Universities Really Are Messed Up (says Yale

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I find it interesting that people seem to think private universities are required to accept and educate the "smartest" kids that apply, however you define smartest (test scores, GPA, rigor, etc).

What if schools like Yale, which has been around since before the country was founded, did an analysis and decided, "It is better for the future of the nation if we teach critical thinking, morality, ethics, history and leadership skills to idiotic wealthy and powerful children (GW Bush, Don Trump Jr), because like it or not, those children will have an outsized impact on the world, rather than only teach the top .1% smartest kids, who are capable of learning on their own without us."

Why can't a school decide that dumb legacies are actually the most important people to educate?

They can do so without our tax dollars or tax exempt status.

[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.

Then get rid of all private education from kids on up. No tax advantage dollars or research dollars for any of it including religious schools

Removing tax exempt status is not necessary because education is explicitly a tax exempt purpose unless they are illegally discriminating. That is in a law that was passed by congress.

But research funding is usually granted by the executive, it can be sent to Harvard or UNC. The law does not care.

Okay then this is clearly just politics. Harvard is to be punished because of politics. Yale somehow it's not going to get as severe punishment because of politics or corruption or whatever it is.

What small potatoes in the big scheme of things. I mean we literally got into yet another war in the Middle East and gave everything away to billionaires because of ivy league college admissions and trans kids and landscapers being immigrants instead of your next door neighbor's 8th grader? We are stupid.

It takes two to tango. if the Ivy league didn't have to go that far. the trans issue didn't have to get so extreme. the illegal alien issue could have been addressed sooner.

Sometimes you got to blow shit up so they don't forget that there are consequences.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yale has traditionally been a home for conservative Republicans: William Howard Taft, his son Robert Taft ("Mr. Republican"), Bush the elder and Bush the younger. William F. Buckley, Jr. the father of modern conservatism. Not sure if that is true any more.

Yale has intentionally cultivated an atmosphere with a mix of viewpoints.

No need to bootlick Yale. That’s just a vague way to state that Yale is a MAGA/GOP spawn point. Ron DeSantis, JD Vance, Bush, etc…yuck. This isn’t exclusive to Yale (HLS + Princeton + Penn are notable offenders) but I’ve never seen MAGA spawn from places like Columbia, UChicago, WASP, etc, because those schools actually force you to examine a wide range of subjects through core curriculums and the liberal arts. Interesting to see how schools that don’t care about exposing students to a wide range of academic fields end up spawning some of the most devilish creatures on earth.

[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.

Then get rid of all private education from kids on up. No tax advantage dollars or research dollars for any of it including religious schools

"No tax advantage dollars or research dollars for any of it." Are you stupid? Dismantle the greatest research engine in the history of man because they have some small institutional priorities which you do not like? That has to one of the most ignorant things ever said on this board.

"including religious schools" That will never happen. Look at the money they gave up to protect Hillsdale.

Meh, it will recover

[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.

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.

I can't speak for all asians. I was mad about the anti-asian discrimination, but SFFA seems to be making a difference in how people talk about being asian.
Also, it's not just poor whites gettig the shaft, its non-rich whites. A lot of the populist faction of MAGA comes from that group.

That group does not seem likely to want to send their kids off to elite private universities. They would like to destroy them as much as possible.

Middle class white families do in fact care but they have gotten so used to getting the crumbs that they pretend they are happy going to their state flagship because everyone has a preference to go to the more selective private schools, except them.

"everyone has a preference to go to the more selective private schools" This just isn't true. They mostly don't care in the way the other prestige obsessive groups care. The vast majority of college kids go to school within a couple of hour drive from their home.

A big part of this is a better understanding of the US college system by long term residents. There are some urban areas and social circles where it is important but not for the vast majority of the middle class.

Regular middle class families aren’t going to take out massive loans to pay for this. They are the donut hole families. That pp is woefully misinformed.

$200K families get free tuition, that's at the 84%ile of households. $100K families get a free ride, that's at the 57th%ile of households. The donut hole doesn't really start until at least $250K

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I find it interesting that people seem to think private universities are required to accept and educate the "smartest" kids that apply, however you define smartest (test scores, GPA, rigor, etc).

What if schools like Yale, which has been around since before the country was founded, did an analysis and decided, "It is better for the future of the nation if we teach critical thinking, morality, ethics, history and leadership skills to idiotic wealthy and powerful children (GW Bush, Don Trump Jr), because like it or not, those children will have an outsized impact on the world, rather than only teach the top .1% smartest kids, who are capable of learning on their own without us."

Why can't a school decide that dumb legacies are actually the most important people to educate?

Interesting comment. Your last line is the only one that matters. Why can't they? There is no logical reason that they cannot have priorities like any other private enterprise.

Jealousy is the only answer. If I can't have it I want to break it.

They also want federal funding.

[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.

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.

I can't speak for all asians. I was mad about the anti-asian discrimination, but SFFA seems to be making a difference in how people talk about being asian.
Also, it's not just poor whites gettig the shaft, its non-rich whites. A lot of the populist faction of MAGA comes from that group.

" but SFFA seems to be making a difference in how people talk about being Asian." Not in a positive manner.

None of the MAGA woke noise about the Ivy leagues has anything to do with helping Asians. It is entirely about keeping black people down, preying on the resentments of poor whites. Stephen Miller doesn't want more Asians at Ivy league schools, he wants fewer Asians in the country.

We were never going to get the racists to say nice things about asians but now the notion that you can say these racist things about asians and still pretend not to be racist has gone away.

My family is mixed so I’m not sure where we fall in the mix but I can tell you that the SFFA decision was extremely unpopular among my kids friend group. Many of their parents liked it but the kids themselves didn’t at all.

[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.

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.

I can't speak for all asians. I was mad about the anti-asian discrimination, but SFFA seems to be making a difference in how people talk about being asian.
Also, it's not just poor whites gettig the shaft, its non-rich whites. A lot of the populist faction of MAGA comes from that group.

" but SFFA seems to be making a difference in how people talk about being Asian." Not in a positive manner.

None of the MAGA woke noise about the Ivy leagues has anything to do with helping Asians. It is entirely about keeping black people down, preying on the resentments of poor whites. Stephen Miller doesn't want more Asians at Ivy league schools, he wants fewer Asians in the country.

We were never going to get the racists to say nice things about asians but now the notion that you can say these racist things about asians and still pretend not to be racist has gone away.

My family is mixed so I’m not sure where we fall in the mix but I can tell you that the SFFA decision was extremely unpopular among my kids friend group. Many of their parents liked it but the kids themselves didn’t at all.

OP: we are Bay Area.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:

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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.

I can't speak for all asians. I was mad about the anti-asian discrimination, but SFFA seems to be making a difference in how people talk about being asian.
Also, it's not just poor whites gettig the shaft, its non-rich whites. A lot of the populist faction of MAGA comes from that group.

" but SFFA seems to be making a difference in how people talk about being Asian." Not in a positive manner.

None of the MAGA woke noise about the Ivy leagues has anything to do with helping Asians. It is entirely about keeping black people down, preying on the resentments of poor whites. Stephen Miller doesn't want more Asians at Ivy league schools, he wants fewer Asians in the country.

We were never going to get the racists to say nice things about asians but now the notion that you can say these racist things about asians and still pretend not to be racist has gone away.

My family is mixed so I’m not sure where we fall in the mix but I can tell you that the SFFA decision was extremely unpopular among my kids friend group. Many of their parents liked it but the kids themselves didn’t at all.

It's trendy for kids to be in favor of DEI. DEI generally preys on the young and stupid.

[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.

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.

I can't speak for all asians. I was mad about the anti-asian discrimination, but SFFA seems to be making a difference in how people talk about being asian.
Also, it's not just poor whites gettig the shaft, its non-rich whites. A lot of the populist faction of MAGA comes from that group.

That group does not seem likely to want to send their kids off to elite private universities. They would like to destroy them as much as possible.

Middle class white families do in fact care but they have gotten so used to getting the crumbs that they pretend they are happy going to their state flagship because everyone has a preference to go to the more selective private schools, except them.

"everyone has a preference to go to the more selective private schools" This just isn't true. They mostly don't care in the way the other prestige obsessive groups care. The vast majority of college kids go to school within a couple of hour drive from their home.

A big part of this is a better understanding of the US college system by long term residents. There are some urban areas and social circles where it is important but not for the vast majority of the middle class.

Regular middle class families aren’t going to take out massive loans to pay for this. They are the donut hole families. That pp is woefully misinformed.

$200K families get free tuition, that's at the 84%ile of households. $100K families get a free ride, that's at the 57th%ile of households. The donut hole doesn't really start until at least $250K

You think they are saving all those free rides for middle class kids from flyover country whose parents make $200K? They aren't going and the upper middle class can't afford it either.

[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.

Then get rid of all private education from kids on up. No tax advantage dollars or research dollars for any of it including religious schools

Removing tax exempt status is not necessary because education is explicitly a tax exempt purpose unless they are illegally discriminating. That is in a law that was passed by congress.

But research funding is usually granted by the executive, it can be sent to Harvard or UNC. The law does not care.

Okay then this is clearly just politics. Harvard is to be punished because of politics. Yale somehow it's not going to get as severe punishment because of politics or corruption or whatever it is.

What small potatoes in the big scheme of things. I mean we literally got into yet another war in the Middle East and gave everything away to billionaires because of ivy league college admissions and trans kids and landscapers being immigrants instead of your next door neighbor's 8th grader? We are stupid.

It takes two to tango. if the Ivy league didn't have to go that far. the trans issue didn't have to get so extreme. the illegal alien issue could have been addressed sooner.

Sometimes you got to blow shit up so they don't forget that there are consequences.

Hence why the poster said we are so stupid. Blowing something up to make a point about a half a dozen trans kids, elite college admissions which affects a very limited number of people, and tapping into ugly racism about immigrants (of which there are millions, but we're all immigrants unless you're native. American and they are an economic engine), is stupid.

[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.

Then get rid of all private education from kids on up. No tax advantage dollars or research dollars for any of it including religious schools

Removing tax exempt status is not necessary because education is explicitly a tax exempt purpose unless they are illegally discriminating. That is in a law that was passed by congress.

But research funding is usually granted by the executive, it can be sent to Harvard or UNC. The law does not care.

Okay then this is clearly just politics. Harvard is to be punished because of politics. Yale somehow it's not going to get as severe punishment because of politics or corruption or whatever it is.

What small potatoes in the big scheme of things. I mean we literally got into yet another war in the Middle East and gave everything away to billionaires because of ivy league college admissions and trans kids and landscapers being immigrants instead of your next door neighbor's 8th grader? We are stupid.

It takes two to tango. if the Ivy league didn't have to go that far. the trans issue didn't have to get so extreme. the illegal alien issue could have been addressed sooner.

Sometimes you got to blow shit up so they don't forget that there are consequences.

Hence why the poster said we are so stupid. Blowing something up to make a point about a half a dozen trans kids, elite college admissions which affects a very limited number of people, and tapping into ugly racism about immigrants (of which there are millions, but we're all immigrants unless you're native. American and they are an economic engine), is stupid.

No, it's very necessary.

[Anonymous]

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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?

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

Then get rid of all private education from kids on up. No tax advantage dollars or research dollars for any of it including religious schools

Removing tax exempt status is not necessary because education is explicitly a tax exempt purpose unless they are illegally discriminating. That is in a law that was passed by congress.

But research funding is usually granted by the executive, it can be sent to Harvard or UNC. The law does not care.

Okay then this is clearly just politics. Harvard is to be punished because of politics. Yale somehow it's not going to get as severe punishment because of politics or corruption or whatever it is.

What small potatoes in the big scheme of things. I mean we literally got into yet another war in the Middle East and gave everything away to billionaires because of ivy league college admissions and trans kids and landscapers being immigrants instead of your next door neighbor's 8th grader? We are stupid.

It takes two to tango. if the Ivy league didn't have to go that far. the trans issue didn't have to get so extreme. the illegal alien issue could have been addressed sooner.

Sometimes you got to blow shit up so they don't forget that there are consequences.

Hence why the poster said we are so stupid. Blowing something up to make a point about a half a dozen trans kids, elite college admissions which affects a very limited number of people, and tapping into ugly racism about immigrants (of which there are millions, but we're all immigrants unless you're native. American and they are an economic engine), is stupid.

No, it's very necessary.

Super necessary

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:I find it interesting that people seem to think private universities are required to accept and educate the "smartest" kids that apply, however you define smartest (test scores, GPA, rigor, etc).

What if schools like Yale, which has been around since before the country was founded, did an analysis and decided, "It is better for the future of the nation if we teach critical thinking, morality, ethics, history and leadership skills to idiotic wealthy and powerful children (GW Bush, Don Trump Jr), because like it or not, those children will have an outsized impact on the world, rather than only teach the top .1% smartest kids, who are capable of learning on their own without us."

Why can't a school decide that dumb legacies are actually the most important people to educate?

Interesting comment. Your last line is the only one that matters. Why can't they? There is no logical reason that they cannot have priorities like any other private enterprise.

Jealousy is the only answer. If I can't have it I want to break it.

They can have priorities but when those priorities conflict with the public policy, they cannot have public funding

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I find it interesting that people seem to think private universities are required to accept and educate the "smartest" kids that apply, however you define smartest (test scores, GPA, rigor, etc).

What if schools like Yale, which has been around since before the country was founded, did an analysis and decided, "It is better for the future of the nation if we teach critical thinking, morality, ethics, history and leadership skills to idiotic wealthy and powerful children (GW Bush, Don Trump Jr), because like it or not, those children will have an outsized impact on the world, rather than only teach the top .1% smartest kids, who are capable of learning on their own without us."

Why can't a school decide that dumb legacies are actually the most important people to educate?

Interesting comment. Your last line is the only one that matters. Why can't they? There is no logical reason that they cannot have priorities like any other private enterprise.

Jealousy is the only answer. If I can't have it I want to break it.

They can have priorities but when those priorities conflict with the public policy, they cannot have public funding

It seems blatantly political to be honest. They go after Harvard. They don't really go after Yale. That's just the way it is now. There is corruption up down back and forth everyday with this administration. We will all be better off when they're gone regardless of your politics.