SES demographics on these forums skew strongly upward, appearing to be heavily the upper edge of the middle class to lower edge of the upper class (e.g. the many forum posters complaining about getting no financial aid at any college, resenting others who do get financial aid, complaining about taxes and high costs of living due to apparent spending double to triple the median income in their region).
Many who believe in democracy and meritocracy believe in it only when they are among the participants or winners, but try to exclude others or do not object to excluding others from participating or competing on a fair basis…
With respect to who can participate or compete on a fair basis in democracy, see the history of voting rights in the US (summary at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_rights_in_the_United_States ) as well as gerrymandering. Other countries or subnational entities can also provide examples.
Merit is about the holistic criteria. How they choose to shape the final class is another construct, doesn’t change the basic definition of merit, as the individual colleges see it. It’s not “merit” to be rich or poor.
We will not take your posts as gospel either.
These colleges themselves claim that being poor is a “merit” and even came up with the “Adversity Index” to quantify this merit.
Unfortunately this index seems to be poorly designed to capture the very important information going in other direction, I am sure CC community can help expand this index with additional questions to make it even more usable for colleges, for example
Where are your relatives on Forbes list?
Are/were any of your parents or grandparents members of congress? Did they chair any committees? Are they on Supreme Court? Mayor of a major US City?
Do they work for NYT, WaPo or WSJ? Do they host any popular TV program?
How many houses on lake Tahoe does your family have? Any apartments on Champ Elysee?
Etc.
In my view admissions to elite universities is not fair because the standards are not uniform. Being a child of a high ranking politician is a rather substantial hook. Being an athlete or a URM is a hook as well. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a more substantial hook in that I think the politicians would have the ear of the people who can influence decisions within the university. The athlete or URM would need to get the attention of the people who make the admission decisions. Their status on the application is what would get them noticed. A higher bar to scale.
I’ve never been one whose desire it was to be influential (beyond my own family) so I guess I really don’t care. The number of congressmen, senators, judges and Presidents who will have children entering college in any given year won’t be substantial and I’m sure there is a hierarchy even among them.
The number is more than you might think. Include governors, mayors of major cities, present and former prominent cabinet members, well known political candidates, and of course the grandchildren as well as the children of all of the above.
@roycroftmom , If you look through a class at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, or wherever, you will find a handful of students with backgrounds like you describe, not a significant number. And lots of them are students with actual qualifications we would all accept as “merit.”
Case in point, only as an illustration: One of my roommates at Yale was the son of the mayor of a small city in northwestern Connecticut, a connection that admissions would clearly pay attention to (just as Harvard admissions would notice the child of the mayor of Lowell or Gloucester). He was later Editor in Chief of the Columbia Law Review, a Supreme Court clerk, and a very high-level Justice Department official, positions for which there are no “hooks” unrelated to ability and performance. Do you count him as an illegitimate admit, or as someone who happened to have a hook but would have been admitted in any rational process?
Re Harvard’s “featherweight” legacy preference: The real relevant comparison is not to the average non-legacy applicant, but to the average applicant from families as sophisticated and affluent as the families of Harvard alumni. I haven’t gone over all of the lawsuit discovery data like some of the posters here. For years various people confirmed that Harvard tracked its acceptance rate for Yale and Princeton legacies (who received no preferential consideration in the admissions process) as a sort of control group for measuring the effect of its preferential consideration of Harvard legacies. The difference in admission rate was very small, and not necessarily significant. There was clearly some sort of embedded preference for the children of affluent, educationally sophisticated families, but Harvard legacy status was indeed a featherweight beyond that.
@JHS your experience clearly differs from mine. Check this years admit stats from the top 5 private schools in Washington if you would like confirmation of the importance of political kid status. You are quite unique in thinking legacy is a “featherweight”, which even the Ivies themselves would not claim.
The difficulty is in separating what is an unfair advantage be it legacy or child of prominent parents from the kid’s own achievements. Kids that get into a top prep school have a better shot at a super elite college because they have already been found to have the ability to achieve at a high level. It is unfair to assume that all kids of politicians are only capable of achieving the infamous “gentleman’s C” and are not in and of themselves high achievers. Genetics being a strong factor, it seems likely that high achieving, smart politicians (or CEOs or graduates of super elite colleges) will have a higher percentage of kids with those same traits. Unless you actually see the kid’s application, there is no way to know if they are being given an unfair advantage. Of course they have lots of privilege in the form of great schools, tutors if needed, opportunities to pursue ECs at high levels regardless of cost, etc. to craft a great application. That is obviously a huge advantage. But the student still has to participate in the activities, take the tests (and hopefully write their own papers).
Admission to a top prep school in Washington does rely upon the same political factors that help in college admission-children of prominent political figures are admitted to benefit the school. Some are qualified, some are not. Even Gore’s son has agreed his very mediocre prep school grades and high school legal troubles weren’t factors in his admission to Harvard.
The issue is that these elite prep schools do have high standards for admissions for MANY students but I am sure the location in relation to DC as well as the influence of politicians impact the enrollment in those prep schools. These prep schools are not only bringing in the best students on merit. The best and brightest get the seats left over after the well connected and DC influencers have their kids in seats. I know my state senator has a child at an Ivy and find it hard to believe that she is there just on merit alone. He also has a rising senior this year who is perfectly average (and a nice kid) and it will be interesting to see where he attends. I imagine it will not be Penn State or Pitt. The perks of power, purse, and prestige has few limits.
Of course these schools are crafting classes that meet their needs and this is beyond the scope of the basic populace. People say over and over that acceptance is not luck, it is merit and also a result of knowing what these schools need and filling that need. Not sure what special institutional need average or average excellent children of politicians fills for the schools. It just continues the status quo of powerful people holding their power.
@roycroftmom , if you look at the admissions statistics for the top 5 private schools in any large city in the country where super-educated, super-ambitious people congregate, you will see pretty much the same thing. It’s even more pronounced in NYC, where one is generally talking about money, not politics. Those schools do really well in elite college admissions in large part because they are fabulous educational institutions that select for students with high academic potential and then shape them into exactly what the elite colleges want to admit. They all probably get some sort of occasional celebrity/politician/billionaire boost, but that’s the frosting; there’s a lot of cake underneath.
They also get some legacy boost, too. But if you want to see how much (how little) legacy actually matters, go hang out at a school with dozens of legacies at all the HYPS colleges. The ones who actually get accepted are the ones who are superqualified.
Of course many legacies are qualified. And so are very many of the denied applicants at many Ivies. Legacy, like political status, is often the determining factor among the many average excellent applicants. If you think DC prep schools are selecting primarily for high academic potential, you clearly do not know the current student body well at all.
In my experience at a NYC prep school, many/most of my classmates were selected for their academic brilliance…at age 3-5. Some of us applied and got in for middle or high school but most of my class started at the school in preschool or kindergarten.
Of course it doesn’t, which is why, for purposes of this issue, it matters that the NYC elite schools do even better than the DC elite schools in getting kids admitted to hyperselective colleges.
I thought the question presented was whether political children do disproportionately well in elite admissions compared to peers with similar qualifications, for which the answer is clearly yes. They may not do as well as Wall St kids enrolled in NY elite schools, but that wasn’t the question
“elite college admissions (they already have all the networking/connections available to them with various doors legally opening to them), is in actuality creating an elite class that perpetually possesses the privileges. This is antithesis of American dream and is very detrimental to our social mobility.”
This is well said, but I’m not sure the US was built on elite colleges providing the social mobility and opportunities you mention, it’s more the public universities that do that for the majority of Americans.
"but Harvard legacy status was indeed a featherweight beyond that. "
It’s a lot more than featherweight, even Harvard concedes that, otherwise they would have objected to the data around legacies being presented, as others have noted. Legacy wasn’t actually the surprise, it was the SCEA advantage that I thought was zero to minimal, but not.
“The number is more than you might think.”
Yeah, add Tiffany Trump (Georgetown Law) and Audrey Pence (daughter, Harvard Law). But is it a lot, I mean if you have 50 admits, even 150 that are there because of what their parents did more than what they did, is it meaningful in a class of 2000 admits? Not sure.
Many here are opining or speculating. That doesn’t make it reality. It isn’t even the level of thinking tippy tops need to find in their applicants.
The advantage to an expensive prep school is not the wealth. It’s the fact those GCs tend to pre-vet or fine comb for their best applicants. And foster the best, facilitating great internships, certain better sorts of comm service, the chance to stand out, in the right ways. Those who are not as able generally get steered to a host of alternatives, from “2nd tier” down to no-names.
NYC does have a critical mass of bright and deserving appliants, of any SES. (Sure, Montgomery County and Northern VA, too. The standards are high there.) Many of the kids in NYC schools, even smaller parochials, earn their positives. Kids who’ve stretched and accomplished, and put forth a well tuned app/supp. Some other areas, too, including very poor areas. At some of the DC suburban hs, the level of work, maturity and thinking is notable. It’s so incomplete to assume this is about Mommy’s or Daddy’s job.
More legacies get denied than approved. Over the years, I came to see just how much this is “the kid’s to win or lose,” how he stretches, accomplishes, and more- and not just titles. Gotta remember that just having the stats and some ECs you think are great, doesn’t equate to the whole the tippy tops look for. Legacy, wealth or not. It’s much more intense to filter for a class than many of you imagine. Many kids never get what the college is about, what those adcoms seek, and/or what a good presentation actually is. That’s all SES, connections or not.