If Harvard's "best interest" isn't fairness but rather perpetuating Harvard as an institution for the maximum amount of time into the future, then its admissions behavior makes sense. Colleges and Universities are institutions (like private companies) and (like private companies) it is very difficult to get them to engage in behavior that they perceive may shorten their own lifetimes.
Put differently, the main goal of an institution is survival. Profit (or a huge endowment, or close connections to the wealthy or those in power) is the primary factor in ensuring survival, and institutions know it.
Harvard has been focused on power over ethics for...well, I'm not sure, but certainly over a hundred years. As much as I would like to believe that admitting better-qualified candidates over "better-connected" candidates (heavy quotes here) will be better for their survival in the long run, I wouldn't put money on it. And, it turns out, neither would Harvard.
Extending this thought: if you thought that the primary concern of so-called elite institutions was ever "fairness", you're mistaken. They deal in Influence.
And yes, it's highly ironic that the current fashion for identity politics and all the other "post-modern" ideologies were started and perpetuated by these institutions, which don't actually engage in said ideologies outside of hiring humanities professors that say whatever they please. Even within that behavior, the hyper-left trend of said professors is much stronger outside of the Ivy League than in it. The tip-top institutions are quite conservative when the rubber meets the road.
Of course, one might also note that these institutions are only "elite" because of their connection to the, well, elite. The entire idea of "fairness" here doesn't really make sense. If Harvard committed itself to "fairness" it would no longer be an elite institution, and nobody would care how fair its admissions were.
MIT might not care about legacies as much as Harvard but they do recruit athletes.
I read about someone that was a recruited athlete for sailing the year I was rejected. The guy had just a ~2100 SAT and no real other hooks to speak of. Really changed my perspectives on how much racial affirmative action actually impacts Asian Americans like me.
> Really changed my perspectives on how much racial affirmative action actually impacts Asian Americans like me.
Do you think that you have a right to an MIT education based solely on merit or intelligence? That's not how prestigious universities have accepted students for like 100 years.
Prestigious universities typically want, in part, a diverse student body, represented by both sexes and multiple races and cultures.
Let's grant for the sake of argument that Asians are just smarter than everyone else. The consequence of this is that all the best universities would be 100% Asian if they accepted students based purely on aptitude.
But the goal of prestigious universities is not to be such a pure meritocracy that this would ever be the case. Not for Asians, nor any other race or culture.
I made it into MIT, but at the time I was at something of a disadvantage demographically. I was a White male in 1980 from an economically advantaged city and area of the country. If I'd been female, or non-White (and maybe non-Asian), or from an underrepresented part of the country, my chances of getting into MIT would have been much greater. I knew this when I applied and planned my backup applications accordingly.
As for SAT scores, at least when I applied, MIT claimed that SAT scores were way down on the list of what they considered to be most important for successful applicants. (Though I'm sure that SAT scores were not ignored.)
I had an SAT score of 1500, which at the time was very high. I.e., it's equivalent to an IQ of 155 or so. (According to the people who do such correlations.) I also had, litterally, straight A's in high school. Not a single B in four years. I had a perfect score on my Chemistry achievement test. And yet I was not accepted via "Early Action".
Just how high does your IQ have to be to get in via Early Action? Well, there is no answer to that question, because that's just one of many things that MIT is considering when they admit students.
> Do you think that you have a right to an MIT education based solely on merit or intelligence?
I feel like you're taking the opposite of what my opinion on this issue is. I think the issue those AA lawsuit plaintiffs have is silly and entitled! (I should clarify the applicant was white in this case - sailing isn't a terribly diverse sport by my understanding).
I actually agree with you, but I am actually becoming convinced nobody has a right to an MIT/Harvard/etc education. If it wasn't clear, 2100 is shockingly low for a HYPSM admit, lower than even my mediocre SAT (also a 1500/1600).
I'd rather take the power back instead of whining about not getting into Harvard and hiring lawyers because you only got into Duke (another school I got rejected from!)
> If it wasn't clear, 2100 is shockingly low for a HYPSM admit
As I mentioned, when I applied to MIT, MIT said that they didn't really weigh SAT scores all that heavily. MIT has graduate departments that don't even require GRE scores at all. (Or at least that was the case at times in the past if it isn't now.)
I once read an interview with the head of Harvard admissions where he said that it's a misconception that Harvard's ideal student is someone who is well-rounded. He said that Harvard would much prefer to admit someone who has done something truly remarkable, even if they are lacking in other respects.
I don't know about this MIT sailing guy. I attended MIT and I never met anyone who had been admitted due to athletics, but Googling reveals that MIT claims they consider athletics along with everything else. For all that's been said here, this sailing guy might have been truly remarkable at sailing, and an excellent student in other respects. MIT may have wanted a good student to help lead their sailing team, and what is wrong with that?
If this guy wasn't a good student, there's no way that he'd end up graduating. It's not as if you can major in basket weaving at MIT.
> If it wasn't clear, 2100 is shockingly low for a HYPSM admit
I just looked up what a 2100 equates to in terms of current scores. It equates to 1470, which is not shockingly low for MIT. Admittedly, it's not near the top of MIT scores, but it's well within the accepted range.
MIT looks at all sorts for things when it admits students. You don't know what other qualifications this student had. He could have had straight A's, max scores on all his Advanced Placement exams, stellar recommendations from teachers, award-winning science fair presentations, etc.
Sailing is by nature a hobby of the already affluent. I'm not really impressed by the elite staying elite at the expense of everyone else.
Like I said somewhere else, I also think a lot of people would graduate from MIT if they were admitted. A 75th percentile student at my undergrad (someone the admissions committee would definitely consider consider "inherently inferior") would probably get a 3.5/5 at MIT and graduate. That's my bet at least.
> Sailing is by nature a hobby of the already affluent.
You're talking about a single student admitted at a school that has an active sailing program and then making a huge extrapolation from it about MIT catering to the "elite at the expense of everyone else".
Also, the sailing program at MIT is tiny little sailboats. The kind that any middle-class person can rent for reasonable rates if they live near a big enough body of water. E.g., the Charles River. We're not talking about yachts for the rich here.
MIT doesn't exist to maximize fairness. It exists to perpetuate itself and to provide a beneficial experience to its students. (Which includes having a diverse student body.) Since it has a sailing program, having a good sailing program is good for MIT's students.
I don't know what school you went to, but MIT is actually quite challenging, and, unlike Harvard, has resisted grade inflation. MIT does do a lot to help students graduate, however. E.g., you can easily change majors if the one you originally chose is not suited to you. And you can come back 20 years later and finish, should you not graduate on time.
But I'll give you one example of how MIT compares to the typical school: I had a visiting Psycholinguistics professor from some big university in Arizona. (I don't remember which one.) It was the easiest class at MIT I ever took. I mean, really, really easy.
The professor was impressed by us MIT students, however, because, according to her, she could make the class much more difficult than she would usually teach it, and we could still keep up.
So, at least from this one data point, it seems that psychology and linguistics majors at a typical college would not be able to handle MIT.
> MIT doesn't exist to maximize fairness. It exists to perpetuate itself and to provide a beneficial experience to its students. ... Since it has a sailing program, having a good sailing program is good for MIT's students.
Yeah, I'm aware that it doesn't. Maybe it shouldn't exist then? I don't think we should be putting institutions that aren't in the national interest on a pedestal like this. Let them lose non-for-profit status and have their massive endowments get taxed.
> I don't know what school you went to, but MIT is actually quite challenging,
My undergrad is also challenging to some people, most colleges are. I don't really know how you can really measure challenging fairly across institutions with just anecdotes.
Unless you're arguing that folks that get into MIT are just inherently superior (which I'm sure you aren't, because that wouldn't be terribly politically correct and would be downright insulting to 99.9% of folks that didn't get into an elite undergrad like myself) I don't really understand your point.
> Yeah, I'm aware that it doesn't. Maybe it shouldn't exist then? I don't think we should be putting institutions that aren't in the national interest on a pedestal like this.
I can't even begin to express how nutty this idea is. MIT's existence is certainly in the national interest. MIT is the world's best university for training engineers and the world needs good engineers. The more, the better. The better they are, the better. MIT is also excellent in other fields as well. I.e., stuff that the world needs.
> Let them lose non-for-profit status and have their massive endowments get taxed.
More insanity!
Look, I work at a famous research institute that is affiliated with MIT and Harvard. Our goal is to do fundamental research aimed at treating and curing cancer and other genetically-based diseases. Many people want to work here because it is so prestigious. And it's a non-profit because it makes no money.
But getting a job here isn't egalitarian or "fair". The people who are hired are hired because the people hiring them believe that they are the best candidate for doing the job. Modulo affirmative action considerations, etc.
So now you'd want to take away our tax-free status? The consequence of doing this is that some terrible diseases that might otherwise be cured might not be. And the same thing is true if you were to take away MIT's and Harvard's tax-free status, because the research institute where I work has close research ties to both MIT and Harvard.
You seem to have lost sight of the purpose of research universities. They do research! Valuable research. And students get to come and be with the researchers and learn from them.
At MIT, every undergraduate student can participate in research. Often with the leading expert in the field.
Regarding sailing being for the rich, it costs $90 a day to rent a four-person sailboat on the Charles River. Anyone in Boston can do this who knows how to swim and sail. Divided by 4, that's $22.50 per person for a day of sailing. Is this really a sport only for the rich?
Let's get rid of the tennis courts and the swimming pool and the bowling alley while we're at it!
> Unless you're arguing that folks that get into MIT are just inherently superior
Inherently superior? No, of course not. But MIT's difficulty level is "calibrated" to those in the top 1% of scholastic aptitude. If someone doesn't have an aptitude somewhere in this ballpark, MIT is probably not going to be a rewarding experience for them.
In the US, the last I checked, 50% of high school graduates went on to college. MIT's difficulty level is clearly calibrated to only a few percent of these college students.
Also, clearly, if we crunched the numbers, we'd quickly determine that there are lot more students in the country who are at an appropriate aptitude level for MIT than MIT can actually admit. Well, such is life. There are plenty of other great schools. MIT can't take everyone who is qualified to attend MIT. No college can.
Life isn't always fair, nor can it be. Just like not everyone can work at my research institute that might want to.
On the other hand, there are plenty of other high-quality choices for education. You don't have to go to MIT to get a high-quality engineering education. And there are plenty of other opportunities in the world for those who wish to do genomics-based disease research.
> I can't even begin to express how nutty this idea is. MIT's existence is certainly in the national interest. MIT is the world's best university for training engineers and the world needs good engineers. The more, the better. The better they are, the better. MIT is also excellent in other fields as well. I.e., stuff that the world needs.
Yup! The world needs American engineers and scientists. MIT is a fantastic school. I'm failing to see how it's irreplaceable compared to University of Michigan, Georgia Tech, University of Washington, UIUC, my alma mater...
> But getting a job here isn't egalitarian or "fair". The people who are hired are hired because the people hiring them believe that they are the best candidate for doing the job. Modulo affirmative action considerations, etc.
Sure! Nothing wrong with that! I'm sure that can still happen if it was affiliated with UMass Boston. Public, less-selective institutions like UNC Chapel Hill do lots of fundamental research too.
> At MIT, every undergraduate student can participate in research. Often with the leading expert in the field.
That's great! I did undergrad research and I'm sure lots of undergrads do!
> Regarding sailing being for the rich, it costs $90 a day to rent a four-person sailboat on the Charles River. Anyone in Boston can do this who knows how to swim and sail. Divided by 4, that's $22.50 per person for a day of sailing. Is this really a sport only for the rich?
Interesting aside, but that's actually a lot more than I expected for a sailboat on the Charles and I was looking into it earlier. I know a few people that sail and it seems like an awesome hobby. Guess I'll have to re-evaluate.
> There are plenty of other great schools. MIT can't take everyone who is qualified to attend MIT. No college can. On the other hand, there are plenty of other high-quality choices for education. You don't have to go to MIT to get a high-quality engineering education.
Yup! I went to a lower tier institution and got an OK quality education. But if you're really going to claim that other schools also provide high quality engineering educations without the social engineering, hate to say it but I don't think you're making a great case for it!
Look, the way I see it is:
1) Either the "MIT woman/man" is so much better than everyone that doesn't get in (like myself) that the cost of re-evaluating the influence of these selective institutions would be enormous to world productivity or
2) These schools are good, but them being selective isn't actually that beneficial to the national interest more than brownie points in a credibility name drop and the specializations that exist there because of the added credibility.
I simply don't see this argument working without admitting to being fundamentally superior.
It seems to me that you just have a big chip on your shoulder, or something. The entire content of what you just posted seems to be a mixture of straw men and sour grapes.
MIT IS a fantastic school. I'm not sure what you mean by "irreplaceable". MIT is irreplaceable only in the same sense that Picasso's art is irreplaceable. There's nothing else quite like it, but there's plenty of other great art in the world: Dali, Van Gogh, Vermeer, Calder, etc. If there never was a Picasso, the world would have been fine. It just wouldn't have been as good as a world with Picasso's art in it.
You're also irreplaceable, as is everyone. Since everyone is different.
Re where I work, there are plenty of other labs that do similar things, but none of them seem to do it as well. It used to be part of MIT but eventually decided to be its own thing. Much of of the original sequencing of the human genome was done here when it was part of MIT. Would that have been done at UMass Boston? I think not. Might it eventually have been? Who knows? Would the human genome eventually have been sequenced anyway? I'm sure. How much longer would it have taken? Who knows, but I do know it would have taken longer.
If MIT hadn't existed this lab would not exist. Why do so many biologist want to work here? Because there are few other places like it, and if knowledge on how to cure various diseases comes to fruition, it's likely to happen here. If and when that day comes, how many lives will be saved and how much suffering will be prevented that might otherwise not have been? I don't have any crystal balls, but these things matter.
In addition to going to MIT as a student, I worked at MIT for quite a few years. I got to redesign the computing and network infrastructure for a world famous lab. I wrote software that was essential for the operation of an X-ray telescope. 1,000 peer-reviewed astronomy papers were published using results from the telescope and my software.
I got to adapt brain imaging software to visualize radio astronomy data for star-forming regions of space. Now I work on software to design CRISPRs to help bring on the zombie apocalypse. Or at least I can dream, can't I?
Could I have done all this somewhere else? Who knows? My backup school was Johns Hopkins. They have a cool physics lab. Who knows what might have happened if I'd gone there instead? Would I have done such interesting things at Chapel Hill? Maybe, but I doubt it.
If I had gone to Johns Hopkins, my life would have been different. But it probably would have been just fine. I got into MIT, where I wanted to go. I consider myself lucky. If I'd gone to Johns Hopkins I would also have been fortunate. If Picasso paintings had never existed, I wouldn't have missed them. As I mentioned, there's plenty of other great art. But in that Picasso works do exist, isn't it just so unfair that I can't afford to buy one! I demand a fair and equal distribution of his art, or it's really not a good thing after all!
Your #1 doesn't parse to me. Who said anything about any person being better? MIT choses its student body to be beneficial to itself, the student body, and the world. Considering MIT's success, it seems to be doing a fine job at this. But you would rather fix something that isn't broken?
Re #2, again you want to fix something that isn't broken. How about MIT just admits students via a completely random lottery of everyone who applies? Do you think that would work out well?
Re fundamental superiority, once again I find you clear as mud. I'm certainly not claiming to be fundamentally superior to anyone. I was just lucky enough to be born smart enough to do very well in high school and then lucky enough to be admitted via MIT's secret sauce selection methodology.
If your question is whether or not MIT is fundamentally superior, I don't know about "fundamentally". It's long been considered the world's best engineering school. As it turns out Harvard has better astronomy due, in part, to its close ties to the Smithsonian. I originally went to MIT for astronomy, and if I had only known at the time, I suppose I would have preferred Harvard. Oh, well. And maybe Caltech has better astronomy too. It turns out I settled for third best.
On the other hand, I got to learn SICP before the book was even published, and that changed my life. That couldn't have happened anywhere else.
> I'm certainly not claiming to be fundamentally superior to anyone. I was just lucky enough to be born smart enough to do very well in high school and then lucky enough to be admitted via MIT's secret sauce selection methodology.
I mean, I wasn’t so your first statement contradicts the next. It seems like you’re saying the ultimate value of a person’s accomplishments is decided when they choose a college. That certainly has disturbing implications for me if that’s the case!
Ultimately this appears to just be beating around the bush. If this institution is so special a random lottery wouldn’t be that different of an outcome. Some folks have proposed that at other institutions [0]. Personally I disagree because I genuinely don’t think who they admit actually matters for 99% of the country. Society should start considering the value of the P50 instead of only lionizing the contributions of the P99.
> It seems like you’re saying the ultimate value of a person’s accomplishments is decided when they choose a college. That certainly has disturbing implications for me if that’s the case!
That's nonsense. I never said anything of the sort.
I've been engaged in another debate here concurrently, which you can easily track down. The originator of that debate posted about a study showing that where you go to school has little impact on your lifetime income. My response argued that income isn't the only benefit that one gets from an education. But I'd readily admit that income is certainly one of the most important benefits.
Unless you have a hankering to work on a small team developing, maintaining, and operating an X-ray space telescope, or to become a prestigious researcher, I'm sure that your education is just fine. That's what the data shows. Also, if you go to graduate school for a PhD, the graduate school you go to is way more important than the undergraduate school you go to. There are plenty of people I know who went to non-elite undergraduate schools but then went on to elite graduate schools.
Personally, I wanted to go to MIT for CS grad school, but I didn't get in. (Despite good grades and excellent GRE scores. How unfair!) I got into BU's PhD program, but BU wasn't doing the kind of research I wanted to do. So I bailed and just got a job at MIT. Though I learned incredible stuff as an undergrad at MIT, it was also difficult to distinguish myself, other than in a few classes for which I was particularly well-suited. Why? Because before I went to MIT, I was the best student out of a thousand. And my SAT scores were the best out of 5,000.
At MIT, though, I was just average. If I had gone to a school where I could have been a bigger fish, maybe I would have gotten into MIT's CS Phd program. Or maybe not. Life is too short to try to second-guess all the maybes. But I have a friend who went to UMD for both undergraduate and graduate school and now he's an Associate Professor at UPenn. Now that he's doing scientific research and applying for grants, etc., it certainly helps him to be a professor in a research lab that has some other very fine minds working with him.
> Society should start considering the value of the P50 instead of only lionizing the contributions of the P99.
Society values research universities based on the quality of the research they do. This is determined largely by the volume and quality of their peer-reviewed publications. Also, I imagine by the publication of influential textbooks, like SICP. Etc.
When the P99 produce results that match that of the P50, then your dream will come true, and not before that. But that's unlikely to happen since universities that are more selective are more likely to attract higher quality researchers. Which will affect their ability to get research grants. Etc.
As for where one should get an education, this is clearly a personal choice. I've gotten to do some interesting things in life due to my education and by staying at or near MIT. But my brother, who went to BU, and never worked on anything of note (other than running Westchester's slam poetry team) is a lot happier than I am, no doubt. Why? Because he found a loving, supportive relationship with a great woman.
This has alluded me. At this point, I'd trade everything I've ever done in life for a job that pays me well enough and a lasting, harmonious relationship.
Did my brother going to BU and me going to MIT result in him ending up happier? Who knows? But ultimately, he's won. At least for what's most important in life.
Regarding my suggestion for where kids should go to school today, I'd probably recommend that if they have enough discipline, they should just get their education from Coursera and/or edX. For whatever reasons, a college education has just become too expensive these days, leaving many students with a terrible debt load that will harm their wellbeing for decades. Whatever benefit you'd get from MIT or Harvard or even University of Arizona might be offset by suffering from crushing debt.
I've taken a bunch of classes on Coursera and edX (including the original machine learning and database classes that were offered online by Stanford for free before there was a Coursera), and they were excellent experiences.
Though actually going to college has a lot of benefits that self-learning in your parents' basement doesn't have. E.g., making life-long friends, getting nookie and learning to navigate sexual/romantic relationships, developing relationships with professors and other researchers, etc. It would be interesting to see data on how the lives of people who take these two different approaches turn out comparatively.
You need to be more than just your SAT or grades to get into elite institutions. It's clear that you didn't get that and thought a SAT score + straight As should be enough. Now you go blaming the "elites".
> It's clear that you didn't get that and thought a SAT score + straight As should be enough
Where exactly did I express that? The other MIT admits from that year I know that aren't privileged sailing athletes from Connecticut, got 2350's on their SATs and performed at Carnegie Hall!
I have genuine difficulty putting sailing in the same category as basketball, track or soccer (for all of which I know recruited athletes in some way or another).
It sounds like Harvard deals in merit and not egalitarianism, where merit considers the power you bring to the table and not merely your academic skill.
If I am a child of a Harvard administrative staff member, then I have an advantage when getting into Harvard. So that would not be a merit advantage. That's just called luck.
Here's the big difference between the upper-class kids and everyone below when it comes to admission's fairness.
Everyone else says "I worked hard as an individual, therefore i deserve to get into a good college."
Upper-class kids says "MY FAMILY worked hard, therefore i (as an individual) deserve to get into a good college."
The emphasis is WHO worked hard. Upper-class kids tend to ride on the coat-tails of their parents and grand-parents.
No one sees themselves as evil. I'm sure that "they" just differ in terms of what they consider ethical. If I may play the devil's advocate: Why is it more ethical to favor those born with ability than to favor those born with connections?
I don't have a quarrel with either form of discrimination, but I do have a problem with the dishonesty about how things actually work.
Apparently we're close enough to post-scarcity that people forget jobs are supposed to do things and not status symbols.
The point of meritocracy isn't that it's more fair or ethical, the point is that we give the most important (on the margin) jobs to the people most capable of doing said job. The fact that money, status, and power flow to the people doing important jobs is an incidental side effect.
Now universities aren't exactly jobs, but the point stands. Universities are supposed to educate people, so that those people can do stuff. Letting in people with connections and not ability means we are not making the best use of our limited educational resources. Note that this is an argument for affirmative action as advertised and an argument against affirmative action as practised.
> But there is one misimpression that people seem to have, that might as well be corrected before any hasty actions are taken: the purpose of Harvard is not to educate students. If anything, its primary purpose is to produce research and scholarly work. Nobody should be surprised that the gigantic endowment isn’t put to use in providing top-flight educational experiences for a much larger pool of students; it could be, for sure, but that’s not the goal. The endowment is there to help build new facilities, launch new research initiatives, and attract the best faculty. If it weren’t for the fact that it’s hard to get alumni donations when you don’t have any alumni, serious consideration would doubtless be given to cutting out students entirely. ...
> This is not a value judgment, nor is it a particular complaint about Harvard. It’s true of any top-ranked private research university, including Caltech. ...
I am definitely not a trained ethicist, philosopher, etc...but my personal view is that morality in a society largely comes down to whether and how power is shared. The weak and vulnerable will stay that way without some help, and the powerful will grow more powerful without either rules or morals to check them.
So in this case, I personally would say it's more ethical to favor those born with ability rather than connections because it rewards the behavior you're ostensibly trying to instill (hard work, overcoming odds, etc.). But again, I'm not surprised by these sorts of admissions policies, and I think swinging the other way so radically that they self-destruct is probably more ill-advised than the status quo.
An organization where long-term revenue matches long-term expenses can last forever. There's no need for Harvard to keep piling up their endowment year after year
Put differently, the main goal of an institution is survival. Profit (or a huge endowment, or close connections to the wealthy or those in power) is the primary factor in ensuring survival, and institutions know it.
Harvard has been focused on power over ethics for...well, I'm not sure, but certainly over a hundred years. As much as I would like to believe that admitting better-qualified candidates over "better-connected" candidates (heavy quotes here) will be better for their survival in the long run, I wouldn't put money on it. And, it turns out, neither would Harvard.