43% of Harvard's White Students are ALDC Admits

[Alpha]

News reporting like this is both woefully irresponsible and ideologically driven. The racial animosity underlying the reporting is quite clear. The reporter simply didn't look at the study or they simply ripped the parts that support their ideology and posted them. Given the way this article has been regurgitated by various outlets, its not clear whether the journalists are lazy or inept.

The actual study simulates what admissions would look like under various conditions. The results are on Table 11 (Page 49), if anyone is interested. https://www.nber.org/papers/w26316.pdf

Under a model with no legacy preferences, white admits fall by 4%, most other races increase their admits by a similar percentage. Under a model with no athlete preference, white admits fall by 6%. Under a model with no race/legacy/athlete preference, white admits increase by 3%, African American admits decrease by 69%, Hispanic admits decrease by 42%, and Asian American admits increase by 51%.

For all the moaning about ALDC privilege, the actual impact it has on the number of white admits is minuscule. The benefits conferred by the current system on African Americans and Hispanics, and the corresponding penalty for being Asian American, is quite staggering. Of course, those results don't support the ideology of those writing the news, so they're buried, and we're left with the completely false implication that white admits would fall by 43% without ADLC preferences.

I guess you just skipped over this part. 

Table 10 also shows what this implies for the overall admit rate for ALDC applicants. The admit rate for all white ALDCs applicants would fall from 43.6% to 11.4%, a drop of over 30 percentage points. We can go one step further and generate an upper bound on the overall LDC admit rate for white applicants when ALDC preferences are eliminated. If we assume that all of the athletes are rejected when ALDC preferences are eliminated, it would imply that the white LDC admit rate would fall from 33.4% to less than 14%. Thus, the average marginal effect of being an LDC on admissions for white applicants is at least 19.4%. 

Legacy admissions policies were designed to be a hidden race/ethnicity preference for White Christians.

https://www.businessinsider.com/legacy-a...es-2013-10

They're doing a poor job of giving whites an advantage if their elimination would only decrease the number of white admits by 4%.

Again, they ran the simulation to see what admissions demographics would look like under various scenarios. That is the appropriate topic, not the advantage white LDC admits have over the rest of the admissions pool.

In the face of blatant racial discrimination, from which black and hispanic admits receive tremendous preference, it's bizarre that you're moaning about LDC admissions policies giving such a small benefit to whites. Let's also ignore the fact that a substantial number of those counted as white are actually Jewish.

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I would assume that if you got rid of Legacy, Asians would go up by a lot and everyone else would lose out?  So that's the group that's actually getting screwed here, rather than black or Hispanic students.  I know that's the case at other schools - if you use CalTech as your base. They are truly color-blind in their admissions, so they have 2x the number of Asians as MIT and other elite schools, which cap their Asian population at around 30%.

Yes, Asians are the ones who are negatively impacted by non-merit-based admissions. A similar situation existed a century ago with Jewish students, which is why we have the LDC preferences to begin with.

Don't you see how strange it is that the media outlets reporting on this study don't mention the monumental discrimination against Asians. Every story just harks on the ideologically-driven  "white admits aren't actually qualified" narrative. It's particularly strange because the only reason we have this data is because of a lawsuit that alleges such racial discrimination against Asians.

Those interested can find a summary of that case here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_f...rd_College