No. They do ask for names of relatives who’ve gone, but that is so that they don’t solicit them for money right after they reject their kid/grandkid. Which is definitely the prudent thing to do.
Ha! But what will Harvard be worth in a couple generations with all the legacies? Are they as good as their parents??? MIT will stay #1 in Tech in a couple of generations.
Genes or not the kids will inherit parents’ money, and therefore highly likely to succeed. Elite schools like Harvard and Stanford are great for networking. Steve Ballmer’s most lucky break is being roommate with Bill Gates. Ballmer was actually a smart math major at Harvard back in the days. He’s not a dumb kid many like to believe.
Legacy admission is just a perfect mirror of the real world. Kids got legacy admission in their mothers’ wombs to great wealth. Why not do it explicitly at the college admission as well?
This whole bribery scheme came about because some middle class parents don’t have the wealth or the connection to send their kids to elite schools. If you donate 10M to fund a professor chair at Harvard I doubt they will say no to your kids. Instead these parents tried to get lucky with a few 100K.
I vividly remember Stanford’s president of the day, father of RISC architecture John Hennessy, flew all the way to Hong Kong to visit Li Ka Shing, the richest man in Asia. It was the late 80s. He got Li to pay for a brand new building at Stanford I believe. No wonder Li’s kid went to Stanford.
The thing is people can be angry at the backdoor and jealous of the wealth, but $10M is 50 people’s tuition @$50Kx4 years. What would happen if every top school openly sold 1 spot per 50 so that everyone could come for free? Would people really resent it then?
I think the current legacy admission system is already striking a pretty good balance. Elite schools are very generous with financial aids. Without legacy donors those middle to lower class kids wouldn’t be able to afford Harvard or Stanford.
Somebody gotta pay. There’s no free lunch, well, not for everybody.
So some pay 10x the tuition, some pay nothing. Some pay sports and earn medals for schools. Some hit the books hard. Everybody is pitching in.
Oh, we are reasonably good and no reason to cry. Nothing is perfect, a non-perfect reality is often already the optimized version without any revolution. The non-perfect organic reality is optimum due to millions of people making decisions based on their best interest and their best choice for their circumstances. It’s far superior than interventions from a few idealistic lunatics.
People are geniuses when they have the freedom to make their own decisions for their own best interest. People can become monsters when they have the power to make decisions for millions of other people.
Here’s another analogy for this forum: Prop 13 and Rent Control are the “legacy admissions” of real estate. There is no question of the benefits that have accrued to all of those homeowners and rent control tenants over time. Yet if those same people did nothing more to reinvest in their futures, not only would the advantages have been wasted, but they would have taken a toll on the properties and communities where they reside. Additional burden (housing costs, renovations, property tax) are then placed on newcomers (‘non-legacy’) who, in most cases these days, have to search for alternatives further and further away from job centers.
Extreme cases
Palo Alto/Stanford, where the only professors who might be able to afford to live there would need subsidized housing or inherited property/wealth.
Rent-controlled College towns/Slumlord, where students are charged heavily for dilapidated apartments in the way For-Profit Schools (like Trump University ) prey upon low-income students through student loans for worthless ‘educational’ programs.
“Perhaps jail time wasn’t necessary but Dre did donate $70 million to USC along with Jimmy Iovine," wrote journalist Yashar Ali. Ali was referring to a 2013 donation to the school from Iovine and Dre that resulted in a building – the USC Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy for Arts, Technology and the Business of Innovation – being named after Dre.