g******4 发帖数: 6339 | 1 【 以下文字转载自 Chicago 讨论区 】
发信人: gogo2004 (挑灯看剑), 信区: Chicago
标 题: Harvard’s acceptance rate for legacies
发信站: BBS 未名空间站 (Tue Nov 4 19:18:27 2014, 美东)
Harvard’s acceptance rate for legacies has hovered around 30 percent—more
than four times the regular admission rate—in recent admissions cycles,
Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons ’67 told The
Crimson in an interview this week.
Fitzsimmons also said that Harvard’s undergraduate population is comprised
of approximately 12 to 13 percent legacies, a group he defined as children
of Harvard College alumni and Radcliffe College alumnae.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/5/11/admissions-fitzsimm
Conclusions
Critics of affirmative action in American higher education sometimes lose
sight of the fact that elite universities give added weight to many
different
types of student characteristics. In this article, we examine the roles
played by
preferences for athletes and children of alumni. Based on complete data for
three applicant cohorts to three of the most academically selective research
universities, we show that admission bonuses for athletes and legacies rival,
and sometimes even exceed, the size of preferences for underrepresented mi-
nority applicants. Being African American instead of white is worth an
average
of 230 additional SAT points on a 1600-point scale, but recruited athletes
reap an advantage equivalent to 200 SAT points. Other things equal, His-
panic applicants gain the equivalent of 185 points, which is only slightly
more
than the legacy advantage, which is worth 160 points. Coming from an Asian
background, however, is comparable to the loss of 50 SAT points.
http://www.princeton.edu/~tje/files/Admission%20Preferences%20E
At some schools, legacy preferences have an effect on admissions comparable
to other factors such as being a recruited athlete or affirmative action.
One study of three selective private research universities in the United
States showed the following effects (admissions disadvantage and advantage
in terms of SAT points on the old 1600-point scale):
Blacks: +230
Hispanics: +185
Asians: -50
Recruited athletes: +200
Legacies (children of alumni): +160 | J***J 发帖数: 6000 | | g******4 发帖数: 6339 | 3 Why I'm Skipping My Harvard Reunion (A Call to Action)
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......
The elephant in the room is legacy. Harvard, like many colleges, treats
children of its own graduates, especially generous donors, differently than
the general applicant pool. I think also on the table should be a set of
stable expectations that certain elite secondary schools have regarding how
many of its students will be accepted to Harvard. One out of 20 members from
the class of 2017 came from seven schools: Boston Latin, Phillips Academy
in Andover, Phillips Exeter Academy, Stuyvesant High School, Noble and
Greenough School, Trinity School in New York City, and Lexington High School
. Of these only Stuyvesant, Boston Latin, and Lexington are public. Also on
the table should be athletic legacy, which, because of Title IX, has the
effect of benefitting upper-class students.
Legacy began after World War I as a way to legitimize the exclusion of Jews
and other immigrants from Ivy League colleges, as Richard Kahlenberg
explains in his book, Affirmative Action for the Rich: Legacy Preferences in
College Admissions. Today it functions largely as a mechanism for
suppressing Asian-American enrollment. If you want a picture of what a
meritocracy might look like, you need look no further than the New York City
specialized high schools which make admissions decisions solely on the
basis of the SHSAT, a test that closely resembles the SAT. At Stuyvesant
High School, the most competitive in the city, 77 percent of the class is
Asian. Lest anyone conclude that these students are somehow economically
advantaged, about half qualify for free or discounted lunch.
College admissions are anything but transparent, so how legacy actually
functions remains largely a mystery. It came under some heat in 2003 when
the Supreme Court considered University of Michigan's affirmative action
policy. At the time, Harvard's admissions dean William Fitzsimmons said he
personally reads all the applications from alumni children. It seems fair to
guess that this courtesy wasn't extended to all 34,295 applicants to the
class of 2018.
We don't have to speculate though about the impact of legacy. If you're a
legacy, your chance of getting into Harvard is about 30 percent. That's
lower than the 43 percent legacy acceptance rate for the class of 1993, but
admissions rates are much lower overall, so in relative terms the legacy
advantage has grown. In 1993, 16 percent of applicants succeeded, so the
legacy admit rate was 2.7 times higher than the non-legacy rate. Today the
overall acceptance rate is 5.8 percent, so legacies have more than a five-
fold relative advantage. One study said that being a legacy is worth
approximately 160 points on an applicant's SAT, about as much as being a
star athlete. Since there are a finite number of admissions spots available,
legacy means that non-legacy applicants are competing for fewer spots. The
disparity is so great it makes most sense to conceptualize college
applications to elite colleges as two separate competitions: one for
children whose parents are legacies, the other for children whose parents
aren't.
Who are the legacies? In 2003, Fitzsimmons told the Washington Post that the
average SAT score of a legacy admit was "just two points below the school's
overall average." Let's put that "just two points" statement in context.
One of the most startling statistics in the Crimson survey is the percentage
of entering students who had a private admissions counselor--overall it's
12.7 percent. Among applicants whose families earned over $250,000 per year,
the rate basically doubled. Among applicants whose families earned less
than $80,000 per year, the rate was about half. So after a lifetime of
advantage--after attending better schools, with more enrichment
opportunities, and having been privately tutored for an exam that's biased
in favor of white people and the established elite, this group still can't
do as well as everyone else. And then, sorry to be crass, they have someone
write their application for them.
The principal justification schools offer is money. Fitzsimmons argues that
legacy preferences are essential to "maintain our position as one of the few
universities in the country to have totally need-blind admissions." Don't
think about that statement too long or blood will start to come out of your
eyes. If you want to feel even sicker, read Harvard graduate Dan Golden's
The Price of Admissions, required reading for anyone who cares about these
issues. Pretty much any section will do the trick, but one experiences a
special nausea reading about Harvard's Committee on University Resources (
COUR), which isn't a committee in any sense of the word I understand after
14 years in academia. They don't set policy or deliberate. Committee
membership is simply a reward for people who have given generously--the
standard threshold is $1 million--or who have proven themselves to be
especially good fundraisers. Of the 424 COUR members, Golden found that 218
had children at Harvard, a total of 336 kids in all. Since 80 members either
didn't have kids or have kids near college age, the rate works out to about
one kid at Harvard per major donor.
To justify this massive disparity it'd have to be true that raising this
money is imperative and that the big donor model is the only way to do it. I
don't buy either premise. As Richard Kahlenberg reports, a study of 100 top
universities found no relationship between the existence of legacy
preferences and increased generosity. Neither Oxford nor Cambridge nor MIT
uses legacy or athletic preferences in admissions decisions. Their prestige
is intact, they have ample endowments, and they get great students. Moreover
, technology has dramatically changed the nature of fundraising. Barack
Obama's 2012 campaign raised $1.1 billion from 4.5 million donors who each
contributed an average of $65.89. I can't help but think that relying
exclusively on donor whales is an antiquated model. Moreover, if there were
a fundraising hit, it would be at most a short-term problem. If Harvard were
to admit an economically diverse class, I'm confident those graduates would
be successful too. If there were a short term hit, Harvard would be well
equipped to handle it, but I don't think it would suffer even temporarily.
Not everyone donates strategically. Many do as an acknowledgment of good
values. If Harvard committed itself to a meritocratic or egalitarian model
of access, I think the money would flow in.
In any event, why is it obvious that the object of the university is to
raise as much money as possible? As an empirical matter, Howard Bowen, the
late former president of Grinnell College said universities act this way
because they have incentives to raise and spend money but none to cut back.
The Bowen Hypothesis is that universities, which by and large are nonprofits
, raise all the money they can and spend all they raise. But that doesn't
make it the right answer. Surely the university has a higher purpose than
self-aggrandizement. What better purpose could there be than offering a
humane, first-rate education to a representative cross-sample of society?
The other justification offered is tradition. Fitzsimmons says that alumni "
bring a special kind of loyalty and enthusiasm for life at the college that
makes a real difference in the college climate and makes Harvard a happier
place." The author John Sedgwick, whose Harvard ties go back four
generations, told The Wall Street Journal that "one of the salient
characteristics of a college like Harvard is its history," and that "legacy
students are a visible representation of that history and make it real for
the students who are attending."
The problem is it's not a history worth preserving. It's a history of wealth
, privilege, racism, elitism, and classism. Reading defenses of legacy, I
can't help but think of the justifications offered for excluding women from
Augusta National or gay boys from the Scouts. I could draw other analogies,
but I'd prefer instead to look ahead 375 years and how much grander Harvard'
s tradition will seem in retrospect when it has broken from the past and
fashioned a new university based on merit and equal access.
* * *
Enough beating up on rich people: let's talk about how Harvard beats up on
the middle class. My freshman year, Harvard tuition was $11,360. Room and
board ran another $4,000. All in, including books, snack money, and tickets
home on the
.....
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/evan-mandery/why-im-skipping-my-h |
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