepted 76
applicants from a pool of 501. About 200 of those applicants were Jewish and
only five got in." He notes that Dean Milton Winternitz's instructions were
remarkably precise: "Never admit more than five Jews, take only two Italian
Catholics, and take no blacks at all."_

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota)

~~~
Udik
If Jews are extremely over-represented (with respect to their share in the US
population, which is about 1.7%), shouldn't there be an affirmative action for
non-jewish students?

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twsttest
Students whose parents went to Harvard tend to grow up aiming for Harvard
themselves. It's likely that a high percentage of the Harvard applicant pool
are legacies in the first place. If their stats are as good or better than the
average of the admitted class, then what's the problem?

Is there clear evidence that legacies have an easier time getting in on a per
case basis compared to a similar student without that that designation, as is
the case for applicants with the URM designation?

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raincom
I know of a professor, who used to be at MIT, then Microsoft research. He
joined Harvard a few years ago; one of the side benefits is to secure
admission for his progeny.

~~~
drfuchs
Some universities automatically admit children of faculty, but Harvard is not
among them. Source: Me, DP of Harvard faculty member. See also
[https://hr.harvard.edu/faculty](https://hr.harvard.edu/faculty)

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gentleman11
Do we really need to include race in our analysis? Why not look at all Harvard
students?

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ThemalSpan
Because race has been built into the fabric of our society. If we don't
acknowledge that, then racial injustice will continue to propagate through
time un-impeded.

~~~
twsttest
Only by overcoming the concept of race can we actually overcome social
division. Divisions among whites have melted away as they stopped seeing each
other as "English" or "Italian" and instead came to unite. Similarly for us as
citizens to unite we need to stop seeing each other as "white" and "black" and
instead overcome these superficial differences.

Injustice can easily be rooted out while also overcoming the concept of race.

The problem is that race-oriented thinkers obsess over race and reify it,
actually making racial tension worse.

~~~
medee
Competition for reproduction and resources between groups of genetically
proximate organisms is the history of "life".

~~~
twsttest
Through the mixing pot of America we can come together and overcome our
natural tendency towards division. This is part of what makes America a great
nation.

Again, the racially-oriented thinkers often just exacerbate division.

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ThemalSpan
America's history has a continuous component of oppression. At no point since
the founding of the country have all folk present on this land been equal and
free. Pretending that past (and current) atrocities didn't happen, and
ignoring whom they targeted, means that the inequalities they created will
linger.

Even today, COVID 19 affects Black and Latino folks at greater rates. That is
a real, physical, manifestation of racial injustice. Ignoring that means
ignoring structural problems in America.

~~~
twsttest
This is the case for every single country on Earth, and is actually still the
case for most countries on Earth. Show me a country today and I'll show you a
set of groups who are oppressed in that country.

However it is America that has come the farthest in overcoming racial
discrimination, which is why people from around the world want to come here in
droves.

Those groups are disproportionately affected because they are
disproportionately living in cities, which has nothing to do with racial
oppression.

The Latino population has swelled in recent decades and new immigrants to the
US are almost always poorer than the general population. That's been true for
the last 200 years and there's nothing wrong with that.

Yet racialists like yourself ignore this and try to claim discrimination. It's
intellectually dishonest.

As for Blacks in America, the only thing that will bring them up and negate
past discrimination is a improvement of their culture and focusing on the
future. Most of black poverty today is caused by broken homes and other
cultural issues, not oppression.

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david927
Mix the smart and the rich paints and call it one color.

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DataSciGuy_401
I'd need to know what the percentage of ALDC students across races and across
the total population is in order to interpret this statistic

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scott_s
From the abstract:

> Among admits who are African American, Asian American, and Hispanic, the
> share is less than 16% each.

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LudwigNagasena
And when Harvard puts quotas for "minorities", it doesn't limit offers for
these people, it limits them for the other 57%.

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Geekette
Non paywall access: [https://sci-hub.se/10.3386/w26316](https://sci-
hub.se/10.3386/w26316)

