[oaktowner]

> If you remove the people born into privilege, from attending your college, all you succeed is in making your college irrelevant,

I don't think that the Cal Grants program was ever designed to remove those people from the program. It was designed to make sure they didn't get an advantage. In other words, it was prevent universities from letting people who otherwise would not have made the grade in just because their parents made the grade.

Giving alumni's children an advantage isn't giving an advantage to "the smartest, most charismatic, most talented people" -- it's giving an advantage to the luckiest (the ones who happened to be born into it).

And the phrase "it would be ideal if those born into privilege could also clear the SAT" is such a strange one. OF COURSE rich people can "clear the SAT;" in fact, they get the advantage of MUCH better preparation, etc. So this is absolutely about giving an advantage to kids who could not qualify on their own.

To be clear: I don't think Stanford is doing this to keep poor people out (their scholarships have always been very generous). But I do think the administration probably done some basic calculation: they get more in donations from alumni who want legacy admissions for their progeny than they get from Cal Grants.

And Stanford has decided that accepting some kids who just don't make the grade is worth that economic advantage.

[bombcar]

The whole point of the OP is that if you have merit-based students AND the landed gentry, the landed gentry get at least 4 years of interaction with smart but poor(er) backgrounded people.

Without it, you end up with some entirely merit-based schools and some true Ivory Towers and the Twain rarely meet.

[michaelt]

The problem, in my mind, is the interaction of legacy admissions with other forms of background-based admission.

Once I'm overlooking poor test scores for the 'landed gentry' background, I've got little defence when people demand I overlook poor test scores for other backgrounds too.

Before I know it, a trivial amount of arguably-unfair-ness that was flying under the radar becomes a non-trivial amount, and now everyone's mad at me.

[yalok]

> the administration probably done some basic calculation: they get more in donations from alumni who want legacy admissions for their progeny than they get from Cal Grants.

The calculation was beyond basic - I read somewhere here that it was around $3m that they were getting from Cal Grants.

Around 8 years ago, I heard (from a friend of mine) that the min donation to guarantee admission to Stanford was ~$10m. Wouldn’t be surprised that it’s even a higher number nowadays…

[_alternator_]

The crazy thing is that they refused CalGrants not because it forces them to end legacy and donor admissions, but because they’d have to publish data about such admissions.

So the calculation was that a report showing how much unfairness there is in the admissions process will hurt the Stanford ‘brand’ by more that $3M per year. Ouch.

[gpt5]

Applicants who get admitted due to a (very) large donation are a tiny pool, and unrelated to the legacy admission question.

Their benefit is also much clearer, the $10M donation you mentioned can clearly and directly help a lot of students.

[rowanG077]

I don't think SAT tests for talent and charisma. It does test for smart for some definition of smart.

[ghaff]

Top schools in the US, of any variant, mostly don't really want good SATs as a sole measure. They may be an important factor. But admissions are far more multi-faceted--however imperfect. And however unsatisfying that may be to some people with top SAT scores.

[hn_throwaway_99]

Ok, fine, then can we stop pretending in the bullshit of the meritocracy then, and that everyone who graduated from these elite schools is so deserving?

At least the British aristocracy had the concept of noblesse oblige, while the US aristocracy loves to lecture the poors on how they should be pulling themselves up by their bootstraps (and it always bothers me that that analogy was invented to point out the impossibility of actually pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, but somehow came to mean the opposite).

[Henchman21]

IMO the "bootstraps" thing was always an insulting joke. Something the wealthy would say to knowingly insult the poor. Go do the impossible you stupid poor person while they laugh so hard their monocles fall into their brandy. Its like spitting on someone just cause you can. Yes, this is an absurd characterization, an almost cartoonish villain trope. It's a silly world!

But something happened: people who didn't understand it was meant to indicate somthing impossible started using it like it was some moralizing good. And here we are, saying dumb shit on the internets.

[ljsprague]

>it's giving an advantage to the luckiest (the ones who happened to be born into it).

Are people born smart not also "lucky"?

[bytehowl]

"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." -Stephen Jay Gould

[OccamsMirror]

Not always: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/poverty-shrinks-b...

[late2part]

you're missing his point. Cal Grants removes an advantage that actually functions in the real world.

[AlexandrB]

You could make the same argument for why any kind of prejudice should be allowed since, for example, racism provides an advantage that functions in the real world. This seems like a bad defence for legacy admissions.

[overfeed]

Where's the special admission program for lottery-winners, con-artists and pickpockets? Those also function in "the real world" - so why not at Stanford?