You ought not to think of it as a rigerous academic forging fire for the meritocratically selected brightest minds, but rather as a finishing school for America's elite.
So long as they keep producing presidents, diplomats, CEOs, senators, and so forth, they will continue to have a great reputation.
You don’t need to be a good school to have notable alumni. They aren’t “producing” anything. Ive league schools use the same curriculums as the unknown university I went to, and from the lectures I’ve seen, the teaching isn’t any better either.
They just reject anybody who isn’t a well-connected, hard-working high performer, so it makes it look like they are producing notable alumni. Good material in -> good material out.
And, yeah, you can discriminate pretty heavily and still be selective within the remaining groups you aren’t discriminating against. It’s not strictly either-or.
And, who knows, maybe they knowingly discriminate against lower/middle class people and against asians because they perceive those groups will struggle more after graduation due to their disadvantages (targets of racism / lack of connections / lack of money) and will not make the school look as good?
Having a brilliant son who would have previously been discriminated against by Harvard’s admission process, I’m happy to see explicit race components removed. However, should he choose to apply and go (mostly to be connected to opportunities he otherwise wouldn’t have), if he leaves with a degree and nothing more, what good is it? The one Harvard professional peer I had came from the middle class, ended up at the same FAANG as me (who is just about as unconnected as one could be), and burned out in the process. Sample size of one, but it wasn’t an inspiring story.
It's not up to you. It's far easier to be admitted into Harvard than to have your opinion on Harvard admissions be something that Harvard should be concerned about. Part of the definition of "exclusive and prestigious" is that elites get to decide what it is.
The reason Harvard is a top institution is because it is an elite institution. It is not because of its quality of instruction or thought, which are just fancy decorations.
Places I think of as “new generation” prestigious universities include: Berkeley, UT-Austin, Georgia Tech, MIT, CMU, UIUC, Caltech, U. Michigan, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, UW-Madison, UCSD, etc. (Most of those places existed 100 years ago, but weren’t considered top-tier like they are now.) One thing that’s notable is that a number of these are public flagship institutions.
Everyone claims to be meritocratic, until the elite people who were actually really good are all competing with each other. At that point it’s almost better to not compete and make up this aura of superiority to maintain everyone’s positions. Why argue when you can get all these mid level decent people on board furthering your missions?
Even if legacy admissions were removed most people aren’t getting into Harvard. It will always be __intended__ for people who actually understand how to think and deduce shit. Admit a few legacy people and get more money for the endowment or some influence here and there.
Most people in the world just want to be told what to do. They freeze when the task is open ended and requires innovation. Very few people take genuine initiative to do anything novel. Fostering an elite atmosphere where the top people can further the mission while allowing arbitrary numbers of decent but not quite elite folks to come in secures that position. They put the rest to work.
I am probably wrong. But that’s how I’ve seen it play out irl.
STEM types absolutely dont wanna go to harvard for example - why try to push there and deal with bs of racial discrimination? if you can get better engineering education at CMU/MIT/Caltech, heck even Ohio State has pretty decent engineering progam
For STEM students it was just never as good a choice as schools with more developed eng schools.
False, because Students for Fair Admissions (the org who sued Harvard for racial discrimination) - are young people and they have millions of supporters around the world
> Harvard could afford to provide nearly full scholarships for every student with 1% of the annual return on its $50.9 billion endowment. Many other elite colleges could easily afford it too. They don’t, because they want to maintain an aura of exclusivity.
To me it would be more exclusive and prestigious if they gave everyone a free ride but it was entirely on merit. Like much of Europe, and how the UK used to be (tuition in the UK is still more reasonable than Harvard though).