Legacies
Without being a Larry Summers fan, I thought he got the boot as Harvard's president under ridiculous circumstances. In this Bari Weiss interview about the future of legacy admission, Summers makes sensible points about the purpose of an elite university's admission process while avoiding several fashionable types of arrant nonsense. Mostly he seems to consider questions like: Should we care whether a student is self-motivated or simply allowing his over-involved parents to stuff his resume with expensive baubles? Does an applicant's history of overcoming adversity tell us how much he'll benefit from a challenging university curriculum? Do we trust ourselves to detect intellectual talent any more, or have we decided that we can teach calculus to a horse if we purify our politics sufficiently? If elitist topics like calculus aren't the point any more, then why not simply mail the diploma to anyone who asks for it, to level the playing field? OK, he doesn't ask those questions exactly, but his thoughts are tempting him into these dangerous heresies.
A question that caught my eye was whether the people paying a fortune in Harvard tuition legitimately expected their little darlings to get the whole Harvard experience, the most important part of which is developing a good rolodex in preparation for a life of nepotistic privilege. Not that I can't see the practical value of such an approach, but it meshes poorly with the image of Harvard as social justice warrior.
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4 comments:
It's pretty much contradictions right the way down. But these are smart people capable of disguising that and making the world go their way.
As Harvard admits well under 10% of its applicants, and the overwhelming majority of its applicants have SAT scores that are sky-high (IIRC I have read that 1500 SAT scores give you a 10% chance or less of being admitted to an Ivy League school), admission by lottery would probably not result in a big change in the intellectual capabilities of the incoming freshman class.
"A question that caught my eye was whether the people paying a fortune in Harvard tuition legitimately expected their little darlings to get the whole Harvard experience, the most important part of which is developing a good rolodex in preparation for a life of nepotistic privilege."
It has been my experience with Ivy League graduates that this is in fact the chief argument for their schools. I'm not convinced they're better schools, to put it mildly; but they definitely do offer this advantage over any other program.
Big difference between 1500 and 1600. I'm not sure about Harvard, but traditional a place like MIT was stuffed with STEM types that approached 1600. That makes for a completely different classroom from one dominated by 1500s, which is bright without portending a lot of Nobel prizes.
Still, you may be right that a lottery among the top sliver of SAT scores would yield a result competitive with the most sophisticated sifting of all the non-SAT detritus in the students' applications. It would be massively male and Asian, though, and quite unpopular with the SJW crowd.
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