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Harvard’s ‘Legacy’ Preferences Are a National Disgrace
The high proportion of legacy admissions is certainly surprising but it may not be as consequential as it seems. Most of the children of Harvard graduates will be pretty bright themselves. They may not have worked hard in High Shool in full knowledge of their legacy status
The lawsuit against Harvard claiming it discriminates against Asian applicants may or may not succeed. But even if it fails, it has done the great public service of revealing how the school’s admissions process works behind the scenes.
The school was forced to turn its admissions data over to an expert witness for the plaintiffs: Duke economist Peter Arcidiacono, who analyzed the data and found that Asian applicants are far less likely to be admitted than white applicants with the same academic credentials. And now, using numbers the suit has made publicly available, Arcidiacono and two co-authors have written a disturbing report laying out how legacy, athlete, and similar preferences warp the Harvard admissions process. Much like race-based affirmative action, these policies admit hundreds of students each year who would not be accepted on the basis of their academic records. And each of Harvard’s preferences twists the school’s racial balance in a different way.
The report is a compelling illustration of how a prestigious, progressive institution departs from meritocracy to reward the wealthy and connected. There may be little the government can do about non-racial preferences, considering Harvard is a private school and there’s no law against these forms of discrimination. But healthy doses of public shame are warranted, especially given how strongly Harvard and similar Ivy League schools control the pipeline into the top echelons of American society.
The authors’ data cover the classes that applied in the autumns of 2009 through 2014 and are limited to applicants from within the U.S. By my math (based on their table 2), “LDCs” — legacies whose parents also went to Harvard; those on the dean’s list, often thanks to donations by relatives; and children of faculty and staff — were about a fifth of the students Harvard admitted during this time. Recruited athletes were another tenth. As the authors note, while it’s hardly identified with jock culture in the public imagination, Harvard for some reason fields 42 Division I sports teams.
In the authors’ analysis, legacies experience several times higher odds of admission than do otherwise similar applicants from less favored lineages. Those on the dean’s list are especially preferred. Recruited athletes have an astounding 86 percent chance of getting in despite relatively weak academic records. (Such strong athlete preferences are why the recent admissions scandal involved bribing coaches at several schools.)
In the authors’ estimation, most athletes and LDCs (together, “ALDCs”) at Harvard would not have gotten in based on their other credentials. Combining some more of their numbers (from table 10), I find that about 70 percent would not have made it. Paired with the fact that about 30 percent of students admitted to Harvard are ALDCs, this suggests that roughly a fifth of Harvard undergrads are there because of who their relatives are, or because they’re good at sports.
There’s a racial component to these boosts, too. The headline result from the paper, featured prominently in the abstract, is this:
"Among white admits, over 43% are ALDC. Among admits who are African American, Asian American, and Hispanic, the share is less than 16% each. Our model of admissions shows that roughly three quarters of white ALDC admits [i.e., about a third of all white admits] would have been rejected if they had been treated as white non-ALDCs."
In other words, ALDC preferences are largely an affirmative-action program for certain privileged subsets of white people. One is almost tempted by the idea that Harvard’s preferences for underrepresented minorities might be justified simply to level the scales a bit.
But the numbers don’t really support that argument. The fact that a third of white Harvard students get in via ALDC preferences doesn’t mean a third of whites are occupying spaces that would otherwise go to the underrepresented minority groups that receive racial preferences. Without preferences, many white legacies would be replaced by white non-legacies — or by Asians, the overrepresented minority at the heart of the aforementioned lawsuit.
Indeed, as this table shows, the number of white admissions would fall by just 4 percent without legacy preferences and 6 percent without athlete preferences. (Though it would fall more if both were eliminated at once, of course, and unfortunately this leaves out the smaller D and C categories in ALDC.) In both scenarios, the largest number of abandoned seats go to Asians.
The final row of the table also shows us what happens if legacy, athlete, and racial preferences are removed. In that case, whites actually receive 3 percent more Harvard slots than they do currently, because in today’s system they lose more from racial preferences than they gain from the others. Asian admissions rise more than 50 percent. Admissions crater dramatically for both blacks and Hispanics, falling more than two-thirds for the former and 40 percent for the latter. So no, race-based affirmative action does not merely balance out the racially disproportionate impact of legacy preferences. It’s just a different distortion with a different, and more drastic, racial effect.
But there is a strong connection between the two nonetheless. The argument against affirmative action has always been that we should judge people as individuals, and the work of Arcidiacono et al. shows that these other preferences do immense damage at the individual level. They let in hundreds of students each year simply because of who their parents are or how well they can throw a ball (or whatever one does to score in lacrosse) — and every preferred student who’s admitted excludes someone more qualified. Worse, these preferences exist not as an attempt, however misguided, to redress America’s reprehensible racial sins but merely to heap more donations on top of Harvard’s $37 billion endowment and to cultivate an amorphous sense of community based around sports teams and family members who attended the school decades ago.
Harvard is widely considered the single best school in the country. It sends its graduates out to influence all of U.S. society’s major institutions; all the current Supreme Court justices attended law school at either Harvard or Yale. And yet a substantial fraction of people walking around with prestige-soaked Harvard degrees were not given this opportunity on the basis of their academic record or potential.
The government may not be able to stop this. But the rest of us could stand to be a little less bowled over by the Harvard credential. And those of us who detest racial preferences should despise legacy preferences twice as much.
SOURCE
Why South Korea Can’t Quit College
More advanced societies tend to have more educated citizens, which is one reason why politicians of all stripes call for sending more students to college. One country has taken that impulse to its logical extreme—but has found that more is not always better.
South Korea has a more educated population than any other country in the developed world. Seventy percent of young Koreans (ages 25-34) have completed some higher education, and a similar proportion of high school graduates continue on to college or university each year. By contrast, only 49 percent of young Americans have a degree beyond high school. The rich-world average is just 44 percent.
In every advanced nation, university graduates out-earn those with only a high school degree. But when the number of workers with a university degree rises, the number of university-level jobs often doesn’t keep pace. Korea’s glut of educated workers means that those with higher degrees earn just 24 percent more than high school graduates, compared to a 69 percent earnings boost in the United States. And in a stunning reversal of a near-universal norm, young Koreans with a university degree have a higher unemployment rate than their less-educated peers.
“High youth unemployment [in Korea] is reflective of a structural, supply-demand mismatch in the labor market,” reports economist Tieying Ma in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. The World Economic Forum estimates that nearly half of Koreans are overqualified for their jobs. Yet at the same time, employers clamor that universities gloss over many practical skills that the Korean labor market desperately needs.
Ironically, while left-wing politicians argue that America can boost its college attainment rate by making public universities tuition-free, South Korea became the most educated country in the world by following the opposite model.
Unlike the United States and most European nations, a majority of Korean students attend an independent private university. Though universities receive significant direct subsidies from the central government, tuition at both public and private institutions still costs thousands of U.S. dollars per year.
As I wrote in an American Enterprise Institute report last month, the right to charge tuition gives institutions a revenue source other than government funding, allowing them to more effectively meet student demand for degrees.
Tuition-charging countries like Korea and the United States tend to produce more graduates than the “free college” nations of northern and central Europe. For nations with a strong cultural affinity for education, the demand-driven model of tuition paired with government subsidies is a recipe for stratospheric college attainment.
Korea’s love affair with education is often traced to the end of World War II when the country emerged from decades of Japanese colonial rule as an impoverished, agricultural nation where barely one in five adults were literate. During the colonial period, Japanese policy allowed Korea just one university. But as rapid industrialization boosted the standard of living to rich-world levels, parents, guided by a Confucian tradition that emphasizes education, began to spend small fortunes out-of-pocket on their children’s schooling. Hundreds of universities, public and private, bloomed.
“Whether their children wanted it or not, whether they had an academic aptitude or not, parents just wanted to send their children to universities,” said former education minister Seo Nam-soo in an interview with The Economist. “Parents send their children to go to university in order to relieve their regret for not going to university themselves.”
Preparation for university starts at early ages. Most parents send their children to hagwon, private tutoring centers that prepare students for high-stakes exams that determine their educational and economic futures. Between hagwon and traditional schooling, education can consume close to every waking hour of a Korean child’s time, as well as a hefty portion of the household budget.
A 2016 survey found that 83 percent of five-year-old Korean children attend hagwon, with the typical student attending the tutoring sessions five times a week for 50 minutes per session. At older ages, hagwon have been blamed for high rates of depression and suicide among Korean teenagers. So pervasive are the schools that the government felt the need to ban hagwon sessions after 10 p.m., and state agents patrol key neighborhoods (such as Seoul’s Gangnam district of K-Pop fame) after dark, looking for illegal tutoring rings to bust.
Hagwon tutoring culminates in the Suneung, a national college-entrance exam so revered that authorities halt air traffic in the country during portions of the test so students can focus. Suneung scores help determine which institution students will attend in Korea’s tiered higher education system. The big three “SKY” universities (Seoul National University, Korea University, and Yonsei University), which churn out most of the nation’s political and business leaders, offer the most-coveted spots but accept only a small fraction of students.
Korea’s love for education is reflected in the vast sums parents spend out of pocket on schooling, in addition to the government’s substantial contribution. But much of Korea’s spending on education is inefficient, if not downright wasteful. Shelling out millions of Korean won on private tutoring and expensive universities might give your own child a leg up, but too often, that just comes at the expense of another student.
With places at top-tier universities limited and the labor market suffering from an oversupply of university-educated workers, spending more and studying more will not move the economy forward. As one Korea Herald writer opines: “Academic inflation has effectively devalued actual experience on the job and undermined diplomas earned from all but the most prestigious institutes.”
But much of Korea’s spending on education is inefficient, if not downright wasteful.
The central government recognizes what ails Korea’s education system, but many of the reforms it proposes are top-down. Many of the reforms don’t address the roots of Korean credentialism, and some—such as forcing universities to admit more applicants on the basis of standardized tests—may backfire.
A more promising avenue is to give students more choices. Currently, vocational education is enjoying a renaissance in Korea.
In 2010, Korea introduced Meister schools, vocational high schools inspired by Germany’s vaunted apprenticeship programs. Meister schools have more autonomy than other schools and work closely with industry to train students with in-demand skills. Students have a direct track into relevant jobs and are barred from pursuing university for three years after graduation. Meister schools receive more funding than regular high schools and land students in jobs at sought-after companies such as Samsung. Proponents hope this will destigmatize vocational education and lure students away from the university track.
Lee Ju-Ho, another former education minister who oversaw the introduction of Meister schools, hopes they can help tackle Korea’s university obsession. “Vocational education can provide alternative options for students who do not go to universities and have different talents,” he said in an interview with Today. “If there is no well-developed vocational and technical education in the system, you will have only vertical differentiation ending up with first-tier, second-tier universities.”
Advocates should be careful not to oversell Meister schools, though. They’re expensive to run and still account for a small share of students. And the close association between taxpayer-funded schools and specific companies raises the cronyism concern that schools will train students for the needs of certain businesses, not the needs of the whole economy.
Still, vocational education offers Korea a promising route out of the quagmire that its higher education glut has created. The United States should watch Korea’s path forward carefully.
Korea is a nation where the standard belief has become that college is the only path to economic prosperity, which has shortchanged an economy desperately in need of practically skilled workers and bolstered the prestige of a small group of elite universities. Sound familiar?
SOURCE
Outgoing University of California President Janet Napolitano Was More Politician than Educator
University of California President Janet Napolitano is stepping down from the post she has held since 2013. Californians, particularly students, have cause to wonder why she was given the job in the first place. Never known as an educator, Napolitano ruled the university like a typical politician.
As the Sacramento Bee noted, “in 2017, a state audit alleged Napolitano’s office hid $175 million from the public while tuition increased,” and it was just a bit more than an allegation. Napolitano used the money to shower perks on staff and renovate the houses of UC chancellors. State Auditor Elaine Howle reported that Napolitano’s office “intentionally interfered” with their investigators. Despite the corruption and obstructionism, Napolitano faced no criminal charges.
Reports of her resignation failed to note that Napolitano made her public debut in the 1991 campaign to keep Clarence Thomas off the Supreme Court. Anita Hill accused Thomas of sexually harassing her, and attorney Napolitano, then with a Phoenix law firm, represented Hill in the matter. During the confirmation proceedings, Hill’s witness Susan Hoerchner “suddenly developed amnesia” about parts of her story that contradicted Hill. Napolitano refused to answer questions about whether she had persuaded Hoerchner to change her testimony.
Napolitano became attorney general and governor of Arizona, then headed up the federal Department of Homeland Security. In that role, she put out the DHS report Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment, a sweeping indictment of those who prefer limited government and defend constitutional measures such as the Second Amendment.
For their part, UC students asserted their First Amendment rights by protesting Napolitano’s steady tuition and fee hikes while hiding $175 million. When the slush fund emerged, students called for Napolitano’s resignation and issued a statement reading: “We believe that the administration is incapable of holding itself accountable.”
If students, parents, and taxpayers see Janet Napolitano’s departure as long overdue, it would be hard to blame them.
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