[_mh56]

Here in India, we have quotas for different kinds of people. There's caste based, Gender based and finally EWS (Economically Weaker Section) Quota. Overall 60% of total seats are reserved for these people.

My friend who's ultra rich was selected in EWS Quota. His father who runs his own company took Zero pay for the last two years so he qualified for the benefits. Meanwhile people who actually deserved this had to compete for the non reserved seats.

The point is you can't just give preference based on income as its incredibly easy to fudge.

[jakeinspace]

This is off topic, but do you find it difficult seeing this friend the same way while knowing that they and their father gamed the system like that? If I learned this about somebody I knew it would seriously hurt their image in my eyes.

[ab0aa907]

Coming from other side of border but with similar culture and attitudes, corruption is so common in that part of the world that most of the people don’t even see it.

They would consider it smart to game the system.

Only way I can explain this attitude is to compare it tax loopholes in the west. It is very hard for many Americans to see loopholes in tax codes as unethical. Like using mega-backdoor-ira loophole to bypass income limits for contributing to IRA. (Personally, I am not saying that tax loopholes are ethical or unethical, just something that can be seen both ways.)

[WalterBright]

The only equitable tax is one that taxes other people.

[photonbucket]

People will do what they can to make their children's lives better. It just means the system was poorly designed

[PragmaticPulp]

A suggestion: Judge the parent who did the action, not the child who was along for the ride.

Unless you have some specific knowledge that the child insisted on their parents taking the action, it’s not really fair to blame the child. A lot of children don’t have much choice in the matter at that age.

[DSingularity]

Well he is still his “friend”. Perhaps he has repented and paid for the education of a number of people who would otherwise not be able to afford it.

[_mh56]

Atleast in India, everyone "games" systems as much as they can. Those who can't dream about gaming it. The Kafkaesque system makes sure that the few who actually tread the right path are never rewarded [1].

And unlike EU, this benefits corporates/capitalism as they can cut through the red tape easily by "gaming" things.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33368104

[WalterBright]

Does it benefit capitalism? India has always had a less prosperous economy.

[yencabulator]

Bias toward corruption probably means any prosperous company will have its pockets emptied by those with power within the company.

[harvey9]

That sounds like it was designed to be easy to game; income in last two years as a metric rather than total assets, or zip code, or high school attended etc

Does India have something like SAT as well?

[cuteboy19]

Yes, it's actually much harder. But the final results are group by category order by rank. There is negative marking to discourage guessing, so the cutoff for certain categories can even be 0 or even negative

[harvey9]

So you could make the cut (be considered a successful exam taker) with a zero score just because a large proportion of your peers got negative scores?

This seems just as unhelpful for deciding who to hire or who to allow onto a higher course of study as the campaigns we have seen on some USA university campuses to give all students an automatic A grade.

[cuteboy19]

That is the cost of equity.

Note that the system also has many holes, so the categorization isn't perfect. Its possible for a large number of students to belong to the categories only on paper. So you don't even get equity in the end.

[pmoriarty]

> you can't just give preference based on income as its incredibly easy to fudge

That's why you have to look at total wealth, not just income... though I'm sure the ultra wealthy will find some way to work around that as well.

[_mh56]

You don't even need Trusts for this. EWS is decided by an issued certificate. The issuer can be bribed.

[Rebelgecko]

I knew a kid in high school whose parents divorced for college financial aid reasons. As long you have a trusting relationship, seems easy enough to divorce, give one spouse the wealth, and then remarry when you don't care about FAFSAs any more.

[nradov]

As a practical matter how would college admissions departments even try to account for "total wealth"? That number doesn't appear on income tax returns. Applicants could write down any number and there wouldn't be any way to verify it short of a court ordered forensic audit.

[SoftTalker]

You disclose it on FAFSA, which most schools require even to be eligible for non-need-based financial assistance (such as academic scholarships)

[csa]

Trusts are the most common way to do this.

[pmoriarty]

Then any trusts that benefit you should be counted as part of your wealth.

[zamnos]

So then the trust doesn't list you as a beneficiary but instead goes through a series of shell corporations that they don't control on paper. With stakes this high - your very child's future, there are always going to be people that are rich enough to break the spirit of the rules.

If it's a small handful of people, there's probably better things for them to spend time on, rather than trying to make an unbeatable system.

[civilized]

Wouldn't any metric be gamed? Why single out income for criticism? At least favoring lower income is going directly at the problem.

[tomcam]

What the hell. When you say caste based do you mean something unspoken or is it explicitly legislated? Mind-blowing.

[doetoe]

Discrimination against lower castes is very real. There are quota to somewhat compensate for this. Maybe you interpreted it as there being quota for each caste?

[tomcam]

Trying to understand, not interpret. Is there law allowing discrimination against lower cases? Or is there law allowing reverse discrimination to redress previous discrimination?

[doetoe]

Sorry, I hadn't seen your message. There is a law prohibiting caste-based discrimination. For university admissions there are also quota for low caste, casteless and tribal people, meaning that a certain percentage of places is reserved only for students belonging to those groups

[tomcam]

Thanks. That matches what I had expected.

[LewisVerstappen]

> The point is you can't just give preference based on income as its incredibly easy to fudge.

Okay, well this is the US.

Your tax returns are a very good indication of how much money you make.

If you lie on your tax returns then you have much bigger issues than college admissions counselors.

[vlovich123]

I think you’re missing the point. The really wealthy can just stop receiving income and have enough to draw on from their accumulated wealth. You can start looking at net assets but it’s a cat and mouse game against lots of very well resourced opponents.

[77pt77]

> You can start looking at net assets

When I applied for grad school many admission documents explicitly asked about this, even outside the realm of financial assistance.

[throw0101a]

> If you lie on your tax returns then you have much bigger issues than college admissions counselors.

If you own a large amount of equities you can get a secured loan on those holdings and use it to pay your bills while taking zero salary. This allows folks to live fancy lifestyles without selling holdings and triggering capital gains:

* https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/13/portfolio-loans-can-be-one-w...

The loan is not counted as income.

[WalterBright]

At some point the loan gets paid, and then the income taxes apply.

[pclmulqdq]

Taking a $0 salary for a few years is feasible for most rich people. That's why the FAFSA (financial aid form) also asks about assets.

[tyoma]

Or they could just have their kid “adopted” by a friend and avoid having to list parents income: https://www.propublica.org/article/university-of-illinois-fi...

[jefftk]

And the CSS profile, like FAFSA but for fancier schools, is even more exhaustive.

[djbusby]

If your family has $10MM in the bank, you too can take (and report) to IRS zero income.

[sklargh]

Assuming US due to agency choice. What about a 1099-INT? Surely even trivial interest earnings on 10mm would trigger this?

Moreover I'd expect that any given user w/10mm would be rolling into multiple accounts to maximize protection offered by FDIC.

[pjscott]

If you put the money mostly into bonds or stocks that don't issue significant dividends, you'll pretty much just have to worry about capital gains (form 1099-B), and those aren't taxed until the fiscal year in which they're realized.

[flangola7]

In the US parents' income is already considered when applying for financial aid. Just add that info to admissions

[lordnacho]

Does this mean you can not work for a couple of years to make it easy to get in, plus get a discount on the fee?

[selectodude]

No, assets are taken into consideration for that exact reason.

[wernercd]

"tax returns" and the OPs example was someone who had millions in the bank and took no "income" for years to fudge the tax return.

[foobiekr]

Deferred compensation plans allow you to strategically create a low w2 income for awhile and are mostly available to high earners.

[notlukesky]

40% for meritocratic entrance is more than twice what is at elite schools in the US. Maybe ambitious Americans should move to India for a fairer chance.

At most US elite schools, less than 20 percent is for “non-reserved” seats. Elite schools reserve seats for sports teams (affirmative action for rich white elites with “sports” like fencing and rowing), legacies (affirmative action for rich white elites), related to professors and school administrators (affirmative action for rich white elites), those who write essays on poverty tourism and their work experience in the NGO/white savior/charity scams (rich white elites), and then regular affirmative action (capped at 20%].

So it is a brilliant way to use regular affirmative action for Blacks as a weapon to ensure that rich white elites always win and do not compete with the “deplorable” poorer whites, the Asians and immigrants.

[onetimeusename]

This is kind of a racist against whites who I think are used as a scapegoat no matter what. In my experience, those sports teams you are talking about are filled up with international and Asian students[1][2]. The dumb white elite student and the extremely talented, poor Asian student stereotypes are not true in my opinion. Maybe they were in the past.

Even the SAT score can be gamed.[3] I think pretty much every admissions advantage that exists is found and exploited. These schools are no longer about providing an elite education to talented students who want to get ahead. They are credential factories and students who go these schools have parents that push them from young ages to get in because they want the status credential. I have all sorts of stories about how fake a lot of students CVs are. Fake non profits, doing math competitions despite not liking math, getting into obscure sports, etc. It's absolutely not just white people who do this.

I am not advocating for dropping test scores. I just want to point out how aggressively people pursue getting admitted to elite schools and the specter of cheating hangs over it all too. I have friends who did tutoring in other countries who talk about paid SAT test takers.

[1]: https://gocrimson.com/sports/mens-fencing/roster

[2]: https://goprincetontigers.com/sports/mens-squash/roster?path...

[3]: https://qz.com/980074/the-sat-can-be-hacked-and-gamed-with-t...

[QuarterReptile]

>These schools are no longer about providing an elite education to talented students who want to get ahead.

This is the arbitrage opportunity for lower-ability legacy students. If the schools provided elite educations, they would chew up and spit out lazy rich kids (and probably generate parental acrimony toward the schools in the process, weakening the donor connections.) As affirmative action of all shapes and sizes creates an ever-expanding group of people most likely to fail who the school is particularly determined to not flunk, there is more safe space for deadweight rich kids (which, for the record, I suspect is an overplayed trope relative to actual prevalance, though probably not hard to find at top-ranked schools.)

[onetimeusename]

> arbitrage opportunity for lower-ability legacy students

Is that generally true or is that a stereotype?

Legacy students also had a higher average SAT score than non-legacy students, at 1523 for legacy students and 1491 for non-legacy students.[1]

[1]: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2021/9/8/2025-freshman-su...

[lordnacho]

"The average SAT score of students with family income under $40,000 was 1443, while those with a family income of more than $500,000 averaged 1520."

Would the legacies tend to have much higher income, or is any old person who's a child of an alumnus considered a legacy?

[QuarterReptile]

Child of alumnus should be considered legacy, but that's not to say that thay factor doesn't also skew wealthy.

[QuarterReptile]

First, if that number could be read directly as a refutation of my hypothesis, it would be tied, rather than showing an advantage to the legacy students.

Now, a few guesses: first, to the extent that affirmative action is even partially successful in targeting disadvantaged groups, affirmative action students should be less likely to be legacy, meaning that applications of legacy students should at least reflect a numerical superiority consistent with the strength of the affirmative action bias. Second, I will say that from personal experience I valued, more highly than was deserved, the schools that my parents attended; in this way those schools were the beneficiaries of highly effective advertising, through my parents, that made me more focused on those particular schools than they deserved (so much so that two of the three were two of the four schools I intended to apply to.) The aggregate outcome of that effect across all legacy applicants should be a higher-than-usual applicant quality in the pool of legacy students.

[BurdensomeCount]

Now remove the affirmative action portion of the non-legacy students and compare numbers again.

[cuteboy19]

This particular example is just not representative. It does "benefit" whites who are apparently 83% of the athletic quota. The graph is just terribly made. We need not blame or scapegoat whites but at the same time acknowledge that they are the beneficiary

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2021/9/8/2025-freshman-su...

[onetimeusename]

As a contrast, this points out that Asians disproportionately were affected by Stanford's decision to cut varsity sports.[1] This resonates with the experience I have had.

I don't know if whites are generally the beneficiary of student athletic admissions policies at all elite schools although it is complicated because of things like decades old sports from before diversity was a concern and team size. I don't see Harvard cutting long successful teams just to appease non white people but then again they probably would. Also things like the men's football team have a very large roster of 100+ people.

[1]: https://stanforddaily.com/2020/09/27/varsity-cuts-challengin...

[rayiner]

> So it is a brilliant way to use regular affirmative action for Blacks as a weapon to ensure that rich white elites always win and do not compete with the “deplorable” poorer whites, the Asians and immigrants.

I just realized that there are more Appalachians in America than Asian Americans. But how many people have you run into in an elite school with an Appalachian accent? (Or a southern or mid-atlantic, or other lower-tier white accent?)

[QuarterReptile]

I can think of exactly one guy: a classmate in electrical engineering courses who was from Kentucky. While you can obviously still find accents in the US, there are lots of reasons why you won't run into that family of accents much. Just about everyone in the US can avoid accents they don’t want by engaging in all forms of audible media, and social climbers and people who move around will avoid strong accents. Those are the same people who will filter to the top of any affirmative action cohort and end up at elite schools.

Maybe the redneck culture of poor Appalachian people is less sticky than the redneck culture of many poor Blacks in the US. My personal anecdotes support that, but then selection bias means they necessarily must.

When I run into guys at work with heavy Appalachian accents, they tend to be heavy machinery mechanics. That's also where I find Black guys who cling to a large amount of Black redneck culture. And those two groups together comprise the supermajority of heavy machinery mechanics at work, come to think of it.

Source: I spent my entire childhood on counties adjacent to what is considered 'Appalachia', and I went to a higher-end college with a significant affirmative action focus on geographic distribution around the US.

[pilarphosol]

This is about right. They want every podunk town to remember that the smartest or most impressive kid in 10 years went (finishing is optional) and they don’t really want more “strivers” than that.