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.
> It's just laughable that an admissions process is a trade secret
More and more, I view these Ivy league colleges (and a few others like MIT, Stanford, etc) as private clubs not too dissimilar from country clubs. Beyond the anti Asian bias, I think something more revealing will be the number of legacy admits.
Education is getting more decentralized and so the only real value of these institutions is brand recognition and network.
If that is indeed a good analogy, then it makes sense Harvards admission criteria is a trade secret.
> Education is getting more decentralized and so the only real value of these institutions is brand recognition and network.
This is simply not true. I went to what I would call a tier 3 school for undergrad and then ended up at MIT for graduate work. The difference between the two institutions was really night and day. Not only are the classes more rigorous and the instructors objectively better at MIT, but the students just think differently: they have much more ambition and are far less constrained by the status quo / what their parents did. Being around that totally changed my outlook of what is possible and what I should expect from myself, and really pushed me to make huge career and self-education strides.
"More and more, I view these Ivy league colleges (and a few others like MIT, Stanford, etc) as private clubs not too dissimilar from country clubs."
They always were, to some extent. Comparably, they are considerably more egalitarian now than they were even 50 years ago.
"so the only real value of these institutions is brand recognition and network"
Whatever the admissions problems - they are still very good schools. They tend to have better profs and better students and that counts for a lot. Also huge financing basis, and due to 'brand' they get visitors from prominent individuals the world over.
I think the problem is not the schools - it's the way we treat 'brand value' particularly in places like the Silicon Valley.
I wonder if during interviewing, what would happen if interviewers were simply not allowed to know the educational background of the candidate - after all, once they have been admitted for an interview, does that information really matter at all (i.e. in the context of a specific interview?).
It's hard for younger people to avoid this, and when I did a lot of interviewing in my 20's I think I was too skewed by this, not having the opportunity to know really what all of that meant.
Particularly when it comes to socialization - I find that Ivy League types are confident and polished communicators, so I particularly enjoy the process of trying to 'see past the nice smile' to find what counts ... but fully aware of how important it is to still have 'brand recognition' even at the company early on, as this actually does help to recruit more talent and investment, sadly.
Was there ever a doubt in that? I wish I had known that University is for networking and making connections. Maybe my life would have been easier.
My ex's internship at Harvard was as simple as her dad knowing a prof that is friends with a harvard one. No prep, no interview, no nothing. It opened a lot of doors and that's great, but the interesting thing was that when things are so easy to attain, I had to do a lot of convincing to actually get her to attend it.
And when I contrast it to the amount of stones that were thrown in my way, I can't help but be a little bit jealous
I don't think the (high rate) of legacy acceptances has ever been considered a secret at the top ivies? "Harvard's incoming class of 2021 is made up of over 29 percent legacy students, reports The Harvard Crimson." https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/06/harvards-incoming-class-is-o...
At the school I went to, even before I applied I knew that their admissions process funneled legacy applications into an entirely separate pool from normal applications.
>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.
I have interviewed maths applicants at Oxford, with the caveat that it was 20 years ago.
The things that struck me were that a lot is dependent on the individual interviewers. I tried hard to look for potential as did most of the interviewers I spoke to did but can be easier said than done. The exam wasn't a big factor in the decision making I found, unless somebody did really well or really badly, as the marks were all very bunched up and we couldn't see the scripts to see what people were getting right and wrong.
Also, the course is really hard for somebody who hasn't done double maths A-level, so if somebody only has single maths, you have to pretty confident that they will be able to basically teach themselves further maths A-level. There is obviously some support from tutors with that, but the set-up is aimed at people with double maths.
They definitely don't only take groomed Maths Olympiad winners and the questions are much easier than Olympiad questions (in my undergraduate year there were only two of us who had made it to the top 20 country in the British Maths Olympiad stuff for example - Cambridge filters them all off!)
I also don't think even the top schools train up for the interviews as much as you say - I went to a school that was top ten in the A-level league tables nd only had one mock interview.
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.
> 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.
It varies a lot between colleges/interviewers. I initially interviewed at Trinity (Cambridge), and there was an admissions exam (roughly STEP I/II level) and the interview was solely focused on that. I was then pooled to Selwyn, and there was no admissions exam and the interview was much more general (split into three parts - NatSci DoS-barely even about the subject, more about yourself generally/why Cambridge; CompSci DoS-more general questions, it was more about coming up with an idea, or how you would implement something, and broader CS concepts, than being able to chase down a specific answer to a set question; Physics DoS-focused around a particular question, but was more interested in you being able to come up with a viable method, and explain your reasoning, than being able to do every single step there and then (I needed _a lot_ of hints, and was still admitted for CompSci, and that DoS later said that wasn't an issue - I could see the broader idea, and would have got there with time/being able to look things up)). Someone who interviewed directly with Selwyn said they had the same experience.
> 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.
I'm from the U.S., so take my input with a grain of salt with regards to applying it to the English school system, but in my experience the majority of mathematical talent comes from outside work, with next to zero support from schools.
I don't know if that analogy holds, since the emperor made a habit of writing amicus briefs to the Supreme Court arguing (metaphorically) "I'm nude and that's OK! Though it would be awfully inconvenient for you to say I were naked. I just prefer a holistic fashion policy which includes nude among a range of options such as deshabille, birthday suit, unclothed, etc."
Verbatim quotes:
Brown University, University of Chicago, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Duke University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, Stanford University, Vanderbilt University, and Yale University submit this brief as amici curiae in support of respondents. Amici have long used admissions policies similar to the Harvard Plan that Justice Powell approved in Regents of University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978), and the University of Michigan Law School plan this Court upheld in Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003). Amici accordingly have substantial experience with admissions policies that consider all aspects of an applicant’s background and experience, including in some circumstances the applicant’s racial or ethnic background.
...
Amici accordingly urge the Court to interpret the Constitution, consistent with Bakke and Grutter, to continue to allow educational institutions to structure admissions programs that take account of race and ethnicity as single factors within a highly individualized, holistic review process.
You'll find all the colleges have an outreach programme where they send the undergrads around to various schools to encourage the kids to apply.
I'm not sure the dons themselves can do much about it, it seems like they only get to see a small sample of the total pool of applicants. I only met a couple of them when I was applying, and after I got in it didn't look like they had a full view.
As for data, it's not obvious what data would tell you whether they did or didn't try.
Elite schools in the US know and admit this, too. They are constantly trying to figure out how to minimize the duds.
> I would assume they claim this because they are being sued by Asians about bias
This claim is made so often, yet it is so fantastically short-sighted. It boggles my minds that people think that great grades and great standardized test scores are the best predictors for being a strong contributor in an elite academic setting (yes, it's great for predicting more good grades, but that's a shallow definition of success in an elite school setting -- the resources available can be and are used so much more productively).
Things like charisma (incl. leadership), curiosity, drive, and creativity make a huge difference, and those things are fantastically difficult to quantify in a reliable way that can scale. Things like financial capital and social capital are real things that keep a school healthy and strong over time.
If a person from a given group feels like they were discriminated against, I would ask them to try to answer better the question of what do they think that they are giving to the school. Directly or indirectly, almost all admits to an elite school have a very solid answer to that question.
While I agree that Ivy League admissions could be more transparent, I certainly hope they don't move to the Oxbridge style of purely focusing on academics.
University admissions are not just a means of selecting people - they are also important behavioral incentives for teenagers. I'd much rather encourage high schoolers to focus on a wide variety of interests (for some that might be academics, for others, the arts) rather than coerce everyone into caring about grades at the expense of everything else.
The thing is, if I'm poor and you're rich, your papa can take you to posh places in Europe and Asia, can pay for dancing and music lessons and for all sorts of fancy things which make you a lot more well rounded than me, when we're both 18-19.
At least with a test the playing field is way more leveled.
If you want extra info, add another test. You want to major in Math? Cool, you also have to pass a geography/history/biology/whatever test (you choose which one and it only counts 15%).
> 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
Most will admit it's subjective as well (Cambridge). I've had at least two Directors of Studies tell me that half of the point of the interview is finding someone they want to teach/work with.
Well, the second that admissions process gets out, an entire industry will move to game the metrics it uses. That will make those metrics largely useless, as only the rich will be able to afford private coaching to make sure they hit the metrics.
>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.
Perhaps I'm just cynical, but when I'm walking around Harvard Square, I always assume the point of "excellence" is that intelligence and money should get married.
I don't think it's the same. Stuy (and Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech, etc) have only a single well-defined metric -- the test. Admissions are as transparent as it gets.
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.
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.
They will never fully open the black box, because people will optimize for its contents.
There is an UNBELIEVABLE amount of entitlement thinking and out and out attempts to cheat that go on at places like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford. If no one knows what admissions is looking for other than straight A's, then you just get straight A's and do the extras that YOU think are important. (Which as it turns out, is what they really want to determine.)
But then Harvard is no longer a perfect selector of the elite and a degree from Harvard no longer signals surefire intelligence.it never did top begin with, but that's beside the point, it's all about branding.
Many big tech companies made their hiring processes more transparent. Partly because of the call for more diversity in tech. I hope colleges follow suit. Even if the formula is "Rich daddy" + "lacross".
With Tech the opening up actually comes partly as a response to universities. I worked quite closely with our HR team recruiting some grads and they had to explain "If you want to exclusively hire <insert very specific description> then recruit from <Y> university".
Sure enough, roughly 30% of our office were from that university and it was incredible how well we'd managed to select for very specific, but technically irrelevant, characteristics.
Harvard has not perpetuated the myth of meritocracy in decades. That's what the whole lawsuit is about: trying to force the plaintiff's version of meritocracy.
Do you have evidence to the contrary?
You know, I think you're right. I just went to their admissions page. They have no mention of "being the best", etc. It's all about affordability, diversity, inclusiveness, etc.
I guess at this point the myth is self-perpetuating, and Harvard just lets it be.
They could probably end the lawsuits in a minute if they just up and said "we're not the best and don't care about wanting the best."
Open data style it could list your category on the diploma received.
Harvard - X, Harvard - Y or Harvard - Z, that way any of those categories wouldn't be devaluating others.
Is this something you could know for any university? I imagine most private ones anyway would be pretty secretive about how many positions they reserve for so-called "legacy" students.
- Lots of AP success, good grades, good recs, etc. are just table stakes for anyone who is seriously considering going to an elite school. If that's all an applicant is bringing to the table, they will basically be competing with 1000s of clones. This does not bode well for them unless they have something else that stands out.
- Based on pure intellectual prowess, maybe ~30% of each Harvard class (less in other elite schools as prestige level decreases) is able to understand/identify/conceive of, work on, and solve interesting problems. The number of people who meet this standard and do not get into an elite school (typically the school of their choice -- they are aggressively courted) is very small, and it is usually due to some glaring error and/or omission in their application.
- The rest of the class is filled up with solid-but-unexceptional intellectual clones (good grades, etc.) who are bringing something else to the table. This could be (using your order and adding some) child of wealthy alums, child of donors, talented athlete, possessor of social capital, racial diversity, geographic diversity, etc.
First, note that "fairness" in terms of merit stops at 30% or less of the class. If one were to limit "fair" to actually being intellectually qualified, then the admissions would stop there. Is that fair? I don't know, but I am certain that almost no one wants that on either side of the fence.
So the next question that the admissions group has to answer is "Well, how do we fill the rest of the spots. Hmmmm... we have a BUNCH of applicants that kind of look alike. How shall we prioritize them?"
This is how we get groups that get an advantage. As said above, this could be a child of wealthy alums, a child of donors, a talented athlete, or a possessor of social capital. It could also be something like race (both for literal diversity of color, but also for diversity of life experiences) or geographic location.
Are any of these "fair"? Some may be more fair than others (athletes, even at athletically-weak Ivies, develop social capital that stays with them after graduation that most non-athletes don't really appreciate), but at least they are a functioning heuristic that can arguably add something at a higher rate than "random".
I would personally say that selecting for one or more of these groups may not be "fair" as in "choose from like group randomly", but I think it is probably much better for the ecology surrounding the school(s). Each of these groups leads to something positive for the school, while selecting at random means that the school will also benefit randomly (and probably less in the long run).
These schools are at the top, and they want to stay there. Making admissions decisions that are likely to increase their financial and social capital is a good way to do that.
> No more pretending to be fair and all that bullshit
The best I can tell, elite schools are as fair as they can be for the truly strong/qualified applicants -- they all get admitted. After those are admitted, while staring into the face of a lot of academically similar applicants, the elite schools start making decisions that benefit and perpetuate their existence. To be fair, I am surprised that the paths that lead to these decisions generate as much interest as they do. It seems fairly natural to me.
You might be doing yourself a disservice. There are a lot of people who would be extremely competent in practice who are put off by the dirt and competition of the election process.
Choosing officials by lot is also extremely resistant to the money-in-politics problem and corruption amongst officials (it becomes easier to detect, and occasionally you get incorruptible people in the role).
The ideal political system could well be random lot to determine a small pool of candidates (I think 3-4), then voters choose 1.
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.
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.
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.
"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?
Once the measures for admission are made public they'll cease being good measures as many will teach/live to the measures rather than actually remain high quality students. (Of course the measures may also be bad measures.)
It may be better for the school to have a written system for evaluating or at least reaching an initial coarse filter result which they create and disseminate to external auditors who ensure it has been applied 'fairly' to the data set and which can provide opinions about the process without revealing details that could ruin the effectiveness of the measures.
Additionally they could monitor the applicant pool to see if the applicants are more uniformly reacting to a discovered / leaked measure and thus that it has ceased being a good tool for decision making.
Being smart and being able to get shit done (that describes the top of most elite school classes) is not a mystery -- it's just really hard to do. The people who are able to do it, however, are pretty much all admitted.
The measures for admission for the rest of the people (I call them very smart but unexceptional "clones") is based on things that benefit the university -- athletes, donors, etc. The "secret" for these folks is just to add value to the university. Some folks are born with it (cough Kushner cough), but others earn it by being leaders, athletes, etc.
Check out Cal Newport's stuff on these matters. He's about as close as it gets to correct, imho.
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.
IMO, perceiving and have hard data are two different things. If it was proven by data then they might have to give way to all kinds of lawsuits. Without data they can steadfastly claim to be neutral even if they are perceived otherwise.
Legacy and donors do get preferential treatment, but almost all of them are fairly strong academically (not as strong the top 30% or so of the class, but still strong). There are very few people who are unqualified but still get in due to legacy or donor status (cough Kushner cough).
> Likely because people might find their policies unethical, which would stop them to making choices that maximize the perceived value of a Harvard degree?
Which assumptions are you relying on which result in one begetting the other?
If they reveal their policies, those are highly publicized and enough moral outrage is generated, they'll have to commit to changing their policies or risk having their reputation permanently stained. Of course, being Harvard University, they would probably wouldn't take too hard a blow, but it would still devalue them.
"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."
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.
Some of it also likely occurs because the children of Harvard graduates will have a better idea of what the process is looking for, not least of which because they have an N=1 daa point of a successful application.
Similarly, if you're trying to have a successful interview with a company, it helps to talk to people who have interviewed there before, preferably people who have interviewed there successfully.
(The process may well have other issues that make "legacy" applications more likely, but a higher acceptance rate of such applications doesn't inherently suggest a problem.)
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.
Than the general population possibly, but not than the applicant pool, which is the comparison that matters.
It seems more likely that in the applicant pool the non-legacy kids would be smarter. Imagine how confident of your ability you'd have to be to apply to Harvard as a random kid from a public high school in Iowa. Whereas if you'd grown up expecting to go there because your parents did, the threshold for applying would be pretty low.
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.
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'.
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.
>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.
By this definition, that "problem by any social measure" already exists. The Jewish (undergrad) population at Harvard is 25% [0] whereas the U.S. Jewish population is approximately 2%. Given this already-existing 10x overrepresentation, would a significant increase in the percentage of Asian-American students vs the domestic population be a social problem? Maybe yes maybe no, it's a complex question.
No it is not. East Asians on average are higher quality students than gentile whites in every measure of intelligence and grit we have. Denying them entry because such ethnic differences make you uncomfortable is not just.
The idea of 'Over representation' of a certain racial group based on there
percentage of the population is entirely subjective and racist.
At Cal Tech Asians are roughly 50% of students. Cal Tech does not consider race in admissions. Those students rightfully earned there places base on merit and objective criteria.
To make the suggestion that they should be systematically denied those positions because of there race and percentage of population is regressive. Who gets to decide what percentage of what race is a good percentage?
Harvard is desperately trying to cover there criteria because it more then likely runs contrary to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and they are going to louse this law suite if it goes to trial.
Lets see the exact formula that Harvard is using for race vs percentage of the population so we can apply the same formula to all races they admit. Lets compare European, Jewish, Asian student percentages based on the same formula.
I think that administration at Harvard is scared to death of that type of scrutiny but that is exactly what they are going to get. And it could seriously stigmatize the school for decades. And set some significant legal presented so Schools can not use these sort of
behind closed doors racist regressive policies any more.
> 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.
The "I don't see colors" part of me is cringing at what this implies. Aren't Asian-Americans supposed to be more than their race?
It's not quite the 50% that you say would be a problem "by any social measure", but Caltech has 43% Asian undergraduates, 28% White, and it seems to work out OK.
I think this is going to be a watershed case that shows that race based
admissions and affirmative action programs no matter the intent are
socially and morally regressive. They inevitably lead to racist polices and
race based favoritism of one for or another.
"The court documents, filed in federal court in Boston, also showed that
Harvard conducted an internal investigation into its admissions policies in
2013 and found a bias against Asian-American applicants. But Harvard never
made the findings public or acted on them."
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.
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.
"Bias and racism is predictable when you choose to abandon Meritocracy based on objective measurable criteria."
Meritocracies aren't purely objective, either. Someone has to come up with the metrics, and someone has to decide whether someone meets those metrics. And not every metric that would be needed would be something that can be easily and objectively quantified.
It might also be because the system is not actually consistent or well-defined. They might, say, depend primarily on reviewer judgement, and can measure reviewer correctness on hit/miss student ratios for those admitted, while not actually encoding it in strict law.
Exposing this however would inevitably require that they do, strictly, define their terms and conditions, which may lead to worse outcomes, if its not easy to produce non-gameable rules, or rules that actually match successful reviewer judgement.
Readit News
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.
More and more, I view these Ivy league colleges (and a few others like MIT, Stanford, etc) as private clubs not too dissimilar from country clubs. Beyond the anti Asian bias, I think something more revealing will be the number of legacy admits.
Education is getting more decentralized and so the only real value of these institutions is brand recognition and network.
If that is indeed a good analogy, then it makes sense Harvards admission criteria is a trade secret.
This is simply not true. I went to what I would call a tier 3 school for undergrad and then ended up at MIT for graduate work. The difference between the two institutions was really night and day. Not only are the classes more rigorous and the instructors objectively better at MIT, but the students just think differently: they have much more ambition and are far less constrained by the status quo / what their parents did. Being around that totally changed my outlook of what is possible and what I should expect from myself, and really pushed me to make huge career and self-education strides.
They always were, to some extent. Comparably, they are considerably more egalitarian now than they were even 50 years ago.
"so the only real value of these institutions is brand recognition and network"
Whatever the admissions problems - they are still very good schools. They tend to have better profs and better students and that counts for a lot. Also huge financing basis, and due to 'brand' they get visitors from prominent individuals the world over.
I think the problem is not the schools - it's the way we treat 'brand value' particularly in places like the Silicon Valley.
I wonder if during interviewing, what would happen if interviewers were simply not allowed to know the educational background of the candidate - after all, once they have been admitted for an interview, does that information really matter at all (i.e. in the context of a specific interview?).
It's hard for younger people to avoid this, and when I did a lot of interviewing in my 20's I think I was too skewed by this, not having the opportunity to know really what all of that meant.
Particularly when it comes to socialization - I find that Ivy League types are confident and polished communicators, so I particularly enjoy the process of trying to 'see past the nice smile' to find what counts ... but fully aware of how important it is to still have 'brand recognition' even at the company early on, as this actually does help to recruit more talent and investment, sadly.
My ex's internship at Harvard was as simple as her dad knowing a prof that is friends with a harvard one. No prep, no interview, no nothing. It opened a lot of doors and that's great, but the interesting thing was that when things are so easy to attain, I had to do a lot of convincing to actually get her to attend it.
And when I contrast it to the amount of stones that were thrown in my way, I can't help but be a little bit jealous
At the school I went to, even before I applied I knew that their admissions process funneled legacy applications into an entirely separate pool from normal applications.
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.
The things that struck me were that a lot is dependent on the individual interviewers. I tried hard to look for potential as did most of the interviewers I spoke to did but can be easier said than done. The exam wasn't a big factor in the decision making I found, unless somebody did really well or really badly, as the marks were all very bunched up and we couldn't see the scripts to see what people were getting right and wrong.
Also, the course is really hard for somebody who hasn't done double maths A-level, so if somebody only has single maths, you have to pretty confident that they will be able to basically teach themselves further maths A-level. There is obviously some support from tutors with that, but the set-up is aimed at people with double maths.
They definitely don't only take groomed Maths Olympiad winners and the questions are much easier than Olympiad questions (in my undergraduate year there were only two of us who had made it to the top 20 country in the British Maths Olympiad stuff for example - Cambridge filters them all off!)
I also don't think even the top schools train up for the interviews as much as you say - I went to a school that was top ten in the A-level league tables nd only had one mock interview.
It varies a lot between colleges/interviewers. I initially interviewed at Trinity (Cambridge), and there was an admissions exam (roughly STEP I/II level) and the interview was solely focused on that. I was then pooled to Selwyn, and there was no admissions exam and the interview was much more general (split into three parts - NatSci DoS-barely even about the subject, more about yourself generally/why Cambridge; CompSci DoS-more general questions, it was more about coming up with an idea, or how you would implement something, and broader CS concepts, than being able to chase down a specific answer to a set question; Physics DoS-focused around a particular question, but was more interested in you being able to come up with a viable method, and explain your reasoning, than being able to do every single step there and then (I needed _a lot_ of hints, and was still admitted for CompSci, and that DoS later said that wasn't an issue - I could see the broader idea, and would have got there with time/being able to look things up)). Someone who interviewed directly with Selwyn said they had the same experience.
I'm from the U.S., so take my input with a grain of salt with regards to applying it to the English school system, but in my experience the majority of mathematical talent comes from outside work, with next to zero support from schools.
I don't know if that analogy holds, since the emperor made a habit of writing amicus briefs to the Supreme Court arguing (metaphorically) "I'm nude and that's OK! Though it would be awfully inconvenient for you to say I were naked. I just prefer a holistic fashion policy which includes nude among a range of options such as deshabille, birthday suit, unclothed, etc."
Verbatim quotes:
Brown University, University of Chicago, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Duke University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, Stanford University, Vanderbilt University, and Yale University submit this brief as amici curiae in support of respondents. Amici have long used admissions policies similar to the Harvard Plan that Justice Powell approved in Regents of University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978), and the University of Michigan Law School plan this Court upheld in Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003). Amici accordingly have substantial experience with admissions policies that consider all aspects of an applicant’s background and experience, including in some circumstances the applicant’s racial or ethnic background.
...
Amici accordingly urge the Court to interpret the Constitution, consistent with Bakke and Grutter, to continue to allow educational institutions to structure admissions programs that take account of race and ethnicity as single factors within a highly individualized, holistic review process.
I'd like to see proof of above with data. I think "they" want everyone to believe that they try hard to let in disadvantaged kids
I'm not sure the dons themselves can do much about it, it seems like they only get to see a small sample of the total pool of applicants. I only met a couple of them when I was applying, and after I got in it didn't look like they had a full view.
As for data, it's not obvious what data would tell you whether they did or didn't try.
Elite schools in the US know and admit this, too. They are constantly trying to figure out how to minimize the duds.
> I would assume they claim this because they are being sued by Asians about bias
This claim is made so often, yet it is so fantastically short-sighted. It boggles my minds that people think that great grades and great standardized test scores are the best predictors for being a strong contributor in an elite academic setting (yes, it's great for predicting more good grades, but that's a shallow definition of success in an elite school setting -- the resources available can be and are used so much more productively).
Things like charisma (incl. leadership), curiosity, drive, and creativity make a huge difference, and those things are fantastically difficult to quantify in a reliable way that can scale. Things like financial capital and social capital are real things that keep a school healthy and strong over time.
If a person from a given group feels like they were discriminated against, I would ask them to try to answer better the question of what do they think that they are giving to the school. Directly or indirectly, almost all admits to an elite school have a very solid answer to that question.
University admissions are not just a means of selecting people - they are also important behavioral incentives for teenagers. I'd much rather encourage high schoolers to focus on a wide variety of interests (for some that might be academics, for others, the arts) rather than coerce everyone into caring about grades at the expense of everything else.
At least with a test the playing field is way more leveled.
If you want extra info, add another test. You want to major in Math? Cool, you also have to pass a geography/history/biology/whatever test (you choose which one and it only counts 15%).
Most will admit it's subjective as well (Cambridge). I've had at least two Directors of Studies tell me that half of the point of the interview is finding someone they want to teach/work with.
Perhaps I'm just cynical, but when I'm walking around Harvard Square, I always assume the point of "excellence" is that intelligence and money should get married.
[0] http://www.bkmag.com/2015/03/31/only-ten-black-students-were...
- 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.
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.
They will never fully open the black box, because people will optimize for its contents.
There is an UNBELIEVABLE amount of entitlement thinking and out and out attempts to cheat that go on at places like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford. If no one knows what admissions is looking for other than straight A's, then you just get straight A's and do the extras that YOU think are important. (Which as it turns out, is what they really want to determine.)
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Sure enough, roughly 30% of our office were from that university and it was incredible how well we'd managed to select for very specific, but technically irrelevant, characteristics.
I guess at this point the myth is self-perpetuating, and Harvard just lets it be.
They could probably end the lawsuits in a minute if they just up and said "we're not the best and don't care about wanting the best."
https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/application-process/w...
My take:
- Lots of AP success, good grades, good recs, etc. are just table stakes for anyone who is seriously considering going to an elite school. If that's all an applicant is bringing to the table, they will basically be competing with 1000s of clones. This does not bode well for them unless they have something else that stands out.
- Based on pure intellectual prowess, maybe ~30% of each Harvard class (less in other elite schools as prestige level decreases) is able to understand/identify/conceive of, work on, and solve interesting problems. The number of people who meet this standard and do not get into an elite school (typically the school of their choice -- they are aggressively courted) is very small, and it is usually due to some glaring error and/or omission in their application.
- The rest of the class is filled up with solid-but-unexceptional intellectual clones (good grades, etc.) who are bringing something else to the table. This could be (using your order and adding some) child of wealthy alums, child of donors, talented athlete, possessor of social capital, racial diversity, geographic diversity, etc.
First, note that "fairness" in terms of merit stops at 30% or less of the class. If one were to limit "fair" to actually being intellectually qualified, then the admissions would stop there. Is that fair? I don't know, but I am certain that almost no one wants that on either side of the fence.
So the next question that the admissions group has to answer is "Well, how do we fill the rest of the spots. Hmmmm... we have a BUNCH of applicants that kind of look alike. How shall we prioritize them?"
This is how we get groups that get an advantage. As said above, this could be a child of wealthy alums, a child of donors, a talented athlete, or a possessor of social capital. It could also be something like race (both for literal diversity of color, but also for diversity of life experiences) or geographic location.
Are any of these "fair"? Some may be more fair than others (athletes, even at athletically-weak Ivies, develop social capital that stays with them after graduation that most non-athletes don't really appreciate), but at least they are a functioning heuristic that can arguably add something at a higher rate than "random".
I would personally say that selecting for one or more of these groups may not be "fair" as in "choose from like group randomly", but I think it is probably much better for the ecology surrounding the school(s). Each of these groups leads to something positive for the school, while selecting at random means that the school will also benefit randomly (and probably less in the long run).
These schools are at the top, and they want to stay there. Making admissions decisions that are likely to increase their financial and social capital is a good way to do that.
> No more pretending to be fair and all that bullshit
The best I can tell, elite schools are as fair as they can be for the truly strong/qualified applicants -- they all get admitted. After those are admitted, while staring into the face of a lot of academically similar applicants, the elite schools start making decisions that benefit and perpetuate their existence. To be fair, I am surprised that the paths that lead to these decisions generate as much interest as they do. It seems fairly natural to me.
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I wouldn't elect any political official or moderator by pure lottery.
Choosing officials by lot is also extremely resistant to the money-in-politics problem and corruption amongst officials (it becomes easier to detect, and occasionally you get incorruptible people in the role).
The ideal political system could well be random lot to determine a small pool of candidates (I think 3-4), then voters choose 1.
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
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.
Likely because people might find their policies unethical, which would stop them from making choices that maximize the perceived value of a Harvard degree?
Once the measures for admission are made public they'll cease being good measures as many will teach/live to the measures rather than actually remain high quality students. (Of course the measures may also be bad measures.)
It may be better for the school to have a written system for evaluating or at least reaching an initial coarse filter result which they create and disseminate to external auditors who ensure it has been applied 'fairly' to the data set and which can provide opinions about the process without revealing details that could ruin the effectiveness of the measures.
Additionally they could monitor the applicant pool to see if the applicants are more uniformly reacting to a discovered / leaked measure and thus that it has ceased being a good tool for decision making.
The measures for admission for the rest of the people (I call them very smart but unexceptional "clones") is based on things that benefit the university -- athletes, donors, etc. The "secret" for these folks is just to add value to the university. Some folks are born with it (cough Kushner cough), but others earn it by being leaders, athletes, etc.
Check out Cal Newport's stuff on these matters. He's about as close as it gets to correct, imho.
Which assumptions are you relying on which result in one begetting the other?
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.
Similarly, if you're trying to have a successful interview with a company, it helps to talk to people who have interviewed there before, preferably people who have interviewed there successfully.
(The process may well have other issues that make "legacy" applications more likely, but a higher acceptance rate of such applications doesn't inherently suggest a problem.)
It seems more likely that in the applicant pool the non-legacy kids would be smarter. Imagine how confident of your ability you'd have to be to apply to Harvard as a random kid from a public high school in Iowa. Whereas if you'd grown up expecting to go there because your parents did, the threshold for applying would be pretty low.
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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'.
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.
By this definition, that "problem by any social measure" already exists. The Jewish (undergrad) population at Harvard is 25% [0] whereas the U.S. Jewish population is approximately 2%. Given this already-existing 10x overrepresentation, would a significant increase in the percentage of Asian-American students vs the domestic population be a social problem? Maybe yes maybe no, it's a complex question.
[0] https://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/The-most-heavily-Jewish-US-co...
No it is not. East Asians on average are higher quality students than gentile whites in every measure of intelligence and grit we have. Denying them entry because such ethnic differences make you uncomfortable is not just.
At Cal Tech Asians are roughly 50% of students. Cal Tech does not consider race in admissions. Those students rightfully earned there places base on merit and objective criteria.
To make the suggestion that they should be systematically denied those positions because of there race and percentage of population is regressive. Who gets to decide what percentage of what race is a good percentage?
Harvard is desperately trying to cover there criteria because it more then likely runs contrary to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and they are going to louse this law suite if it goes to trial.
Lets see the exact formula that Harvard is using for race vs percentage of the population so we can apply the same formula to all races they admit. Lets compare European, Jewish, Asian student percentages based on the same formula.
I think that administration at Harvard is scared to death of that type of scrutiny but that is exactly what they are going to get. And it could seriously stigmatize the school for decades. And set some significant legal presented so Schools can not use these sort of behind closed doors racist regressive policies any more.
The "I don't see colors" part of me is cringing at what this implies. Aren't Asian-Americans supposed to be more than their race?
It is? Why? And is it Harvard's to fix to the detriment of Asian-Americans?
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"The court documents, filed in federal court in Boston, also showed that Harvard conducted an internal investigation into its admissions policies in 2013 and found a bias against Asian-American applicants. But Harvard never made the findings public or acted on them."
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollme...
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...
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.
Meritocracies aren't purely objective, either. Someone has to come up with the metrics, and someone has to decide whether someone meets those metrics. And not every metric that would be needed would be something that can be easily and objectively quantified.
It looks pretty bad for them.
Exposing this however would inevitably require that they do, strictly, define their terms and conditions, which may lead to worse outcomes, if its not easy to produce non-gameable rules, or rules that actually match successful reviewer judgement.
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