Context:
How wealth and legacy status impact admissions
Michelle Obama’s speech at the 2024 Democratic National Convention
Kamala has shown her allegiance to this nation. Not by spewing anger and bitterness, but by living a life of service, and always pushing the doors of opportunity open to others.
She understands that most of us will never be afforded the grace of failing forward. We will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth.
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The pink part is called legacy admissions. It’s how elite universities grow their endowments. That is their ultimate goal: grow and grow and grow some more.
It isn’t just admissions though, it’s also tuition. Schools like Harvard could easily afford to give free tuition to all their students. The fact that they don’t is rather mysterious. I suspect part of the reason is that the students whose families can afford the tuition see it as a sort of conspicuous consumption.
Legacy admisisons = admitting the kids of people whose parents attended. That’s also a huge thing.
But it’s only part of what’s going on; wealth has a large direct impact too.
It has a name… “Nepotism”.
“Bribery”?
That’s usually “I hire my relatives” not “I admit the kids of rich people” — the admissions officers are not generally relatives of the rich.
"Academic admissions preference policies have been in the public eye for the last few years. It is known that being a legacy student, meaning that the applicant’s family has strong family ties to the university, gives a significant advantage when it comes to applying to highly selective institutions. It has been in practice by top institutions since the 1920s.
Looking at the numbers, calling it a “big advantage” hardly seems to do it quantifiable justice. For example, Harvard has an acceptance rate of under 6%. However, if it were a legacy student applying, their odds of admissions jump to 33%."
And that’s why the top-level post was looking exclusively at admission rates for non-legacies, who also get a huge advantage from having rich parents
Rich folk are also good at gaming all the other criteria (varsity sports, extracurricular achievements). “opportunity hoarding” I think is the term that’s been used, or resume padding. It’s also about being able to pay full tuition.
I suspect the ‘affirmative action’ trend also reflects the difference in ambition/drive between the low-income high achievers and the >70% high achievers. The low income group is smaller than the >70% group (look at the size of the ‘above average odds’ regios and the ‘below average odds’ regions). This is because most of the people in the low income group will never even apply for a private college – only the strongest applicants apply. But from the >70% group, basically every kid applies to college, and they are much more comfortable applying for ‘reach’ colleges (even if it costs their parents a few hundred extra dollars). They’ve also gamed their test scores.
