The moral bankruptcy of Ivy League America
ft.comThis is a very good summary of my own thoughts regarding the Supreme Court ruling.
The American obsession with race in this specific case translates into focusing on a more superficial problem and polarizing the debate, as opposed to finding an easier solution to the bigger problem of ALDC admissions (namely: ban them), which I assume would be less controversial.
They should just increase the price of admission for non merit based spots. but the universities want to take the money as a “donation” instead of cost of goods, so the parents can save on taxes as well and donate twice as much. maybe tuition should be tax deductible for everyone instead.
No they shouldn't: anything that's "pay for play" is morally bankrupt. It reinforces the stigma that there are different rules for the rich in this country.
Bribery of congressmen (a.k.a lobbying) or university deans (ALDC admissions) are forms of legal corruptions. You might argue that a private institution can do whatever it wants, and I agree. But in this case it should get 0 tax benefits/subsidies, esp. when they have $B+ endowments.
They basically already do. It’s called people that pay full tuition (and subsidize people that don’t - full usually doesn’t mean cost, it means cost+). Private universities are typically only using legacy status to add a slight advantage to candidates that are in the paying full freight pool (I.e. they’re not giving a spot to a below average legacy candidate that needs financial aid)
They certainly give away a few of those spots, but the price is a significant donation that will cover more than one student who needs financial aid, and the Ivies give very generous aid to those that need it. I know more than one person that chose an Ivy because they got significantly more aid than from other elite schools to which they were accepted.
Full tuition is still merit based admission in theory. I mean there should be a quoted price for completely merit blind admissions.
They accept Federal research dollars so they should be governed by federal admission guidelines and standards.
Demand for exclusive institutions by the elite won't go away if you ban legacy admissions. Expect some new unaccredited institution to open up, and that's where they'll attend.
Good! Everyone will know these new institutions are full of rich people instead of full of smart people, so the job market value of the diplomas they issue will be priced as such (~ 0).
Which will be terrible for both the rich and the smart.
The rich don't need diplomas, if they can just take over the family's business. In fact they don't even need a job at all. But they may need a few smart people for important positions in said family's business. In an institution composed of both rich and smart people, connections naturally form, so the rich get the smart people they need, and the smart get a good job.
Separate them what will happen is that your future boss will not be as well educated, and will probably hire some of his rich friends instead of his smart friends. And the smart will have a harder time finding the jobs they deserve.
Implying people don't know this about Harvard. Yet the market value of a degree in practically any discipline is quite high.
Mirror: https://archive.is/tlA8T
Schools don't have to be racist in order to end legacy admissions and other non merit based practices. End them all.
Suppose I start a debate club in my living room.
Do I have a right to say "Only my friends can join my debate club"? Do I have a right to say "Children of past participants are always welcome here"? Do I have a right to say "Max occupancy: 1800"?
Most people would say "Yes" to these things.
What if I hire some marketing experts, and eventually my debate club has a really good "brand" and all sorts of companies want to hire participants at enormous salaries for highly influential positions? Once my debate club is a gateway to money, power and influence, do I still have the right to admit who I want? Or does my branding success somehow create an obligation to make admissions meritocratic, rather than some other kind of -cratic (e.g. autocratic, "My debate club, I decide, and that's the end of it," or aristocratic, "Children of members have an easy path to membership", or plutocratic, "Money talks")?
At what point does Harvard become different from my debate club?
What exactly creates a moral (and perhaps legal) obligation that trumps "My debate club, my rules," and necessarily places corresponding limits on Harvard's freedom of association?
>At what point does Harvard become different from my debate club?
When your debate club begins taking in federal funding, then you can compare it to Harvard.
I don’t know exactly where the line is, but it’s actually not so important. Arguments like these miss the more important point. There absolutely is a line somewhere. Why? Because SCALE MATTERS. Always. This is something that is largely missed in most legislation and regulation. It’s so obvious and self evident why a trillion dollar company should have higher regulations that a billion dollar one which should have higher regulation that a million dollar one. Where is the line? I don’t care that much, just make one and address the larger problem.
Freedom of association is extremely limited once you factor in public accommodations. For example, even if I own a hotel, I can’t choose who can stay in the hotel if they are willing to pay in a lot of cases.
Once it becomes a critical part of our social structure. That will always be a judgment call, but Harvard qualifies as that more than any nongovernmental entity today.
Your debate club does not receive millions of dollars each year in taxpayer money. Harvard does.
I find the article hard to respond to, because I don't think it has a coherent point, but I'll comment on some of its apparent assumptions.
One is that all students go there for a quality education. Since the early 19th century if not the very beginnings, faculty have had to acknowledge that a primary function of these institutions is to serve as a holding place for the (often not very bright) children of the rich until they are old enough to get married and do other grown-up things.
Another is that the quality of instruction there is atypically high. Lend an ear to complaints about Ivy League grade inflation and you will realize this is bollocks. While Ivy League graduates do tend to have higher career trajectories, this is attributed to admissions being selective for highly driven people, and for networking opportunities with similar others.
Finally, he assumes the benefits of Ivy League education could be scaled up. For example, suppose Harvard College increased undergrad enrollment from 7K to 40K. What would happen to the networking effect?
Maybe I have a slanted view of some outlier assholes with "The Right"(tm) pedigree, but I came to a conclusion reluctantly that they believed the world owed because they were special and deserving. This included making a killing on services delivered by outsourced foreign workers and restructuring local commodity markets in Africa to enrich themselves first while ignoring externalities such as lower profits for farmers and the preferences of buyers and sellers to make the trade platform useful to them.
i don’t get why the chief beneficiary of AA is elite whites as quoted by the article conclusion? are they referring to the legacy and the donors? how is that AA?
It wasn't worded in the clearest way but I believe the author is talking about AA in the context of Ivy leagues specifically, and that AA at those institutions has done nothing to offset the % of (mostly white) elites who gain access through athletics/legacy admissions, etc. How this benefits those same elites is that by having universities push AA as a part of their public image (i.e., we're doing our part in fixing the damage done by our slave-owning founder) it draws attention away from the privileged forms of admission that actually impact who attends Ivy Leagues. Basically AA at those schools is a smokescreen that does very little while allowing those schools to pretend like they're helping fight for anti-racism, social equity, and so on.
So AA is bad due to malicious compliance? Isn't that throwing the baby out with the bathwater?
It's that AA affects a different pool than the ADLC (athletes, legacies, rich people, faculty/staff people). The ADLC pool remains.
> "The genuinely radical Ivy League option — spending their vast endowments to sharply increase student numbers — is unlikely to be entertained."
This is often said but doesn't seem to be realistic if one digs into the numbers.
Endowments aren't one big slush fund that the university can use however they want; they are a collection of individual donations, many of which can only be used in accordance with the donor's wishes. These are called restricted endowments. Harvard is cited as having the largest total endowment and their latest financial report (https://finance.harvard.edu/files/fad/files/fy22_harvard_fin...) on page 12 shows that 70% of their total endowment are restricted endowments with 20% of the total already composed of restricted endowments that are specifically for financial aid. In theory, the 30% of the total endowment that is unrestricted could be redirected to financial aid, increasing the amount of financial aid by 1.5x from endowment revenue only (the overall increase would be much less than 1.5x since financial aid comes from other sources as well) but it's unclear what other impact that would have on university operations.
tl;dr 1) universities are already using some of their endowments to help students, 2) there are legal limitations on how much more of their endowments they can use to help students even if practical considerations are ignored, 3) if they did so, it wouldn't be enough to "sharply" increase student numbers, and 4) people should really dig into things instead of repeating hot takes from internet pundits at face value.
70% of 53 billion is restricted, but presumably they still make significant money from interest/investment on that money. And IDK, but I assume it's all tax-free too, since the alumni probably wrote a big chunk of the tax code. Are these profits considered part of the endowment too and with similar restrictions? If unrestricted, is the available student aid commensurate with that, or does it disappear into operations and/or dean salary?
Given that interest/investment revenue from restricted endowments is the entire point of the donation, yes, that revenue is restricted.
As for tax treatment, why not just google it yourself instead of assuming? In the US, a tax was added under the Trump administration on revenue from university endowments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endowment_tax#Federal_changes_...
Well I don't really enjoy researching tax law, just criticizing it ;) But it does look like my intuition was pretty reasonable here. The endowments have been taxed for 6 of the 387 years of since the university was founded. Not that I really want to see that money going to the government.. this also won't necessarily help anything unless it's actually going towards to student-aid.
I am paywalled from the article, so maybe I’m misunderstanding the quote you pulled due to lack of context, but you also can’t just double the acceptance rate over night. Even if you could admit more students and cover their tuition, you run into a number of issues, e.g.:
1) Students have to live somewhere. More students living off campus will drive up apartment rent in the area. You can build dorms to increase the housing supply for students and reduce the demand for off campus apartments, but that requires large building projects.
2) Similarly, increasing the student population means more class rooms, teaching labs, and possibly larger lecture halls for the most popular classes (e.g., calculus courses taken by every STEM student). That means more building projects.
3) You need to hire more faculty. While you might be able to get away with adjuncts or postdocs teaching a few things, people that want to go to these schools want to have the opportunity to interact and learn from the top experts in their field, i.e. faculty professors. Expanding the faculty is not an easy thing to do overnight. Even if the will is there to grow, departments are highly selective when it comes to hiring. The person you are hiring is joining the university potentially for life. Moreover, if you choose wrong and deny them tenure, the result blows back on the department. Hot tenure track candidates get many offers, and they don’t want to risk moving somewhere and building a lab for 5-7 years only to be denied tenure and having to move their life elsewhere (they’ve already done that quite a bit throughout their student and postdoc days). Moreover, those candidates need to be courted with resources like spaces for their research lab, so, again, more construction is needed.
4) Where do you build all these buildings? Many of the Ivies are located in major cities (e.g., Boston, New York, Philadelphia). There isn’t a lot of open space to build big new buildings. Moreover, while they often own buildings adjacent to campus and lease them to businesses and tenants, decimating a city block to displace these people in favor of building more lectures or residential halls is a bad look politically and a hard sell to local governments. These schools already draw complaints from the locals about their expansion gentrifying areas and driving locals out through the resulting rise in rents and taxes. Even suburban Princeton has been rapidly consuming their green spaces lately to build new facilities. An option might be to start opening separate campuses, but that’s unappealing to their prospective students.
Maybe there could be a Harvard Lite online academy that wouldn't need any extra buildings and just a little staff, but supply very high quality courses.
Also, it could be available to English-speaking people worldwide, including places like Africa, where wider availability high-quality education could make a huge difference - wouldn't that be a win for anyone who is concerned about social justice?
A lot of these schools have been putting their content on services like Coursera for a while now. I think that’s generally a good thing, but it can’t replicate every aspect of being an on-campus student (no teaching labs for example), and I’m skeptical as to how online degrees that some schools offer (I know Penn recently started an online version of their LDS program) will be viewed the same as a traditional degree by employers
> An option might be to start opening separate campuses, but that’s unappealing to their prospective students.
Is it really unappealing to students though? Or is it just unappealing to abstracted others (like some alumni/profs/admins) that are much more interested in university "prestige" than actual education and education-opportunities?
I think it will be unappealing for a lot of them. Think about some of the logistics. Let’s assume the second campus is nearby but not super close, so perhaps there’s a 20 minute shuttle ride. What do you put at the new, second campus?
Do you isolate some departments there? That has the advantage of students not having to take the shuttle back and forth for random classes since students in those departments will take most of their classes there, but that makes it a pain for them to take electives on the main campus and separates. If they move into off-campus housing, it’s probably going to be close to the second campus and can isolate them from the broader student community. It also makes it a bigger pain for students in other departments to take electives there. Do you just put dorms there? That removes the issue of going back and forth for classes, but separates them from the main campus life.
Some people may not care about the commute, true, but for a lot of people it will be unappealing. I’ve known graduate students who worked in research-only buildings separate from the main campus and they typically found the situation more annoying than they originally expected. I would expect undergraduates, who tend to care even more about being plugged into the school social environment, would be even more bothered by it. The prestige of these schools is high enough that plenty of students will enroll and deal with it, but their top candidates tend to decide between multiple high-end institutions and these quality of life things can play a big role in their choice.
> Think about some of the logistics.
Weighing this against the logistics of paying down student debt for a lifetime, I imagine lots of students would prefer a 20 minute shuttle ride for a few years if they can cut tuition in half by building outside of historical campus, or outside of the city center.
> I am paywalled from the article [...]
Just a technical note: by HN guidelines, the submission URL must point to the original source but I also linked to a mirror that bypasses the paywall in a parallel comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36603895
(Perhaps I should've labeled it "paywall bypass" instead of just "mirror" but I can't edit that post anymore.)
Since I get to subscription page, I can only comment that paywall is not the best way to share views
I posted the link to bypass the paywall together with the submission:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36603895
It's a soft paywall anyway, there are multiple other ways to access the content.
Yeah, and it's not cheap. It is definitely worth the money though, at least for me.
HN seems to be chock full of people who have vendettas against so called "elite" schools probably because they didn't get in. Which is weird since there also is large number of people who were self taught and didn't even go to school and are very successful. These schools are private businesses, forget private universities being some about some bastion of knowledge and discovery of truth, their primary concern is funding ongoing operations. There are plenty of schools that can provide a similar education if that is what you are going for.
The article was not written by "HN." The author, Edward Luce, is an Oxford University graduate whose father holds the title of a baron in the UK, was at some point the Governor of Gibraltar, and then a member of the British parliament for 20 years. Do you think what he wrote stems from an anti-elite agenda? Or could it perhaps simply be good journalism, even if it means upsetting the powers that be?
I can't speak for the collective "HN" but the interest in this topic might have something to do with the fact that a lot of people here believe anything but meritocracy is suboptimal and ultimately self-defeating in the longer run.
I decided to share this also because, no matter the topic, it's been a while since I've read anything so succinctly put, and getting to the gist of the matter, gloves off.
I didn't even read article, and my point was entirely fulfilled by your response and other comments here. There are plenty of places where things are sub optimal but the amount of attention received by this is disproportionate. All I am saying is an observation