If Harvard finds that eliminating AA means that they are getting fewer students from low income households, then they have room for some amount of needs-based admissions within their current aid budget.
Probably not one-for-one, but low income households is another form of “diversity” for Harvard.
Harvard leadership actually wants to educate poor people? Bahahahah that’s funny.
Here’s another. Most public schools draw from well defined geographic areas – the school “boundaries” for neighborhood schools. There are probably sources for socio-economic markers from the Census. In fact, schools may already gather them because they impact statistics on standardized exams. Give extra weight to applicants from schools in “challenged” neighborhoods.
And, increase the weights for “leadership” and class rank. Interesting question, suppose schools like class presidents, and captains of athletic teams. Are Asian-Americans as well represented in those groups as they are in the top rungs of standardized exams? If not, do Asian parents sue for back-door discrimination.
Texas (public Universities) already chooses based on top 10% of class and they have not been sued.
I don’t see how you could win that one.
You really don’t want to end up like NYC with their elite public schools (Stuyvesant HS) which are basically 70% asian (as entry is only exam based). You would end up swinging the proverbial pendulum far too much to the other side of “diversity” i.e. lack of diversity.
Harvard, Princeton, and Yale have been giving full rides to the median US household for 20 years.
They might admit a token poor person every now and then as a publicity stunt, but for the most part their class is full of rich people. “Hey look everyone! Here’s our poor person, we’re virtuous!” Said Harvard.
I think it’s common. At my fancy elite school, I had a roommate who was going there because it was cheaper than the cheap state school he liked better.
Don’t I remember reading that Harvard’s endowment is now so large that assuming they don’t get carried away with construction, salaries, etc. they don’t actually need to charge tuition; and the only reason they do charge tuition on those students who have the means of paying it is because they don’t want the perceived value of a Harvard degree to be diluted by just giving it away?
Certainly. But it’s the old person.matters more than the average.
My last true actuarial job, the president was an actuary that went to Manitoba, and my supervisor went to Western lol. And they’re better actuaries than I’ll ever be, with a uwaterloo degree.
This is especially true in the Toronto job market. Waterloo has an internship program where your last year at uni you intern at a company. As a result, the entry level market for non-Waterloo attendees is extremely difficult.
Not every high school computes class rank. Mine didn’t. We also didn’t elect a class president, although everybody knew which students had the ear of the faculty.
An article that looks at (although not in great detail) one school’s scoring mechanism used as an alternative of explicit affirmative action (hopefully non-paywalled link):
Thanks for sharing.
I saw a thread about proposed adversity scores once before, which considered more variables and was not limited to medical school. It’s a black box where no applicant is allowed to know her own adversity score, and no one but the school knows when or how often it’s a deciding factor in admissions. It would basically be schools saying “trust me, it’s for great justice” while parents are left to wonder whether their kid was rejected because her adversity score wasn’t high enough.
Given how opaque college admissions are already, perhaps that’s not an issue.
I sometimes think we would be better off with (probably stringent) minimum requirements and then random draws.
I’ve heard that suggestion for Ivy schools.
Or they can just increase prices so fewer people apply.
Looks like the days of giving consideration to children of alums and donors seeking admission might be coming to an end.
Article: “The records revealed that 70% of Harvard’s donor-related and legacy applicants are white…” What should that % be? Legacy admissions is, of course, biased. It is not biased toward “white people”. The argument should simply be legacy/non-legacy and omit race.
The NAACP and much of the media has bastardized the word “diversity” into a very narrow definition.
Diversity <> “more black people”.
The stats for Canadian actuaries show that the proportion of Black actuaries in our profession is equivalent to their proportion in the broader Canadian population. There is a small underrepresentation in the Asian and female groups but those are being rectified through new entrants.
The biggest underrepresentation in the Canadian actuarial community is from the Indigenous community. I agree with those who say the outreach has to start early, not just at the university entrance level. We have been trying to do that at the Actuarial Foundation of Canada through our support of programs in elementary and high schools with Indigenous populations. It will be a long time though before we see many Indigenous actuaries. I have only met one during my career.