Considering "they paid a lot so we let them in" is perfectly valid and legal selection criteria at private schools and universities, I fail to see how legislation like this is going to matter.
There are universities for which that would be a valid argument. They are expensive places to store mediocre children of the wealthy and are deigned for purpose.
More prestigious private universities use a lot of government funding to fund widely cited research which is what makes them prestigious.
In that case why not just tie government funding to admission rule changes, instead of blanket regulate private institutions? Are businesses not allowed to pick their customers in the US?
That kind of like saying that Russia has free speech, you just can't say things that are prohibited by law.
One can reasonably argue that such protected categories are necessary for a just and fair society, but let's be clear about what it is we're advocating.
> More prestigious private universities use a lot of government funding to fund widely cited research which is what makes them prestigious.
Just a correction, the unversities are NOT the ones that apply for, and receive funding from e.g. the NIH.
It is individual researchers that apply, and receive, funding. And this money goes towards their salary and research. No funding, no salary, no reseacher.
Universities don't themselves receive government funding.
This might be shocking to some, but when a researcher receiver a federal grant (for example), the university takes a significant cut which they refer to as Facilities and Administrative (F&A) costs [1]. The F&A covers the so-called "indirect" costs of conducting research on university facilities: buildings, utilities, admin and accounting, support staff for compliance with federal regulations, etc.
Each university has its own F&A rate, which can be as much as 60% of received federal funds [2]. This rate has historically trended upward.
Well, the university will take a big slice (sometimes ~40%) of what researchers get from the NIH as "overhead", and then spend it on admins. And if professors hire grad students, the university will take another big slice as "tuition" even if the grad students aren't taking any courses.
This is one reason I'm leaving academia – if I raise money outside of academia, I actually get to keep it.
> Are not all universities "they paid a lot so we let them in"?
No.
Being able to pay tuition and all the other expenses is necessary but not sufficient to gain admittance.
My preference for admission is a lottery system. Have the school set the bar for admission (which can still contain some qualitative criteria) and then after that, it's a lottery for all that exceed that threshold.
Set the bar for admission as you described. Have two options for admissions for those who meet the bar. You can choose one and only one of the two systems per admissions cycle.
Option 1: Lottery. Every student is entered into a drawing.
Option 2: Auction. The highest bidders get admitted.
The proportion of slots available for auction or lottery is the same as the proportion of students choosing auction vs lottery.
This allows the rich to buy their way into the school while keeping the majority of the slots available for everyone without extreme wealth.
Now I know what you are thinking, "why should the rich get to buy their way in?" To which I reply, why not? We only sell a small percentage of the slots, only to otherwise qualified applicants, and only to the highest bidders (meaning they necessarily overpay per the winners curse).
I'd argue that it's not the current system, and also not how the power-brokers who designed the current system want it.
One of the important functions of the current university system is to cherry-pick the smartest, most charismatic, most driven, and most ambitious poor children and give them a seat at the table, indoctrinating them in the ways of the well-to-do and providing them opportunities within polite society. Basically, take anyone who rolled an 18 on one of their D&D attribute scores and make them a lord. By doing this, you decapitate the leadership of any potential revolution. Anyone who has enough charisma, intelligence, ambition to organize the poors into a movement that actually has a chance of success instead has a much easier pathway of going to university, getting a degree and a middle-class job, and enjoying a comfortable existence without the risk of being killed in the revolution. Keep your friends close and your (potential) enemies closer.
Pure lottery admissions doesn't have this property. The biggest threat is that you miss someone talented, who then gets pissed off and overthrows the system. You want to have humans looking over the application packets of everybody, and you want lots of competing admissions departments so that if one of them screws up, that person gets snatched up by another university.
I think the crucial part of OP's proposal is that the number of slots allocated to each system is proportional to the total number of students who have applied for that system. In practice this would mean that most slots would be allocated through lottery, because the bidding game would be too expensive for most.
> Legacy admissions at private universities are not blind auction
Donor admissions. I’ve literally heard Hamptons parents timing pregnancies to not overlap with billionaires’ kids, the theory being a million can buy a seat in an “off” year that would cost far more in an “on.”
Harvard takes about 2,000 kids a year. The Dean's or director's list is about 200 of those [1]. If a few more kids come from families giving tens of millions, that will absolutely reduce the odds of a family giving high hundreds of thousands making the cut.
Harvey Mudd College has need-blind admissions so being able to pay tuition and other expenses is in fact, not necessary to gain admittance. They make up the difference through financial aid. Many other highly-selective schools also do need-blind admissions. Even those that don’t may still admit students to whom they will give generous financial aid to make up the difference between what their family can pay and what the school nominally charges.
The counterargument is that the large donations (often $10M or even $100 M and above) that wealthy doners give to help their kids get admitted enables universities to grant generous scholarships to smart but not wealthy students.
When you think of it, I'm sure you admit that there are better ways than lottery.
a) increase the number of people admitted.
b) increase the bar for admissions so that it matches the admissions.
Private Ivy League's are massive hedge funds that artificially limit admissions.
For example, Harvard takes 1200 per year, receives 50,000 applications. Harvard could easily increase the number of admissions to 10 - 15 thousand and tighten admission criteria little bit.
A lottery is too complicated and can lead to bias, just choose based on merits. That not only reinforces the prestige of the college but by using qualitative data the entire way makes it impossible to claim biases were at play.
No, but it used to be. I got into the first state university that I attended that way. When I tried it again some years later at a different state university, it no longer worked that way.
The most important thing for a university or a school is it's signalling value for a graduate. If people know that "X graduate" is a mark of a well-educated, smart person, a school will be successful beyond measure. If, however, a school starts to admit anyone who's willing to pay and stop failing people, then the signal will dilute quickly, as will the prestige and applicants, eventually.
Which is also why they previously had their internal diversity mandates. That way their alumni as future leaders can legitimately claim they had a black or brown friend in college.
Maybe I'm naive, but I always thought the purpose of Affirmative Action in private universities was to insure those black and brown people were given the opportunity to become the future leaders.
Eh, I'd go the opposite route. You meet a threshold, you go into a lottery. They can all sit there on selection day where the hopper spits out the names of admitted students one by one.
Most admission should be by that route. Set proper threshold and then do lottery. But outright auction for some fraction of admission would be good subsidy for rest. Set minimum at proper level say at least 2-5x normal unsubsidised tuition cost.
Because that's not what's happening here. They're saying "you had a family member graduate here, so we aren't going to expect the same academic prerequisites for your entry".
That means that a high-achieving student with uneducated parents will get rejected, while a low-performing student with a parent who is an alumni still gets admitted.
This, for an institution that is accredited by the state, that offers credentials that are widely treated as societal merit, represents a profound form of economic discrimination. It also completely destroys any illusion that the college's application process is meritocratic, which is a fundamental assumption of the system at large.
This system in inherently racist, because there are plenty of kids getting admitted because their parents or grandparents are alumni. That means that white kids are getting an easy entry to an elite school because their white parents or grandparents, who were born before the end of segregation, attended and graduated from that school before Black Americans were even allowed to enroll.
With our extremist SCOTUS now stripping Black Americans of the benefit of Affirmative Action, the only measure that actively leveled the playing field, tearing down this discriminatory system is more important than ever. Especially since these elite schools largely require familial elitism and socioeconomic superiority to qualify for admission, leading to the demographics of students at these schools to sway far whiter than the general college-attending population (because Black people are actively being discriminated against because of the nature of their familial history).
It might also be that their family contributed to the success and reputation of the university for a few generations. As small as that contribution might be, there could be merit in it.
> Considering "they paid a lot so we let them in" is perfectly valid and legal selection criteria at private schools and universities, I fail to see how legislation like this is going to matter
(b)(1) "'Donor preference in admissions' means considering an applicant’s relation to a donor of, or a donation to, the independent institution of higher education as a factor in the admissions process, including asking an applicant to indicate their family’s donor status and including that information among the documents that the independent institution of higher education uses to consider an applicant for admission.
...
(c) Commencing September 1, 2025, an independent institution of higher education shall not provide a legacy preference or donor preference in admissions to an applicant as part of the regular or early action admissions process."
§ 66018.4(b) and (c) of the California Education Code, as amended today
