Early action application numbers for Ivies and MIT…
Most show a big spike when going TO beginning with Class of 2025, but Harvard’s spike was largest. The latest 17% drop in Harvard applications could just be a continuation of the pullback from the initial 2025 spike (as the “market” adjusts to the likelihood of success for TO applicants), plus fallout from the SCOTUS decision.
Harvard’s numbers are still significantly higher than pre-2025, like many others. Also, if the events of this fall have had an impact on Harvard’s numbers, it seems Columbia would have also seen a drop since that has been a hot spot of activity, but they didn’t see such a drop.
I don’t think that the SC ruling was it, but until/unless the schools release racial breakdown of applicants, we will never know.
However, I am 100% sure that all highly selective colleges know what race their applicants are, and are looking for information in the way that the SC said was acceptable, stating that a school may consider “an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.” Some colleges went so far as to mandate a specific essay response to exactly the quoted phrase from the ruling. So while it’s possible that borderline applicants who felt that they had only a Hail Mary chance, because of race, decided not to apply, that would have been the case across the board for the highly selective schools. I suspect that most qualified URM applicants were not deterred. We know that the schools continued, and even ramped up, their outreach to potential URM candidates.
I also don’t think that many applicants are aware of certain ongoing problems at Harvard which may not be the case at other highly selective schools, namely, bad food, mostly bad freshman housing in the Yard, minimal and last-minute (but mandatory) academic advising that impedes the registration process, an often cliquish atmosphere of wealthy and exclusive prep school grads feeding into the influential finals clubs system, and probably more that I’m unaware of. What everyone who reads the news was aware of was that a consortium of 33 clubs in a coordinated effort immediately blamed the victims of a massacre. That may have been it.
I would not have sent my child to Columbia or Berkeley in the late '60s, even though Kent State was where students were killed, and exams were delayed by civil unrest at many colleges. Columbia and Berkeley were in the news, the ones that people were most aware of. Most parents who are paying for college want their child to go to a functioning university, not one riven by disruptive demonstrations. While there were most certainly demonstrations at other universities, in fact, at many, Harvard’s hit the news in a worse way, because of that statement by the clubs consortium, and Harvard’s much-delayed and totally inadequate response. Unless my child had had an extremely compelling reason to go there, I would have told them to take Harvard off their list, had they been applying this year.
Schools are still required to report race in ipeds and common data set. They do have this info from the applications (and schools suppress that info when reading apps).
Yes, does anyone want their child in an environment where Antisemitism is rampant? Seriously. There’s a reason some campuses are highly explosive while others aren’t. Antisemitism is just a symptom of an underlying problem, it isn’t the whole problem.
Colleges need to foster a variety of opinions. There’s been a toxic cancel culture in these schools, which ultimately promotes conformity to one set of ideas. Students are either in or they are out. There’s no middle ground when so much learning happens through the lens of oppressors v oppressed. Everyone wants to cheer for the underdog, right? So, that puts the “in” people always on the side of who wants to paint themselves as oppressed. Add to the mix that students aren’t hearing from a liberal to conservative spectrum, one has to wonder if the schools aren’t brainwash factories.
My kid is a college sophomore in a school renown to be liberal. The campus has been calm but somehow my kid came across some disturbing “anti-Zionist” material targeting Jewish students, in an attempt to turn them against Israel.
So, all is not well, Even on the quieter campuses.
Pay attention to courses offered. Many classes use the binary argument of oppressed v oppressor as the lens to how they are taught. Look through course descriptions and you will see this—oh, and colonization is a word covered in courses that use a simple minded binary oppressed v oppressor argument. My kid took a class in Emerging Third World Nations where the entire course was on Africa and the bad guys were Western Countries (No mention of the Eastern slave trade with the Ottomans). Once you see how prevalent this lens is, in a course catalog, you will understand why so many people, with no ties to Palestine attacked American Jewish college students.
I don’t think these degrees, ones based on this simpleminded oppressed v oppressor arguments,. are going to be worth much in down the road. These kids are going to have to deprogram themselves.
How is it that UCLA still employs this man at all, let alone as a law professor? It’s not only a question of antisemitism on campus, it’s a question of perfidy.
Yes, that is his specialty. IME all law professors, regardless of speciality, must teach at least some sections of one of the requirements ( torts, contracts, criminal, etc etc) since there are many and all students have to enroll. He isnt teaching just one elective of Sharia law, of that I am certain.
Human rights law probably has large enrollment there. It is an expansive field; is there any evidence he isnt teaching that accurately?
He is the Omar and Azmeralda Alfi Distinguished Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law where he teaches International Human Rights ; Islamic Jurisprudence ; Political Asylum and Refugee Law ; The Trafficking of Human Beings : Law and Policy ; Political Crimes and Legal Systems ; and Muslims, Race and Law .
That was not the case at my law school. Many more professors only taught the upper level classes. A chosen few guided the first years through their foundational classes.
I used to believe that professors could separate their personal feelings from their professional teaching. Liz Warren was one of my law professors way back when. She was nothing like the crazy liberal she is now. I doubt she would teach a current class the way she did 30 years ago.
If he is competently teaching HR, refugee law or human trafficking, that seems sufficient to retain employment. The Islamic oriented courses seem pretty niche to me for a major law school, but UCLA law has a lot of niche electives-they offer courses on suing the police; black reparations; the resurgence of psychedelics; and Silicon Valley law.
My very liberal DD just took a class with one of the most well known conservative legal scholars in the country. She loved the class, said he was an amazing lecturer, and said you would never ever guess what his personal political leanings are.
