What Would Happen if Harvard Stopped Considering Race in Admissions?

Here's a wild idea...how about increase enrollment overall! Yeah...hire more staff, more professors, build more classroom and research buildings. There's obviously a strong demand. Elite institutions need to stop trying to be the "Patek Philippes" of higher education...only a few gain admission...each individually numbered...for a lifetime of elegance!

It would only work if all primary education were equal ....that would be the only way everyone would have an equal chance. But we are so far from where we intended to be as a country.

In order to even the playing field race must be considered. The systemic persecution of people of color has led them to be at a disadvantage in comparison to white people.

What is their "overall institutional objective"? To continue to pile up the endowment funds? Harvard could charge $100k/year and it would still have thousands and thousands of applicants. While there are many colleges and universities that deliver the same quality (or better) education, there is only one Harvard, and it is the name brand that many parents want. That brand is valuable because their children will meet the children of powerful people who can smooth their life paths. Really, it is access to wealth and power that is so attractive. We saw the value of the Ivy League name brand (in this case, Yale) in the recent disgraceful exhibition that was the Supreme Court hearing. Most people who apply to Harvard are qualified to go there, with the exceptions of rich kids, children of famous/rich parents, athletes, and legacies. So scratch them. What would happen if Harvard had an all-Asian freshman class? Or all-latino? Or all African-American? Or all native American? Or all Jewish? (My family likes those last two.) Or all whatever? Change the cultural group the next year. I am only half joking here. Wouldn't it be wonderful if employers (including our government) stopped drooling over the Ivy League? (This Berkeley grad would appreciate it.) I look at the platinum-plated resumes of the white collar criminals who gave us the last recession--those resumes nearly always included an Ivy degree--and I'm not too impressed with their ethics.

How can this expert claim Harvard has 23 times more wealthy kids than poor ones given that 70% of Harvard students are on financial aid?

Does Harvard really need a football team? The sport is dangerous leading to long term mental problems. What role does football play in education?

Easy answer. Admissions would be based on merit. Affirmative action is on its way out. Most Americans are against it & vote to ban it when given a chance. If you want to see Affirmative action's future come to California. For decades Asian Americans complained that they were being short changed in UC college admissions. They not only argued that race-conscious policies were unfair but proved convincingly that they were victims. In 1996 voters amended the state constitution by voting for Prop 209, to prohibit state institutions from considering race, sex, or ethnicity, in public education. By law admission to UC colleges now had to be race neutral. Post Prop-209, Asian students benefited tremendously. They are almost 50% of student body at UC-Berkeley California schools. This an almost 25% increase. Clearly in an open admissions process where affirmative action does not enter into enrollment decisions & where legacy and donor issues are discouraged, Asian-American students compete very well. In the subsequent years, the Asian community has opposed all measures that seek to return affirmative action to California. California's present is America's future. They are bringing the fight against affirmative action to the Supreme Court. This time around, there is a more organized & vocal group of Asians who are on board — and are very willing to play their part in ending affirmative action forever. Supporting this flawed policy isn't an option for them & soon the rest of the US.

Legacy admissions are embarrassing, unnecessary, and unfair. They perpetuate privilege, rewarding mainly "elite" white students of highly educated and wealthy parents. Harvard claims they're needed for fundraising and (bizarrely) alumni interviewing. No data supports that, since other schools (like the entire UC system) have gotten rid of legacy admissions and have not suffered any decrease in donations. And they're patently unfair. What's more unfair and un-American than to judge someone based on their parent's accomplishments? Plus, if one of your parents went to Harvard, you almost certainly started life with a huge leg up. You don't need an extra break when the time comes to apply to college. Harvard should show some moral fiber, follow the lead of Oxford, Cambridge, and the UC system, and end this ridiculous, regressive practice.

It’s not which school you go to. It’s what you do when you get there.

Consider the difficulties of the admission office for the moment. Harvard receives some 40,000 applications and it has some 2,400 places to award. It has to consider a variety of goals, variety of students, students for its various fields, students with money and students that need support, social responsibility. It seems that it allots 24% of the spaces to students who come from 5.6% percentage of the country's population. Social and political institutions achieve only reasonable success in their purpose (if they are lucky) and it seems to be that in dealing with a near impossible task, the beleaguered admission counselors are doing a reasonable job.

The article does not directly address the question of what percentage of legacies actually benefit from legacy preference. As others have suggested, I think it is very small - the vast majority likely would get in without preference. Alums of top schools by nature prioritize education, tend to make higher salaries that allow them to pay for better schools and enrichment, and motivate their kids to "be like mom and dad." Additionally, some form of affirmative action has now been in place for more than a generation, though admittedly it has grown more in recent years. So now there is a critical mass of legacies who are minorities, because by the 1980s and early 1990s (when the parents of most current applicants were graduating from college), there was a significant population of minorities on campus.

Harvard is just an example of what's up in America. We are not a meritocracy. Not even close. But everyone has to maintain that lie. There was an article this week about a guy who couldn't get another job after a layoff in his fifties. He killed himself in his car. The comments are full of people planning to euthanize themselves like an old plow horse when they get too old to be hired. It's a meritocracy, after all. If nobody will pay us, we must be worthless. We must deserve to die. That’s how powerful the meritocracy lie is. It gets you a self-cleaning population of disposable workers. So two things are true: 1) As long as Harvard is worth something to the oligarchs, they will have as many seats as they want for their kids. 2) Harvard will always say it lets people in on merit. That's why it's worth something to the elite in the first place! People keep saying the dumb rich kids are there to subsidize the smart poor kids. Ridiculous. Harvard has a gazillion dollars. It's the other way around. The smart kids are there to jack up the average test scores and make the dumb rich kids look smart. The billionaire babies don't need Harvard’s education. They don't need the leg up. The tens of millions of dollars in "donations" from Daddy around admissions time are not paying for Junior's college. They are paying for the lie that Junior deserves his spot at the top. That’s what’s for sale. And oligarchs get to buy what they want. So it won’t change.

30 years ago, a British prof, of all, explained to me that if a private University does do not admit about 10% of rich alumni kids, that institution will soon run out of money to offer free, or very low cost education to gifted poor students. I was aghast, but had to admit that it was true

Eliminate Z-list and athletes for 5 years and reassess. Neither are related to academic achievement.

Harvard is insulting its own alumni when it says that without legacy preferences its alumni would cease to volunteer and donate to the school. Not all Harvard alumni are public spirited, but I refuse to believe that they would give up on helping an institution most of them loved just because it won't automatically give their children admissions preferences. Further, no one is saying that Harvard can't name stuff after big donors, which is also an inducement to donations. And if Harvard's alumni decided to donate to the schools that actually enroll their children, that would be a GOOD THING, because those schools will all have smaller endowments than Harvard and they need the money more. If a rich Harvard alumnus donated to the where a sub-Harvard offspring ended up, a school like University of Rochester, Emory, Case-Western, Tufts etc I'd be very happy. Harvard is tying itself in knots with racial preferences and its defense of those racial preferences. It can't admit that it is an more an engine of the perpetuation of privilege than class mobility.

Harvard should simply admit what it is- an elite private university serving the white Anglo-saxon protestant community. With a 36 billion dollar endowment, they hardly need any Federal funds and so do not have to follow Federal guidelines in this regard.

What The Ivy League really needs is for their endowments to be taxed to provide relief for student debt. Harvard is sitting on almost $40 billion untaxed money that could pay off the student debts of almost everybody in Massachusetts. That they sit on their pile of cash and use it only for bragging rights is a bigger scandal than their racist admissions policy.

Black and Hispanic representation will fall by half, and Asian middle- and upper middle-class students will fill the gap. This is what happened at UC Berkeley since California outlawed racial discrimination in admissions. It's as easy to predict what will happen when race is no longer a factor in admissions as it is easy to decide the current system. As everyone in the admission game knows, Harvard's and other elite private adcoms "optimize" for a set of 4 desired outcomes, of the most important, by far, is TUITION REVENUE. Here's how it works. The adcoms "optimize" for: 1) academic + other "quality" metrics used by US News (SAT scores etc); 2) a hard # of slots reserved each year for: a) ATHLETES (5-8% of total) b) ALUMNI kids (11-13%) c) FIRST-GENERATION kids (<10%) d) GEO representation (<3%); 3) 27-32% of total slots reserved for "URMs" = students claiming at least some degree of African, Hispanic or Native American descent; 4) 45-50% of slots reserved for "FULL-FREIGHT" students who receive no aid. They fund the gap between the school's operating budget and its internal/external financial aid budget. #4 is the largest group by far. These are SUPER-WEALTHY students whose parents make $650k+ HH income and can easily pay $300k for an undergrad degree. The super-wealthy are at least 50x more likely to gain admission to Harvard than equally high-achieving kids who lack the other "hooks" of race, recruited athlete, 1st-generation status, or geographic origin.

So basically Harvard admits they use affirmative action as a scapegoat to prevent white admission from falling to 32% from the current 40%. And if Harvard is justifying their racial bias by stating the generational discrimination faced by African Americans, leading to black income being 60-70% of white income—then where exactly does that leave Asian students? First and second generation students whose parents came to this country with two hundred dollars in their pocket and not speaking a word of English? Does Harvard factor that into their ‘personal’ scores or does the word Asian appearing on their application automatically disqualify them from coming from disadvantaged backgrounds. The racial discrimination by Harvard is vile, and the way they’re answering the questions in this lawsuit just further cements they have no grounds for their actions.

Nobody is saying that admissions should ONLY be based on test scores. They are saying that RACE should not be a factor in admissions. @Greg H says that Harvard discriminates because they are looking for leaders. The data in this case have proven otherwise. For three consecutive years Harvard admitted African Americans at exactly the same rate as all applicants. That is a mathematical near impossibility. The data proves that Harvard has implemented racial quotas. The quotas have nothing to do with leadership abilities. Harvard decides that they want an undergraduate class with certain characteristics, and they fiddle with the most subjective scores until they get their desired outcome. This is the second time in a century that Harvard has been caught doing this. And this time we have laws that prohibit this sort of behavior.

If Harvard is tremendously increasing focus on economic class, and getting rid of all other advantages except for Athletes, it is hardly unfair for African American class share to drop to 10%. As it is now, they can score 350 points less on an SAT than an asian and still be granted admission.

What if race-based affirmative action could be limited to African-American applicants whose background demonstrates that they are still suffering from the economic and social effects of slavery and/or Jim Crow violence and segregation. The 14th Amendment certainly envisions steps to overcome these effects.

It would be interesting to know how many Asian-Americans at Harvard are legacies. And athletes. And applied early admission. And attended a pipeline high school (Boston Latin anyone?). I bet the number is high, and that underscores the plaintiffs case.

Universities used to strive for excellence. Now they strive for diversity. Modern medicine, technology and science are the results of excellence, but the hypothetical benefits of diversity are yet to be realized.

Here are two profiles - which has the admissions advantage at a highly selective university? 1. Biracial (Black/white) kid at urban public high school where 42% of the students are low-income and many live in public housing. Unable to pay full tuition (50% at most at a private college assuming 25K in student debt). Family doesn't own a home. Father took seven years to finish college because he was working full time. Grandmother never got past 10th grade and worked as a domestic. 2. Top student at high school that routinely sends 6-8% of its graduates to Ivy+ colleges. Studied abroad in the Middle East and has traveled extensively. Close relatives who are graduates of Yale, Penn, Duke and MIT (a legacy!). Rarely encounters an adult that isn't a college graduate, and most have graduate degrees. Lives in a zip code where homes are $1K+ per square foot, and where the school system spends 28K per student, the highest in the state. You can see the gimmick here - it's the same kid (mine). The narratives that we tell ourselves and each other rarely fit a simple frame.

One action that might help would be to expand the number of elite universities, especially public universities. If demand exceeds supply (as it does), how about expanding supply? Oh, sorry, it would take a lot of money to create and expand those great public universities. We're too busy cutting taxes.

Here's what folks need to understand about legacy admits: in my experience they almost always have additional "tips" that get them admitted. 1. they can pay the full bill 2. they apply early admission 3. they are athletes of elite sports (squash, crew etc) 4. they attend a pipeline high school or prep school I have never known a legacy to get admitted to Harvard without one of these other tips. Furthermore, I am quite sure that at most highly selective colleges, being a legacy doesn't matter much unless you can pay full freight and are a prospect for a sizeable donation.

The hypocrisy of Harvard's stance - that is it not using preferential and biased criteria in its admissions practices - is what bothers me. Harvard ought to just stop pretending that their decisions are fair or based on "creating a learning environment" - just admit that their choices are based on "unfair" preferences. Affirmative action and race should not matter, but neither should legacy, donors or athletics.

No legacies in the ives, no Bush presidency, no Kavanaugh supreme court appointment. Just think of it. Ending legacies? Ha. Power is power and the process continues.

With a $40 BILLION ENDOWMENT, does Harvard really need to give preference to wealthy white legacies and students whose families are major donors??? Following his parents’ multi-million dollar pledge donation, Jared Kushner was accepted to Harvard -- the most obvious example of unsound (and unscrupulous) admissions policy.

How about if colleges like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, etc., closed down their admissions factories? Keep some staff to determine if applicants meet basic criteria: Perhaps test scores and GPA. Assign each application a unique number, then randomly generate a list of accepted applications. Notify the students and you have your freshman class.

This argument always comes down to "should admission be solely based on the test score". Generally the Ivies tend to believe that they should be teaching the next generation of leaders. Therefore much more than test scores count. Almost everyone admitted has scores that are high. However great weight is put on other activities. Is the person a good athlete, a good writer, a good musician, a good artist, or politically active. Will that person use their learned skills to better our world. It's a judgement call. The real fallacy occurs when a student believes he/she cannot succeed without a Harvard education. The diploma means little once you enter adult life, beyond bragging rights. As many an all- american athlete has learned, once you turn pro all that matters is how you play.

Asian Americans, among others, would get a fair shake.

It's sad that students will be accepted or rejected because of their backgrounds. Who the parents are shall NEVER be a factor in evaluating students.

It becomes more apparent that Harvard is using its "holistic" admission policy not to achieve diversity but to give cover to its "legacy" admissions. Yes, Harvard is discriminating Asian Americans in the name of diversity, while giving privileged access to its elitist aluminis and promoting racial adversaries. How hypocritical and evil!

Harvard's website says the class of 2022 has 23% Asians. In New York City, the major specialized public high schools, where admission is based solely on test scores, have 70% (Stuyvesant), 60% (Bronx Science), and 50% (Brooklyn Tech) Asian student bodies. So if Harvard used test scores only, it would probably admit double the number of Asians it currently enrolls. But is Harvard legally required to do this? Harvard admits more Asians than the percentage of the overall US population that is Asian (roughly 5%). So can it really be said to discriminate against Asians on the basis of race? Maybe the upshot of all of this is: if you don't like legacy students, children of big donors, scholarship athletes, faculty brats, etc. -- go to another university! There are lots of great ones out there. Harvard is overrated!! In fact, all of the ivy leagues are overrated as educational institutions. They're social clubs, geared toward passing the torch of power from one generation of elite to the next. Exhibit A: Brett Kavanaugh. (Note: this writer has no affiliation with Harvard whatsoever.)

Imagine if the NBA recruited teams based not on talent and ability, but on legacies, wealthy donors, and being a member of an underrepresented demographic group. NO! The NBA is effective because it is competitive. If a university wants to succeed academically, then it needs the most academically promising students who have the highest test scores and the best GPA from the most challenging curriculum. That is the steak...everything else is parsley. Affirmative action in ANY PROCESS is perverse, whether the NBA or Harvard School Admissions.

The question we should ask is why, even with lower test scores, lower grades, less likelihood of being a legacy, and less likelihood of being a recruited athlete, black applicants are far more likely to be admitted to Ivy League colleges than white students. Maybe no one's race disadvantages his chances of admission. But clearly others' race strongly advantages them. It is said that Jared Kushner's father donated $2 million to Harvard help get his two sons admitted. But at the end of the day the $2 million got them only the same likelihood of admission as applicants five miles away in Newark (who on top of that get to attend for free).

People have the idea that a Legacy admit is nothing more than a "dumb alum", but that is simply not the case. Virtually all competitive schools who have Legacy admissions, treat them pretty much the same. First of all, they usually must apply Early Decision/Early Action (depending on which the school has). Then, when their application is evaluated, if it is equal to another non-Legacy student, the Legacy student will get the admissions slot. Their applications must be EQUAL! They are not allowed to be lower, unlike the preference given to First Generation admissions and Under-represented Minority admissions. Their scores and grades (test score in particular) are often 100-200 points LOWER than others who are admitted. The boost a Legacy gets is a very small one, indeed. I don't know where people have gotten the idea that the Ivy League and other highly competitive schools should be populated by those who come from poor families, or from those who had little education, pushing out those whose families are educated, value education and have children who are highly accomplished. So they are also wealthy - doesn't being highly educated usually go hand-in-hand with being financially successful? Isn't that exactly what is preached to the poor - education is your ticket out of poverty. Oh - we forgot to tell you, that if you are successful, your own children will be penalized as getting the kind of education you got is only for those whose parents haven't had it. Hogwash!

Set a minimum bar for entry, then run a lottery.

Just wait until the plaintiffs possibly become alumni. If they are successful with this suit, they will regret eliminating legacy admissions for their own off spring. They should be careful for what they're asking for. Could backfire for them and then they'll cry to reverse the legacy admissions for their favor. Wait for it.

"The university’s witnesses also said it was necessary to preserve the legacy advantage because it helped encourage Harvard alumni to volunteer and donate." Yuck. When did we become a society where donating to your alma mater was only a self-interested investment? We need to reform our way of thinking about universities.

In these comments there seems to be a presumption that all AA students are qualified in academic terms - Harvard’s own data supplied in the brief are helpful here, so is the College Board’s online data. My concern is different than what this lawsuit is about. Under AA, students might be “mismatched” to a university and not able to handle the work. If a university is reaching down 300-500 points on the SAT to fullfill their diversity requirements, this becomes more likely. There has been a fair amount of good scholarship written on this topic, I would encourage the readers here to find it and explore it. As a society, we should want to be sure that AA is not hurting some students. I have seen this play out in real life. My sister, a decent math student, was “mismatched” and accepted into a difficult engineering school. She did not do well and had to transfer to a different college. She ended up demoralized, thinking less of her own abilities, and saddled with a lot of debt as she now needed 5 years to complete her college degree.

Wow. Harvard explains that it has to continue giving preferences to the children of the economic and social elite they've already graduated in order to be keep the donations flowing - donations which are then used to help those children of the donors maintain their positions among the elite. Which makes sense if you understand that Harvard is not a school whose significance lies in the quality of it's education so much as it's reputation as a school for world and business leaders. Where the most important resources is not just your brain but your social IQ. It's like an elite boarding school where many from high society go. If too many of those kids came from ordinary or working class families, one of the most valuable things Harvard offers - the ability to network and create valuable business and political ties - vanishes. Because as we have seen time and again, especially in politics - it's not what you know, it's who you know and how much money you can get from them.

No amount of social tinkering is going to make this process fair or equitable. A top school with limited spaces for admission, someone is always going to be on the losing end. Solution, a student should have a good second, third and fourth choice that are just as good and probably cheaper than Harvard.