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> Considering that the US universities consistently rank among the top and they do produce the significant portion of the groundbreaking innovation and technology, maybe the American model has a merit? There's a long discussion to be had here, but... let me try to give the short version. Sure, the US does some things right. Mostly, though, it's momentum. The US made some very good decisions between 1940 and 1990 and academia evolves slowly, so it's only been in the past decade that we've started to see the loss of relevancy. > If you think about it, legacy admissions strengthens the connection of the alumni(which is likely to have significant career progress at the time of their offspring attends college) with the institution and gives them reasons to protect the school, and the legacy admission students give access to their successful parents connections. It should be nice to have the kids of Google founders as classmates, for example. Don't you think? This is a pretty naive view, and I say this as someone whose peer group is at least 50% elite college grads. Smart poors and legacy kids don't really mix. When the mixing does occur, it's predatory. The truth is that, by age 18, people who know they are and where they fit into society, and the rich kids have already been socialized to see us as the enemy, the teeming masses, the poors who exist to be exploited then discarded. If you want to "make connections", you have to do it in the first two years of prep school. Beyond that, it's too late. Those fuckers will never let you in. You have a better chance (still low, but nonzero) at violent overthrow with a large enough rabble armed with AK-47s. That said, you're not wrong that it benefits smart poors that rich brats also attend the same schools. It's a fog-of-war effect. At the individual level, you don't know if a person got in because they were smart or because they were rich. Thus, the rich brats look like they might be smart, and the smart poors end up with enough of a rich brat veneer to make it, at least, into middle--possibly lower-upper, if they don't make mistakes--management. |