Today is the deadline for accepting college admissions offers. For parents and kids who are disappointed, let’s consider the strategic mistakes that they might have made.
Most obviously, a child who fails to identify as Elizabeth Warren’s cousin (i.e., “Native American”), is at a disadvantage. Same deal for Black, Latinx, 2SLGBTQQIA+, etc. These identifications are often matters of personal choice and colleges and universities have made their prejudice against cisgender heterosexual whites and Asians clear so a failure to identify in some kind of preferred category isn’t excusable.
Some more nuanced lessons from the NYU data leak, from a friend in suburban Boston who is numbers-oriented and fed everything into a database management system:
The real comparison is between “cohorts” – basically they lump people into clusters by zip code, background, interests. NYU admissions rate for our [somewhat rich suburban public] high school was effectively 3%. Way lower than their average admission rate.
Moving to a zip code from which few people apply to the schools of interest could help. Moving to a less elite neighborhood within the same metro area, for example, could actually save a huge amount of money as well as enhancing a child’s admissions chances. Evincing an interest in less-popular majors, e.g., classics, could help. (My friend: “It isn’t enough just to say classics – you need Latin courses, participation in known Latin competitions, etc.”)
(Maybe the ultimate hack would be moving into a zip code that is 99% occupied by The Villages or similar kids-forbidden development. It’s virtually guaranteed that zero other kids will apply from that zip code if kids under age 19 aren’t allowed to live in 99% of that zip code.)
From a different friend whose child attends an elite private school in Philadelphia:
One kid got into [Queers for Palestine League] penn last year for deferred admission because of crew and now [the child’s] class has twice as many kids doing rowing than previous class
Let’s check in with Harvard, where they say that they hate inequality and also that they want as much federal money as possible funded to richer-than-average schools in richer-than-average states. (i.e., don’t send the money to universities in poorer-than-average Michigan, Ohio, and Mississippi where the result would be increased equality among states) Layla L. Hijjawi, a Crimson editor:
Mahmoud Khalil, for example, is a green card holder — otherwise known as a lawful permanent resident — who has been detained, apparently for pro-Palestine organizing at Columbia University. The Trump administration has linked his actions, which ought to be defended by the First Amendment, to terrorism, claiming he poses a threat to American foreign policy.
One doesn’t even need to organize pro-Palestinian protests to become a target; simply attending one is enough to merit condemnation and threatened deportation, as the case of Yunseo Chung makes clear.
Most egregiously, merely publishing a pro-Palestine opinion piece — as many editors of this very paper have — can apparently result in being snatched off the streets and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for supposedly supporting terrorism like Rumeysa Ozturk, another permanent resident of the U.S.
This is a clear escalation of its attack on pro-Palestine speech on campus. Harvard must not yield in the face of this right-wing pressure. The conciliatory approach of Harvard President Alan M. Garber’s email regarding funding review misses the mark by treating the review as being pursued in good faith, ignoring the obvious insidious and chilling intention of the campaign developing under the guise of preventing antisemitism.
Loosely related… (source)
Didn’t Mahmoud Khalil commit non-speech crimes, like assaulting people (albeit only ones he thought might be Zionists so I suppose that’s okay), destruction of property (probably mostly Jewish property though, so that’s fine too), barring doors and preventing access to building (to keep Zionists and Jews out, sure, so no problem there; but it might have been a fire code violation.)
“(i.e., don’t send the money to universities in poorer-than-average Michigan, Ohio, and Mississippi where the result would be increased equality among states)”
Phil – The reason that states such as California and Massachusetts receive a disproportionate amount of federal research funding is because those states have universities with outstanding researchers — e.g., California has Stanford, Berkeley and UCLA, while Massachusetts has Harvard and MIT. I am certain that Mississippi is a fine place to live, but on ChatGPT I could not find one nobel laureate at the University of Mississippi. Rather than concentrating federal research funding among the universities that have the most creative researchers, do you really want to spread it among around the country to professors that might be great teachers but the odds of them producing useful research are low? In any given field, the top 1 or 2 percent of researchers will produce almost all of the research that really matters.
Let’s examine a hypothetical talented computer scientist; let’s call him Phil. Phil has founded a successful IT consulting firm, has written one of the first books for writing web applications that connect to a RDMBS, and even has a rule named after him, with its own Wikipedia page. When Phil decides to go to graduate school, does he choose Ohio University? No, he chooses MIT (which is consitently ranked in the top two universities in the US for computer science, along with Stanford). When he receives his PhD, does he teach at Central Michigan University? No, he teaches at MIT. I suspect a major reason Phil choose MIT is because the students are so smart.
The genius of the best US research universities is that they concentrate talent. The reason you attend MIT is not just for the professors, but many of your fellow students will be quite gifted. As Paul Graham points out, if you want to launch a successful startup, attending a top school is beneficial because at such schools you are more likely to meet a suitable co-founder. Bill Gates met Paul Allen at Lakeside School, and he met Steve Ballmer at Harvard. Larry and Sergey met at Stanford. Mark Zuckenberg met his co-founders (Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes) not just at Harvard, but they were his roommates in Kirkland house.
At Harvard, I mainly studied defense policy and international security. I had many mentors, but my primary mentor was Michael Nacht, who is in my NSHO the smartest defense analyst in the U.S. I also met Richard Garwin, who many say is the smartest man in the world. (See “True Genius” by Joel Shurkin.) Many of the Harvard undergraduates were a bit intimidating — one had published three math papers in peer reviewed journals while in high school, another had played a piano concerto with a major symphonic orchestra at age 16, while a third had written a book that was published by Simon & Schuster. That concentration of talent exists in only a few U.S. universities.
Yet despite your fine education, you sort of missed Phil’s point, right?
James: As bnNE notes, my point is that “concentration of talent” as you put it is a form of inequality and tends to coincide with a concentration of wealth. Therefore, people who say that they’re against inequality should oppose using federal taxpayer dollars in any way that tends to increase the concentrations of wealth and talent. The Queers for Palestine League schools, including Harvard, are fulsome in their condemnations of inequality and, therefore, they should be happy with their existing advantages over universities in poorer states. If Harvard said “inequality is good because people vary in their degree of merit” then it wouldn’t be inconsistent of them to try to hoover up as much federal cash as possible. They would be merely greedy rather than hypocritical and greedy.
Academics don’t seem to be shy about following the money. If University of Mississippi (your example school, which is in the poorest state) got all of the money that currently goes to Harvard and Columbia I am sure that they would have plenty of Nobel laureates on staff within a few years (and, since having a Nobel laureate as a thesis adviser is highly correlated with whether one will receive one him/her/zir/theirself, be producing some homegrown ones). So there would be no reduction in the number of Nobel laureates in the U.S. and there would be a reduction of inequality as money and economic activity were redirected from MA and NY to MS.
Shower University of Mississippi with $billions and see geniuses to stampede it. Isn’t it was Texas doing with its universities, using oil revenues? Or UAE for that matter? I am sure that UAE gets to keep its form of government despite the geniuses, hope that Texas too gets to keep its Repiblican form of government, despite its newly found geniuses.
Indeed! I have plenty of friends who say that (1) taxpayer-funded abortion care should be available weekly and on every street corner and for pregnant people’s pregnancies through 37 weeks, and (2) Trump is Hitler and American democracy ends with his election. Where are they to be found? Soaking up the dollars as University of Texas professors! No moves to states offering unlimited abortion care. No moves away from the Trump dictatorship while it is still legal to leave the U.S.
@philg Harvard and Columbia(other lib universities) might be getting lot of Fed funding now. But to get to this point, they have to prove and do good research and development and it was along journey. It did not happen over night. If University of Mississippi start doing the same I am sure they will get the same funding. What/who is preventing University of Mississippi and other universities doing this.
Anon. you are for meritocracy in allocations of large amounts of other people money to universities. Do you also support meritocracy in said universities admissions? Or do you agree with admitting large numbers of foreign antisemites,
fully financed by their theocratic and other dictatorship governments, and accepting donations from said governments and their subjects to establish political departments and centers there? There are many more social engineeri1ng reasons to send Harvard money to University of Mississippi then serve foreign dictatorships and theocracies in US colleges.
@perplexed I was only referring to the research funding, not about admissions. Again we have a federal administration that does not like lib collages and favors non lib collages, they can easily provide funding to other collages, it will be chump change in over all budget. Personally I do not like admitting foreign students who’s values/policies/beliefs does not align with ours.
Anon, if you do not like your college admission policy, why you would not speak up and together with other like-minded individuals through administrative bums ruining American higher education out? When you do I will support you.
Ivy League colleges have become businesses focused on preserving their brand and elite club membership. They actively lobby both private and public sectors to maintain their elite status. If their mission were truly to improve lives, we would see consistent, large-scale contributions to society, especially given the brainpower and financial resources at their disposal.
Their tax-exempt status alone is a major privilege, and it should be the only break they get. When was the last time Harvard, MIT, or other Ivy League schools made a big contribution to the broader public? Right, Facebook.
Anon: “Harvard and Columbia(other lib universities) might be getting lot of Fed funding now. But to get to this point, they have to prove and do good research and development and it was along journey. It did not happen over night.”
I agree with you. But the current system is set up with positive feedback and, therefore, is a guaranteed engine of inequality. A school with one great researcher gets money. That attracts 10 more great researchers (I’m including grad students in this term). They do more great research and get more money. Eventually this school has so much money that they’re an incumbent whom an upstart university can never hope to compete with. It’s the “generational wealthy” that people at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia love to say is immoral on an individual basis. The positive feedback can be broken simply by taking these noble folks at their anti-inequality word. Take all of the money away from the rich schools in the richest states and give it to the best schools in the poorest states. Great researchers have a track record of following the money.
(A simpler statement of the above: Harvard and Columbia don’t have great researchers because they’re inherently great, e.g., better administration and more elaborate DEI programs. They have great researchers today because they had great researchers 10, 20, and 30 years ago who wrote successful grant applications.)
@Philip, you raise a great point. Our government is quick to break up monopolies in the corporate world, yet institutions like Harvard, and other Ivy League schools, have effectively become monopolies themselves, made so by the government help using tax payers money. If we are serious about addressing systemic inequality and promoting fair access, these academic monopolies need to be broken down and restructured as well.
@philg
“Take all of the money away from the rich schools in the richest states and give it to the best schools in the poorest states.”
Why not the worst schools in the poorest states? Giving it to the best schools is still elitism.
@philg I agree with you.
“Take all of the money away from the rich schools in the richest states and give it to the best schools in the poorest states. Great researchers have a track record of following the money.”
If you do the above, will these collages become like today’s elite collages in 10 to 20 years?
“Maybe the ultimate hack would be moving into a zip code that is 99% occupied by The Villages or similar kids-forbidden development. It’s virtually guaranteed that zero other kids will apply from that zip code if kids under age 19 aren’t allowed to live in 99% of that zip code.” This is fake news. The ultimate hack would be just renting a p.o. box in one of these trash neighborhoods and “identifying” the p.o. box as your home. Or else just rent a cheap apartment and get mail forwarded.