One of the top indicators of willingness to give back to your or your kids’ the alma mater is the sense of satisfaction with the four year experience. Do you think your kids feel (or will feel) this way, 3puppies?
There are donors who give huge amounts, for many reasons, sometimes loyalty, sometimes to start/underwrite a program they’re interested in, sometimes for the tax write off, etc. But the small contributions also matter. Percent of giving by a class or the whole can affect corporate and foundation giving. Not just the big bucks. Not all legacies are automatically giving more than others.
My perspective comes from within an elite. I think it’s risky to assume general comments on CC or in the media are accurate. We all put in to a big vat of ideas and some vetting is good.
I’m wondering, eg, who (besides some stalwart CC folks) knew many schools put out “what we look for” types of info or other (pretty telling) hints. Versus how many stop at US News, the CDS, their own school Naviance. It’s common advice even from adults, to check the CDS, place your stats and then, “You won’t know if you’d be admitted unless you apply.”
To some extent, if a kid doesn’t have the ability to look a bit further, his stats can’t make up for that. Then some on CC tell them to do this further digging and get the equivalent of blank stares. Recently, I pointed a high stats kid to this and he came back with, couldn’t I just digest it for him. Really? Or someone else asked a kid why those Ivies- “they have my major.” (Oops.)
These threads often surprise me. It seems like many of the posters attended elite schools themselves, but there’s often surprise expressed at what I thought was common knowledge.
I attended one of these schools about 35 years ago. The stereotype of the “dumb jock” and the “dumb legacy” were alive and well. These stereotypes seemed pretty accurate to us, though it’s not like people obsessed about it. The stereotype was probably more accurately “mediocre legacy”. The stereotype was that legacies would have money; they would pick certain majors, do well socially, and work just hard enough to get a B average (which would probably correspond to a B+/A- average nowadays).
From what my children tell me, both stereotypes are alive and well. However, since the % of legacy admits has gone down in the last generation, I suppose that the legacy admits aren’t stereotyped to the same extent since there’s probably a lot less lowering of the bar for legacies nowadays.
I think it’s important to define what people mean when they talk about “academic standards” at schools like Harvard. What does this mean?
That someone could pass their classes and graduate with at least a C or B- average? At Harvard the average grade is an A-. If you choose your major and your classes appropriately and aren’t spending all your time in an alcohol or drug induced stupor, then 75%+ of the applicant pool could probably meet this standard.
That someone will do at least “about average” or better at Harvard?
My bet is that almost all the legacy admits can meet standards #1 and #2. If that’s what people have in mind, then imo “academic standards” aren’t being lowered for legacies.
That someone is some kind of near (academic) genius? Well, I don’t know what everyone else’s experience was, but very few of my classmates were geniuses. I would say that very few kids in the current classes are geniuses. I think it’s commonly accepted that only 10%, maybe at most 20%, of Harvard’s class is admitted primarily for their academic chops; i.e. because Harvard thinks these kids have the potential to be academic superstars in their adult lives.
The reason that it’s only 10-20% isn’t because Harvard isn’t admitting them because they are being displaced by . I bet the admit rate for these academic stars is something like 40%-75%. It’s because there are maybe only 1000-2000 such kids nationwide in each year, and you’re attempting to judge very young 17 year old kids, many of whom may not have been exposed to the academic resources that would make them flourish. Harvard is trying to enroll a good many of these kids; the problem is that there just aren’t that many of them.
So that’s why (imo) Harvard isn’t doing something stupid - like some people have proposed - of admitting their entire class just on the outcomes of grades and some tests. Harvard is happy to admit kids who seem (at age 17!!) to have the potential to be academic and intellectual leaders of the future. But there’s no point in going any deeper in the pool on a purely academic basis. They’d rather admit people who seem (at age 17!!) like they could be future leaders in business, politics, technology, the arts, etc, plus also clear an academic bar that is pretty high relative to the average person on the street.
@lookingforward , DS has already told me he plans on doing so, and earmarking whatever he contributes to undergrad financial aid. But he has also told me he is putting away the maximum towards his 401(k), which makes me happy that he is thinking ahead.
This is really the money quote. We all do, even the ones that are full pay. There is a lot of research that shows that for certain professions and certain corporations and for certain majors, reputation is indeed king. Just getting a good education from a good school is not enough. If your kid wants to work in these areas, not getting into an elite is a gate closing that they may never be able to open again. That is why, even if sending your kid to one of these schools will be a significant financial challenge because you may not qualify for any aid, some parents do it, because they want to fulfill their kids’ fantasy to live the ultimate American dream. They cut elsewhere for their kid’s future. Every now and then, they may wonder if it is all worth it, but then they look at their kid and decide Yes.
That is why for such parents, the admission policies of these schools when it comes to any group including legacies is so important. It is after all a zero sum game. They know that if their kid is forced to stand in a different line while other lines out there are moving faster and into the admit pool of the elite school, their kid despite years of effort and hard work and excellent academics will find the gate closed when their turn comes, because somehow they are just “Oh so Boring”, or “one-dimensional” or “ooh, such a typical EC for this particular group, so not special” etc, etc stereotypes that they hear exists within the “elite admission committee”
@Canuckguy is still overreading Archidiacono on legacies by a considerable margin. Archidiacono isn’t actually looking at legacies, other than as a check on his work with race. Here’s what you can take from his two paragraphs and one table about legacies:
He says that his data on legacies is not robust because of the low number of legacies.
Legacies (like African-Americans, and including nonwhite legacies) have a lower median class rank than white nonlegacies at the end of their freshman year, but on an unadjusted basis narrow the gap by about a third at the end of their senior years. Adjusting for course selection/difficulty, they are only about half as far behind white nonlegacies at the end of one year, but fall another 4 percentage points at the end of senior year (also like African-Americans, but with much smaller differences). Legacies both take courses that are more harshly graded than average as freshman and take more leniently graded courses than average as seniors.
However, both on a raw basis and on an adjusted basis, at the end of their sophomore years there is no meaningful difference between legacies and white nonlegacies, and only a very small difference at the end of junior year. All of the deterioration in adjusted class rank comes senior year.
It’s awfully hard to look at two groups that are essentially equal on both an unadjusted and adjusted basis after two years of college and say that one is weaker than the other.
It is most assuredly not a zero sum game. I’m assuming that VeryLucky refers to a kid who doesn’t get into Harvard but has to “settle” for JHU or U Chicago or CMU. And so I’m calling hogwash on the claim that a door closes on the poor U Chicago grad.
There isn’t a single “elite” type employer that does not admire (in some cases revere) places like Chicago. Not ivy league, but plenty prestigious.
So exactly where is your " I couldn’t get into Harvard because I’m not a legacy, LGBT, play a helmet sport, or under-represented minority" kid ending up? Hofstra? Yes- then you may be closing some doors. It is difficult (not impossible, but difficult) to get to DE Shaw or Bridgewater or Bain or Goldman Sachs from Hofstra, especially in a core function. But dropping down to Northwestern, Duke, Rice???
I am beginning to understand your ire if in fact, you think this is true. I worked for one of the elite type employers in recruiting- and the “top tier” school list is much more robust than you may believe. The list of 'overrated" colleges is ALSO more robust than people like to admit (undergrad majors in “International Business”, I’m talking to you) but that’s the subject of a different post.
That’s the beauty of holistic- a kid can show he’s multi-dimensional, interesting, involved in several ways. They don’t simply submit their transcript and scores.
Its a zero sum game at any one school. There are only certain number of seats. Every seat filled is one less seat available for the rest of the applicants. So if 25% of the seats are filled by Legacies then that is 25% less seats for the unhooked student. In fact I have seen estimates that unhooked students are really competing for only 50% of the seats once all the hooks are taken into account.
Look you just don’t have your facts straight. Look at the percentage of recruits who go into PE, Hedge funds and VC and Harvard just kills every other school, prestigious or not, specially for undergraduate level analyst jobs. This is not even a fair fight. I don’t care two hoots about “Harvard” per se. In fact I think there are a lot of schools including Chicago where a child can get a much better education. If the recruiting practices at these employers were more <> “holistic”, I wouldn’t give two cents about Harvard or its ilk, but that is not the case. The profile of analysts at these firms is as “uniform” as you can possibly get. If you want to work for these firms (now we can argue about why someone would want to do that) you better go to Harvard or maybe Penn Wharton will work, otherwise the path is much more difficult, even Yale won’t do. Having said that, if my kid wants to become a doctor, I wouldn’t care about any of the elites, including Chicago. There are plenty of ways to become a doctor that is outside this rat race to get into elite schools where you can preserve your sanity. So it is all contextual.
So setting aside this notion about why a kid would want to go into a particular profession, Harvard’s admission practices and preferences for legacies, URM’s, ORM’s, women etc etc, becomes extremely important for an unhooked applicant with very specific career interests. Its not “Harvard” they are chasing. Far from it.
Well, hint, Harvard isn’t selecting based on a kid’s post-grad hopes. Don’t tell them it’s your criteria. (Not saying VLP is or was.) They also aren’t choosing as exclusively on future potential by some narrow definition of success. How hard is it to realize a Harvard is a Harvard in large part because of what does happen during the 4 years. We need someone to come post about causation vs correlation.
Sorry, a kid cannot show this. Showing “multi-dimensional” is not like showing a rose, where everybody who sees it can objectively agree that what they are seeing is a rose. A kid can be multi-dimensional, to eleven dimensions but if the reader on the other side just rolls their eyes and yawns, this kid is fried tofu.
Not to go down this path again, but that is why “Holistic” is a bunch of hog-wash. Harvard, used this in the 1920’s to keep Jews out. Its was just a nice way for Harvard to blatantly discriminate, yet not face any consequences including public shaming. Now if you were a WASP kid in the 1920’s, “holistic” was beautiful for you. You did well under the rules of that game. But ask the Jews who had to suffer thru “Harvard’s Holistic Admissions” in the 1920’s and you will get a very different answer.
Its all perspective and where you stand. Neither the WASP kid or the Jewish kid of the 1920’s were evil. The rules of the game that pitted one against the other on the other hand, I am not so sure about…
Kids do show it. Or not. We aren’t talking about mind reading. Nor the little subtleties only a parent is aware of. VLP, you aren’t a believer. Try to consider what can come through on an app/supp, why those questions ask what they do. I’m guessing you at least peeked at what your son filled out.
CC feels, imo, that kids with depth and breadth are padding, suppressing their passions, wrecking their life balance. Not.
And nearly a hundred years have passed since the 1920’s. Even 15 years ago is an ice age past. Let’s get real.
Use holistic to your advantage. Or rail against it and do what you want. Which gets a kid further?
If Hurwitz can quantify legacy effect with his method and data, he surely can quantify the effect of race, test scores, EC, etc. We can then peek into the holistic black box and realistically estimate the odds for a particular applicant. However, that might drive down, way down, the number of applicants.
I would read what blossom wrote. She knows what she is talking about. The only issue I would have with what she wrote is that - depending on size and geography - some firms do not do on-campus recruiting at the “drop down” (not my phrase) schools like Rice etc just because there’s only so many schools you can visit.
Some of your statements seem to confuse cause with effect. Let me supply some additional food for thought. I work in one of these industries that people think of when they imagine “gates closing” … my company is filled with elite school grads … among others.
If someone is interested in pursuing one of these careers, then they’d damn well better focus 20 times more on their own talents, skills, and capabilities than on whether they went to Harvard or Rice. From my perspective as an employer, it’s about what you can do for me. I don’t really care about the name on your diploma.
We do recruit a lot at Harvard because we’ve found that it’s a great candidate pool and we’ve been able to find some great employees there. But just because someone managed to “get into the right line” doesn’t make them one of them. In fact, our job as the hiring employer is to weed the fakers out at the interview stage (if not before so we don’t actually have to waste the hour of time).
If someone is just obsessed with getting into the “right line” but doesn’t actually have the “right stuff” (for us), then from my perspective they are simply just trying to trick us. If we’re good at our jobs, we will identify these people and pass them over in favor of someone from another, “lesser” school who has more talent. Worst case, if we make a hiring mistake then we can and will fix the problem in an instant with a dismissal notice.
As long as someone is at a school where there’s on-campus recruiting they won’t be at some huge disadvantage. And all of this just applies to fresh graduates; after their first job, the college someone attended starts becoming irrelevant from a hiring point of view.
Bain Capital isn’t going to start recruiting at Framingham State for an entry level analyst any time soon. But that does not mean that a kid from a school a notch down isn’t going to/can’t get hired by Bain Capital if they don’t get into Harvard.
Actually we are, An app is read in less than 15 minutes, in many cases less than that. These Adcoms read thousands of apps, from morning to night during the admissions cycle. After a while it all gets blurry. You place too much faith in a severely flawed system. Worse, you seem to judge the efficacy of how well the kid showed it by looking at the outcome. The kid who got in showed it in spades. The kid who did not must have been terrible at it. How Strange! specially for somebody who has such a distaste for numbers based admissions. There you are ready to bend over backward and entertain all kinds of reasons for why a kids academics could be “less than stellar”. There this “just show it” doesn’t seem to apply with as much rigor. We will just have to agree to disagree here. I don’t ever see us agreeing here.
Oh please. How many years has it been since slavery has been abolished in this country?
Of course we are. We know we have to play and we played hard and aggressively by using every trick in the book. We did fine. In fact, most would say we did quite well under this system. That doesn’t make the system right or fair. It just means we dodged a bullet, while others were not so lucky
My grandmother [AB Radcliffe 1919], all three of her brothers [AB 1925, 1927, and 1936/PhD 1947], one brother-in-law [AB 1932 AM 1934], and one son-in-law [AB 1942, LLB 1949] were students at Harvard University during that period. They were all Eastern European Jews with no significant social connections outside their community and public school educations (except for the youngest brother, who was one of the first Jews to attend a WASPy boys’ private school in the city where they lived).
None of them ever had anything remotely bad to say about Harvard. They strongly believed that Harvard had treated Jews with less discrimination than any other equivalent private university. Only one of them lived long enough to have read Karabel, and I never asked him whether he did and what he thought about it. But I grew up being told that Harvard was uniquely welcoming to smart Eastern European Jews.
