43% of Harvard's White Students are ALDC Admits

[sanantone]

A = Athlete
L = Legacy
D = Donor
C = Children of Harvard Employees

Forty-three percent of Harvard's White student body was admitted under ALDC preferences. Out of the White students who were ALDC admits, roughly three-quarters of them did not have the qualifications to be admitted on merit. Only 16% of ALDC admits are Asian, Black, or Hispanic. 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...s-smart-iq

[ss20ts]

Why would anyone be surprised? Harvard is a legacy school. Make a small donation and your kid can go there because you went there. Lots of schools have legacies.

[dfrecore]

Not shocking.

[Alpha]

There are indications that the age of legacy admissions is coming to an end
An end to legacy admissions? Princeton should follow Amherst College’s lead - The Princetonian (dailyprincetonian.com)

[bjcheung77]

LOL, this is what I was expecting. Most Ivy schools are the same, it's not out of the ordinary, they want one of those 4 options to retain their traditional ways of providing scholarships. Look at the disparities across other Ivy schools, I would guess they would be similar, even if they were to end this later or sooner, it'll take time to get out of those traditions... only time will tell...

[Alpha]

From Harvard, itself
In Admissions, Harvard Favors Those Who Fund It, Internal Emails Show | News | The Harvard Crimson (thecrimson.com)

[alexf.1990]

News reporting like this is both woefully irresponsible and ideologically driven. The racial animosity underlying the reporting is quite clear. The reporter simply didn't look at the study or they simply ripped the parts that support their ideology and posted them. Given the way this article has been regurgitated by various outlets, its not clear whether the journalists are lazy or inept.

The actual study simulates what admissions would look like under various conditions. The results are on Table 11 (Page 49), if anyone is interested. https://www.nber.org/papers/w26316.pdf

Under a model with no legacy preferences, white admits fall by 4%, most other races increase their admits by a similar percentage. Under a model with no athlete preference, white admits fall by 6%. Under a model with no race/legacy/athlete preference, white admits increase by 3%, African American admits decrease by 69%, Hispanic admits decrease by 42%, and Asian American admits increase by 51%.

For all the moaning about ALDC privilege, the actual impact it has on the number of white admits is minuscule. The benefits conferred by the current system on African Americans and Hispanics, and the corresponding penalty for being Asian American, is quite staggering. Of course, those results don't support the ideology of those writing the news, so they're buried, and we're left with the completely false implication that white admits would fall by 43% without ADLC preferences.

[sanantone]

News reporting like this is both woefully irresponsible and ideologically driven. The racial animosity underlying the reporting is quite clear. The reporter simply didn't look at the study or they simply ripped the parts that support their ideology and posted them. Given the way this article has been regurgitated by various outlets, its not clear whether the journalists are lazy or inept.

The actual study simulates what admissions would look like under various conditions. The results are on Table 11 (Page 49), if anyone is interested. https://www.nber.org/papers/w26316.pdf

Under a model with no legacy preferences, white admits fall by 4%, most other races increase their admits by a similar percentage. Under a model with no athlete preference, white admits fall by 6%. Under a model with no race/legacy/athlete preference, white admits increase by 3%, African American admits decrease by 69%, Hispanic admits decrease by 42%, and Asian American admits increase by 51%.

For all the moaning about ALDC privilege, the actual impact it has on the number of white admits is minuscule. The benefits conferred by the current system on African Americans and Hispanics, and the corresponding penalty for being Asian American, is quite staggering. Of course, those results don't support the ideology of those writing the news, so they're buried, and we're left with the completely false implication that white admits would fall by 43% without ADLC preferences.

I guess you just skipped over this part. 

Table 10 also shows what this implies for the overall admit rate for ALDC applicants. The admit rate for all white ALDCs applicants would fall from 43.6% to 11.4%, a drop of over 30 percentage points. We can go one step further and generate an upper bound on the overall LDC admit rate for white applicants when ALDC preferences are eliminated. If we assume that all of the athletes are rejected when ALDC preferences are eliminated, it would imply that the white LDC admit rate would fall from 33.4% to less than 14%. Thus, the average marginal effect of being an LDC on admissions for white applicants is at least 19.4%. 

Legacy admissions policies were designed to be a hidden race/ethnicity preference for White Christians.

https://www.businessinsider.com/legacy-a...es-2013-10

[dfrecore]

I would assume that if you got rid of Legacy, Asians would go up by a lot and everyone else would lose out? So that's the group that's actually getting screwed here, rather than black or Hispanic students. I know that's the case at other schools - if you use CalTech as your base. They are truly color-blind in their admissions, so they have 2x the number of Asians as MIT and other elite schools, which cap their Asian population at around 30%.

[sanantone]

I would assume that if you got rid of Legacy, Asians would go up by a lot and everyone else would lose out?  So that's the group that's actually getting screwed here, rather than black or Hispanic students.  I know that's the case at other schools - if you use CalTech as your base. They are truly color-blind in their admissions, so they have 2x the number of Asians as MIT and other elite schools, which cap their Asian population at around 30%.

Yes, Asians are the ones who are negatively impacted by non-merit-based admissions. A similar situation existed a century ago with Jewish students, which is why we have the LDC preferences to begin with.