To who? Nobody deserves to go to Harvard any more than somebody deserves to come to my board game night. Harvard isn't a natural right, it's an organization.
> Harvard’s admissions process is not a good way to attract the best students.
Harvard's admissions process isn't intended to attract whatever your measure of "the best students" is. Harvard thinks the best students are a mix of children from alums, extremely high achieving normies, and a particular racial mix that makes them seem visibly cosmopolitan. They were told the the third class was illegal because it was racist. Other than that Harvard hasn't been restricted; who Harvard admits is who Harvard intended to admit.
> I think the goal isn’t to fill Harvard with a particular class, but to fill it with amazing students.
Who's goal? Harvard's goal is clear. What's not clear is why it should change its standards to ones that "middle-class" kids have better access to.
imo, it's the same energy as the fight against Affirmative Action; middle-class white people demanding that the standards exclude things that they can't be good at (like being black, or having fancy parents), and include things that they can do, like doing well at their mediocre high school and taking tests.
This is cloaked in pseudo left-wing rhetoric of fairness and inclusiveness, but a kind of fairness that doesn't consider the difficulty of black lives in a country that enslaved them, and is deeply worried about the access of children who never missed a meal to Harvard.
The only real case against legacies is that it is also racist, but it is a difficult case. Even to make that case would rest on Jim Crow, because your angle would be that their legacy admissions have been tainted by past racist policy, and are carrying that policy into the present. It still wouldn't be about middle-class wish fulfillment.
To who? Nobody deserves to go to Harvard any more than somebody deserves to come to my board game night. Harvard isn't a natural right, it's an organization.
> Harvard’s admissions process is not a good way to attract the best students.
Harvard's admissions process isn't intended to attract whatever your measure of "the best students" is. Harvard thinks the best students are a mix of children from alums, extremely high achieving normies, and a particular racial mix that makes them seem visibly cosmopolitan. They were told the the third class was illegal because it was racist. Other than that Harvard hasn't been restricted; who Harvard admits is who Harvard intended to admit.
> I think the goal isn’t to fill Harvard with a particular class, but to fill it with amazing students.
Who's goal? Harvard's goal is clear. What's not clear is why it should change its standards to ones that "middle-class" kids have better access to.
imo, it's the same energy as the fight against Affirmative Action; middle-class white people demanding that the standards exclude things that they can't be good at (like being black, or having fancy parents), and include things that they can do, like doing well at their mediocre high school and taking tests.
This is cloaked in pseudo left-wing rhetoric of fairness and inclusiveness, but a kind of fairness that doesn't consider the difficulty of black lives in a country that enslaved them, and is deeply worried about the access of children who never missed a meal to Harvard.
The only real case against legacies is that it is also racist, but it is a difficult case. Even to make that case would rest on Jim Crow, because your angle would be that their legacy admissions have been tainted by past racist policy, and are carrying that policy into the present. It still wouldn't be about middle-class wish fulfillment.