Privilege Much?

One of the secrets of Harvard is that within the academic community, the undergraduate program is considered rather mediocre.

I heard this from my step-mom (Radcliffe, 1956, and former college president), economist Brad Delong, and a number of my step-mom's acquaintances.

What Harvard sells, as are the connections created.  You graduate from Harvard, and you are something akin to a Mafia, :Made Man."

What the school is selling is entry into a social set. 

So it comes as no surprise that the university's admissions data indicate a tremendous amount of "White Boy Affirmative Action" for alums, donors, and the like.

Harvard University is a notoriously tough school to get into, with an acceptance rate of just 4.5% in the most recent admissions cycle for the class of 2023. But it’s significantly easier to land a spot at the esteemed Ivy League institution if you’re a legacy student or an athlete—a fact that disproportionately benefits white applicants.

A new study notes that in the six admissions cycles between 2014 and 2019, 43% of white students admitted to Harvard were either legacies, recruited athletes, children of faculty and staff, or students on the Dean’s Interest List—a list of applicants whose relatives have donated to Harvard, the existence of which only became public knowledge in 2018. By contrast, no more than 16% of admitted students who were African-American, Asian-American, or Hispanic fell into one of those favored categories.………

It’s not news that elite institutions like Harvard give special dispensation to athletic recruits and to applicants whose relatives have a relationship with the schools, whether as alumni or donors. The Wall Street Journal reports that over the past five years, Princeton University admitted 30% of its legacy applicants, compared to 7% of the general applicant pool, while the acceptance rate for legacies at the University of Notre Dame, Georgetown University, and the University of Virginia is roughly double the rate for the overall applicant pool. 

………

The newly revealed statistics on legacies and athletes are a reminder that inequality in the Ivy League isn’t an accident; it’s by design.

 Indeed.