Because they want something that provides a subjective element for making decisions.

Admissions is high-stakes for everyone, including Harvard. Having some opaque, non-mechanical criteria lets them pick and choose without giving as much of a lever to lawyers.

But why they need it?

Theoretically - so they can decide between two students that both had 4.0 GPAs, perfect SAT scores, and were class presidents, etc.

Cynically - it gives them cover to manage to "other goals" and chalking it up to a subjective measure that can't be proved/disproved

The best way I've been able to find to think about this is the fundamental axiom of geopolitics, which is basically tribalism defined mathematically. People want to work with and help others who are closer to them, who they feel are neighbors, brothers. This gets more and more true the more money and resources you have.

While you and I are more tribally identified with Asian Americans, America's upper crust considers them a threat. An elite university is a gateway into the upper crust, so it makes tribal sense for them to limit their access on grounds that to everyone else looks blatantly racist but doesn't really feel that way to them.

If I had to wager a guess, I imagine that the upper crust justifies this morally by saying that without Harvard and other elite schools, no Asians would get to climb that ladder. And also to note that not even the paragons of democracy, the Greeks, were immune to tribal identification and social stratification and racist policies to enforce them. Sparta was especially egregious in this regard.

From Harvard's perspective, in order to maintain their prestigious reputation, they have to cater to the tribal whims of the upper class, even if they don't want to. Otherwise Harvard, well, wouldn't be Harvard anymore, the prestige will move on to other universities that are willing to play ball. Remember, it's not us that determines Harvard's prestige status, it's the elites. Expect Harvard to dream up an endless array of subjective metrics that pay lip service to inclusivity while in practice serving exclusive goals.

I believe that if we succeed in forcing an inclusivity agenda onto the Ivy League, then it'll just cause the elites to make even more ultra-exclusive educational institutions and send their kids there, revoking not just Harvard's, but the whole Ivy Leagues' cool card. While this will democratize Harvard, it will ultimately increase stratification and inequality.

Tragedy of the commons writ large.

If Harvard admission criteria leave out the best applicants to other colleges, and they go on to create powerful companies like Google in large number, will Harvard’s prestige decrease despite continued support from the elites?

Doing well in tech entrepreneurship needs brilliance more than great personality and political connections (they should be above a level but you don’t need a very high level of them).

Politics is still the surest route to power but billionaires are also powerful and have longer influence. If next generation moguls are educated elsewhere, the colleges with more merit based criteria should emerge as more elite.

People that can become successful despite the school they go to are classic social climbers and obviously the school they go to would benefit from having those social climbers go there. But the relative benefit to the organization of one successful alum is miniscule compared to the benefit that the school has on every single matriculant.

A university's entire goal is to empower anyone to succeed. That's the whole reason they exist. If Harvard's reputation as a gateway to elite society is lost, society doesn't gain another one elsewhere. It's just lost. People that could succeed without college will still succeed. It's all those people that couldn't have succeeded without college, that went to college and gained the benefit of having an education there, that will lose that opportunity.

Imagine a world in which Harvard is only slightly better than Georgia State. That's what's at stake here.

People forget that Harvard may be their first choice, but their safety schools will be Stanford and so on.

These candidates who don’t get into Harvard but were contenders are not hurting for overall choice.

I agree with you, but this is not a tragedy of the commons.

> The tragedy of the commons is a term used in social science to describe a situation in a shared-resource system where individual users acting independently according to their own self-interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling that resource through their collective action.

The Ivy League is a resource shared by both the commons and the elites. The belief stated at the end of my comment, that collective action taken to make Harvard more inclusive will inevitably strip it and all the other Ivy League schools of its vitality, will spoil that resource, forcing the elites to stop sending their kids there and snuffing the Ivy League's social ladder aspect out of existence.

That's a classic case of a tragedy of the commons. It's both a tragedy, in that nobody wanted that outcome, and it's driven by the collective action of the commons.

Huh, it's an interesting idea, that Ivy League is a public resource. I don't agree with that, because they're private institutions. I can see where you're coming from, though, and I'd say that's a super-populist way of thinking about them (and please note that I didn't say anything else about populism). But even in the case that the Ivy League universities were a public resource, it certainly is not "writ large" that this is a tragedy of the commons.

You seem to have knowledge and an understanding of the concept that I don't. I'd love to hear your articulation.

It's right there in my last post. Ivy League universities are not a public resource. Also, a tragedy of the commons is a tragedy of the commons, and you are being really disingenuous trying to compare control on the inputs of an Ivy League university with eating a species into extinction.

They don't have to be public, they have to be shared.

I thought you had some interesting economic point to make about these kinds of situations. So instead let me make one of my own. Economics isn't physics, it's broadly applicable to any kind of situation you think to apply it to. Any time you have a situation where you'd want to say, "this is why we can't have nice things," you're looking at a tragedy of the commons.

Many organizations create processes that are essentially random number generators. It allows bureaucrats to insert their personal preferences under a veneer of technocracy. Hang out at a corporate budget allocation meeting sometime.

I wonder if the processes are created for that purpose, or if that is just how they end up getting used.

Usually an accident, or unconscious. In this case, I suspect intentional.

It's pretty common for someone with good intentions to institute a policy for deciding what they thought was previously disorganized and substandard. Instead, all they've done is create a way for powerful people to hide their choices behind the "objective" policy. The trick is that the folks in power control the inputs, even if they don't control the algorithm. As a management consultant, the client boss didn't tell me what to say, but they decided who I could talk to. Note the current trend in machine learning.

Imagine if Harvard had fed its past admissions into an artificial neural network! Maybe they could have hid behind that back box.

I suspect all of the above

Because every applicant has the best grades and extracurriculars in the world, the only thing left to use for admissions is “How pleasant of a person is this student to be around?”

That is an acceptable answer, even if not a self-consistent one. Truly pleasant people would not have problems with the less socially adept ones.

That's how you maintain a certain reputation, create a harmonious atmosphere where nobody who would rock the boat gets in.

Seems to me they're doing it to achieve the opposite effect (Asians are stereotypically the most docile).

Because future leaders aren't the ones with the best academic test scores.

In light of how academic testing is done, that might not be a bad thing on its own.

And who are?

Someone with personality: "the guy you'd want to have a beer with"

Underrated comment of the century.

It's a cliche.

Yes, but its exceptionalism is its aptitude!