This is a very good summary of my own thoughts regarding the Supreme Court ruling.
The American obsession with race in this specific case translates into focusing on a more superficial problem and polarizing the debate, as opposed to finding an easier solution to the bigger problem of ALDC admissions (namely: ban them), which I assume would be less controversial.
They should just increase the price of admission for non merit based spots. but the universities want to take the money as a “donation” instead of cost of goods, so the parents can save on taxes as well and donate twice as much. maybe tuition should be tax deductible for everyone instead.
Demand for exclusive institutions by the elite won't go away if you ban legacy admissions. Expect some new unaccredited institution to open up, and that's where they'll attend.
Do I have a right to say "Only my friends can join my debate club"? Do I have a right to say "Children of past participants are always welcome here"? Do I have a right to say "Max occupancy: 1800"?
Most people would say "Yes" to these things.
What if I hire some marketing experts, and eventually my debate club has a really good "brand" and all sorts of companies want to hire participants at enormous salaries for highly influential positions? Once my debate club is a gateway to money, power and influence, do I still have the right to admit who I want? Or does my branding success somehow create an obligation to make admissions meritocratic, rather than some other kind of -cratic (e.g. autocratic, "My debate club, I decide, and that's the end of it," or aristocratic, "Children of members have an easy path to membership", or plutocratic, "Money talks")?
At what point does Harvard become different from my debate club?
What exactly creates a moral (and perhaps legal) obligation that trumps "My debate club, my rules," and necessarily places corresponding limits on Harvard's freedom of association?
I don’t know exactly where the line is, but it’s actually not so important. Arguments like these miss the more important point. There absolutely is a line somewhere. Why? Because SCALE MATTERS. Always. This is something that is largely missed in most legislation and regulation. It’s so obvious and self evident why a trillion dollar company should have higher regulations that a billion dollar one which should have higher regulation that a million dollar one. Where is the line? I don’t care that much, just make one and address the larger problem.
Freedom of association is extremely limited once you factor in public accommodations. For example, even if I own a hotel, I can’t choose who can stay in the hotel if they are willing to pay in a lot of cases.
Once it becomes a critical part of our social structure. That will always be a judgment call, but Harvard qualifies as that more than any nongovernmental entity today.
I find the article hard to respond to, because I don't think it has a coherent point, but I'll comment on some of its apparent assumptions.
One is that all students go there for a quality education. Since the early 19th century if not the very beginnings, faculty have had to acknowledge that a primary function of these institutions is to serve as a holding place for the (often not very bright) children of the rich until they are old enough to get married and do other grown-up things.
Another is that the quality of instruction there is atypically high. Lend an ear to complaints about Ivy League grade inflation and you will realize this is bollocks. While Ivy League graduates do tend to have higher career trajectories, this is attributed to admissions being selective for highly driven people, and for networking opportunities with similar others.
Finally, he assumes the benefits of Ivy League education could be scaled up. For example, suppose Harvard College increased undergrad enrollment from 7K to 40K. What would happen to the networking effect?
Maybe I have a slanted view of some outlier assholes with "The Right"(tm) pedigree, but I came to a conclusion reluctantly that they believed the world owed because they were special and deserving. This included making a killing on services delivered by outsourced foreign workers and restructuring local commodity markets in Africa to enrich themselves first while ignoring externalities such as lower profits for farmers and the preferences of buyers and sellers to make the trade platform useful to them.
i don’t get why the chief beneficiary of AA is elite whites as quoted by the article conclusion? are they referring to the legacy and the donors? how is that AA?
It wasn't worded in the clearest way but I believe the author is talking about AA in the context of Ivy leagues specifically, and that AA at those institutions has done nothing to offset the % of (mostly white) elites who gain access through athletics/legacy admissions, etc. How this benefits those same elites is that by having universities push AA as a part of their public image (i.e., we're doing our part in fixing the damage done by our slave-owning founder) it draws attention away from the privileged forms of admission that actually impact who attends Ivy Leagues. Basically AA at those schools is a smokescreen that does very little while allowing those schools to pretend like they're helping fight for anti-racism, social equity, and so on.
> "The genuinely radical Ivy League option — spending their vast endowments to sharply increase student numbers — is unlikely to be entertained."
This is often said but doesn't seem to be realistic if one digs into the numbers.
Endowments aren't one big slush fund that the university can use however they want; they are a collection of individual donations, many of which can only be used in accordance with the donor's wishes. These are called restricted endowments.
Harvard is cited as having the largest total endowment and their latest financial report (https://finance.harvard.edu/files/fad/files/fy22_harvard_fin...) on page 12 shows that 70% of their total endowment are restricted endowments with 20% of the total already composed of restricted endowments that are specifically for financial aid. In theory, the 30% of the total endowment that is unrestricted could be redirected to financial aid, increasing the amount of financial aid by 1.5x from endowment revenue only (the overall increase would be much less than 1.5x since financial aid comes from other sources as well) but it's unclear what other impact that would have on university operations.
tl;dr 1) universities are already using some of their endowments to help students, 2) there are legal limitations on how much more of their endowments they can use to help students even if practical considerations are ignored, 3) if they did so, it wouldn't be enough to "sharply" increase student numbers, and 4) people should really dig into things instead of repeating hot takes from internet pundits at face value.
70% of 53 billion is restricted, but presumably they still make significant money from interest/investment on that money. And IDK, but I assume it's all tax-free too, since the alumni probably wrote a big chunk of the tax code. Are these profits considered part of the endowment too and with similar restrictions? If unrestricted, is the available student aid commensurate with that, or does it disappear into operations and/or dean salary?
I am paywalled from the article, so maybe I’m misunderstanding the quote you pulled due to lack of context, but you also can’t just double the acceptance rate over night. Even if you could admit more students and cover their tuition, you run into a number of issues, e.g.:
1) Students have to live somewhere. More students living off campus will drive up apartment rent in the area. You can build dorms to increase the housing supply for students and reduce the demand for off campus apartments, but that requires large building projects.
2) Similarly, increasing the student population means more class rooms, teaching labs, and possibly larger lecture halls for the most popular classes (e.g., calculus courses taken by every STEM student). That means more building projects.
3) You need to hire more faculty. While you might be able to get away with adjuncts or postdocs teaching a few things, people that want to go to these schools want to have the opportunity to interact and learn from the top experts in their field, i.e. faculty professors. Expanding the faculty is not an easy thing to do overnight. Even if the will is there to grow, departments are highly selective when it comes to hiring. The person you are hiring is joining the university potentially for life. Moreover, if you choose wrong and deny them tenure, the result blows back on the department. Hot tenure track candidates get many offers, and they don’t want to risk moving somewhere and building a lab for 5-7 years only to be denied tenure and having to move their life elsewhere (they’ve already done that quite a bit throughout their student and postdoc days). Moreover, those candidates need to be courted with resources like spaces for their research lab, so, again, more construction is needed.
4) Where do you build all these buildings? Many of the Ivies are located in major cities (e.g., Boston, New York, Philadelphia). There isn’t a lot of open space to build big new buildings. Moreover, while they often own buildings adjacent to campus and lease them to businesses and tenants, decimating a city block to displace these people in favor of building more lectures or residential halls is a bad look politically and a hard sell to local governments. These schools already draw complaints from the locals about their expansion gentrifying areas and driving locals out through the resulting rise in rents and taxes. Even suburban Princeton has been rapidly consuming their green spaces lately to build new facilities. An option might be to start opening separate campuses, but that’s unappealing to their prospective students.
HN seems to be chock full of people who have vendettas against so called "elite" schools probably because they didn't get in. Which is weird since there also is large number of people who were self taught and didn't even go to school and are very successful. These schools are private businesses, forget private universities being some about some bastion of knowledge and discovery of truth, their primary concern is funding ongoing operations. There are plenty of schools that can provide a similar education if that is what you are going for.
The article was not written by "HN." The author, Edward Luce, is an Oxford University graduate whose father holds the title of a baron in the UK, was at some point the Governor of Gibraltar, and then a member of the British parliament for 20 years. Do you think what he wrote stems from an anti-elite agenda? Or could it perhaps simply be good journalism, even if it means upsetting the powers that be?
I can't speak for the collective "HN" but the interest in this topic might have something to do with the fact that a lot of people here believe anything but meritocracy is suboptimal and ultimately self-defeating in the longer run.
I decided to share this also because, no matter the topic, it's been a while since I've read anything so succinctly put, and getting to the gist of the matter, gloves off.
mochomocha|2 years ago
The American obsession with race in this specific case translates into focusing on a more superficial problem and polarizing the debate, as opposed to finding an easier solution to the bigger problem of ALDC admissions (namely: ban them), which I assume would be less controversial.
naveen99|2 years ago
88913527|2 years ago
4cao|2 years ago
willcipriano|2 years ago
csense|2 years ago
Do I have a right to say "Only my friends can join my debate club"? Do I have a right to say "Children of past participants are always welcome here"? Do I have a right to say "Max occupancy: 1800"?
Most people would say "Yes" to these things.
What if I hire some marketing experts, and eventually my debate club has a really good "brand" and all sorts of companies want to hire participants at enormous salaries for highly influential positions? Once my debate club is a gateway to money, power and influence, do I still have the right to admit who I want? Or does my branding success somehow create an obligation to make admissions meritocratic, rather than some other kind of -cratic (e.g. autocratic, "My debate club, I decide, and that's the end of it," or aristocratic, "Children of members have an easy path to membership", or plutocratic, "Money talks")?
At what point does Harvard become different from my debate club?
What exactly creates a moral (and perhaps legal) obligation that trumps "My debate club, my rules," and necessarily places corresponding limits on Harvard's freedom of association?
fakedang|2 years ago
When your debate club begins taking in federal funding, then you can compare it to Harvard.
zenapollo|2 years ago
confuseddesi|2 years ago
scarmig|2 years ago
Georgelemental|2 years ago
wrp|2 years ago
One is that all students go there for a quality education. Since the early 19th century if not the very beginnings, faculty have had to acknowledge that a primary function of these institutions is to serve as a holding place for the (often not very bright) children of the rich until they are old enough to get married and do other grown-up things.
Another is that the quality of instruction there is atypically high. Lend an ear to complaints about Ivy League grade inflation and you will realize this is bollocks. While Ivy League graduates do tend to have higher career trajectories, this is attributed to admissions being selective for highly driven people, and for networking opportunities with similar others.
Finally, he assumes the benefits of Ivy League education could be scaled up. For example, suppose Harvard College increased undergrad enrollment from 7K to 40K. What would happen to the networking effect?
1letterunixname|2 years ago
dustingetz|2 years ago
SpaceBuddha|2 years ago
quantified|2 years ago
ThrowawayR2|2 years ago
This is often said but doesn't seem to be realistic if one digs into the numbers.
Endowments aren't one big slush fund that the university can use however they want; they are a collection of individual donations, many of which can only be used in accordance with the donor's wishes. These are called restricted endowments. Harvard is cited as having the largest total endowment and their latest financial report (https://finance.harvard.edu/files/fad/files/fy22_harvard_fin...) on page 12 shows that 70% of their total endowment are restricted endowments with 20% of the total already composed of restricted endowments that are specifically for financial aid. In theory, the 30% of the total endowment that is unrestricted could be redirected to financial aid, increasing the amount of financial aid by 1.5x from endowment revenue only (the overall increase would be much less than 1.5x since financial aid comes from other sources as well) but it's unclear what other impact that would have on university operations.
tl;dr 1) universities are already using some of their endowments to help students, 2) there are legal limitations on how much more of their endowments they can use to help students even if practical considerations are ignored, 3) if they did so, it wouldn't be enough to "sharply" increase student numbers, and 4) people should really dig into things instead of repeating hot takes from internet pundits at face value.
photonthug|2 years ago
tnecniv|2 years ago
1) Students have to live somewhere. More students living off campus will drive up apartment rent in the area. You can build dorms to increase the housing supply for students and reduce the demand for off campus apartments, but that requires large building projects.
2) Similarly, increasing the student population means more class rooms, teaching labs, and possibly larger lecture halls for the most popular classes (e.g., calculus courses taken by every STEM student). That means more building projects.
3) You need to hire more faculty. While you might be able to get away with adjuncts or postdocs teaching a few things, people that want to go to these schools want to have the opportunity to interact and learn from the top experts in their field, i.e. faculty professors. Expanding the faculty is not an easy thing to do overnight. Even if the will is there to grow, departments are highly selective when it comes to hiring. The person you are hiring is joining the university potentially for life. Moreover, if you choose wrong and deny them tenure, the result blows back on the department. Hot tenure track candidates get many offers, and they don’t want to risk moving somewhere and building a lab for 5-7 years only to be denied tenure and having to move their life elsewhere (they’ve already done that quite a bit throughout their student and postdoc days). Moreover, those candidates need to be courted with resources like spaces for their research lab, so, again, more construction is needed.
4) Where do you build all these buildings? Many of the Ivies are located in major cities (e.g., Boston, New York, Philadelphia). There isn’t a lot of open space to build big new buildings. Moreover, while they often own buildings adjacent to campus and lease them to businesses and tenants, decimating a city block to displace these people in favor of building more lectures or residential halls is a bad look politically and a hard sell to local governments. These schools already draw complaints from the locals about their expansion gentrifying areas and driving locals out through the resulting rise in rents and taxes. Even suburban Princeton has been rapidly consuming their green spaces lately to build new facilities. An option might be to start opening separate campuses, but that’s unappealing to their prospective students.
desireco42|2 years ago
4cao|2 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36603895
It's a soft paywall anyway, there are multiple other ways to access the content.
disgruntledphd2|2 years ago
bfeynman|2 years ago
4cao|2 years ago
I can't speak for the collective "HN" but the interest in this topic might have something to do with the fact that a lot of people here believe anything but meritocracy is suboptimal and ultimately self-defeating in the longer run.
I decided to share this also because, no matter the topic, it's been a while since I've read anything so succinctly put, and getting to the gist of the matter, gloves off.