[ketchupdebugger]

just like how a public company have share holders, an institution like Harvard have donors. They have to listen or else their source would dry up.

[dgacmu]

I can't speak for Harvard, but I can address my own university: The pressure to resume using test scores came from the faculty, because we observed that there were an unusually high number of students admitted who were failing the math (and math-y) courses. We want people to succeed in our classes, not enter and fail out. No donors involved.

It doesn't seem like a bad experiment to have tried, but the results were negative and bad for the students, so time to back it out.

[ghaff]

Beyond some basic literacy, you really need some filter on math. I tutored in an MBA program which, I assure you, was not at all math-intensive. There was some subset of students who were just clueless about basic high school math. (Read any of the first year MBA memoirs and this is sort of a theme.)

Even many of those who were not clueless definitely leaned on those of us who had worked as engineers to take the lead on the math stuff in group projects.

[mathgradthrow]

Public institutions get paid the full amount by everyone who receives a degree. Failing out is a discount that the school administrators don't want to offer.

For instance we're instructed by admin to never encourage students to pursue mathematics. They "must" be funneled through an academic advisor, who can establish whether or not this is worth the financial risk of them potentially failing. This is regularly presented as "improving equity".

[b112]

You're lucky.

Some schools continue the "social justice" movement further, ensuring that those you cited don't fail.

[fullshark]

I'm pretty sure Harvard's endowment will thrive even if the donors go to zero. Harvard is more interested in prestige and public perception. That is their currency.

[vondur]

I see that Harvard's endowment is currently around 50 billion dollars. I suppose with good investments that could last for a long time, provided that Harvard doesn't need to dip into it to fund daily operations. Harvard's annual budget currently is around 5 billion per year.

[brodouevencode]

Yes, and I would lump public (and even some private) companies into the pile. When all this went down it was certainly groundbreaking (at least to me) because in my previous 40 years on this earth I had never seen anything like it. There's a whole new dynamic now of seemingly wanting to "be on the right side of history" which has somehow translated to doing whatever is socially popular.