from Hacker News

The moral bankruptcy of Ivy League America

by 4cao on 7/5/23, 5:36 PM with 42 comments

  • by mochomocha on 7/5/23, 6:09 PM

    This is a very good summary of my own thoughts regarding the Supreme Court ruling.

    The American obsession with race in this specific case translates into focusing on a more superficial problem and polarizing the debate, as opposed to finding an easier solution to the bigger problem of ALDC admissions (namely: ban them), which I assume would be less controversial.

  • by 4cao on 7/5/23, 5:37 PM

  • by willcipriano on 7/5/23, 5:56 PM

    Schools don't have to be racist in order to end legacy admissions and other non merit based practices. End them all.

  • by csense on 7/5/23, 11:39 PM

    Suppose I start a debate club in my living room.

    Do I have a right to say "Only my friends can join my debate club"? Do I have a right to say "Children of past participants are always welcome here"? Do I have a right to say "Max occupancy: 1800"?

    Most people would say "Yes" to these things.

    What if I hire some marketing experts, and eventually my debate club has a really good "brand" and all sorts of companies want to hire participants at enormous salaries for highly influential positions? Once my debate club is a gateway to money, power and influence, do I still have the right to admit who I want? Or does my branding success somehow create an obligation to make admissions meritocratic, rather than some other kind of -cratic (e.g. autocratic, "My debate club, I decide, and that's the end of it," or aristocratic, "Children of members have an easy path to membership", or plutocratic, "Money talks")?

    At what point does Harvard become different from my debate club?

    What exactly creates a moral (and perhaps legal) obligation that trumps "My debate club, my rules," and necessarily places corresponding limits on Harvard's freedom of association?

  • by wrp on 7/6/23, 1:34 AM

    I find the article hard to respond to, because I don't think it has a coherent point, but I'll comment on some of its apparent assumptions.

    One is that all students go there for a quality education. Since the early 19th century if not the very beginnings, faculty have had to acknowledge that a primary function of these institutions is to serve as a holding place for the (often not very bright) children of the rich until they are old enough to get married and do other grown-up things.

    Another is that the quality of instruction there is atypically high. Lend an ear to complaints about Ivy League grade inflation and you will realize this is bollocks. While Ivy League graduates do tend to have higher career trajectories, this is attributed to admissions being selective for highly driven people, and for networking opportunities with similar others.

    Finally, he assumes the benefits of Ivy League education could be scaled up. For example, suppose Harvard College increased undergrad enrollment from 7K to 40K. What would happen to the networking effect?

  • by 1letterunixname on 7/5/23, 9:51 PM

    Maybe I have a slanted view of some outlier assholes with "The Right"(tm) pedigree, but I came to a conclusion reluctantly that they believed the world owed because they were special and deserving. This included making a killing on services delivered by outsourced foreign workers and restructuring local commodity markets in Africa to enrich themselves first while ignoring externalities such as lower profits for farmers and the preferences of buyers and sellers to make the trade platform useful to them.

  • by dustingetz on 7/5/23, 7:33 PM

    i don’t get why the chief beneficiary of AA is elite whites as quoted by the article conclusion? are they referring to the legacy and the donors? how is that AA?

  • by ThrowawayR2 on 7/5/23, 6:44 PM

    > "The genuinely radical Ivy League option — spending their vast endowments to sharply increase student numbers — is unlikely to be entertained."

    This is often said but doesn't seem to be realistic if one digs into the numbers.

    Endowments aren't one big slush fund that the university can use however they want; they are a collection of individual donations, many of which can only be used in accordance with the donor's wishes. These are called restricted endowments. Harvard is cited as having the largest total endowment and their latest financial report (https://finance.harvard.edu/files/fad/files/fy22_harvard_fin...) on page 12 shows that 70% of their total endowment are restricted endowments with 20% of the total already composed of restricted endowments that are specifically for financial aid. In theory, the 30% of the total endowment that is unrestricted could be redirected to financial aid, increasing the amount of financial aid by 1.5x from endowment revenue only (the overall increase would be much less than 1.5x since financial aid comes from other sources as well) but it's unclear what other impact that would have on university operations.

    tl;dr 1) universities are already using some of their endowments to help students, 2) there are legal limitations on how much more of their endowments they can use to help students even if practical considerations are ignored, 3) if they did so, it wouldn't be enough to "sharply" increase student numbers, and 4) people should really dig into things instead of repeating hot takes from internet pundits at face value.

  • by desireco42 on 7/5/23, 6:34 PM

    Since I get to subscription page, I can only comment that paywall is not the best way to share views

  • by bfeynman on 7/5/23, 8:14 PM

    HN seems to be chock full of people who have vendettas against so called "elite" schools probably because they didn't get in. Which is weird since there also is large number of people who were self taught and didn't even go to school and are very successful. These schools are private businesses, forget private universities being some about some bastion of knowledge and discovery of truth, their primary concern is funding ongoing operations. There are plenty of schools that can provide a similar education if that is what you are going for.