Correct. There's a belief at the very top of these schools that they only want so many people leading one-dimensional lives focused on entering upper middle class trades like law and medicine.
This is just classism dressed up as racism. People who don't want to enter the upper middle class and have strong extracurriculars are just the already upper middle class/upper class. The professions like law/medicine are what the lower classes shoot for, trying to be a journalist or a political player is the domain of the higher classes.
"These people work too hard for too low aspirations, we need more people who work less hard but have higher aspirations"
ivy league educations are obviously a very scarce good. is it really so wrong to want to limit the amount of unambitious professionals they matriculate?
i was a smart enough kid that i probably could have done well academically at an ivy league school, but the whole time i was in college i knew i had no loftier goals than just getting a nice job as a software engineer and enjoying my time after work. there are hundreds of good state schools that do a great job preparing you for this kind of life if you put in the work. a spot at a school like MIT would honestly have been wasted on me, even though i was likely "smart enough" to be there.
The Ivy League schools understand that admission is a ticket to a comfy-but-historically-and-culturally-insignificant middle-class life. Their goal is to guard against applicants seeeking that and to look for those who will go further.
It's not unlike VCs who guard against investing in founders who will take the first acquisition offer they see so they can score a few million and live comfortably. That outcome does nothing for them.
You're making an argument of rational self interest, which doesn't at all speak to morality.
Imagine a company that maintains a culture of grooming executives through the ranks. After reviewing their data, they find that more women than men leave to start families. Are they then justified to hire only men, or more subtly divert resources to only groom male junior employees?
OK, so an Ivy League school wants to continue with policies with racist outcomes because it's better for the school. It's probably going to stay legal for quite some time, so they'll be free to continue. But they shouldn't receive a dime of government money, and will deserve the scorn they'll be viewed with in history.
Asian students make up a much greater percentage of Harvard College students than the percentage of Asians in the U.S. population, that doesn't sound like a racist outcome.
What's most frustrating is this case is a stalking horse for white racists who want to eliminate race as a consideration to keep higher education predominantly white and therefore economically advantaged.
> they find that more women than men leave to start families
They're definitely justified in filtering out people (men and women) who are more likely to leave to start familier, and prefer those who won't.
This is of course a bad outcome for society, but that's how capitalism works - and if we want companies to optimize for/prefer families, then we should structure the societal incentives such.
> This is of course a bad outcome for society, but that's how capitalism works - and if we want companies to optimize for/prefer families, then we should structure the societal incentives such.
There's a premise here (and in many similar arguments) that the capitalists and their decision-makers (the managers) can only follow financial incentives; they are almost victims of circumstance with no agency of their own.
Markets and financial incentives are useful tools, but very imperfect. To keep society functioning and to do good and do well, we all must sacrifice some financial benefits. What is the financial incentive for soldiers, as a simple example, or for nurses who serve in Ebola zones? For Albert Einstein? 'The market made me do it' is not a defense; there are financial incentives for murder too; we must make our own decisions and we are responsible for the consequences.
From another perspective, it's ironic that capitalists, traditionally more conservative, take on this structuralist argument, usually abhorred by the right. If we say the system makes minorities and women poor, they say it's nonsense. If we say the system makes capitalists do evil, well what else could they do?
Tsk tsk, of course we should restrict those who seek upper middle class lives in law and medicine, when clearly we should instead be selecting for upper-upper middle class livelihoods in I-banking and, once in a blue moon, management consulting!
Clearly 'reitzensteinm is baiting this "IvyAdmisions" [sic] character. No one who had a job at Harvard for more than a month would tolerate that statement, but "IA" agrees heartily. He's going to claim that he was in admissions at a different Ivy, but no matter how people might look down on Penn or Cornell, they wouldn't have this joker around either. This account has existed for 42 days, and is trolling this entire thread.