Students suing elite U.S. colleges seek 'wealth favoritism' information

You are spot on. I'm a middle-class student who played the game to get into one of the six schools mentioned in this article. It was immediately obvious that the "diversity" of my school came from a large number of dual citizens living a life of luxury and privilege. Racial quotas were a red carpet for the international elite who spoke the same language and shared the same life experiences regardless of their race, whether they came from anti-Democratic countries or upstate New York. These same individuals got special platforms to talk about adversity while I went to bed hungry. I am grateful for the financial aid that was given to me, and I will always appreciate the large endowment that supported this, but I hope the admissions system gets exposed for what it is.

The degree to which the elite institutions have managed to co-opt the left by playing identity progressives against economic progressives is both brilliant and scary. They've managed to paint adding some privileged, Ivy League educated minorities to corporate boards as progressive victories on behalf of minority groups who mostly don't even attend college. Meanwhile there has been zero progress on adding workers to corporate boards, which would do far more to advance the material and social interests of those same minority groups.

> U.S. colleges have been carefully steering conversations about admissions in the direction of racial quotas, to avoid talking about how by far the largest driver of unfairness in the admissions process is legacy admissions and donation quid pro quo arrangements.

A lesson that generalizes well. Remember Occupy Wall Street, Piketty's tome, the Bernie primaries? It all feels like distant history now.

> the largest driver of unfairness in the admissions process is legacy admissions and donation quid pro quo arrangements

From my personal experiences, I suspect the restriction of financial aid based on arbitrary cutoffs affects more people. I know several people who got into ivys, but didn't go because they didn't qualify for financial aid and chose not to take on large amounts of debt, coming from frugal lower/middle class families.

And this will be very very good popcorn-munching drama.

I mean, I do think that students getting in because daddy gives a couple million isn't the end of the world.

The college I went to 20 years ago went away from need-blind admissions, which basically meant if you can pay you get some preference. Now THAT was bad, because it affected the general student population. If instead you have a reserved number of "bribe" students and that means pure-merit admissions can be done with the rest of the students, well, ok.

I love how admissions of athletes to play sports gets a total pass. Probably because it putatively is a good means for minorities to get into schools, even if they are separated off into purely sports training tracks and joke academics.

The real issue is the MBAs running the colleges as a profit industry. Except there's no profits, so they pay... themselves.

Imagine what would happen if colleges fired their admissions departments, set aside all considerations of wealth and race, and had a database admit students with a single query on a result of standardized test results ordered from highest score to lowest, accepting students in that order until the year's class was filled.

I agree but I’m always wondering how admissions departments and those who are in charge benefit from donations. I understand bribery, but this is a bit different. If the money goes to universities for a donation, do people somehow get rewarded for this?

I think there is an easy fix. If you accept Federal funds at all then you have to have a fair and open admissions process.

Discovery happens before a trial. The plaintiff gets to ask the defendant for relevant documents. This can be clearly weaponized—the plaintiff can request everything and make the defendant spend a lot of time and money on it. A common recourse is for the defense to argue the initial discovery request is overbroad and burdensome. Often there’s some negotiation but of course the judge makes the ultimate call. I won’t opine on the merits of this particular claim, but it’s a common claim.

It also works both ways. The defendant can dump all sorts of papers on the plaintiff and say, “be careful what you ask for, good luck wading through this!”

I guess the ace in their sleeve is that "harass and embarrass" rhymes. It sticks in your mind and will draw your attention every time you see or hear it being used. That's an easy 10x multiplier to the strength of the argument :).

> embarrass

I don't even disagree with this, but I'm not sympathetic towards the schools, either.

> For those that argue "meritocracy" and that standardized testing is the answer: the SAT ...

Maybe other standardized tests are or could be better predictors. Some countries rely exclusively on them for admission (and if I'm not wrong, also the US is some specialized fields such as law or medicine).

> 75% of those would not have been admitted w/o that help

this not making a claim anywhere near as interesting as it pretends. Since you're using a %, what is the % difference in quality that admitting these 75% makes (assuming it's even true, considering I don't believe much from the Guardian) and how does that (what the author calls "affirmative action") compare with other affirmative actions taken to achieve a balanced class? were they otherwise 99% good enough, or only 10% good enough?

My money is on above 90% because I went to an elite school (that has no legacy) and lots of people there were extremely highly qualified, and the ones who weren't did not fall in a pattern of being wealthy or whatever, probably better explained by something like your evidence of how ineffective IQ (what SAT does correlate to) or high school grades are in predicting college GPA and how effective GPA is or isn't in predicting future contributions. I find grades have much more to do with psychological makeup, like do you rebel against authority, or knuckle under. Good grades are valuable, but don't tell the whole story of your value as a contributor, sometimes screwed up and crazy genius works better. But either way, shouldn't that be up to the school what combinations they wish to place their bets on?

Seems like you are going down the path of presenting the reality, where a lot of people will ignore "wealth favoritism", cronyism, nepotism, etc... But mention affirmative action, specifically minorities of color as oppose to women of a certain persuasion (also ignored or given a pass), and things can get real hot and tribalistic, real fast.

Well sir/madam, good luck with your arguments and evidence. At the very least, as it's doubtful such biases or prejudices that protects systematic advantages and socioeconomic position will be altered, it will make for a good popcorn read.

It does not look to me the SAT study you linked to concludes what you claim it concludes.

You are saying in 81% of the cases the SAT score is useless. They are saying this:

  When HSGPA (high school GPA) and SAT are combined, the correlation with FYGPA jumps to .61, an increase of .08 and a 15% boost in predictive utility over using HSGPA alone.

> Then I discovered that that list accounted for a full 25% of EVERY incoming class.

This is open knowledge. From the WSJ, https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-get-into-the-ivy-league-extr...:

```

Nearly half of white students admitted to Harvard between 2009 and 2014 were recruited athletes, legacy students, children of faculty and staff, or on the dean’s interest list—applicants whose parents or relatives have donated to Harvard, according to a 2019 study published in the National Bureau of Economic Research.

At Harvard, low-income students with top academic scores had an admit rate of 24% compared to 15% for all other applicants, according to a 2013 study by the school. Harvard has said it believes enrolling a diverse student body is important because the school wants students to learn to work with people from different backgrounds.

“The middle class tends to get a little bit neglected,” said Hafeez Lakhani, a private college counselor in New York who charges $1,200 an hour. “Twenty years ago, Ms. Younger would have had a good shot at an Ivy League school.”

```

And at that point. I think it should be entirely open auction. 25% of incoming class going to highest bidder in order. Then that money would be used to lower tuition of the other 75%.

One school cuts their financial aid program, sucks but not illegal. Every school cuts their financial aid program, smells like price fixing. Students would have chosen a school with a more attractive financial aid program, which is a real effect — it’s super common to apply a bunch of similar schools and go to the one that gives you the most financial aid but the allegation is that all the programs dried up all at once and not going to college at all pretty much isn’t an option for a lot of fields.

Without some kind of intervention that prevents employers using college degrees for employment decisions we’re gonna be here a while.

No the students did receive aid and they probably received more aid than they would at almost any other school in the country. Of course there are cheaper sticker price options like in-state public universities, but specifically talking about the aid, it is quite good at elite schools. If people want to be mad about kids getting ripped off they should be mad at mediocre private U that has the same sticker price with a worse product and substantially worse aid packages.

Anyway the claim in the lawsuit about lost money is really just theoretical - most of the top schools collaborate in developing methods to determine how much aid a student should receive. The lawsuit is claiming that if the top schools could not "collude" on aid, students would have gotten more of it.

However I think that is a massive assumption that is not going to play out the way they would like. These schools reject 100s of qualified people every year that would gladly take a spot with current aid packages. There might be an occasional superstar that schools do compete over, but your average small town middle class 1600 SAT kid is super fucking replaceable.

Hell I could see aid being lower if schools didn't "collude", because being part of this need blind consortium is good PR. The lesser schools that give lesser aid are the ones that supposedly don't collude.

Legally it will be an interesting case though - the reason these schools are allowed to work together on aid package formulas is because they practice need blind admissions, which really only the top unis do. The lawsuit argues that admissions is not actually need blind, because of preferential admission for wealthy donors and some other admissions dynamics that are more common and inadvertently factor in wealth.

That makes this discovery highly relevant to the case, and while I think need blind status will be ultimately upheld, I'm sure the schools don't want the info getting out.

Interestingly, the initial lawsuit is based purely on public info and a handful of salty (unclear why) students. There isn't private info about people's aid packages or anything like that supporting it as far as I can find. I suspect the people suing realized they had an argument the schools weren't actually need blind, and that is what they actually wanted to challenge, so they dug up an argument about supposed low ball aid packages because the need blind schools form an aid consortium.

A lot of the articles about the lawsuit have left out critical details about what is actually being claimed, the claims make no sense until you realize this is actually about challenging need blind status. Here is an article that does touch on the key issues: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/10/us/financial-aid-lawsuit-...

Not really, wealthy students alone don’t make or break elite schools. Yale for example doesn’t have nearly the reputation of Harvard even though 5 presidents went to Yale etc.

In the end it’s the non wealthy students that make or break a schools reputation which is why schools give out scholarships etc. It’s a pure transaction your future achievements aid us and our reputation and resources aid you.

Schools also specialize so Harvard doesn’t have nearly the reputation in say animation as CalArts etc.

Yes, elite institutions are designed to help perpetuate class hierarchies. Why is this a "benefit" that society should tolerate?

> You have the opportunity to meet people who can invest in your ventures.

and who are also completely lacking empathy for the financially challenged at best, disregard and look down upon the less privileged at worst. Both may lead to social isolation of persons with different socioeconomic background attending said schools.

My experience as a very poor student at elite university is that the classes don’t mix much, though there maybe exceptions for a standout athlete on a team sport.

Part of it is logistics: wealthy had money for weekend ski trips, cars, didn’t have to work student jobs so had more free time.

Maybe it’s changed? I was there over a decade ago.

not if they took your seat

More to the point: part of the benefit is to get into the wealthier classes yourself.

The main part is the status signaling. And using the value of the university degree for future wealth building.

Not hating, just observing.

It's the other way around. People from poorer backgrounds are brought in for the education of the rich students. It's like a zoo. Or it's so the rich students can take advantage of your talents once you leave.

No.

> They are private universities, why does it matter in the first place?

It's not because something is private that suddenly no regulations apply. Regarding universities, I don't think the issue is that some category is over-represented, but the fairness of the admission process. That being said, with affirmative action, the admission process is already biased and isn't on academical merit alone.

> you know how to play the game

As a business owner, I value this trait highly.

It’s very rare that “be highly competent” alone is enough to optimize for (ethical) success.

People, including one’s customers, often have drivers other than competence (e.g., significance or likability). Knowing how to cater to those drivers while also being competent is a fairly common and consistent recipe for success.

Is 'play the game' = be a good student?