Stanford to continue legacy admissions and withdraw from Cal Grants
104 comments
·August 9, 2025SilverElfin
malfist
Seems reasonably. You and to discriminate? That's disappointing, but nobody is going to stop you, but the public tax dollars sure as hell shouldn't support your discrimination
TrackerFF
I always found it wildly fascinating how US schools have things like legacy admissions, athletic scholarships, standardized admission test, admission letter, letters of recommendation, extracurricular activities, and what have you.
Such a contrast to other systems where for example your HS grades will count 100% - and similar "ungameable" systems.
breadwinner
Right. It is called holistic review. Originally invented to limit the number of Jewish people in top universities (not kidding)! Now being used to limit the number of Asians.
Elite-College Admissions Were Built to Protect Privilege
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/histor...
The new holistic admissions policy worked as intended, successfully suppressing Jewish admissions.
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/06/23/a-lawsuit...
The 'holistic' admissions lie - The Daily Californian
https://www.dailycal.org/2012/10/01/the-holistic-admissions-...
The False Promise of 'Holistic' College Admissions - The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/12/the-fa...
Lifting the Veil on the Holistic Process at the University of California, Berkeley - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/education/edlife/lifting-...
fvgvkujdfbllo
This is very eye opening. As a geek with strong academic background always felt cheated by the system.
My professor explained that academics alone is not enough for success in life. He explained that some of the smartest engineers report to average business majors in companies. And he explained that that I cannot get any scholarships with perfect GPA while my roommate, a B student, has scholarships because he plays basketball and will likely get in leadership role in early on. That is good for the university as their graduates are seen as more successful.
It was a hard thing to listen to but I accepted it. I wish he told me the truth though.
null
rayiner
High school grades in the U.S. aren’t standardized and aren’t reliable. A standardized test like the SAT is the strongest predictor of college success: https://www.reddit.com/r/Sat/comments/1alp6vh/the_evidence_i... (collecting evidence)
derbOac
That paper is pretty misleading and flies in the face of most peer-reviewed research (I don't know that journal, for what it's worth).
My guess is because it was focused on those attending elite institutions:
"In their paper on admissions to highly selective colleges... students at each of the schools in this analysis... Students opting to not submit an SAT/ACT score achieve relatively lower college GPAs when they attend an Ivy-Plus college..."
My guess is the meaning of a high or low GPA versus standardized test changes quite a bit when you have groups very highly selected based on a wealth of other information.
The Dartmouth report has always frustrated because they, along with that other paper, selectively present conditional means rather than scatterplots, hiding the variability around points to make things look more predictive than they are. Means by predictor level are almost useless without knowing the conditional variance for each predictor level. They're basically deliberately pretending that there is no error variance in the prediction equation.
Meta-analyses suggest that both standardized test performance and GPA predict later performance. For example:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10627197.2015.99...
In some literature, GPA is superior, and others, testing.
There are other studies from decades ago showing that when standardized tests are temporarily removed from admissions (e.g., due to a court ruling), it has almost no influence on outcomes of admitted students later, suggesting admissions committees are able to select comparable students without tests.
I'm not saying tests are horrible and should be omitted, I just think people really overstate their predictive utility and it causes a ton of problems down the road.
ghaff
I took a grad marketing class once with a business professor who studied this sort of thing. GMATs rather than SATs but same idea. Basically GMATs mattered more than anything else especially metrics such as letters of recommendation that were basically worthless.
I knew the director of admissions somewhat at an elite school and he said that they basically put a couple of quantitative metrics (like SAT) on one axis and read essays and considered other metrics like interviews on the other axis for diversity before that term became popular.
The upper right more or less got in, the lower left didn't, and then they debated the middle ground.
orochimaaru
The SAT isn't strong enough to predict anything. It can generally be answered by someone in their sophomore year at college or even their freshman, depending on what level of courses they are taking.
The problem finding a hard enough test with as little human intervention for assessments. Because human intervention brings with it subjectivity. This subjectivity was manageable when there weren't so many people applying for top schools (e.g. in the early 1900's). But right now its not.
SAT/ACT/GRE are no indicator of success. What this "study" is merely proving is that schools may have regressed in their rigor for grading hard courses.
malfist
Why does it matter if a college student, after three years of education, can do well on the entrance exam? Isn't that a given?
siva7
So? In many countries high school grades also aren't standardized and counts 100% for admission. The system still works reliably and not worse than in america.
Mountain_Skies
Can you quantify that claim?
liquidpele
Ungameable… lol. Take a look at Asian countries for what happens when you rely only on grades… cheating becomes the norm since numbers are all that matter.
DiogenesKynikos
Cheating is not the norm in Asian countries.
The real downside is that school is insanely competitive, students study incredibly long hours, and they feel intense pressure to perform well on their exams.
The upside is that the students are much more serious about their studies than in the US, in general.
SilverElfin
They had that previously in some places. California universities used to not have affirmative action (quotas) but they apparently removed consideration of test scores to help achieve the racial composition they felt was “correct” in another way, since it was resulting in a skew towards whites and Asians in their view. Not sure what the process is today.
cortesoft
Athletic scholarships and standardized test admissions are way less gameable than HS grades
odo1242
Yea, especially since the people who get the highest grades in HS, in the US where you have a decent amount of latitude to pick your classes, are generally just the students who refused to take any hard class.
liquidpele
Or the ones that do 10+ faked “AP” classes over the summer and transfer those credits in. Not kidding.
huevosabio
Standardized tests are the least gameable. HS grades are pretty poor proxy given the wide range of quality in HS.
morpheos137
Other countries probably have a more centralized, standardized schooling system. In the USA schooling is at the local and state level.
throw0101d
> Other countries probably have a more centralized, standardized schooling system.
Which is basically what the SATs are:
DiogenesKynikos
This is what Baccalaureates, Abitur, Gaokao, etc. are: much more standardized high-school final exams, used as a metric for university admissions.
diggernet
Having HS grades count 100% is a really bad idea. Not because of anything about the schools, but because HS age isn't representative of people's abilities. I had terrible HS grades due to a complete lack of interest. After growing up a little and getting my act together, I got A's in college. Thank goodness they didn't base my admission on HS grades.
JoshTriplett
Standardized tests work much better than high school grades, and also handle cases like young students who go to university at or before the "normal" age of a high school student.
The SAT and GRE aren't perfect, but they're a massive help to students who would otherwise be outside the normal path. Get a high score on the SAT, and nobody cares whether you went through traditional K-12.
elashri
> GRE aren't perfect
This is understatement, GRE being required for STEM postgraduate studies was always university requirement for all not something the STEM department would want.
One can argue that the quantitative part have a point but for the language part, you must be kidding me. Unless you are going to English literature it is just plain stupid (maybe even if you study literature).
DiogenesKynikos
For native speakers of English, the language part of the exam is just seen as a general test of intelligence.
For non-native speakers, it's just a test of how well they learned English, and nobody in admissions expects them to score as well as native speakers.
Beyond this, there are subject-specific GREs. They're far from perfect, but they're more uniformly comparable across all candidates than grades are.
breadwinner
This seems reasonable. California doesn't want to subsidize the education of the privileged few who qualify as "legacy admission". And Stanford doesn't want to give up the financial support from alumnus.
globnomulous
> alumnus
Alumni. Stanford may care most about just that one alumnus, but my suspicion is that they care at least as much about other alumni and alumnae. :)
technothrasher
> Alumni.
Often "Alums" nowadays, as Alumni is traditionally male gendered.
BobaFloutist
Yup. And you can think of legacy admissions as college "whales", people who pay full price for an advantage and subsidize the price for less wealthy students. It's absolutely an imperfect system, but it at least redistributes a little wealth along the way
musicale
Stanford undoubtedly did the math and determined they would lose money overall (gifts are 7% of Stanford's income, tuition and fees 13%).
Boo-hoo, rich university loses money. Like the 21% Trump tax on endowment income, etc. Maybe they'll have to fire some useless, non-teaching administrators and build fewer country club dorms and luxury amenities, right?
But... Stanford would probably argue that admitting a single less-qualified donor child can cover the financial aid expenses of dozens of qualified students whose parents simply have less money. (Financial aid is 5% of Stanford's budget.)
If this is true, California's goal of banning legacy and (especially) donor admits could have an unintended consequence of reducing the number of qualified but non-rich students who will be admitted.
But... many gifts are restricted, you say! Buildings. Endowed faculty chairs. Particular research centers and programs. Specialized scholarships. Etc. Nonetheless, Stanford has to balance its budget, and even restricted gifts save money and allow them to shift dollars from one place to another. (Note debt service is 4% of the budget as well.)
ghaff
Universities definitely favor unrestricted gifts. But, to the degree that you make a restricted gift, you can be sure that there's often money shuffling in the background to the degree the gift is substantial.
dlcarrier
I'm okay with academia being an institution of the elite, as long as we stop pretending that their BS (or BA) will make everyone successful. We can't all be elite; that's not how that works.
Rich people are going to waste their time and money no matter what, but I didn't want them also wasting yours and mine. The man-hours and percent of the GDP (often paid for with taxes) we put into conflating cause and effect is absurd.
We dodn't need merit-base academia, we need merit-based employment that disregards elite and academic status.
SoftTalker
When a Bachelor's degree became a proxy for "can show up and complete assigned work" for employers that was the start of its decline as an academic credential.
JKCalhoun
How likely is it we'll have the one when we don't even have the other?
We'll have neither, of course. The wealthy will always be able to pay for what they want — merit be damned.
wnc3141
I agree that participation in the middle class shouldn't depend on borrowing six figures as a teenager. I dream of the day where any worker has economic security
delfinom
That's already happening with technical/trade/alternate school to career paths are rising up and some colleges are panicking with declining enrollment.
I am on a co-op board here in NY, pretty much all our young buyers the last 2 years are all gen-Z who went the non-college route and have saved up more than enough to put a downpayment on a home for themselves and have a mortgage instead of college debt.
dehrmann
How did they save for the down payment? The ROI for college isn't what it used to be, but there isn't a clear non-college path in the US, either.
musicale
"It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others."
rayiner
Props to California for doing this. Stanford showing its true colors here.
renewiltord
Yes, perfectly reasonable to pull state funding for private enrichment. Now, all we have to do is get rid of the racism in “holistic admission” and use a demonstrably fair system like performance on standardized tests.
simianwords
It’s interesting to see that merit best admissions is pushed from both sides of political spectrum - legacy admissions and DEI.
DragonStrength
You’re close. The issue is we can’t discuss class, so they look for all sorts of other analogs which they can get the wealthy folks on board with. DEI is acceptable to the wealthy because they ultimately see less of a threat there than from a person of the same race from the South or Midwest. In the workplace, the female Stanford legacy can still be underprivileged then thanks to gender versus the white male from a poor state with a land grant degree.
simianwords
both DEI and legacy are going away so it works in your favour.
mc32
I think legacy admissions is only supported by the elites —be they leftists or rightists. Normal leftists and normal rightists don’t support legacy admissions (pay to play). I think the vast majority of people would support fair admissions (GPA + something else that signals academic aptitude).
Most people would detest the extracurricular noise that some institutions use because often only people with money can afford their kids doing those things and two they are bullshit things. By most people I mean potential students such as those that in great numbers end up in state schools or community colleges.
impossiblefork
You can't be a leftist and support legacy admissions. You can be a right-liberal and support legacy admissions, but even the mildest mild-mild leftism would reject that kind of thing.
NewJazz
How do you compare GPA across different schools?
acomjean
Isn’t that why standardized tests like the SAT/ACT… exist?
mc32
I think you can gauge that from the historical performance of students from those sources. Of course, there is a lag as schools either improve or dilute grades.
simianwords
I agree with you but I meant both democrats and republicans are pushing merit based admissions. Gavin Newsom against legacy and Trump against DEI.
On the point people vastly prefer GPA - I don’t agree because people on the left prefer DEI and affirmative action.
rayiner
I think even most democrats oppose it: https://manhattan.institute/article/study-finds-most-democra.... Though unfortunately, it appears that what swings democrats from support to non-support is learning that it hurts asians, not just white people. :-/
alecco
Stanford became Harvard.
jen20
Was there a point in recent memory where it wasn’t? As a non-American I’d always considered them to be the Oxford and Cambridge (respectively) of the US.
andrewl
Some would say Harvard and Yale are the Oxford and Cambridge of the US. But we’re a big country, and we have a lot of schools. Many lists of top schools include these, alphabetically ordered:
Columbia University, Cornell University, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, Rice University, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, Yale University
But this discussion of rankings reminds me of a quote from John Allen Paulos:
In fact, trying to convert a partial ordering into a total one is, I think, at the root of many problems. Reducing intelligence to a linear ordering—a number on an IQ scale—does violence to the complexity and incomparabilities of people’s gifts.
JKCalhoun
They're West coast. "Elite" schools in the U.S. are typically East coast (old monied).
genghisjahn
Pick up a copy of Palo Alto and read thru that. Lots of interesting Stanford history there.
Cornbilly
DEI for rich mid-wits is fine for anyone else it’s Communism.
lo_zamoyski
Here's another perspective.
Let's say Harvard's admission were to become largely based on social status rather than merit. You could say "so be it", but let it be known that that is what Harvard is. Being one thing while advertising another is lying and the greatest offense.
A positive side effect is that perhaps we won't fetishize Harvard as much and keep insisting that one must get into Harvard. You don't. Harvard's brand depends on you thinking you do, of course.
The current model of academia in the US and elsewhere is wretched. Obscene tuition is one thing. The failure to educate is another. Universities got out of the education business a while ago. Universities are focused on jobs, that's the advertising pitch, which is not the historical and proper mission of the university. So you end up with institutions that are bad at both.
So if these "elite" schools lead to a disenchantment with merit, I see a silver lining. It could provide the needed impetus and motivation to distribute education more widely in smaller colleges with a greater clarity and focus on their proper mission (e.g., Thomas Aquinas College [0]) while creating a robust culture of trade schools. The majority of people do not need a college education! And frankly, it's not what they're looking for.
Germany does something like this. Fewer people go to university there, and they have a well-developed system of trade schools.
Furthermore, you could offer programs that allow students at colleges to take classes in these trade schools.
Let's stop trying to sustain a broken model. The time is ripe for educational reform.
PeterStuer
If as you hypothesise universities are focussed on jobs, how do you explain the countless utterly useless degrees they keep pumping out en mass?
burnt-resistor
No surprise. C'mon, they host the Hoover Institution and celebrities and rich people pay coaches to get their kids in. It's a power funnel racket.
PS: I'm an ex-Stanford FTE.
georgeburdell
People went to jail for those bribes. It’s not a legal tactic to begin with
orangecat
They went to jail because they bribed people who were not authorized to accept bribes instead of the people who were (with the latter people charging much more, of course).
lotsofpulp
Just because the bribes were too small. If they were large enough to help build a building, then they become legal again.
energy123
It was because the bribes benefited a small number of administrators instead of being equitably distributed across administrators
rahimnathwani
No, it's because the money went to individual employees directly, rather than being received by the institution.
IncreasePosts
Has Thomas Sowell ever commented on legacy admissions? I can't find anything but I imagine he would not be a fan, just like he isn't a fan of affirmative action.
rr808
Legacy is better than people think. The undergrad academics at T10 universities really aren't anything special. People want to go because of the connections with wealthy & well-connected students, but then complain when wealthy well-connected students get a easier ride. You fill Harvard of Stanford with only people with 1600 SATs will turn them into places you dont really want to go to.
jfengel
When you prefer legacy students, you perpetuate the kind of discrimination in effect when their parents and grandparents were admitted.
Perhaps this is better for the school as a whole. But when that argument was made to help students who were previously discriminated against, people swore that didn't matter, because all discrimination is bad.
Legacy students are the easiest way to see that discrimination is not over yet. There are many others but this one is really transparent. There are many potential ways to deal with it, but "end discrimination for them but not for me" isn't a good one.
musicale
> When you prefer legacy students, you perpetuate the kind of discrimination in effect when their parents and grandparents were admitted.
Universities will likely claim that legacy and (especially) donor admits bring more money into the university, which in theory allows them to increase overall economic diversity (and likely social and demographic diversity as well) of the student body by admitting a larger number of qualified students under a need-blind admission policy.
jfengel
Many of these universities have vast investment funds. Expanding would indeed allow them to provide more education, but that does not appear to be their goal.
ryandrake
Yes. Imagine if you could get an elite Wall Street or Consulting job based significantly on who your dad is. That would be unfair, discriminatory, and otherwise pretty terrible, except for the already elite and wealthy. Oh, wait...that already happens, and it's indeed terrible in all the ways you would predict. This really needs to be cracked down on, but the rich and powerful will always support it.
burnt-resistor
The rich having their way is the blueprint for a third-world country.
CrazyStat
> The undergrad academics at T10 universities really aren't anything special.
This surprised me when I went from my decent but not great-by-ranking (generally ranked in the 50-70 range) undergrad university to a top 10 ranked university for grad school. The undergrad students weren’t noticeably smarter, nor did they work harder on average. They were more ambitious and more entitled. Cheating was rampant (pre-LLMs, I expect it’s even worse now) and professors mostly just didn’t care. The median household income at the top 10 school was more than double what it was at my undergrad school.
That was an enlightening experience.
SoftTalker
Ambition and a sense of entitlement (manifest destiny) built America.
ethan_smith
Research from Opportunity Insights shows legacy preferences reduce social mobility while multiple studies find no evidence legacy admits enhance campus culture or alumni giving beyond what could be achieved through need-blind admissions.
yieldcrv
Top universities don’t exist for social mobility, that is merely happenstance that the people that want to pay have gatekept access to the purse by having attended university.
bumbledraven
> You fill Harvard of Stanford with only people with 1600 SATs will turn them into places you dont really want to go to.
Isn’t that basically Caltech? They had a 3% acceptance rate in 2023, the lowest in the nation. https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/lowest-accepta...
rr808
Yes sure there will be some elite purely academic places, but Caltech so small its a blip, most high schools are larger.
BobaFloutist
They'll turn into Cal, where people absolutely want to go.
lo_zamoyski
> The undergrad academics at T10 universities really aren't anything special. People want to go because of the connections with wealthy & well-connected students, but then complain when wealthy well-connected students get a easier ride.
Indeed. And the irony is that even when poorer students do attend, they find that the expensive habits of the richer students exclude them from mingling with them in many cases.
(Fun fact: one reason for uniforms in Catholic schools was to eliminate wealth from the picture.)
PeterStuer
Which was always absurd as there's no less vestimentary affluence signaling in uniform high schools than in any other.
The signs may be more subtle and sublimized to a careless outsider, but in the schools those signals are obvious and stand out just as blatent as anywhere else.
IncreasePosts
You couldn't even do that - only about 500 people get a perfect SAT score per year.
burnt-resistor
It sounds hyperbolic and they probably mean high school students with 1500+ SAT-I, 5 AP everything, and other community leadership achievements.
Meanwhile, there's the ultra-talented people IIT turns away every year. Maybe the smart thing would be to also pick up international students as second-chance admits rather than chase away tourists, students, researchers, and workers?
PeterStuer
US universities have always thrived on full price paying foreigners, especially at the graduate level. They also make for very cheap and docile TA's
burnt-resistor
People with 1600 SATs tend to be ultra-productive, down-to-Earth individuals. (My high school had dozens of them.)
Legacy creates an closed, self-reinforcing, entitled aristocracy.
What kind of society do you want?
Legacy admissions and holistic (discriminatory) admissions should be disallowed as long as these universities receive public fundings directly or indirectly.