This guy did the math.
When grilled at trial in the lawsuit over Asian-American admissions about the “Dean’s Interest List,” a confidential list of applicants with ties to big donors whose admission rate is higher even than legacy applicants, Harvard’s dean of admissions, William Fitzsimmons, called the list “important for the long-term strength of the institution.” Earlier, during a deposition, he described legacy as “essential to Harvard’s well-being.” But Fitzsimmons couldn’t point to a shred of data to support these claims. In any case, the colleges don’t need the money. The eight Ivy League schools have a combined endowment of more than $100 billion, which they retain from their wealthy alumni in part because of the massive tax break they receive as nonprofits, a status that seemingly only can be defended on the premise that they promote class mobility.
May 23rd, 2019 at 2:34PM
“promote class mobility”…actually, a case could be made that the true social function of these institutions…whatever the intent of the individuals running them and working in them…is to *inhibit* social mobility.
Here’s Peter Drucker, from 1969:
“One thing it (modern society) cannot afford in education is the “elite institution” which has a monopoly on social standing, on prestige, and on the command positions in society and economy. Oxford and Cambridge are important reasons for the English brain drain. A main reason for the technology gap is the Grande Ecole such as the Ecole Polytechnique or the Ecole Normale. These elite institutions may do a magnificent job of education, but only their graduates normally get into the command positions. Only their faculties “matter.” This restricts and impoverishes the whole society…The Harvard Law School might like to be a Grande Ecole and to claim for its graduates a preferential position. But American society has never been willing to accept this claim…
It is almost impossible to explain to a European that the strength of American higher education lies in this absence of schools for leaders and schools for followers. It is almost impossible to explain to a European that the engineer with a degree from North Idaho A. and M. is an engineer and not a draftsman.”
American society in recent decades has come much closer to accepting HLS (etc) as Grande Ecoles, in the sense Drucker described, than it was when he wrote the above.
May 23rd, 2019 at 2:48PM
David: Yup. Look how rich Harvard students are.
Of course, given this fact, it would be the odd middle or lower class applicant who, looking around the place, would actually decide to spend four years being made to feel incredibly shabby.