Universities Really Are Messed Up (says Yale

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think the lack of transparency is huge. They really need to switch to just having some basic paramaters (SATs/ACTs above X, top X% of graduating class) and then have a lottery for spots.

That sounds like a recipe for going back to when it was designed to admit even more advantaged students then the current system allows. That's certainly not going to help the Fox News viewers that someone was posting about on here.

But a lottery for students who meet certain clear academic thresholds would get rid of the admissions advantages for expensive sports or starting your own charity (that only your parents donate to - I have a friend whose kids used this to get into an Ivy) or getting an internship at your dad's friends company. With Khan academy a smart kid anywhere can study for the SATs and be in the top of their class if they have the drive.

None of this makes any sense.

Sports are only an advantage if you are recruitable and that will not go away under any circumstance. A higher floor might happen like in the NESCAC but the private schools which created college athletics will not be abandoning them.

Nobody got any actual advantage from a non-profit that didn't have real impact. Admissions saw through those things years ago. An internship carries virtually zero weight in a college application unless it was truly special.

It's not about the SATs and that will not change. Private schools get their priorities and they have every right to them. Nobody is entitled to admission to the private school of their choice.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The most overrepresented student at Yale is the private school graduate. By far. That will NEVER change.

64% of matriculants came from public high schools.
36% of matriculants came from independent day, boarding, and religious schools.

when you say "by far" what does that mean?

Only 10% of American kids go to private high schools. Filling over a third of your incoming class with them is very disproportionate.

Lets be honest, private school kids for the most part are far better trained than the average public school kid. Easy to defend, just blame the k-12 system because that is where the issue lies.

if that is true why doesn't MIT take a higher share of private school students? Or why don't Ivy League school take more kids from Stuyvesant and Hunter? the answer is because Ivy League schools have non-academic criteria that favor the rich and connected.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think the lack of transparency is huge. They really need to switch to just having some basic paramaters (SATs/ACTs above X, top X% of graduating class) and then have a lottery for spots.

That sounds like a recipe for going back to when it was designed to admit even more advantaged students then the current system allows. That's certainly not going to help the Fox News viewers that someone was posting about on here.

But a lottery for students who meet certain clear academic thresholds would get rid of the admissions advantages for expensive sports or starting your own charity (that only your parents donate to - I have a friend whose kids used this to get into an Ivy) or getting an internship at your dad's friends company. With Khan academy a smart kid anywhere can study for the SATs and be in the top of their class if they have the drive.

lottery away for your next future crop of private equity vultures and corporate lawyers. Who cares? Maybe we could take a little more time and attention to find our future nuclear physicists and biochemists, etc. not sure I want my transplant surgeon to be the lottery winner.

THose jobs are not open to only people who went to Yale (or a top college). But if Yale said, there is no meaningful difference among students with SATs above 1550 who are in the top 5% of their graduating class so we will do a lottery I would take that over the current system. if they wanted to, they could run separate lotteries by state or to ensure a class that represents the U.S. by family income. But that takes power away from the school so it will never happen.

There is no meaningful difference between a 1500 and a 1550, where do you draw the line? Private institutions get their own priorities.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think the lack of transparency is huge. They really need to switch to just having some basic paramaters (SATs/ACTs above X, top X% of graduating class) and then have a lottery for spots.

That sounds like a recipe for going back to when it was designed to admit even more advantaged students then the current system allows. That's certainly not going to help the Fox News viewers that someone was posting about on here.

But a lottery for students who meet certain clear academic thresholds would get rid of the admissions advantages for expensive sports or starting your own charity (that only your parents donate to - I have a friend whose kids used this to get into an Ivy) or getting an internship at your dad's friends company. With Khan academy a smart kid anywhere can study for the SATs and be in the top of their class if they have the drive.

lottery away for your next future crop of private equity vultures and corporate lawyers. Who cares? Maybe we could take a little more time and attention to find our future nuclear physicists and biochemists, etc. not sure I want my transplant surgeon to be the lottery winner.

THose jobs are not open to only people who went to Yale (or a top college). But if Yale said, there is no meaningful difference among students with SATs above 1550 who are in the top 5% of their graduating class so we will do a lottery I would take that over the current system. if they wanted to, they could run separate lotteries by state or to ensure a class that represents the U.S. by family income. But that takes power away from the school so it will never happen.

I don't think it makes any sense to take some of our top universities that could train our next Einstein and have it just be a lottery. I don't really know how to find the next Einstein, but probably MIT has a better idea of how to do it than we do.

For other disciplines a lottery might make more sense.

Nobody proposed a pure lottery.

Say you have 10,000 students with perfect grades and perfect SAT scores, all ranked number one in their class. A sane university would find the next Einstein by educating them all. After all, based on his own prior record, a 17-year-old Einstein would not get admitted to an American T20 in 2026.

But since educating all highly-qualified students is apparently out of the question, the next most sane approach is to select the lucky few by lottery. Instead we use “who lives in New Mexico” and “who has the most expensive independent counselor.”

Which are perfectly acceptable metrics for a private institution to use. We have public schools for things like lotteries. Doesn't anyone understand the rights infringement that everyone is asking for?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think the lack of transparency is huge. They really need to switch to just having some basic paramaters (SATs/ACTs above X, top X% of graduating class) and then have a lottery for spots.

That sounds like a recipe for going back to when it was designed to admit even more advantaged students then the current system allows. That's certainly not going to help the Fox News viewers that someone was posting about on here.

But a lottery for students who meet certain clear academic thresholds would get rid of the admissions advantages for expensive sports or starting your own charity (that only your parents donate to - I have a friend whose kids used this to get into an Ivy) or getting an internship at your dad's friends company. With Khan academy a smart kid anywhere can study for the SATs and be in the top of their class if they have the drive.

lottery away for your next future crop of private equity vultures and corporate lawyers. Who cares? Maybe we could take a little more time and attention to find our future nuclear physicists and biochemists, etc. not sure I want my transplant surgeon to be the lottery winner.

THose jobs are not open to only people who went to Yale (or a top college). But if Yale said, there is no meaningful difference among students with SATs above 1550 who are in the top 5% of their graduating class so we will do a lottery I would take that over the current system. if they wanted to, they could run separate lotteries by state or to ensure a class that represents the U.S. by family income. But that takes power away from the school so it will never happen.

There is no meaningful difference between a 1500 and a 1550, where do you draw the line? Private institutions get their own priorities.

Except this is a private institution that gets a lot of taxpayer subsidies. if their priority is to educate the rich, I think it is reasonable to ask why they don't pay higher taxes on their endowments.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Unless Yale plans to dramatically increase in size, the only way to end the “murky admissions practices” is to be open about conducting a lottery for everyone over a certain benchmark. There is no fair way to pick a mere 2% from a pool of highly-qualified 17 year olds.

Or the colleges could start demanding more tail end differentiation between students on the SAT.

There are a thousand perfect SAT scores every year. That number used to be in the dozens.

Tsinghua and Beijing do not have trouble selecting the top 0.05% students among 13 million kids based on the Gaokao, which has never seen a perfect score in its history.

They don't by any means achieve what you just said. A single test with a single sitting is guaranteed to not achieve what you asserted just due to normal variation.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The most overrepresented student at Yale is the private school graduate. By far. That will NEVER change.

64% of matriculants came from public high schools.
36% of matriculants came from independent day, boarding, and religious schools.

when you say "by far" what does that mean?

I just looked up Swarthmore they have almost exactly the same breakdown 36 percent independent/religious…

MIT is 14%
Stanford is 27%
Princeton 35%
Harvard 37%

This is misleading.

MIT is 68% public school. Yale is 64% public school..

MIT is 14% private, 8% religious. 9% foreign, 1% home, and 1% other. See how you have to add those all up to get 100% (a little over for rounding)?

Yale doesn't do that. It's 64% public and 36% of matriculants came from independent day, boarding, and religious schools. Religious schools are private schools. Home school is too. International and homeschool are in those numbers (almost all international are private).

Unless you're going to actually do the work, it's probably easier to look at public school period.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The most overrepresented student at Yale is the private school graduate. By far. That will NEVER change.

64% of matriculants came from public high schools.
36% of matriculants came from independent day, boarding, and religious schools.

when you say "by far" what does that mean?

Only 10% of American kids go to private high schools. Filling over a third of your incoming class with them is very disproportionate.

Lets be honest, private school kids for the most part are far better trained than the average public school kid. Easy to defend, just blame the k-12 system because that is where the issue lies.

if that is true why doesn't MIT take a higher share of private school students? Or why don't Ivy League school take more kids from Stuyvesant and Hunter? the answer is because Ivy League schools have non-academic criteria that favor the rich and connected.

also because you didn't look into the numbers enough to see it's not the big giant difference you think,

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The most overrepresented student at Yale is the private school graduate. By far. That will NEVER change.

I would not be so sure.

“When selective admissions seem so inexplicable — or, worse, tilted in ways that benefit the already advantaged — it should come as no surprise that many Americans do not trust the process,” the committee wrote.

I just don’t see how you can ever have an explicable process for undergraduate admissions and an admissions rate under 5%. 17 year olds are just not that fully formed yet. And if they were, college would be pointless.

I can point to half a dozen countries where they do this every year.

But none of them achieve what you think that it does. Cram school privilege is even worse in Asia than privilege here, you are delusional if you believe otherwise. Public school kids in the UK get huge advantages over private school kids because of the former huge admissions imbalances. What you dream of doesn't exist. In some countries testing schemes exist which do not achieve what you believe that they do.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yale committee concludes that colleges and universities have completely lost the plot:

“High costs, murky admissions practices, uneven academic standards and fears about free speech on campuses, the committee said, are among the reasons for widening discontent over higher education’s worthiness.

The findings reflect misgivings that Americans have described across years of polling and interviews. But the report, from a 10-professor panel at one of the nation’s most renowned universities, amounts to a damning depiction of academia’s role in cultivating the political and cultural forces that are reshaping higher education’s place in American life.”


https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/us/yale-report-colleges-unversities-trust.html?unlocked_article_code=1.bVA._ebw.-PVgolGZ4r5r&smid=url-share

Your landscaper could have told you this.

Any FOX viewer could have told you this.

Hopefully they’re not patting themselves on the back about these conclusions.

You don't have to be either one of those things to see the issues.

What are the solutions? Seems like the fox viewers decided that destroying funding for scientific research was the solution and instead spending it on bombing a country to result in sky high energy prices that suck lots and lots and lots of money out of all of our wallets . Great job Fox viewers.

Sometimes you have to cause a ruckus
if you want to fight injustice.

Injustice my ass. The whining just takes us down a road of more government control.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The most overrepresented student at Yale is the private school graduate. By far. That will NEVER change.

64% of matriculants came from public high schools.
36% of matriculants came from independent day, boarding, and religious schools.

when you say "by far" what does that mean?

Only 10% of American kids go to private high schools. Filling over a third of your incoming class with them is very disproportionate.

Lets be honest, private school kids for the most part are far better trained than the average public school kid. Easy to defend, just blame the k-12 system because that is where the issue lies.

if that is true why doesn't MIT take a higher share of private school students? Or why don't Ivy League school take more kids from Stuyvesant and Hunter? the answer is because Ivy League schools have non-academic criteria that favor the rich and connected.

also because you didn't look into the numbers enough to see it's not the big giant difference you think,

I am sure that it isn't what you are hoping to find. Step one would be to see if you can find application differences. Do that then report back. What you are trying to say is that the Ivies have criteria which do not favor incessant grinding of math and sciences which is what happens in the communities which you describe because that is what was successful where they came from. Chinese, Indian, Korean, and Japanese universities are focused on training large numbers of engineers. They have public schools and we also have public schools for that. Quit trying to bend private universities to what you want. They have every right to do what they want.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yale committee concludes that colleges and universities have completely lost the plot:

“High costs, murky admissions practices, uneven academic standards and fears about free speech on campuses, the committee said, are among the reasons for widening discontent over higher education’s worthiness.

The findings reflect misgivings that Americans have described across years of polling and interviews. But the report, from a 10-professor panel at one of the nation’s most renowned universities, amounts to a damning depiction of academia’s role in cultivating the political and cultural forces that are reshaping higher education’s place in American life.”


https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/us/yale-report-colleges-unversities-trust.html?unlocked_article_code=1.bVA._ebw.-PVgolGZ4r5r&smid=url-share

Your landscaper could have told you this.

Any FOX viewer could have told you this.

Hopefully they’re not patting themselves on the back about these conclusions.

You don't have to be either one of those things to see the issues.

What are the solutions? Seems like the fox viewers decided that destroying funding for scientific research was the solution and instead spending it on bombing a country to result in sky high energy prices that suck lots and lots and lots of money out of all of our wallets . Great job Fox viewers.

Sometimes you have to cause a ruckus
if you want to fight injustice.

A ruckus? An economy headed for a recession. A job market in the toilet for yale graduates and every other graduate. Inflation going up prospects for our kids futures going down That's not a ruckus to fight it justice that is cutting off your nose, lips, ears, eyes, cheeks and chin to spite your face

Just take yale and get the f*** if that's what it takes to get rid of you. You sound like such a genius! You'll be able Make Yale so much better.

[Anonymous]

These are private institutions with their own priorities which they have every right to. The idea that admissions is somehow hierarchical in terms of scores and grades needs to just go away. Elite schools want an interesting mix of interests and talents. They are assembling a class. The fact that a kid might have better admissions chances from having collected rare western wildflowers and being able to have a discussion on them or played violin at an incredible level, or being a top volleyball player while keeping high grades than someone at the top of their class in high school with high test scores is fine. Actually, it is more than fine.

Maybe we need to separate the undergraduate portions of these schools from the graduate portions. The grant money is actually for the grad schools and their research anyway so why pretend. Admissions to the grad schools is pretty straightforward and subject based which makes sense for them as well. The undergraduate schools could make sure that they aren't admitting a disproportionate number of their grad students from their undergraduates and the undergraduate schools can do as they please.

[Anonymous]

Older Ivy grad here. So many younger graduates from my Alma mater just seem like hyper-sensitive useless deadbeats. All talk and no action. Whiny. Just yuck.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Older Ivy grad here. So many younger graduates from my Alma mater just seem like hyper-sensitive useless deadbeats. All talk and no action. Whiny. Just yuck.

Ikr? Can they please let in some better students that could produce insightful posts like yours?