Does India have something like SAT as well?
This seems just as unhelpful for deciding who to hire or who to allow onto a higher course of study as the campaigns we have seen on some USA university campuses to give all students an automatic A grade.
Note that the system also has many holes, so the categorization isn't perfect. Its possible for a large number of students to belong to the categories only on paper. So you don't even get equity in the end.
Unless you have some specific knowledge that the child insisted on their parents taking the action, it’s not really fair to blame the child. A lot of children don’t have much choice in the matter at that age.
They would consider it smart to game the system.
Only way I can explain this attitude is to compare it tax loopholes in the west. It is very hard for many Americans to see loopholes in tax codes as unethical. Like using mega-backdoor-ira loophole to bypass income limits for contributing to IRA. (Personally, I am not saying that tax loopholes are ethical or unethical, just something that can be seen both ways.)
And unlike EU, this benefits corporates/capitalism as they can cut through the red tape easily by "gaming" things.
That's why you have to look at total wealth, not just income... though I'm sure the ultra wealthy will find some way to work around that as well.
If it's a small handful of people, there's probably better things for them to spend time on, rather than trying to make an unbeatable system.
Okay, well this is the US.
Your tax returns are a very good indication of how much money you make.
If you lie on your tax returns then you have much bigger issues than college admissions counselors.
When I applied for grad school many admission documents explicitly asked about this, even outside the realm of financial assistance.
Moreover I'd expect that any given user w/10mm would be rolling into multiple accounts to maximize protection offered by FDIC.
If you own a large amount of equities you can get a secured loan on those holdings and use it to pay your bills while taking zero salary. This allows folks to live fancy lifestyles without selling holdings and triggering capital gains:
* https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/13/portfolio-loans-can-be-one-w...
The loan is not counted as income.
At most US elite schools, less than 20 percent is for “non-reserved” seats. Elite schools reserve seats for sports teams (affirmative action for rich white elites with “sports” like fencing and rowing), legacies (affirmative action for rich white elites), related to professors and school administrators (affirmative action for rich white elites), those who write essays on poverty tourism and their work experience in the NGO/white savior/charity scams (rich white elites), and then regular affirmative action (capped at 20%].
So it is a brilliant way to use regular affirmative action for Blacks as a weapon to ensure that rich white elites always win and do not compete with the “deplorable” poorer whites, the Asians and immigrants.
I just realized that there are more Appalachians in America than Asian Americans. But how many people have you run into in an elite school with an Appalachian accent? (Or a southern or mid-atlantic, or other lower-tier white accent?)
Maybe the redneck culture of poor Appalachian people is less sticky than the redneck culture of many poor Blacks in the US. My personal anecdotes support that, but then selection bias means they necessarily must.
When I run into guys at work with heavy Appalachian accents, they tend to be heavy machinery mechanics. That's also where I find Black guys who cling to a large amount of Black redneck culture. And those two groups together comprise the supermajority of heavy machinery mechanics at work, come to think of it.
Source: I spent my entire childhood on counties adjacent to what is considered 'Appalachia', and I went to a higher-end college with a significant affirmative action focus on geographic distribution around the US.
Even the SAT score can be gamed.[3] I think pretty much every admissions advantage that exists is found and exploited. These schools are no longer about providing an elite education to talented students who want to get ahead. They are credential factories and students who go these schools have parents that push them from young ages to get in because they want the status credential. I have all sorts of stories about how fake a lot of students CVs are. Fake non profits, doing math competitions despite not liking math, getting into obscure sports, etc. It's absolutely not just white people who do this.
I am not advocating for dropping test scores. I just want to point out how aggressively people pursue getting admitted to elite schools and the specter of cheating hangs over it all too. I have friends who did tutoring in other countries who talk about paid SAT test takers.
[1]: https://gocrimson.com/sports/mens-fencing/roster
[2]: https://goprincetontigers.com/sports/mens-squash/roster?path...
[3]: https://qz.com/980074/the-sat-can-be-hacked-and-gamed-with-t...
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2021/9/8/2025-freshman-su...
I don't know if whites are generally the beneficiary of student athletic admissions policies at all elite schools although it is complicated because of things like decades old sports from before diversity was a concern and team size. I don't see Harvard cutting long successful teams just to appease non white people but then again they probably would. Also things like the men's football team have a very large roster of 100+ people.
[1]: https://stanforddaily.com/2020/09/27/varsity-cuts-challengin...
This is the arbitrage opportunity for lower-ability legacy students. If the schools provided elite educations, they would chew up and spit out lazy rich kids (and probably generate parental acrimony toward the schools in the process, weakening the donor connections.) As affirmative action of all shapes and sizes creates an ever-expanding group of people most likely to fail who the school is particularly determined to not flunk, there is more safe space for deadweight rich kids (which, for the record, I suspect is an overplayed trope relative to actual prevalance, though probably not hard to find at top-ranked schools.)
Is that generally true or is that a stereotype?
Legacy students also had a higher average SAT score than non-legacy students, at 1523 for legacy students and 1491 for non-legacy students.[1]
[1]: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2021/9/8/2025-freshman-su...
Now, a few guesses: first, to the extent that affirmative action is even partially successful in targeting disadvantaged groups, affirmative action students should be less likely to be legacy, meaning that applications of legacy students should at least reflect a numerical superiority consistent with the strength of the affirmative action bias. Second, I will say that from personal experience I valued, more highly than was deserved, the schools that my parents attended; in this way those schools were the beneficiaries of highly effective advertising, through my parents, that made me more focused on those particular schools than they deserved (so much so that two of the three were two of the four schools I intended to apply to.) The aggregate outcome of that effect across all legacy applicants should be a higher-than-usual applicant quality in the pool of legacy students.
Would the legacies tend to have much higher income, or is any old person who's a child of an alumnus considered a legacy?
My friend who's ultra rich was selected in EWS Quota. His father who runs his own company took Zero pay for the last two years so he qualified for the benefits. Meanwhile people who actually deserved this had to compete for the non reserved seats.
The point is you can't just give preference based on income as its incredibly easy to fudge.