43% of White Harvard students not admitted on merit

If Harvard admitted students based on merit alone, it would be 80% Asian,15% White, 5% Hispanic and 0% Black.

Ivy Leagues are only looking for PR. I remember an episode of Gossip Girl (I know, chick show) that pointed out something very accurate. If you haven't watched it, Serena van der Woodsen was NYC's "it" girl and basically a socialite. She was personally invited by the dean of Yale himself to the school, despite having gotten in trouble in school countless of times and having "ok" grades and attendance (she was even partially responsible for a guy ODing). Yet, the school thought it was a great PR move, because everyone would want to go to school where the "it" girl went.

I can't believe it's only 43%. It seemed much higher when I was at another top Ivy as a grad student.

R1 said everything that needs to be said about this.

I come from many generations of Harvard grads. I know that I got perfect SAT scores, and I knew 4 other legacies with the same in my class. Harvard has assumed correctly that most legacies will do very well there, as they are both blessed with privilege 9top high schools) and good genes.

You are confusing legacies ( yes privileged but with top scores from top schools) with the less deserving offspring of the super wealthy who will donate tens of millions to the school.

A LOT of legacies do not have top scores. Yes they come from top schools and have the manners of their class, but they are by no means accomplished.

I agree this is a valid point, but the title of the post is inconsistent with and more extreme than the article itself. The article makes clear that not all of of the 43 percent are white and not all of them are otherwise unqualified for admission.

Sorry I am wrong on the first point.

Hey, gurls! Everybody smell Miss R5. They don't make 'em like her anymore.

Stop being petty, R9.

Very racist @R1 So no black students deserved to be admitted to Harvard based on merit?

[quote] If Harvard admitted students based on merit alone, it would be 80% Asian,15% White, 5% Hispanic and 0% Black.

So?

I knew two twins in my class that would say from grade school onwards that they would be going to Harvard.

They were good students--not great.

And yes, they both got into Harvard.

Their dad had gone and he made big contributions. Yes, they were white

[quote] The article makes clear that not all of of the 43 percent are white and not all of them are otherwise unqualified for admission.

Legacies and big contributors are, by far, white.

Similar situation with Yale.

As stated above, do not confuse “legacy” with “legacy with a lot of money.”

Just because someone’s a legacy, doesn’t mean they won’t have good grades. If your parent(s) went to Harvard, there’s a good chance that you’re intelligent, and that your parent got you well-prepared academically.

If your parent went to Harvard, there’s also a non-negligible probability that your parent is very wealthy and donates a lot of money to the school.

R1 R5 R9 R11

How smart are these privileged, white Harvard men and women when they've been undermining their positions for decades with anti-white curricula?

That’s bullshit. Most of them are well-qualified. Especially the legacy admits. I know one kid who’s father, mother and brother were Harvard who was rejected by Harvard and accepted by Yale and Stanford.

Merit is not defined by grades and test scores. Admissions goal is to build a community. Harvard beat Yale in The Game this weekend. Rah!

On the internet, no one knows that R5 is a dog....

[quote] Harvard has assumed correctly that most legacies will do very well there, as they are both blessed with privilege 9top high schools) and good genes.

And good genes??! Jesus Christ.

R18 the freeper is whining about "anti-white" curriculum but probably wants to ban books about black people

As an actual Princeton grad....

1. Admissions to Ivies are insane competitive now which is why you may have noticed that the list of "top colleges" had more or less doubled, meaning "schools where McKinsey, Goldman, etc. will recruit."

2. That means that for every kid Princeton rejects there are probably a dozen with very similar scores and grades and extracurriculars. That is where legacy comes in. If they are deciding between 5 kids with more or less identical credentials--and geographic and socioencomic backgrounds, the applicant whose parents went there may have a leg up.-- but it is far from a guaranteed "admit"

3. Being a legacy was much more of a leg up even 15 years ago, but top schools can now "curate" their classes so they feel like Noah's Ark. This of course works to the disadvantage of kids in areas where lots of their peers are also applying to top collleges--Harvard isn't taking 20 kids from Horace Mann, even though they are all legacies.

4. Athletes, depending on the sport and how good they are, get some preference, but the vast majority fall into that "might have gotten accepted anyway" umbrella. It's a leg up and a coach can pull for a student they want on the team, but the student has to be within range of what the admissions committee is looking for overall. So it's more a leg up over similarly qualified students than a "how did this idiot get in."

5. The athlete bit is controversial because most of the athletes at Ivies and other top colleges play sports that only affluent white kids play: Field Hockey, Lacrosse, Rowing (crew), Fencing, Sailing, Tennis, Squash--these are not sports played at middle or working class public high schools. Thus the majority of student athletes come from either private schools or wealthy suburban public schools that are more or less private schools. Yes, there is basketball, football and baseball, but the other sports have many more athletes in total. This is where the bias issue comes into play.

6. Yes, they do admit the children of people who donate millions. But it has to be millions or close to it. A $100K check is not going to cut it. Those kids are often (but not always) not all that bright and we used to joke that they helped the rest of us by taking up all the Cs and Ds on the grading curve. OTOH, they don't need to be A students, they just need to graduate.

7. The study however, is complete bullshit because no one has any real idea why the admissions committees make the decisions they do, and given that they do not have anything vaguely like a "4.2 weighted GPA + 1550 SAT minimum" type standard, there is no way to make a claim that "75% would not have been rejected otherwise". And, as I explained above, the line between who gets in and who does not is often random. I graduated HS close to 20 years ago and even then, I knew kids who say got into Stanford but were rejected by Duke and Brown. Maybe Stanford needed one more kid who wanted to be an anthropology major or Brown already had too many kids who wanted to be English majors. It's really a crap shoot.

There are geniuses of all races and genders in the world. There’s also more than one way of showing genius, but even if you limit it to math, there are still geniuses of all races and genders in the world. I think genius extends to many other fields as well, and I have better memories of my high school Latin teacher than any of my other teachers growing up. He was a black man, and genuinely excited about Cicero, the culture idea of Saturnalia, and the Aeneid (which the whole class memorized the prologue too.) I also knew a Vietnamese man in college, undoubtedly a genius at both piano and physics, whose chief interest was in psychology- just because someone is good at academics doesn’t necessarily mean they only want to pursue one single idea of success in their lives. Cheers to diversity and different kinds of learning.

Geniuses are outliers

PS: The fact that DLers base their "knowledge" of Ivy League admissions based on plot twists from "Gossip Girl" is priceless.

My solution was to attend the bottom of the ivies. It was very brave of moi, I suffered a lot, but fortunately had the grit and spine to get through it. Also remember, Yale cock is poison and Harvard cock is boring. MIT has much better cock than Harvard and its not even Ivy League.

How was Ithaca?

"Ithaca is Gorges." And so is Cornell's frat cock.

If the whole school were only a bunch of dreary grinds who had done nothing their wholes lives but study for tests and accumulate extracurriculars strictly for their resumes, who would really want to be there (except for them) Sounds like Dullsville without the freewheeling, spoiled legacies to spice things up.

I happen to find some Asian men sexy.

R25 You must be bad at math. It’s about distribution and certainly not about ~diversity~.

DL would be better with more posters like r25 and no posters like r1

R34 = delusional

Once you are IN the Ivy League, nobody wants to deglamorize the experience. How silly. The Ivy League is often a bootstrapper's first wonderful chance to be fly private with a gorgeous golden boy, or party with the fun daughter of a scary dictator or oligarch.

Athletes and legacies can get into almost anywhere, no matter their skin color if their grades coming in are at the least "okay." Children of faculty and staff, same deal. That's not just a "Harvard" thing.

The "Deans Interest List," with kids whose parents donated, is the problem.

I was friends with a kid who had a college named after his grandfather. He went there for "free" and never did anything. He was a bit of a sociopath now that I think about it.

Be interesting to know if this is the case at Oxbridge, as well.

In my final gruelling year of high school, I was a hair from earning a place at Cambridge to study Literature (the last of two candidates in a pool of a hundred or more, but was pipped at the last by someone who I suspect was a legacy.

Some of the biggest idiots I've known have multiple Ivy degrees.

I've known and worked with quite a few Harvard grads through the years, so the original post doesn't surprise me in the least. None of them were top scholars, or even exceptionally bright. What they have/had in abundance is self-confidence and the certainty that their Harvard degree made them superior to everyone else.

The best way to get into a top ivy is to be a great student from a shitty state. Colleges are desperate for geographical diversity.

If you are an excellent student from North Dakota, Kentucky, Alaska, etc, you get a ticket to the Ivies.

They already have too many NYers and Californians.

Private institutions should be able to admit anyone for anyone reason they want. And also reject anyone for any reason they want. No one has a right to go to a private university.

[quote] The "Deans Interest List," with kids whose parents donated, is the problem.

No.

There are maybe two or three kids who meet this description each year

Logic: How many billionaires are there each year with 18 year old kids who are determined to get their kids into Harvard, and the kid wants to go along with it AND the kid is dumb as a box of rocks.

Not many.

The athlete thing is big because, as I'd mentioned earlier--these are kids who are parlaying a talent is a sport that not many people play in high school-- rowing, field hockey, squash--into admissions to a school that might otherwise have been a reach for them.

Look at the schools that have teams competing in these sports--they are mostly either SLACs (small liberal arts colleges like Williams and Haverford) or Ivies and other top universities.

That's not to take away from their athletic ability and the hard work they put in to get that good, it's just they are far more of a presence than any legacies or kids of major donors.

[quote] If the whole school were only a bunch of dreary grinds who had done nothing their wholes lives but study for tests and accumulate extracurriculars strictly for their resumes, who would really want to be there

You've just very accurately described the University of Chicago. "Where fun goes to die"

[quote] The best way to get into a top ivy is to be a great student from a shitty state. Colleges are desperate for geographical diversity.

Yes.

There are Urban Myths in the NYC private school scene about "my neighbor's cousin's friend's former boss" who moved their from the Upper East Side to a high school in North Dakota, where one of the parents was from, in order to ensure that their kids would get into Harvard. Usually punctuated by some detail like "and even though they only got a 1400 on the SAT-- I mean it's not like there are SAT tutors in North Dakota--they still got in!!!"

It's a an urban myth, but the fact that it is so often repeated is telling.

^^moved their kids

I was a legacy admit to my university—not an Ivy but a public school that was tough to get into. I am 95% sure of this because other kids I knew with better scores and grades than I did got rejected. Being a legacy meant the school designed someone from the alumni office to go to admissions and campaign for my admission, among other benefits (really). I got this cushy treatment even though my alum parent hadn’t donated a dime to the school or even had much at all to do with it after graduation. The school also hosted a special weekend for prospective legacy students at which many parents got into a screaming fight with an admissions counselor who said it was important for the school to recruit students who were the first generation in their families to go to college.

I loved my time at school but not the feeling that I took advantage of a systemic benefit I shouldn’t have had. I bring this up whenever someone complains about affirmative action in front of me. Mostly I look forward to the day schools fully concede that admissions is an art, not a science, that things like SAT scores are gameable with enough time and money (the good genes guy above is not the sharpest knife in the drawer…), and that where you went to school as a teenager is not a reflection on your intelligence or worth. Parents who turn this stupid system into a bragging contest at the country club don’t do anything good for their kids.

I feel very very guilty that I was born so good looking I was able to pay my own Ivy education through modeling, not even touching my skip generation trust. I'm ashamed my parents are very important and very rich and got me in on their glamorous name and position, alone. Insult to injury, I'm hung like a horse and a brilliant lacrosse player. I apologize now to the deserving average boy of color whose place I stole.

Hmmm, are you also R5, R48 ;)

R1 really really really hates black people. It is a white supremacist troll who probably doesn't even live in the United States.

More from R1:

[quote] If Harvard admitted students based on merit alone, it would be 80% Asian,15% White, 5% Hispanic and 0% Black.

[quote] Geniuses are outliers

[quote] Bill Maher: Democrats Can’t Win By Telling White People They Suck People constantly talk about the demographic decline of whites but fail to note that blacks are also a diminishing demographic. America is becoming more Latino and Asian and don't expect Latinos to be reliably democrat voters in the future. Non-white people are not a monolith whose values and interest align with black Americans.

[quote] White, college educated upper middle class white people are reliable Democrat voters. I suspect Democrats will shed working class Latino voters faster than they will lose support from the so called "bobos", who revel in the 'guilt porn' message that white people are evil and responsible for every ill in the world. Democrats are becoming the party of rich urban whites and black activists. None of their 'Latinx' messaging is appealing to 99% of Latinos.

[quote] Jair Bolsonaro is more of a fascist than Trump ever was and he's the president of the most 'diverse' country on earth. Chile is on the path to electing a Pinochet praising hard right Catholic with 9 children. Too many liberals think non-white = liberal.

[quote] R178 Latinos are diverse, they also are not as wedded to party politics as blacks or whites are, thus they have more swing voters per capita.

[quote] I have yet to see this supposed bottomless well of empathy that black Americans have for people other than themselves.

[quote] Voting patterns are not static and democrats are going to get slaughtered in the midterms.

[quote] R189 your posts are 95% strawmanning.

[quote] The sort of bellicose fact-lite people like R182 is why latinos and asians are not going to be shoe in democrat voters. The democrats leaning into this this aggressive black activist jargon is a mistake.

[quote] Trump was an ineffective president and his politics were more in line with '70s trashy NYC conservatives like Roy Cohn. Trump = Hitler nonsense has gotten out of hand. You can hate Trump but realize he's not Hitler. If you want to see what real fascists are like look at Bonsolero and Orban.

Leftist rag of a newspaper. White people have the highest IQ, creative and innovative. They have brains and brawn. The stupid leftist Marxist newspaper is writing all sorts of hit pieces to further their stupid woke agenda. And I am not even white but I hate NYTimes/WaPo and the anti-white liberal media. Americans should just stop reading these newspapers and put them out of business. They are waging a race war and it is not a good thing.

R42 And people also have a right to comment on the fact that the policies private universities employ to the benefit of white people attract much less comment and condemnation than the policies they apply to people of color.

[quote]Merit is not defined by grades and test scores. Admissions goal is to build a community. Harvard beat Yale in The Game this weekend. Rah!

The very definition of the rot at the core of the elite American education system.

Ivy League or no-leage, in the end most graduates will be working jobs they secretly hate, so they can impress people they don’t like. And two minutes after your retirement, everyone will have forgotten about you.

[quote]White people have the highest IQ, creative and innovative.

Oh, dear.

[Quote] Private institutions should be able to admit anyone for anyone reason they want. And also reject anyone for any reason they want. No one has a right to go to a private university.

The vast majority of such “private” institutions gets millions in government funding

R55 Race differences in intelligence are generally consistent with differences in the historical record of creative achievement in the arts and sciences. The North East Asians (classical Mongoloids) and the European Caucasoids have the highest intelligence and the greatest creative achievements, while other races have lower IQs and lesser creative achievements. There is however an anomaly: North East Asians have a higher IQ than Europeans, but their creative achievements have been less.

With which they produce research that benefits the whole of society, r56.

R57 please keep your Bell Curve bullshit to yourself

Achievement in the last correlates to latitude. Places with similar climate could import developments in agriculture and domesticated animals from neighboring civilizations. Once there is surplus food, arts and sciences are possible.

[quote] Race differences in intelligence are generally consistent with differences in the historical record of creative achievement in the arts and sciences.

Bull shit. When standardized by how the tests are designed, given, and proctored, there is no differences in intelligence.

What a coincidence, that whenever whites come up with some theory, they always place themselves at or near the top

If whites were the smartest, Asians would be dominating all the California colleges, which cannot take race into consideration when granting acceptances.

R27 Hi YMF!!

R16, R5 here. Weld freshman year (where my dad and grand dad lived, they do that with legacies lol) , Eliot House (also a family tradition), but I was too cool for Harvard and transferred to Berkeley (best years of my life!).

And to those of you who think the non whites and non Asians who are admitted to my alma mater have lower scores: WRONG.

There is a small pool of Black high school students that get perfect SAT scores are near, get top grades, top AP scores, etc. There are a few hundred of them and they are offered full scholarships to all the Ivies. Those are the caliber of non white students I met when I was at Harvard.

The Ivies actively compete for this small pool of ultra high performing students.

R51 White people are not superior to anyone. You’re just a white supremacist. It doesn’t matter if you’re not white, you were told to believe white people are better than everybody which is false.

R61 Always.

Acting like whites are superior. They’ve clearly never been in a Wal Mart and seen what the majority of white Americans really look like.

They judge white people from a very small pool of white people. They ignore the idea that rednecks and hillbillies probably make up the majority of white people in the US.

It’s a dysmorphia.

I suspect that a huge chunk of Ivy League admissions are legacies. Years ago, the Daily beast gave John Mccains spawn Megan a regular column after she graduated from Columbia. I read it a few times out of curiosity and it didn't read like anything a Columbia journalism major would write. I'm not talking simply about the content. There are a few conservative writers out there who have loathsome beliefs but are able to eloquently explain them. Her stuff read like something a 14 year old would write for political science class.

[quote] Private institutions should be able to admit anyone for anyone reason they want. And also reject anyone for any reason they want. No one has a right to go to a private university.

Should they be allowed to reject gay people for their sexuality? Or is it already actually illegal to discriminate based on this?

[quote] White people have the highest IQ, creative and innovative.

No, they do not. Asians top whites. That’s simply a fact.

If Asians get the top scores, let them fill up the colleges. Maybe lazy whites will get their shit together.

R68 you don't know what "legacy" means. John McCain did not attend Columbia or any Ivy.

You mean VIP spawn admissions? Different category entirely.

Thank you R72

And top colleges are not filled up with the idiot spawn of celebrities, alumni and top donors.

There is one Jared Kushner per class, maybe two out of around 2K

R72 That was what I meant. Whatever. The point still remains that a rich brat got into a top university for no other reason than her fathers name.

R72 well, I was in billion dollar development campaigns for a decade, though a few decades ago, and top colleges then each had more than "a couple" spawns of the global elite. Doesn't mean the kids are idiots, but they are not 1% in talent and intellect. Yes in cachet, connections, wealth. This applies to Ivies, Oxbridge, University College London, etc and also to ambitious and pretentious 2nd tiers.

Cool story R75!

R74 yes, likely. I was pointing out the subtle differences in these categories. Spawn doesn't even need to be donor prospecting for endowment. The spawn can have all kinds of value to a particular institution. Harvard took Jazz Jennings for the woke buzz. FAIL as an admit by the way.

Go back to stormfront R57, there is only ONE human RACE.

Another Princeton grad and veteran interviewer of applicants here, and what YMF says is true. The top schools could fill their classes with highly qualified, brilliant students five times over, and which applicants they choose in a given year is a crap shoot for the individual applicant, since the schools are always trying to curate a class, and much depends on how the class is shaping up. They need a mix of big donors, athletes, artsy types, minorities, scientists, someone who's going to take an anthropology class so they don't have to shut down that department...and they're always looking for the people who are going to break out and reflect glory on the university (with little notable succes at that last effort, fwiw).

I would add that OP's article is sensationalist trash for singling out "white students". If you base your definition of merit on grades and test scores, white students are actually at the greatest disadvantage in Ivy League admissions after Asian students. Blacks, Latinos and other minorities (Native American, Pacific Islander...) are routinely admitted with significantly lower test scores. So are students of all races who apply from academic deserts like Alabama, and those who are socioeconomically underprivileged (or successfully pretend to be). Top schools want to diversify their student bodies and shed their reputations for elitism, and they're desperately seeking "underrepresented" applicants.

For example, 22% of Princeton's admits this year were first-generation college students, and 68% of U.S. citizens or permanent residents in the admitted group self-identified as people of color, including biracial and multiracial students. So in a country that's demographically still 60% Non-Latino white, that actually indicates significant discrimination against white students (as well as those from middle-class and highly educated families) in the admission process.

That said, athletes in elitist sports like lacrosse still get an admission bonus, simply because the schools have to field a team and therefore need players, whether or not they have perfect SAT scores.

More information about Princeton's admission policies at the link.

R79 you’re not taking any socio-economic factors into account though, and acting like every student has equal access to a good education in the first place. Pretending like your average minority student and your average white student get to 18years old on an equal playing field is naive / disingenuous. Let alone the ability of different types of students to be able to even afford to attend university in the first place.

There was a study done back in 2013 surveying the admitted students of the top 30 universities.

On average, legacy admitted students have higher SAT scores non-legacy admitted students. Of course, that can certainly vary from school to school.

As some posters posted above, don’t confuse “legacy” with “legacy with money.”

R65, that doesn’t surprise me. The Yoruba people of West Africa have a mathematics tradition that goes back centuries. It’s not just about tradition, though. I’ve seen news articles about children of poor Chinese immigrants whose parents were factory workers who went on to do very well in schools in the U.S., partly because of a culture already existing in the U.S. Asian communities where education is strongly encouraged. And there are also news articles periodically about black students who were homeless and from poor families who went on to become successful after focusing on education. All the stuff about cultural heritage makes me think, the Romans were considered barbarians by the Greeks. And then they conquered the Greeks and appropriated x, y, z. And the Britons were considered barbarians by the Romans at the time that Rome conquered what would one day be England. And the Picts who fought naked in blue paint were considered barbarians in King Arthur’s time. All of them “white” and for most of history, the vast majority of the population unable to read or write. Genius Leonardo Da Vinci was born to a lower class mother and a notary, not to a wealthy family known for contributions to science…

R1 believes 0% of blacks would get into Harvard on merit. This was typed on Datalounge in 2021. And people still want to pretend we live in a post racial society.

Also there is a supply of minority students for the Ivy League who were ALREADY financial aid attendees at the elite boarding schools.

Did black students get into Harvard and other Ivy leagues even before affirmative action became a concept? Yes they did. So r1's O% is demonstrably false. Black students even got into universities that used to be openly racist.

I believe college in general let alone prestigious ones, are becoming redundant in this age. Hearing someone went to Harvard no longer gets you the same leg up it used to. It's going to matter less and less.

People don't realize that while there are high achieving people of all ethnicities, there are only a few thousand spots at Ivy League schools, so even amongst the "top performing" blacks and whites Asians are even more "top" performing.

Perfect GPA, and perfect SAT scores aren't a ceiling. It's not as though people who max out these traditional measures of intelligence, which are really just fuzzy proxies for IQ evaluations, stagnate once they reach this level. For instance take two hypothetical people: both 1800 SAT ,+4.0 GPA. one Asian male and the other white and female. The former developed his own linux distribution and mastered calculus in middle school (this is more more common than people think). The latter is very accomplished but not "genius" smart.

If anything the problem with the SAT and why it is a poor measure of academic success is that it's too easy.

[quote] Hearing someone went to Harvard no longer gets you the same leg up it used to.

Sort of, R86, but not for the reason you think.

The issue is that as Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford are now creating these curated classes as per R79, and more and more kids are applying to top colleges, a bunch of other schools have also become included in the "top" list, beyond the Ivies. More than these but figure Duke, Georgetown, Vanderbilt, Northwestern, Wash U, Hopkins , U Chicago, plus a bunch on small schools like Williams, Pomona and Amherst.

Or to quote a family friend who is in the thick of this now (referring to kids from Manhattan private schools) - "The only kids who get into Harvard, Yale and Princeton now are freaks, athletes or kids whose parents wrote seven-figure checks. All the kids who used to go to those schools now go to Columbia, Penn and Cornell. All those kids now go to Duke and Georgetown...and those kids go to Vanderbilt and Wash U"

So a much bigger pool of "top schools" and thus Harvard seems less special.

R1, Know of several Black students from poor backgrounds that won full scholarships into top East Coast private schools based on their athletic performance and academic potential while still very young. Yes their usually single mothers pushed them to succeed.

All went on to Ivy League Universities including Harvard. All said that it was the hours of study hall with dedicated instructors that allowed them to excel on the entrance requirements. All got multiple job offers upon graduation.

“Curating” the class is not a new phenomenon.

R90 "athletic performance" speaks volumes.

The problem with the SAT is that it can be taught.

SAT tutoring is a multimillion dollar business aimed squarely at the upper middle class and the good ones really can boost scores significantly.

This is not an option for those outside the upper middle classes, whose parents don't have a spare $5K to prep them for the SAT, and then another $5-10K for a private college counselor who will work with them on shaping their resume starting freshman year of high school. (What courses to take, what extracurriculars they need, etc.)

R93 low income Asians who can't afford fancy SAT prep classes still score exceptionally well on the SAT.

R93, because of this, the University of California system have stopped requiring SAT scores. It's going to take 5 years to determine what to replace them with. The rest of the country will follow,

There is no relationship between how well someone does on the SATs and how they do in college--so what's the point?

[quote] low income Asians who can't afford fancy SAT prep classes still score exceptionally well on the SAT.

Not true at all. Low income Asians don't do well.

I lived in a six person suite my freshman year at Harvard (Weld, the Kennedy dorm in the yard). They curated our suite as follows:

Two old money prepsters (me and another whose father was in the same class as my dad at Harvard) - the other was from old money with no money, spoke both ancient and modern Greek.

Two Jews (both became doctors, as did I)

Two Asians (back in the 80s when they were still a minority)

R96 Poorer Vietnamese, Thai, and Laoians don't but Chinese Americans absolutely do. On a related note Stuyvesant, the top public school in the New York state is 73% Asian and 53% low income.

SMH - Read R79 for what "curation" looks like in 2021, not 40 years ago

And as for low-income Asians, they do have a whole system of SAT tutoring that does not involve private tutors but still involves lots of studying for a test to improve scores--a test that is supposedly designed so that studying will have no effect on the score.

[quote] Poorer Vietnamese, Thai, and Laoians don't but Chinese Americans absolutely do

Which ones "Love you long time"?

I saw a news story on the BBC a couple of years ago about Asian (in Asia) school system churning kids who score highly in test results but suck at innovation.

[quote] I saw a news story on the BBC a couple of years ago about Asian (in Asia) school system churning kids who score highly in test results but suck at innovation.

But, let me guess, British students are the cream of the crop!!

[quote] I saw a news story on the BBC a couple of years ago about Asian (in Asia) school system churning kids who score highly in test results but suck at innovation.

The difference is not lack of innovation. In the west, there's a ton of money floating around to support innovation if you have a great idea. In most developing countries, people still have great ideas--they just don't have the money to operationalize the idea.

Not surprising in the least.

"The SAT is not a good measure of intelligence/academic performance"

But high school GPA is?

R105, so using two unreliable measurements of achievement may not be the best way forward...

[quote]43% of White Harvard students not admitted on merit

OP, so what? That leaves the 40% of "diversity free-ride" students and the remaining 17% of Middle Eastern and Asian full-pay students whose parents keep Harvard afloat.

Hello. Harvard is kept afloat by its $53.2 billion endowment.

GPA raises another issue, which is why colleges like the SATs.

The Harvard admissions office is very familiar with the grading system at Dalton, Harvard-Westlake. Scarsdale, New Trier, Choate et al and have relationships with their guidance offices and so they understand what a 4.3 GPA at one of those schools really means, right down to "getting an A from Dr. Jones in AP Bio is very impressive as she old gives out three or four As a year:"

The problem is when they have an applicant from East Central Flyoverstan Regional High School and have zero idea what those grades mean and how easy it was to attain them and thus rely on the SAT as a back-up stat.

R106 They are still more reliable than student essays or any other shitty holistic measures. IQ is still the best predictor of adult success, but the curious rampant IQ denialism in higher ed means IQ tests are verboten.

[Quote] IQ is still the best predictor of adult success,

Link please

[Quote] thus rely on the SAT as a back-up stat.

Yes, the point of a national test was to rank everyone with a standard test—but the wealthy have learned to hack it. This, it’s worthless now

I went to an Ivy and what struck me was that each student had accomplished some pretty mind boggling by the time he/she got there. Examples include a friend who had written an opera that was performed by a company. Another had published several scientific papers. Another was a regional figure skating champion. And on and on and on.

I guess these accomplishments supersede grades

R112 If "wealthy" people have hacked the SAT, then how do poor Chinese students do so well on the SATs?

R113. But 95 percent of them end up doing boring things in life like aim the rest of us.

Sorry—R97 knew someone who could speak Ancient Greek? How? Why? Did his dorm LARP ‘The Secret History’? Please explain and expand.

Usually when someone knows ancient Greek or Latin they're 1) inbred English aristocrats 2) very traditional Catholics 3) Mormon

Mormons know ancient languages? I know they often know modern ones from their missions.

Omit reference to the unspeakable vice of the Greeks!

[quote] Yes, the point of a national test was to rank everyone with a standard test—but the wealthy have learned to hack it. This, it’s worthless now

LOL. You really do need to spell everything out for DLers

The point is not that they use the SAT to compare the working class Flyoverstani kid to some kid from Palo Alto, it's that they have a Flyoverstani kid who has a 4.5 GPA and is Valedictorian of Corn County Regional High School West, which they have never heard of before, and he looks impressive, but then they look at his SATs.

If he had a high score (perhaps not as high at the kid from Palo Alto whose parents hired a private tutor, but high enough) then they figure he's pretty bright and the grades were not just because everyone else was an idiot and/or grade inflation.

But if he's got a 900 on the SAT, then they're going to get suspicious that the coursework was too easy, that the grading too loose, etc. If they;re conscientious, they will talk to the school, maybe there was a reason his SATs were so low (e.g., death in the family that month)

But otherwise it's a pretty good secondary data set for the admissions team.

As for the fate of Harvard (and other Ivy) grads, Tom Wolfe summed it up well in "A Man In Full"

To paraphrase, Harvard grads easily land jobs at large prestigious companies--banks, management consultancies, etc., where they make a very good salary for a 22 year old.

They're smart and competent enough so they do okay, but many of them never rise beyond middle management because the skills that help you get into Harvard are different than the skills that equate to success in the business world.

And by the time they realize they're in a dead end job, it's too late to really switch and so they remain there.

They're making enough money to remain part of the upper middle class, but they're never going to be fabulously wealthy and have to always worry about those middle management layoff when they are in their 50s and opportunities are limited.

We know Jared Kushner got into Harvard not based on his low school grades but on his father's donation of $2.5 million.

The real problem is the drummed up prestige of eight universities over all others.

The last time an Ivy was founded was 150 years ago in 1865.

The US population has grown to 8.6 times what it was then, so there should be 70 universities considered to be of that calibre today.

Of course, then they might not seem so special...

Nobody said social and economic stratification was fair, hunties. A couple thousand kids get into ivies each year. A couple hundred kids are legitimately so gorgeous they can start on professional modeling careers that aren't based on delusions, plastic surgery, or famous parents. A couple thousand 17 yo boys each year realize they have grown gorgeous 9 or 10 inch cocks. 100 kids a year become world class running prospects. 5000 are gifted footballers. There are 2775 billionaires in the world. They probably produce 6000 kids in their lifetimes.

[quote]If Harvard admitted students based on merit alone, it would be 80% Asian,15% White, 5% Hispanic and 0% Black.

80% Asian, 20% White

[quote]Some of the biggest idiots I've known have multiple Ivy degrees.

Same. Thread closed!

[quote]I believe college in general let alone prestigious ones, are becoming redundant in this age. Hearing someone went to Harvard no longer gets you the same leg up it used to. It's going to matter less and less.

Absolutely, this has become very prevalent in the digital age. People have been exposed to a wider world, and Ivy League graduates can often be just as dumb as everybody else. The prestige of the Ivy League has really been tarnished.

[Quote] Some of the biggest idiots I've known have multiple Ivy degrees.

I always hear that sort of whining from people who couldn’t ever get into an Ivy League school

r128 if you have any real world experience, it's true.

YourMillennialFriend isn't exactly a great advertisement for a Princeton education.

Have you not read any of the other posts R123

TL;DR: What you are hoping for has already happened and there are a another dozen or two universities that are now included in the pool of "top colleges" as defined by "where top companies like McKinsey and Goldman recruit"

Ted Cruz graduated cum laude from Princeton.

Come on, IQ hereditarian denalists, even self-avowed socialist and Marxist Fredrik DeBoer acknowledges that IQ and how well people perform on standardized tests is largely genetic and that liberals are delusional if they think they can equalize the distribution of academic talent and skills.

R132, I assure you, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Ron DeSantis—All graduates of top colleges, aren’t stupid.

They know their base very well and are expertly able to morph into whatever their base wants. It’s a mistake to think they’re somehow idiots. They are actually extraordinarily clever.

R133, No one can completely equalize it but you don’t leave a certain group as slaves in society either. You try to equalize things like childcare and education and see who rises to the top.

There are entire populations we write off just because of their skin color or social class. Give everyone a chance and see whose brains can help society

Let stop pretending that other colleges names have truly risen to be as coveted as the ivys. Only Stanford really has. Sure an Ivy degree is no guarantee of anything (just as having a college degree in general isn’t) but it’s a great screener to find smart, capable employees.

[Quote] Hearing someone went to Harvard no longer gets you the same leg up it used to.

It still gives you a leg up. If you’re hiring and your final two candidates went to Harvard and Univ of Podunk, even subconsciously you would prefer the Harvard guy, if all other things are equal. Having Ivy leaguers at your company gives it prestige and attracts others

R5 here - Harvard legacy that transferred to Berkeley.

Berkeley has won more Nobel prizes than the entire former Soviet Union. Stanford pales in comparison with the achievement of Berkeley.

Ah the Harvard mystique:

of my 5 roommates freshman year at Weld:

2 doctors, ordinary, one did a little bit of research, but no Nobel there

1 corporate attorney, wealthy

1 tenured professor at CUNY, RateMyProfessor scores are poor (married to my sister's husband's freshman roommate, yes six degrees of separation)

1 head of a department at Hunter College

My sister met her husband at Harvard. She does estate planning part time and he is a tenured professor at DePaul in Chicago.

All quite ordinary achievements for those in our level of privilege.

Didn’t one of those Harry Potter kids get an honorary free ride to Harvard? Says it all.

R138, you seem rather needy.

R140, No.

The one who played Hermione went to Princeton or Brown, I believe, Don’t know if it was a “free ride”-whatever that means—but I think she only attended for a year

R139, actually the fact that they all have great careers speaks to Harvard helping them fulfill their promise

Two docs, two lawyers, one professor is pretty amazing.

No one guarantees a Nobel prize after a Harvard degree but we know most be will strong contributors to society.

George W Bush, Jared Kushner, Donald Trump: these are the consequences of white legacy and white financial influence on institutions of higher learning. That should be enough to disgust anyone.

134. On the other hand Hawley does use the word “irregardless”.

R145, likely a choice because he knows his base uses it. Everything Hawley does has been calculated

Hmm. The speech was otherwise full of fancy words and legal reasoning.

Don't spend too much money on your bachelor's. As long as you get one, the name doesn't matter much.

Stop all immigration from Asia for the next 10 years. Let disadvantaged people catch up. Then resume restricted immigration. If Democrats are serious about racial inequality and eliminating poverty they will do that. But they are not.

R145 I love ‘irregardless’.

R148 I have a BA in dramatic art from a middling-calibre and eccentric/‘hippie’ but still respectable British university, preceded by seven years at a grammar school. At this juncture, I wonder whether to bother continuing further through higher education; I’m naturally scholarly, but being currently in my late 20s without a career and floundering somewhat in this uncertain age I’m not sure how I can support myself. I know every intern and high-school leaver these days has an MA in business or whatever from a second-string Uni nowadays, so is there anything one can do to rise above this mob? Shall I go for a PhD, or just not bother and ship myself to Dubai instead?

^^^forgot to add that I was due to study a Masters in Literature & Classics rather than Drama, but a massive emotional breakdown prevented this. How I even managed to complete a Bachelor’s in such a simple subject while being so poorly, I still don’t know. I’m recovered now, but it’s taken three years out of school and working in coffee-shops etc. to get there. Now I miss learning and stretching my mind among other young people, but not the restrictions of the scholastic environment. What to do?

I think it’s fine to have a classical education and major in English or Anthropology or whatever, but I think you should have some backup technical training. If not programming, welding or furniture repair or wedding photography—something that you are good at. It can’t hurt to have a few skills if the the economy is hard and you can’t get a job.

Not only did Emma Watson go to Brown, she graduated! As did I and anyone can tell you it's not difficult to graduate from an Ivy. They have VERY HIGH graduation rates. Its one thing their admissions offices do well - admit students who they guess can succeed at THAT school and graduate. For all the complaints about losers or rich spawn getting in, they all manage to graduate. Brown of course is the gut Ivy.

I have no idea who the girl in r154's pic is nor do I care.

R151, if you think you might have anxiety or emotional issues in the workplace, working from home might be a good option. As long as you can do the job well, you wouldn't have to worry about whether being seen upset or emotional would affect your success on the job. And you'd still have contact with other people, whether virtually, or going into the office as needed, or even in theatre shows after work, which you might be able to fit in if you don't have to factor in a commute time from your job. You could start with general office admin work, which any college degree would make you overqualified for, but which often gets advertised as "college preferred". Once that gets you in the door, you can get promoted within the company. Look for companies where people have been there for 5, 10 or more years. That might serve you better than an advanced degree - I think there are a lot of PhDs who never become tenured professors - too few jobs in the field and too many people competing for them. And adjunct professorships can be very low-paying.

[Quote] Stop all immigration from Asia for the next 10 years. Let disadvantaged people catch up. Then resume restricted immigration. If Democrats are serious about racial inequality and eliminating poverty they will do that. But they are not.

Huh? Immigrants are a tiny percentage in the US (about 10 million legal immigrants and 10 million illegal ones—we’re talking about 1.5% of the population). Restricting immigration will have little to no effect on racial equity and eliminating poverty.

R157 Not sure of your statistics but I stand by my statement. Democrats and white liberals don't care about uplifting minorities. They care about virtue signaling rather than taking concrete action. Democrats and Republicans are also beholden to political pressure groups. They need to pass a law suspending all immigration from Asia for the next 30 years .

[quote] They need to pass a law suspending all immigration from Asia for the next 30 years .

Yes, the Bottom Protection Act.

I read about that, the goal is to protect American bottoms from being shut out by submissive Asian immigrant bottoms

As if the average to low IQ members of the underclass (not the entire unclass - just the stupid ones) are going to miraculously uplift themselves to skilled occupations and living wages if the "immigrants" are gone.

[Quote] They need to pass a law suspending all immigration from Asia for the next 30 years

We tried that already: the Chinese Exclusion Act. Didn’t work out so well

[Quote] They need to pass a law suspending all immigration from Asia for the next 30 years

I’m baffled how this will “uplift” minorities exactly.

R157 here— just correcting my stats— there are 40 million legal immigrants and 10 million illegal ones— 50 million altogether (15% of the population).

R149’s statement about allowing disadvantage people to catch up still makes no sense. Don’t you realize that their disadvantages occurred because society has made the choice to disadvantage them by keeping them poor, jailing them, not offering opportunities?

[Quote] As if the average to low IQ members of the underclass (not the entire unclass - just the stupid ones) are going to miraculously uplift themselves to skilled occupations and living wages if the "immigrants" are gone.

To become a legal immigrant in the US, you usually have to be skilled and educated (not all but most). They don’t do the shit jobs most of the underclass does. It’s not like the underclass is suddenly going to become IT professionals if the Asians were blocked. In fact a main reason why we need the Asians is the Americans are general terrible in a tech and science

Maybe R164

There's another theory that says it's because companies can pay them 25% less than they'd pay an American engineer and because many of them are initially here on things like H1 visas, they're less likely to complain about working conditions and very unlikely to switch to another job.

As both Indian and Chinese immigrants move into the upper middle classes, forming sizable minorities in many upper middle class suburbs (especially the ones noted for their top school districts) and even the old WASP prep schools see an influx of Asians, I do wonder if the white upper middle class will revolt if they feel that the Asian's offspring are taking jobs and opportunities away from their offspring.

Have you met the high school graduates entering universities now?

If schools had to rely on merit for any group the places would be ghost towns.

R1 I don't think the number for black students would be absolutely zero.

But that also goes to show how absolutely abysmal public schools are in this country in 2021. Most of the high performing academic students either have private schooling K-12 or seek additional education elsewhere.

I went to an Ivy League school... Current working as a federal employee making about $130k a year. A high school colleague of mine went to Virginia Tech, currently working for the consulting company Accenture as a Senior Manager. According to Glassdoor, Senior Managers at Accenture make $200k+, and get various bonuses based on performance.

So who ended up better off? The Ivy League graduate or the non-Ivy graduate?

Whatever Ivy League school you allegedly went to R168 did not teach you the foolishness of drawing inferences from a single anecdotal input.

You chose a different line of work than your friend, one that is lower paying.

Depending on where in the US you live, R130K is not nothing, especially for a single person with no dependents,

And Virginia Tech is a good school, especially for STEM.

It's not like your friend went to SUNY-Potsdam or Loudon County Community College

I know several people who went to state colleges and they're now making bank in the financial services industry in NYC.

Let;s nip this in the bud.

Not going to an Ivy League school does not sentence you a life of penury. There are many more very wealthy people without Ivy League degrees than there are with them.

If you look at the list of Fortune 500 CEOs, the vast majority did not attend an Ivy League college and many of them went to small local colleges you've never heard of.

At best, an Ivy degree makes it slightly easier to land your first job, depending on what field you want to go into.

It may also impress some clients even 30 years after you graduate. (Most won't care where you went to school.)

So yes, it is likely that you know a college drop-out or graduate of the sort of state college the writers on series like "White Lotus" use as shorthand for "no-name state school" who has become very successful. We all do.

Study STEM anywhere and you will make a good living. If you study Arts and other leisure-time hobby education then Ivy league will give you a leg up. Or Law perhaps. Of the STEM colleges, MIT/Stanford is good but many other universities are just as good as well.

R157, since we’re in a global economy and we all compete with each other, working conditions here won’t improve unless they also improve internationally. China can’t keep ignoring its own labor laws and let its employees get literally worked to death. It’s a right-wing authoritarian government that makes gay rights activists and women who report sexual assault “disappear”; it’s also been a plutocracy that ignored its own labor laws - so much for “workers of the world unite”. But the people that live there do some incredible things to survive- like the guy who was in the news for making medicine for his toddler in his own apartment because he’s forbidden to travel outside of China due to COVID restrictions. I think limiting immigration from there is the wrong idea - the more we limit immigration the less people there have a way out, a way to hear other news. Just human rights need to matter more. Companies don’t need to push so hard, here or abroad.