Universities Really Are Messed Up (says Yale

[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?

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.

My bad, you're right, MIT should read 22%

[Anonymous]

So if they increase financial aid, who exactly is going to pay the difference?

-Other students? Tuition is so high because some schools already redirect up to a third of it to financial aid. The transparency problem in affordability is driven by exactly this.
-Alumni? Yeah, after you disallow legacy preference I’m sure you will have alumni lining up to give more money.
-Taxpayers? Unlikely, there are more urgent social safety net needs.

[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.

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.

I try not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. single test admissions is better than "holistic" admissions that allow admissions officers to limit the number of jews to admit or give some races preferences over others or give preferences to country club sports or people who claim to have a burning passion for medeival literature.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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.

The left love government control when they control the government just as the right love government control when THEY control the government.
Let MERIT control

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Genuine question- why don’t colleges just make tuition free or ultra low cost? It’ll always come off as disastrously pretentious to have tuition rates as sky high as they are. I especially don’t understand how these tiny liberal arts college campuses with $4billion in endowment that put 1/4 of their class on full financial aid and 1/2 the students on some financial aid don’t just drop tuition to $5k or even lower.

Yes, one asnswer is to get rid of all merit and need based aid and just move to the lower rate for everyone. But they do want full pay from the really wealthy and from international students. But no way you can get really wealthy to pay 90,000 when everyone else is paying 20,000. So they make the price 90,000 and then offer steep discounts to everyone else. I agree the discounts should as deep as possible for everyone and tehn let pell grants make up teh difference at the bottom side (and increase pell grants).

I guess my question is what do they fund By the 1/2 who do pay that they couldn’t with endowed funds

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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.

So they can say Whites only?
Or no jews?
Of COURSE they can't do whatever they want.
Can we condition their receipt of federal dollars on them doing what we tell them? Of course!
Can we condition the deductibility of donation made to them on them doing what we tell them? Of course!

The attack on higher education is not a temporary thing. The one area where trump has consistently seen good polling is his treatment of colleges.
EVERY republican is taking note.
Being woke will drawing a target on your own back

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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.

I am willing to make those sacrifices to burn the wokeness out of colleges and universities. They brought it on themselves.

[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?

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.

My bad, you're right, MIT should read 22%

so for this person MIT is 68% public and 22% private. Hmm still not 100%

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote: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.

But they don't have a right to tax exempt status.
They don't have a right to any federal funding.
They don't have a right to any research grants.

If their private status takes away our ability to control our dollars, we should only be funding state schools. Let the private colleges fund their own research and their own student aid and their own donation incentives.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

I think one of the suggestions in the report would be a small, meaningful improvement: put in testing minimums. Would reduce apps and thus increase admissions rate, but would go a long way to getting rid of the lowest performing, "murky" admits from the Legacy, Athlete, Donor, FGLI buckets

But do they actually want to get rid of the lowest-performing scions of mega-donors?

It won't be a huge reach. Legacy admits tend to have higher average stats than the rest of the class at6 Harvard and I would expect it to be the same at any Ivy. Plenty of well trained legacies to choose from.

Legacies have higher than average stats compared to other APPLICANTS, not students. The average legacy student has lower stats. At least at Harvard.

So they're prospects would improve then with 'merit' oriented changes, correct?

The data from SFFA indicates that legacy status gives a 40% boost. IOW, given two identical applicants, if the non-legacy has a 10% chance of admission, the legacy has a 14% chance.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Twist yourself into knots justifying legacy admissions, but if you receive government funding legacy admissions should be abolished.

Ok, let's break it down then. Most govt funding is for grad school research. So keep legacy and keep research funding but give up Pell grants.

Most Ivies would be good with that I suspect. Going any further is social engineering and we should be against that.

Don't forget the tax exempt status. They probably shouldn't keep that if they are giving preferences to mostly rich white people.

Oh and why are we giving any research funding to private colleges when there are so many great R1 flagship state schools?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

I think one of the suggestions in the report would be a small, meaningful improvement: put in testing minimums. Would reduce apps and thus increase admissions rate, but would go a long way to getting rid of the lowest performing, "murky" admits from the Legacy, Athlete, Donor, FGLI buckets

But do they actually want to get rid of the lowest-performing scions of mega-donors?

It won't be a huge reach. Legacy admits tend to have higher average stats than the rest of the class at6 Harvard and I would expect it to be the same at any Ivy. Plenty of well trained legacies to choose from.

Legacies have higher than average stats compared to other APPLICANTS, not students. The average legacy student has lower stats. At least at Harvard.

So they're prospects would improve then with 'merit' oriented changes, correct?

The data from SFFA indicates that legacy status gives a 40% boost. IOW, given two identical applicants, if the non-legacy has a 10% chance of admission, the legacy has a 14% chance.

So it's a thumb on the scale for otherwise equal applicants, it's not given one with lower stats an advantage.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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.

The disdain people would have for academia if we changed our system to mirror China’s would be immense.

Pretty much every poor student that doesn’t go to a prep school would be left behind and couldn’t attend an elite college. This would be a step backwards.

How do you think the SES profile at Tsinghua or Peking compares to Stanford or Harvard?

And is HYPSM the only ladder for social mobility?
Sometimes social mobility from the bottom to the top takes more than a single generation
Go describe our college admissions process in any other country, they will think you must be mistaken.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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?

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.

My bad, you're right, MIT should read 22%

so for this person MIT is 68% public and 22% private. Hmm still not 100%

The rest is mostly international and some home school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

I think one of the suggestions in the report would be a small, meaningful improvement: put in testing minimums. Would reduce apps and thus increase admissions rate, but would go a long way to getting rid of the lowest performing, "murky" admits from the Legacy, Athlete, Donor, FGLI buckets

But do they actually want to get rid of the lowest-performing scions of mega-donors?

It won't be a huge reach. Legacy admits tend to have higher average stats than the rest of the class at6 Harvard and I would expect it to be the same at any Ivy. Plenty of well trained legacies to choose from.

Legacies have higher than average stats compared to other APPLICANTS, not students. The average legacy student has lower stats. At least at Harvard.

So they're prospects would improve then with 'merit' oriented changes, correct?

The data from SFFA indicates that legacy status gives a 40% boost. IOW, given two identical applicants, if the non-legacy has a 10% chance of admission, the legacy has a 14% chance.

So it's a thumb on the scale for otherwise equal applicants, it's not given one with lower stats an advantage.

At some schools, legacy preferences have an effect on admissions comparable to other programs such as athletic recruiting or affirmative action. One study of three selective private research universities in the United States showed the following effects (admissions disadvantage and advantage in terms of SAT points on the 1600-point scale):

African Americans: +230
Hispanics: +185
Asians: -50
Recruited athletes: +200
Legacies (children of alumni): +160[41]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_preferences