To the people complaining about this: this is actually a <i>very</i> positive development that I welcome and you should too. This entire time, elite U.S. colleges have been carefully steering conversations about admissions in the direction of racial quotas, to avoid talking about how by <i>far</i> the largest driver of unfairness in the admissions process is legacy admissions and donation quid pro quo arrangements. If you want to make college admissions more fair, attacking those is way more bang for your buck than anything to do with race, and now some students are not falling for the distraction anymore and asking to see behind the curtain.<p>Expect colleges to fight this much, much harder than they ever did for anything related to affirmative action, because this is actually hitting them where it hurts.
> Lawyers for the schools said in a court filing that the "plaintiffs' goal in pursuing such discovery is to harass and embarrass, rather than because it is relevant to their actual antitrust claim."<p>> The defense lawyers also called the demand for admissions and development records "intrusive and burdensome."<p>Prediction: the schools lose, and have to turn over the data.<p>Maybe if their argument was on privacy of the donors, they'd have a chance. Saying "it's intrusive and burdensome" to ask us for this is utter BS that any judge should see through.
This is one of those complex topics which on HN, seesm to lead to "it's simple, do X" types of analyses, which tend to be simple, confident, and wrong.<p>Some facts to consider:<p>At Harvard, over 40% of non-minority students received special treatment for admissions (which includes factors such as being a legacy, athlete, or the 'dean's list' which was a list of high donating parents). 75% of those would not have been admitted w/o that help. I think this lawsuit is trying to pierce this veil. [1]<p>For those that argue "meritocracy" and that standardized testing is the answer: the SAT has a correlation of about r=0.3 to 0.5 with first year college GPA. Thus, the explained variance (r*2) is about 9% to 25%, meaning as much as 81% of college success is not statstically predicted by the SAT. [2]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/17/harvard-university-students-smart-iq" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/17/harvar...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/national-sat-validity-study-overview-admissions-enrollment-leaders.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/national-sat-val...</a>
I used to work in the admissions office of a top 5 school in the US.<p>I was naive and initially shocked by "the list" when I was told about it. A list of applicants who were the children of faculty, staff, very large benefactors, and politicians. They could NOT be denied by any admissions councilor without a very serious reason (eg. convicted of a violent crime).<p>I raised an eyebrow.<p>Then I discovered that that list accounted for a full 25% of EVERY incoming class. Literally hundreds of students per year.<p>I raised the other eyebrow.<p>Then I realized that the constant and extreme push for diversity recruiting was to obfuscate the obvious nepotism and secrecy in admissions. The remaining part of the incoming class had to vastly overachieve diversity metrics so anyone questioning admissions or seeking transparency could be easily demonized for being <insert insult>.<p>They will never ever EVER allow transparency in admissions.
> The prospective class action filed last year against 17 schools alleged a price-fixing conspiracy in which schools restricted financial aid, causing a class of potentially more than 200,000 students to over-pay for tuition by tens of millions of dollars. The lawsuit survived an early bid by the schools to dismiss it.<p>What does this mean? They didn't qualify for student aid, they qualifed and were denied, or they went to a school, saw they could have paid less and were upset?
Isn’t part of the benefit of getting into these universities the fact that you get to interact with people from a wealthier economic class? You have the opportunity to meet people who can invest in your ventures or who can introduce you to people who can.
They are private universities, why does it matter in the first place?<p>Should Catholic seminaries be forced to admit islamic students? Jeff Bezos has a $150 million house in Los Angeles, should he be forced to allow the homeless to live there?<p>There are a lot of other universities.<p>But if we are going to be strict about it, then it should be strict. We have to look at the exact makeup of every single group of people in the USA and make everything is exact. So that means Jewish students should make up only 2% of elite schools, Catholics should make up 22% of the student body, 1.1% should be muslims, 14% of students must be black, hispanics must be 18.7%, 58% must be white, 7.2% of students Asian and of course must divide it more and more. We have to figure out how many left handed students must be allowed to be in elite universities, how many with crooked vs straight teeth. This is all wonderful stuff.<p>Of course at universities, 50% should be men and 50% should be women. Right now, 60% of students are women and 40% are men, universities must stop admitting so many women, that is very clear. Universities should only allow 50/50.<p>At the premier public university of UC Berkeley, 36% are Asian and so that must be adjusted downwards to 7.2%. 23.8% of Cal Berkeley students are white, so of course, the white student population must be increased to 58%. A lot less Asians should be admitted.<p>At UCLA, 58.6% are women, so that has to come down so it is 50%. 28% of the student body are Asian, so that has to come down to 7.2%. White are 26.3% so that has to be adjusted up to 58%. Hispanics are 22.6%, that has to come down to 18.7%.<p>Of course, this must happen at every single university.<p>I am starting to see how this game should be played now.
This is a problem markets can fix. The only way you get into an elite school is you donate a lot of money, you were admitted for color, or you know how to play the game. None of these abilities are things businesses <i>should</i> value, and I'd rather take a top student from a top state school because they're competent at the right things.
As I understand it, most "elite" universities give special consideration to the children of parents who make large donations, in order to encourage such donations.<p>Is this not well known?<p>I have heard a couple of arguments in favor of the practice:<p>1) It brings more money into the university (most important reason for the university)<p>2) It enables the university to admit and educate a larger number of students than it could otherwise afford to (potentially pro-social reason)
It sounds like the issue isn't the wealth favoritism, it's that the colleges all explicitly state that they don't favor applicants due to wealth. The former has always been true on one level: they're expensive. The latter is presumably due to restrictions on various funding systems requiring them to not have any wealth favoritism.<p>If the claims of the suit are true, then it's presumably trying to use proxies for wealth rather than explicitly saying "give us $$$s and we'll let you in"/
I doubt that it helps their antitrust allegation move forward if they cannot also show that students were <i>denied</i> for needing financial aid, but it might shake some things loose.
Graduating from an elite college is tautologically wealth signaling, so why would the same interested students complain about that fact while at the same time perpetuate its significance?
Universities these days seem to contain a lot of social gangs, roaming around, looking to see where they can exert power and influence. Generally through outrage and cancelling of others. Truly, this is not what university is supposed to be.
Part of the issue with this is that wealthy people are often wealthy because they're very smart, and being smart is in part due to genetics. So it follows that smart children will disproportionately have wealthy parents, and that will lead to more children of wealthy parents in high ranking colleges. This has been proven many times, most famously in the NLSY which surveyed thousands of kids over the course of their life, and researchers found if you adjusted for IQ you could predict a child's future income well, and you could predict which children of wealthy parents were likely to build more wealth or lose it all by looking at their IQ.<p>Unfortunately the courts have a history of disallowing the use of IQ, viewing it as a violation of the civil rights act (see Griggs v. Duke Power Co. for more info). The colleges may be found liable of favoritism towards wealthy students, despite it most likely being the opposite.<p>Lastly here's the article if you're also paywalled <a href="https://archive.is/PX63H" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/PX63H</a>
It's always been obvious the the wealthy are over represented at these schools and that "need blind" admissions somehow result in classes of overly wealthy mixed with just enough middle and lower income folks to blunt the plutocratic sheen a bit.<p>Presumably need blind admissions skew high income to begin with just because some parts of America verge on third world and illiterate without even taking other factors into account, but I also have to assume their financial aid practices are carefully designed, perhaps with full US government support (FAFSA is a hilarious thing in many respects), to further distill out an appropriately wealthy distribution of admits.<p>The fact that government money and aid can go to these schools that are so instrumental in the creation and sustenance of elites has always been a farcical betrayal of the democratic ideal.<p>Very curious how far they've gone to prevent documentation of the kinds of things plaintiffs would know doubt like to know from ever existing to begin with.