Ok. Now that we’ve established what kind of *** you are, we can get down to haggling price. 
“I don’t know how much of that would fall away if all those people were told “thank you, but understand that your gift will have no bearing whatsoever on your family members’ admissions prospects”, but I wouldn’t want to find out.”
Oh, but I do. The minute I receive the “no bearing whatsoever” notice from Harvard is the minute I write my first check.
Regardless of how one feels about the ability to “manipulate” admissions I feel as though there are more parents that need to be educated about this issue. My parents, all throughout high school, thought that if I got straight As and played a couple varsity sports that I would be Ivy League material. They even took me on an ivy league tour (LOL). But Straight As, a 32 on the ACT, and a couple ECs would not have been enough to push me into a top 10 school, especially as a white male student, and they just couldn’t wrap their heads around it and it ruined our relationship for damn near a decade.
I respect the people in this thread who are admitting that they might do the same (donating money hoping for their child’s preferential treatment).
Valid point, DeepBlue86, #178. It would assuage my conscience a bit to make the kinds of donations you have suggested in the first paragraph (thinking about hypothetical donations–not possible in the foreseeable future–connected to the admissions prospects of hypothetical future grandchildren) . What if I wanted to donate to Harvard to establish a Food Bank somewhere on campus?
I feel as though there are more parents that need to be educated about this issue.
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Yes, demystifying the elite admissions process would be helpful. It seems like most posters on CC know the real deal about elite admissions but a lot of students, parents and guidance counselors do not. The author of the recent book “Behind the Ivy Curtain” wrote “there are many myths about what kind of prodigies get into elite schools and I hope this book can shed some light on what kinds of people get in”.
It sounds like you think I’ve revealed something new in my last response, @LadyMeowMeow, but I’ve been consistent throughout in saying that Harvard should do what it believes to be in its best interest. If that means dangling development/legacy preference and using it judiciously, as now, they should do that. Clearly, they’ve taken the view that handling things differently would be worse for Harvard one way or another (maybe they’ve made a similar assessment to mine re: the capital campaign). If Bill Gates were to show up and offer his entire net worth if only Harvard would renounce legacy/development preferences, Harvard would be duty-bound to consider it, and should take the deal if they think it’s in Harvard’s interest.
Parenthetically, and as an illustration of the choices the Harvard administration has to make as it attempts to run one of the world’s greatest universities in the best way it knows how, some things aren’t for sale. A number of the eight Houses along the river haven’t been renovated in many decades, and apparently the capital campaign’s fundraising for this purpose has fallen significantly short (see this remarkably candid article: http://harvardmagazine.com/2016/09/house-renewal-gains-and-challenges), to the point that portions of the endowment are being decapitalized to cover the cost. This problem could probably be solved quickly if Harvard were willing to rename the Houses after donors, but that’s not on the table currently.
I might ask you: how much would it take for you to change your view? If presented with, say, five kids who clearly can do the work at Harvard but probably wouldn’t be admitted in the ordinary course, how much would the university have to be paid for you to agree to give five admissions spots to them? $500m? $1b? Some other number?
Nowadays, possibly. However, when I was in HS, NYU had only been transitioning from being a commuter school for middle class students to targeting more wealthy tri-state students for around a decade.
Hence, it still had a bit of a “stigma” attached from that association for many multi-generationed wealthy kids unless they had no options because of exceedingly mediocre HS stats and their families weren’t willing to make the donations/pull strings necessary to get them into the Ivy/elite colleges.
If this was the same HK tycoon family I’m thinking of, one of his kids attended Princeton with an in-law in the late '80s/early '90s and a past older colleague who was also a Princeton alum attended high school with him as well. By the colleague’s accounts, the scion of the HK tycoon family was a topflight student whose HS stats and ECs were in the range of Princeton admits in that era…and much higher than his own impressive stats.
And that’s even accounting for the fact international students* were usually held to higher academic standards than domestic applicants back then.
If so, from what I recalled from conversations and the HK/East Asian newsmedia, the patriarch didn’t start his donations until his kids were nearing graduation or had already graduated for a number of years.
" the real deal about elite admissions but a lot of students, parents and guidance counselors do not. "
It’s not that hard to learn about what a school values, offers, promotes, and the sorts of current students it’s most proud of. The most competitive colleges aren’t necessarily looking for kids whose hands need to be held through this. But you can take what they do say and show.
It does require, imo, stepping away from what makes a kid a superstar in that one high school you know well. Or sources other than the targets, themselves.
MIT publicly states that legacy has no impact upon admissions. So alums with normal amounts of wealth are not doing so with the hope that their child will be given extra consideration in the admissions process. I don’t know how much MIT will put its thumb on the scale for big donors; perhaps someone else does.
Now, MIT’s endowment per student ($1.2M) is lower than Harvard’s ($1.7M), but certainly nothing to sneeze at. And I think that much of the difference is that Harvard had a very good run for 10 years that ended about 8 years ago, but it propelled them to the largest endowment (although on a per student basis, Princeton is much higher).
@QuantMech my guess is it would be doable in some form, given that Phillips Brooks House, Harvard’s student-run public service organization, runs a (seasonal) homeless shelter in Harvard Square. In any case, I’m sure Harvard would be prepared to discuss it. There appears to be a (non-Harvard) food pantry a few blocks from the river Houses on Western Avenue.
“I might ask you: how much would it take for you to change your view? If presented with, say, five kids who clearly can do the work at Harvard but probably wouldn’t be admitted in the ordinary course, how much would the university have to be paid for you to agree to give five admissions spots to them? $500m? $1b? Some other number?”
Harvard shouldn’t take them at any price because there is no dollar amount that helps more than it hurts. At the lower amounts it’s not worth it, and at the higher amounts it’s too damaging to Harvard’s single most valuable thing, the brand. And please note that it would be a lot better for those 5 kids to be in institutions where they can be admitted in the ordinary course. Rich kids learn all the wrong lessons when they buy their way in.
Incidentally, it would be easier for me to find a price at almost any other institution (where compromising for $$ makes more sense.)
I think you’d make that donation directly to Brooks House.
@LadyMeowMeow really? Five kids, all of whom can do the work at Harvard, who in fact would blend in seamlessly with the rest of the class (particularly some of the recruited athletes, if I may say so) and would never be identified explicitly, and you wouldn’t take them at any price? Not if Bill Gates willed his entire estate to Harvard (not impossible - he’s an alum), and consequently the size of the endowment more than tripled? Not even if, as the president of Harvard, you could play a major role in deciding where all that money would go, and all the good it would do - including, as one alternative, increasing the number of students Harvard could educate by multiples and ending tuition. You would deny thousands more students, in perpetuity, the opportunity to obtain a Harvard education for free, because you think it’s wrong that five acceptable kids got in because Bill Gates made that the condition of willing his entire estate to Harvard. What about taking one?
I would make a different decision, is all I can say.
I am falling down laughing at the idea of a couple of rich kids somehow diluting Harvard’s brand Lady Meow. They don’t dilute the brand- they ARE the brand. Not that everyone at Harvard is rich- but that the “je ne sais quoi” of Harvard (vs. Harvey Mudd, or Rice, or U Chicago, or any number of universities which have a fantastic collection of incredible faculty and wonderful students) includes the presence of rich kids. In some eras, they were dumb rich kids. In other eras, they were smart rich kids. Not as smart as the kids Harvard was trying to use quota’s against (smart Asians, smart Jews, smart urban/ethnics) but “smart enough”. In our current era, the rich kids need something besides squash and sailing, hence all those do-gooder trips to dig latrines and paint the walls of orphanages. And of course, starting your own NGO at the age of 16.
Harvard with NO rich kids? Would legions of families in ordinary suburbs and towns and cities across America be shlepping their kids to music class and debate try-outs and traveling soccer and having their kid go without adequate sleep (ironic, since most of these well meaning attempts will fail to get the kid into Harvard) be motivated were it not for the presence of the rich kids?
They would most certainly not! My kid can go to U Conn or SMU or Villanova if they want to hang out with the sons and daughters of lawyers and pediatricians and VP’s of Community Lending at the local bank. But oligarchs and billionaires and the many children and grandchildren of a Saudi Prince with a sovereign wealth fund behind him?
That’s a different league. That’s Harvard, baby.
(or at least this is what people think as ludicrous as it seems when I put it in writing. Villanova attracts plenty of rich kids. But not Harvard-rich. That’s a direct quote from someone I know pretty well who is neither stupid about college admissions, nor a vapid social climber).
Actually, @LadyMeowMeow , I think you maybe have it backwards. If Harvard threw down the gauntlet, as you suggest – and, by the way, in the process admitted for the first time publicly that it engaged in the practices we are discussing here – it would probably have one of two effects, neither of them very good.
If everyone went along with Harvard, it would simply further enshrine Harvard as the biggest, richest MF in the higher education 'hood. Just as the law forbids the rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, it would forbid rich and poor institutions alike to use a very effective capital-raising technique. The rich institutions would still have all their other advantages, so presumably they would continue to attract a huge share of available higher education donations. And they would no longer have to face pesky price competition in the billionaire-with-teens segment of the market.
More likely, however, the result would be similar to what happened when Harvard and Princeton unilaterally terminated their early admissions programs in 2007 and urged the rest of the world to do the same. The Harvard/Princeton action – together with the book their presidents co-wrote – very effectively publicized the supposed advantages of early decision. The rest of the world said they’d think about it and get back to H/P, then did nothing. Harvard and Princeton terminated their experiment and resumed early admissions a few years later, amid widespread perception that their position had hurt them. In retrospect, their moral stand against early admissions seems to have had the perverse effect of strengthening early admissions programs, legitimizing them, and inducing colleges to get even more aggressive in the percentage of their classes admitted through ED and EA.
@blossom, I’d like you twice if I could. Preach…
I don’t understand why so much of this discussion is focused on development admits versus legacies. In my (limited) experience, legacy admits are usually appropriate candidates for the school to which they’re applying (I’ve seen statistics to this effect in the past but don’t have ready access to them) so a legacy preference isn’t hurting the quality of class composition in any meaningful way. In fact, I’d argue that supporting an established family tradition (NB: I’ve no desire to have fragbot Jr attend my alma mater) is in itself valuable, elegant and strengthens the institution. To use one of my distant co-workers families as an example, I know a family where both granddads, an uncle, dad, mom and brother all went to Tufts but the younger daughter didn’t get in (she ended up going to UVA OOS instead). Would you really begrudge the university putting a thumb (given she got into a comparable institution, it would’ve been a light thumb) on the scale to preserve the coherence of the story?
Going back to my opening sentence, I don’t understand the focus on development admits. If Harvard matriculates 3-4 (total SWAG) development admits a year, we’re talking about 0.2% of its matriculants. While rich purple squirrels are important for People magazine, they aren’t really affecting campus life in any meaningful way and it’s complete hyperbole to suggest it hurts the brand in any substantive way. Why? Outside of a blinkered few, most people aren’t going to begrudge Daddy Warbucks’ $2.5M check to his alma mater to ensure Annie wears crimson. Most people will intuitively understand and accept that people who write large checks to non-profits are afforded a favor or two. Ethically, I suppose you could consider it like buying an indulgence into heaven but this is a poor comparison as they still need to attend, complete the work and graduate.
@blossom As I said upthread: …my spider sense tells me that the main difference would be that the number of students who fall in the “wealthy and connected” bucket would not diminish at all: the well-heeled would still have the necessary advantages to prepare for Harvard. Rather, the wealthy and connected students admitted only on the merits of their applications would have personal qualities more in line with Harvard’s own description:
“Some admission candidates will demonstrate extraordinary promise in academic or research endeavors. Some will show uncommon talent in other areas, such as leadership, performing arts, or athletics. Most of our students combine the best of both scholastic and extracurricular achievement. Personal qualities—integrity, maturity, strength of character, and concern for others—also will play an important part in our evaluations.” https://college.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/viewbook_1617.pdf
Re: #161
But don’t LACs skew even more toward students from wealthy families than similar selectivity universities do?
It’s not that hard to learn about what a school values, offers, promotes, and the sorts of current students it’s most proud of.
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Not to be disrespectful but I find it funny that a distinguished CC Senior Member with over 20,000 posts says it’s easy.
@DeepBlue86 You changed the premises of your question so much that it’s probably not worth continuing with it. There’s no way Bill Gates drops a fortune on kids who don’t get in the usual way, and if he does, it damages both his brand and Harvard’s. Not to mention that the 5 kids would be financial idiots to waste that much on a college entrance. Etc.