Universities Really Are Messed Up (says Yale

[Anonymous]

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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.

The pool of truly highly qualified applicants is much smaller than the number who appear highly qualified on paper. grade inflation, test optional, superscoring, score choice, fake ECs all make it highly difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff, turns college admissions into a cynical game of PR and marketing.

It’s not that you’re wrong, it’s that Yale and its peers have no ability to reverse grade inflation or eliminate the cynical game of PR and marketing, and their admissions offices have no ability to distinguish between the truly qualified and those who only look qualified on paper. Picking the 2% who are truly qualified from a very large pool of people who appear to be truly qualified is impossible.

Qualified for what? Yale needs to have biochem majors and math majors and history majors and drama students and hockey players on and on. You don't get that with a lottery. They can change to a lottery but it fundamentally changes lots of things about current American colleges.

And what good is freeing up science research dollars because you instituted a lottery and ending up without the students interested in pursuing the research? That makes no sense.

I see nothing in this report that indicates a lottery system is going to be used by American universities.

I could do without Hockey players.

You know what would be popular - if the ivy League together got rid of 20% of their sports. Hockey is popular, I get it. But how about moving the following from varsity/recruited sports to club sports:


Mens sailing
Women sailing
Mens skiing
Womens skiing
mens water polo
womens water polo
mens squash
womens squash
mens fencing
womens fencing
I'd also get rid of mens field hockey and women's wrestling but maybe that's too controversial

if you have sports that dont bring in 30 spectators at home, it's a club sport. treat it like one.

get rid of legacy at the same time.

get rid of the Z list.

and put in place SAT minimums.

announce it all at once.

Wouldn't it just be easier to have your kid play by the existing rules rather than trying to reshape it in your image? Get your kid into sailing, squash, water polo and fencing.

Do as much of that as you like but it has nothing to do with pursuing higher education. Makes no sense.

It makes complete sense if they are important to the schools which you want to attend. These schools should not have to align to your priorities, that is a ridiculous level of entitlement. Just remember, the school with the largest D3 atjhletics program is.....MIT. Virtually all of the schools which people on here want to attend are serious about athletics. You might want to ask yourself "what do they know that I don't?"

The fencing team is not the draw for Harvard applicants that you think it is. It does almost nothing for its reputation.

The fencing team is almost all Asian....bite the hand which feeds you. The irony is astounding.

Asians feed me?

[Anonymous]

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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.

The pool of truly highly qualified applicants is much smaller than the number who appear highly qualified on paper. grade inflation, test optional, superscoring, score choice, fake ECs all make it highly difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff, turns college admissions into a cynical game of PR and marketing.

It’s not that you’re wrong, it’s that Yale and its peers have no ability to reverse grade inflation or eliminate the cynical game of PR and marketing, and their admissions offices have no ability to distinguish between the truly qualified and those who only look qualified on paper. Picking the 2% who are truly qualified from a very large pool of people who appear to be truly qualified is impossible.

Qualified for what? Yale needs to have biochem majors and math majors and history majors and drama students and hockey players on and on. You don't get that with a lottery. They can change to a lottery but it fundamentally changes lots of things about current American colleges.

And what good is freeing up science research dollars because you instituted a lottery and ending up without the students interested in pursuing the research? That makes no sense.

I see nothing in this report that indicates a lottery system is going to be used by American universities.

I could do without Hockey players.

You know what would be popular - if the ivy League together got rid of 20% of their sports. Hockey is popular, I get it. But how about moving the following from varsity/recruited sports to club sports:


Mens sailing
Women sailing
Mens skiing
Womens skiing
mens water polo
womens water polo
mens squash
womens squash
mens fencing
womens fencing
I'd also get rid of mens field hockey and women's wrestling but maybe that's too controversial

if you have sports that dont bring in 30 spectators at home, it's a club sport. treat it like one.

get rid of legacy at the same time.

get rid of the Z list.

and put in place SAT minimums.

announce it all at once.

There is an SAT minimum.

When top schools had kids with only top scores and no nationally ranked EC the drop out rate was high because only smart kids can’t handle being in the bottom 30% of the class and someone has to be.

I call BS. See: Caltech.

Or pretty much any school with the word tehnology in the name.

[Anonymous]

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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.

We could do that and give up the greatest basic research apparatus in the history of mankind.

Or, you could quit conflating the graduate side of the universities with the undergraduate side.

I conflate the two because they are the same. You are making an artificial distinction.

Do you intend to hold all republicans responsible for trump? Why? Can't you make the distinction between trump and the rest of the party?

The distinction isn’t artificial, it just isn’t something that you want to contemplate because it doesn’t fit your narrative. Same goes for your republican comment. I was a republican for 35 years. Anyone that voted for that POS deserves whatever shame they get. They enabled the the grifter. The backlash will be hard.

The backlash will be temporary. It always is, but the free political points from bashing DEI at colleges is permanent for the foreseeable future.

Why can't ALL the research at Harvard be done at state schools? If ALL the funding goes there, you don't think the researchers will follow?

They might and that would be fine. My issue is with demanding that institutions drop their priorities for what another group believes to be the "correct" priorities. It's just fundamentally wrong.

Harvard can keep doing what its doing but stop whining about the loss of funding.

Stop complaining about your kid dying of diseases if you don’t want to fund research

We can fund the research at U Mass or UCLA.

[Anonymous]

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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.

Wreak havoc on the country and the world is worth it because you don't like college admissions policies. That is just stupid.

Anyway the backlash is coming. The good for nobody GOP is losing badly in so many recent contests and rightly so. Cant happen soon enough. Reforms to college admissions can happen without burning down the place you fools

No it can't, they don't take you seriously unless you burn the place down. This is the same reason black people riot, nobody takes their concerns seriously until they start burning shit down. A year's worth of rioting 5 years ago and how much police brutality have we had since then? A lot less.
They could have fixed that shit a long time ago, we had the technology to hold cops accountable. But now that people realize that bad things can happen when you let cops kill young black men without much in the way of consequences, we started seeing consequences and with those consequences, we saw fewer bad shootings.

A few years disruption of scientific research is horrible, but worth it. People will die because of delayed scientific discovery, economic growth will be delayed, the consequences are bad for everyone but nobody was taking admissions reform seriously, colleges weren't really obeying SFFA, we had to burn the place down.
If colleges had not lost the plot like they did, this would never have been an issue.
Trump is chemotherapy, the poison that you use to burn out the more deadly disease.
And we are already seeing the changes in admissions and the self reflection by the ivory towers in the OP.

Not following SFFA is not worse than the complete destruction of global US hegemony. Not for Americans, anyway.

One must understand that on DCUM "not following the SFFA" is code for not letting in hordes of Asian drones based on SAT scores. They have a very selective reading of SFFA.

There is only one reading of SFFA. Don't discriminate on the basis of race. I don't see anything in there about legacies or sports or FGLI.

[Anonymous]

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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.

We could do that and give up the greatest basic research apparatus in the history of mankind.

Or, you could quit conflating the graduate side of the universities with the undergraduate side.

I conflate the two because they are the same. You are making an artificial distinction.

Do you intend to hold all republicans responsible for trump? Why? Can't you make the distinction between trump and the rest of the party?

The distinction isn’t artificial, it just isn’t something that you want to contemplate because it doesn’t fit your narrative. Same goes for your republican comment. I was a republican for 35 years. Anyone that voted for that POS deserves whatever shame they get. They enabled the the grifter. The backlash will be hard.

The backlash will be temporary. It always is, but the free political points from bashing DEI at colleges is permanent for the foreseeable future.

Why can't ALL the research at Harvard be done at state schools? If ALL the funding goes there, you don't think the researchers will follow?

They might and that would be fine. My issue is with demanding that institutions drop their priorities for what another group believes to be the "correct" priorities. It's just fundamentally wrong.

Harvard can keep doing what its doing but stop whining about the loss of funding.

Who is whining about the funding? The whiners here keep talking about squash and sailing. Misplaced priorities, indeed.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

We could do that and give up the greatest basic research apparatus in the history of mankind.

Or, you could quit conflating the graduate side of the universities with the undergraduate side.

I conflate the two because they are the same. You are making an artificial distinction.

Do you intend to hold all republicans responsible for trump? Why? Can't you make the distinction between trump and the rest of the party?

The distinction isn’t artificial, it just isn’t something that you want to contemplate because it doesn’t fit your narrative. Same goes for your republican comment. I was a republican for 35 years. Anyone that voted for that POS deserves whatever shame they get. They enabled the the grifter. The backlash will be hard.

The backlash will be temporary. It always is, but the free political points from bashing DEI at colleges is permanent for the foreseeable future.

Why can't ALL the research at Harvard be done at state schools? If ALL the funding goes there, you don't think the researchers will follow?

They might and that would be fine. My issue is with demanding that institutions drop their priorities for what another group believes to be the "correct" priorities. It's just fundamentally wrong.

Harvard can keep doing what its doing but stop whining about the loss of funding.

Stop complaining about your kid dying of diseases if you don’t want to fund research

We can fund the research at U Mass or UCLA.

That's not how research works. They don't hand out the grants and ask UMass to do the research. You have the research team apply for the grants and win it. Does UMass have the research team doing the research on your kid's disease? do they?

[Anonymous]

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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.

The pool of truly highly qualified applicants is much smaller than the number who appear highly qualified on paper. grade inflation, test optional, superscoring, score choice, fake ECs all make it highly difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff, turns college admissions into a cynical game of PR and marketing.

It’s not that you’re wrong, it’s that Yale and its peers have no ability to reverse grade inflation or eliminate the cynical game of PR and marketing, and their admissions offices have no ability to distinguish between the truly qualified and those who only look qualified on paper. Picking the 2% who are truly qualified from a very large pool of people who appear to be truly qualified is impossible.

Qualified for what? Yale needs to have biochem majors and math majors and history majors and drama students and hockey players on and on. You don't get that with a lottery. They can change to a lottery but it fundamentally changes lots of things about current American colleges.

And what good is freeing up science research dollars because you instituted a lottery and ending up without the students interested in pursuing the research? That makes no sense.

I see nothing in this report that indicates a lottery system is going to be used by American universities.

I could do without Hockey players.

You know what would be popular - if the ivy League together got rid of 20% of their sports. Hockey is popular, I get it. But how about moving the following from varsity/recruited sports to club sports:


Mens sailing
Women sailing
Mens skiing
Womens skiing
mens water polo
womens water polo
mens squash
womens squash
mens fencing
womens fencing
I'd also get rid of mens field hockey and women's wrestling but maybe that's too controversial

if you have sports that dont bring in 30 spectators at home, it's a club sport. treat it like one.

get rid of legacy at the same time.

get rid of the Z list.

and put in place SAT minimums.

announce it all at once.

I am fine with giving up sports recruiting. It favors wealthy kids like most other things but has no academic purpose.

You are fine with it, so what. The Ivies have been recruiting for athletics for 125 years, it's important to them and they have every right to it. They shouldn't have to give one inch on sports recruiting until every other school does. Why should they disadvantage themselves relative to Alabama any more than they already do by not offering scholarships??

Because they want to get research dollars from the government. What is it you are missing about this conversation?

So no research money for Alabama right? What about Cal? UCLA? Pitt, Michigan, etc.? Can you see the flaw in your thinking?

Face it, you are just hunting prestige.

I guess you think every research institution is created equal. The researchers compete for research dollars in theory based on the metrics that they use to award the research money. It's not a lottery. They take it away from certain research projects because of politics and they're not just giving it to Alabama. They are eliminating the budget .

All of the named schools receive huge research dollars including Alabama. If eliminating sports recruiting is a requirement for one group to get money it will need to apply to all.

Certain groups here are delighted at the idea of eliminating athletics recruiting at the Ivies but it won't happen because they can't be singled out in the long run (which is why the nonsense going on will end) and requiring it would have an unacceptable blast radius. The best that they can hope for is a higher floor which still isn't helping them.

I don't think you're paying any attention at all. Of course you can single out the ivies. You can single out whoever you want. That is exactly what is happening right now. In fact, Yale has been singled out less than some others, but they were the ones that did this report.

Certain groups are reading the 'report' in the way that they want to see things. I haven't seen the report but but from all of the reporting that I have seen there hasn't been any talk of eliminating athletic recruiting at all. You are more likely to see a higher floor to ensure that there is less chatter about 'unqualified' athletes. They said "reduce the impact of recruiting preferences", not reduce the number of recruits. They could easily drop squash, fencing, maybe even golf. Nobody will care except the families of the Asian kids now dropped who will feel that the rules are changed as soon as they got a seat. The alumni won't care. They try to drop crew or sailing there will be huge alumni pressure, just ask Stanford how that went.

The recent years are a good opportunity for the schools to course correct on DEI which was a huge over rotation but they think long term and can wait out the administration knowing that things will course correct starting as soon as this fall after the mid-terms. I welcome fixes but athletics aren't going away, legacy and other preferences aren't going away, holistic admissions isn't going away.

Clearly dei is not the only thing at all. Golf recruits, football recruits, legacy admissions rich people that donate a lot of money getting in... All of that pisses people off.

It honestly doesn't matter what are the criteria. People with money will invest in getting an advantage for that thing. Why do you think youth sports is literally a billion dollar business? Get rid of the sports recruiting. We're going to have a zillion dollar cram schools get rid of the testing. We'll have something else. If anyone can figure out how to get an advantage with money, someone will have a business to get that money.

[Anonymous]

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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.

The pool of truly highly qualified applicants is much smaller than the number who appear highly qualified on paper. grade inflation, test optional, superscoring, score choice, fake ECs all make it highly difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff, turns college admissions into a cynical game of PR and marketing.

It’s not that you’re wrong, it’s that Yale and its peers have no ability to reverse grade inflation or eliminate the cynical game of PR and marketing, and their admissions offices have no ability to distinguish between the truly qualified and those who only look qualified on paper. Picking the 2% who are truly qualified from a very large pool of people who appear to be truly qualified is impossible.

Qualified for what? Yale needs to have biochem majors and math majors and history majors and drama students and hockey players on and on. You don't get that with a lottery. They can change to a lottery but it fundamentally changes lots of things about current American colleges.

And what good is freeing up science research dollars because you instituted a lottery and ending up without the students interested in pursuing the research? That makes no sense.

I see nothing in this report that indicates a lottery system is going to be used by American universities.

I could do without Hockey players.

You know what would be popular - if the ivy League together got rid of 20% of their sports. Hockey is popular, I get it. But how about moving the following from varsity/recruited sports to club sports:


Mens sailing
Women sailing
Mens skiing
Womens skiing
mens water polo
womens water polo
mens squash
womens squash
mens fencing
womens fencing
I'd also get rid of mens field hockey and women's wrestling but maybe that's too controversial

if you have sports that dont bring in 30 spectators at home, it's a club sport. treat it like one.

get rid of legacy at the same time.

get rid of the Z list.

and put in place SAT minimums.

announce it all at once.

Wouldn't it just be easier to have your kid play by the existing rules rather than trying to reshape it in your image? Get your kid into sailing, squash, water polo and fencing.

Do as much of that as you like but it has nothing to do with pursuing higher education. Makes no sense.

The school values sports. You don’t. Find a school that aliwoth your priorities.

The Yale report indicates that that ship is sailing. Has nothing to do with me. They want to get rid of things like recruiting for sailing that is angering the country. Yale probably needs research dollars more than it needs a sailing team.

People are angry about sailing?

Asians are angry about sports.

Asian here.

Lots of assumptions about asians and sports but the asians I know are not angry about sports. We have the resources to pay for sports. The poor asians don't but they probably get the FGLI preference.
We think some of these preferences are weird (giving a preference to professors kids would be considered pretty corrupt in my home country) but it doesn't bother us.
If you stack up all the preferences, the people who do NOT get a preference are native born white people who don't have the money to provide their kids an edge either through long term expensive activities or just a flat donation to institutions.

If you see an asian get really upset about testing, they probably poor or grew up poor. Testing is seen as a way to disrupt wealth and privilege in asia, here it is seen as reinforcing wealth and privilege.
Affluent asians are disproportionately alumni at some place that is worth having a legacy preference to. 5% of americans are asians, 20% of the alumni at the top schools are asian. The affluent asians might think legacy preferences are weird but we sort of like them. Stanford's recent stand against eliminating legacy preferences was met with a small sigh of relief by some families.

[Anonymous]

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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.

The pool of truly highly qualified applicants is much smaller than the number who appear highly qualified on paper. grade inflation, test optional, superscoring, score choice, fake ECs all make it highly difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff, turns college admissions into a cynical game of PR and marketing.

It’s not that you’re wrong, it’s that Yale and its peers have no ability to reverse grade inflation or eliminate the cynical game of PR and marketing, and their admissions offices have no ability to distinguish between the truly qualified and those who only look qualified on paper. Picking the 2% who are truly qualified from a very large pool of people who appear to be truly qualified is impossible.

Qualified for what? Yale needs to have biochem majors and math majors and history majors and drama students and hockey players on and on. You don't get that with a lottery. They can change to a lottery but it fundamentally changes lots of things about current American colleges.

And what good is freeing up science research dollars because you instituted a lottery and ending up without the students interested in pursuing the research? That makes no sense.

I see nothing in this report that indicates a lottery system is going to be used by American universities.

I could do without Hockey players.

You know what would be popular - if the ivy League together got rid of 20% of their sports. Hockey is popular, I get it. But how about moving the following from varsity/recruited sports to club sports:


Mens sailing
Women sailing
Mens skiing
Womens skiing
mens water polo
womens water polo
mens squash
womens squash
mens fencing
womens fencing
I'd also get rid of mens field hockey and women's wrestling but maybe that's too controversial

if you have sports that dont bring in 30 spectators at home, it's a club sport. treat it like one.

get rid of legacy at the same time.

get rid of the Z list.

and put in place SAT minimums.

announce it all at once.

There is an SAT minimum.

When top schools had kids with only top scores and no nationally ranked EC the drop out rate was high because only smart kids can’t handle being in the bottom 30% of the class and someone has to be.

I call BS. See: Caltech.

Or pretty much any school with the word tehnology in the name.

Technology has destroyed our world. Perhaps we should not have just let SAT cheaters be the ones who get into these schools.

Perhaps if we had athletes and artists we wouldn’t be in such a terrible situation,

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:“
People not from the west but living in the west overlook the downsides and advocate for a system that they understand how to navigate vs one that they do not understand. There is much less angst from the native born. This isn’t unique to the top privates, it applies equally to the top UC schools given that many of these families live in CA. Our system of private universities is unique and the fact that they aren’t focused on peak academics but rather a high baseline then other factors is also pretty unique.

They want to attend these schools because if their prestige but at the same want to change them in ways that would reduce their prestige longer term.”

+1
Well put.

I was born here and I remember a time when the SATs counted for a hell of a lot more than it does now.

Holistic admissions was created to keep Jews out of Harvard. Literally created to give admissions officers enough discretion to discriminate.

SATs were supposed to be a tool find a diamond in the rough, not become a money generating company that makes money off the fear of parents.

How much money do you think the co0llege board makes from the SATs?
They make twice as much from AP testing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The whole attraction of yale etc is that they are full of elite rich people who net work with each other and occasionally with a smart climber who manages to get in with the net work - it has nothing to do with the actual academics - if you went to a lottery system it would just be another version of top public schools - getting rid of the network through getting rid of legacies donors etc. is missing the whole point of these sorting hats for the ultra connected and rich - which alot of our children wouldn't get the benefit of even if they got in

A lot of people see these places as stepping stones to higher academic goals.

[Anonymous]

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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.

The pool of truly highly qualified applicants is much smaller than the number who appear highly qualified on paper. grade inflation, test optional, superscoring, score choice, fake ECs all make it highly difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff, turns college admissions into a cynical game of PR and marketing.

It’s not that you’re wrong, it’s that Yale and its peers have no ability to reverse grade inflation or eliminate the cynical game of PR and marketing, and their admissions offices have no ability to distinguish between the truly qualified and those who only look qualified on paper. Picking the 2% who are truly qualified from a very large pool of people who appear to be truly qualified is impossible.

Qualified for what? Yale needs to have biochem majors and math majors and history majors and drama students and hockey players on and on. You don't get that with a lottery. They can change to a lottery but it fundamentally changes lots of things about current American colleges.

And what good is freeing up science research dollars because you instituted a lottery and ending up without the students interested in pursuing the research? That makes no sense.

I see nothing in this report that indicates a lottery system is going to be used by American universities.

I could do without Hockey players.

You know what would be popular - if the ivy League together got rid of 20% of their sports. Hockey is popular, I get it. But how about moving the following from varsity/recruited sports to club sports:


Mens sailing
Women sailing
Mens skiing
Womens skiing
mens water polo
womens water polo
mens squash
womens squash
mens fencing
womens fencing
I'd also get rid of mens field hockey and women's wrestling but maybe that's too controversial

if you have sports that dont bring in 30 spectators at home, it's a club sport. treat it like one.

get rid of legacy at the same time.

get rid of the Z list.

and put in place SAT minimums.

announce it all at once.

Wouldn't it just be easier to have your kid play by the existing rules rather than trying to reshape it in your image? Get your kid into sailing, squash, water polo and fencing.

Do as much of that as you like but it has nothing to do with pursuing higher education. Makes no sense.

The school values sports. You don’t. Find a school that aliwoth your priorities.

The Yale report indicates that that ship is sailing. Has nothing to do with me. They want to get rid of things like recruiting for sailing that is angering the country. Yale probably needs research dollars more than it needs a sailing team.

People are angry about sailing?

Did you read the article? Admissions preferences. That means VIP donors, athletes, legacy etc.

I guess they can still have a sailing team but no more special admissions for sailors. They will have to work with the students that get in based on academic work.

And then it will just become another school, just like so many others. Nothing special. It's almost as if you have no idea what makes some schools special.

Do these institutions want the millions in research dollars or not? Sorry but the football team and the sailing team, etc. Are pissing off the taxpaying voters.

The big 5 are not pissing off the voters.

The Big 5?

These schools are only pissing off two groups:

People who resent anything given to black people.

Asian strivers who feel that their priorities aren't favored.

Asians don't care about athletic recruiting.
Of all the weirdness that is college admissions in the US, rewarding athletic skills that takes 20 hours a week for years on end seems much less crazy than some of the other preferences.

[Anonymous]

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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.

The pool of truly highly qualified applicants is much smaller than the number who appear highly qualified on paper. grade inflation, test optional, superscoring, score choice, fake ECs all make it highly difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff, turns college admissions into a cynical game of PR and marketing.

It’s not that you’re wrong, it’s that Yale and its peers have no ability to reverse grade inflation or eliminate the cynical game of PR and marketing, and their admissions offices have no ability to distinguish between the truly qualified and those who only look qualified on paper. Picking the 2% who are truly qualified from a very large pool of people who appear to be truly qualified is impossible.

Qualified for what? Yale needs to have biochem majors and math majors and history majors and drama students and hockey players on and on. You don't get that with a lottery. They can change to a lottery but it fundamentally changes lots of things about current American colleges.

And what good is freeing up science research dollars because you instituted a lottery and ending up without the students interested in pursuing the research? That makes no sense.

I see nothing in this report that indicates a lottery system is going to be used by American universities.

I could do without Hockey players.

You know what would be popular - if the ivy League together got rid of 20% of their sports. Hockey is popular, I get it. But how about moving the following from varsity/recruited sports to club sports:


Mens sailing
Women sailing
Mens skiing
Womens skiing
mens water polo
womens water polo
mens squash
womens squash
mens fencing
womens fencing
I'd also get rid of mens field hockey and women's wrestling but maybe that's too controversial

if you have sports that dont bring in 30 spectators at home, it's a club sport. treat it like one.

get rid of legacy at the same time.

get rid of the Z list.

and put in place SAT minimums.

announce it all at once.

I am fine with giving up sports recruiting. It favors wealthy kids like most other things but has no academic purpose.

You are fine with it, so what. The Ivies have been recruiting for athletics for 125 years, it's important to them and they have every right to it. They shouldn't have to give one inch on sports recruiting until every other school does. Why should they disadvantage themselves relative to Alabama any more than they already do by not offering scholarships??

DP. Now that’s funny. (You were trying to be funny, right?).

It's a fair point. What's fair for the Ivy leagues is fair for all Privates correct?....Notre Dame, Clemson, USC. The Ivies are already restricting themselves. Where does it stop? Certain groups only care about because they are chasing prestige. How come they aren't complaining about athletics at Purdue which is generally a better engineering school with D1 scholarships? The answer is Prestige....nothing more.

Which groups are complaining about athletic recruiting?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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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.

The pool of truly highly qualified applicants is much smaller than the number who appear highly qualified on paper. grade inflation, test optional, superscoring, score choice, fake ECs all make it highly difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff, turns college admissions into a cynical game of PR and marketing.

It’s not that you’re wrong, it’s that Yale and its peers have no ability to reverse grade inflation or eliminate the cynical game of PR and marketing, and their admissions offices have no ability to distinguish between the truly qualified and those who only look qualified on paper. Picking the 2% who are truly qualified from a very large pool of people who appear to be truly qualified is impossible.

Qualified for what? Yale needs to have biochem majors and math majors and history majors and drama students and hockey players on and on. You don't get that with a lottery. They can change to a lottery but it fundamentally changes lots of things about current American colleges.

And what good is freeing up science research dollars because you instituted a lottery and ending up without the students interested in pursuing the research? That makes no sense.

I see nothing in this report that indicates a lottery system is going to be used by American universities.

I could do without Hockey players.

You know what would be popular - if the ivy League together got rid of 20% of their sports. Hockey is popular, I get it. But how about moving the following from varsity/recruited sports to club sports:


Mens sailing
Women sailing
Mens skiing
Womens skiing
mens water polo
womens water polo
mens squash
womens squash
mens fencing
womens fencing
I'd also get rid of mens field hockey and women's wrestling but maybe that's too controversial

if you have sports that dont bring in 30 spectators at home, it's a club sport. treat it like one.

get rid of legacy at the same time.

get rid of the Z list.

and put in place SAT minimums.

announce it all at once.

Wouldn't it just be easier to have your kid play by the existing rules rather than trying to reshape it in your image? Get your kid into sailing, squash, water polo and fencing.

Do as much of that as you like but it has nothing to do with pursuing higher education. Makes no sense.

The school values sports. You don’t. Find a school that aliwoth your priorities.

The Yale report indicates that that ship is sailing. Has nothing to do with me. They want to get rid of things like recruiting for sailing that is angering the country. Yale probably needs research dollars more than it needs a sailing team.

People are angry about sailing?

Asians are angry about sports.

Asian here.

Lots of assumptions about asians and sports but the asians I know are not angry about sports. We have the resources to pay for sports. The poor asians don't but they probably get the FGLI preference.
We think some of these preferences are weird (giving a preference to professors kids would be considered pretty corrupt in my home country) but it doesn't bother us.
If you stack up all the preferences, the people who do NOT get a preference are native born white people who don't have the money to provide their kids an edge either through long term expensive activities or just a flat donation to institutions.

If you see an asian get really upset about testing, they probably poor or grew up poor. Testing is seen as a way to disrupt wealth and privilege in asia, here it is seen as reinforcing wealth and privilege.
Affluent asians are disproportionately alumni at some place that is worth having a legacy preference to. 5% of americans are asians, 20% of the alumni at the top schools are asian. The affluent asians might think legacy preferences are weird but we sort of like them. Stanford's recent stand against eliminating legacy preferences was met with a small sigh of relief by some families.

So nobody is actually mad about anything? Glad we cleared all that up. We’ve eliminated all the people who might have a grievance except poor whites. I don’t think they are the ones desperate to get into Yale in the first place so sounds like we’re all good here.

[Anonymous]

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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.

We could do that and give up the greatest basic research apparatus in the history of mankind.

Or, you could quit conflating the graduate side of the universities with the undergraduate side.

I conflate the two because they are the same. You are making an artificial distinction.

Do you intend to hold all republicans responsible for trump? Why? Can't you make the distinction between trump and the rest of the party?

The distinction isn’t artificial, it just isn’t something that you want to contemplate because it doesn’t fit your narrative. Same goes for your republican comment. I was a republican for 35 years. Anyone that voted for that POS deserves whatever shame they get. They enabled the the grifter. The backlash will be hard.

The backlash will be temporary. It always is, but the free political points from bashing DEI at colleges is permanent for the foreseeable future.

Why can't ALL the research at Harvard be done at state schools? If ALL the funding goes there, you don't think the researchers will follow?

They might and that would be fine. My issue is with demanding that institutions drop their priorities for what another group believes to be the "correct" priorities. It's just fundamentally wrong.

Harvard can keep doing what its doing but stop whining about the loss of funding.

Stop complaining about your kid dying of diseases if you don’t want to fund research

We can fund the research at U Mass or UCLA.

That's not how research works. They don't hand out the grants and ask UMass to do the research. You have the research team apply for the grants and win it. Does UMass have the research team doing the research on your kid's disease? do they?

No but the research team that used to do it can move to U Mass.