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.
(E.g. "everyone knows" is an invalid argument for court if someone brings up discrimination; "they admitted it in a public statement" is a totally valid argument.)
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.)
This is laughable. There are many, many people who have worked at admissions at elite schools, and they will tell you the contents of the "black box". What they would say goes something like this:
1. There are 10-30% of the entering class that we know we want.
2. The rest we have to fill with essentially clones (smart but unexceptional students).
3. We choose the clones that we think will make our school a better place in the short term and long term. Due to the multitude of variables that are introduced in selecting from the clones, it looks like our decisions are capricious. Maybe they are for the clones, but the clones aren't where we are looking to find our big winners in the admissions process.
Read some of the stuff by Cal Newport. He's closer to the right track than anything else I've seen.
What people want to know is, how does the school "know" they want the initial 10 percent?
How does the school "know" what clones (drones) they want?
Etc, etc, etc.
1. Sniff test: You read something in their application and say to yourself “damn, that’s really cool”.
2. More robust test: They have worked on a hard problem and have done something interesting with it. This could be research, starting a business, starting a non-profit, something substantive in their community, something creative (usually externally validated like being a top performer), etc. Again, check out Cal Newport’s stuff. He says very specifically that it’s not a formula, because it’s not (I suppose it is at one level of abstraction, but...).
For the rest of the class, there are a ton of variables that are usually out of the control of the applicant (one variable being who is on the admissions committee that year). Again, a quick heuristic is to ask what the applicant is giving the university. If the answer is not fairly compelling, then their chances of getting in decrease dramatically.
If you’re looking for specifics, these are harder to find, and generally vary from year to year depending on the applicant pool. A few random ideas:
- Kushner’s dad pledged $2.5 million over 10 years. It’s probably more than that now.
- PA residents get preferential admissions treatment for Penn. They need something else going for them if their grades and scores are subpar.
- Each elite boarding school gets a range of spots any given year.
- Academically strong athletes are strong, esp. if they are great athletes by Ivy standards.
- Academically weak athletes better be damn good and better have at least one more desired trait. Some of these folks do 13th grade at an elite boarding school to prep them for elite universities in a number of ways.
- Being a legacy doesn’t get you nearly as far as people think it does. The number of legacy rejects typically far outweighs the number of legacy accepts. Again, that applicant better have another desired trait or two.
- Having social capital and being able to demonstrate that goes a long way. What is “social capital”? Well, an applicant might say something like “I want to study economics at $SCHOOL because I want to understand better the fundamentals that my father, the finance minister of $COUNTRY, regularly discusses with me about his job and how that impacts my country and the counties around it.” The size of $COUNTRY can vary wildly, but these folks are unassumingly at elite schools.
Does that better answer your question?
This is actually good, as it severely restricts the number of avenues available to prospective students, (and their parents), to game the system. And you better believe that students, and especially their parents, will try to game the system at a minimum. Again, many go beyond that with out and out attempts at fraud and cheating.
> do the extras that YOU think are important. (Which as it turns out, is what they really want to determine.)
it never did top begin with, but that's beside the point, it's all about branding.
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.
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.
- 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.