What did SFFA vs. Harvard reveal about admissions?

https://sorting-machine.pages.dev/

by StrageMusik • 9 days ago

71 171 9 days ago

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gscott• 9 days ago

It feels like with fewer foreign students college's will have to open more slots to those who can be reasonable ready to be successful and also pay full rate.

rayiner22• 9 days ago

It would have been helpful to model the effect of legacy status while accounting for academic indices.

StrageMusik3• 9 days ago

conflates a couple of things: the legacy tip itself and the fact that legacies tend to have stronger academic profiles to begin with (they come from advantaged households). A skeptic can fairly say "of course legacy admits do well, they're better applicants"

rayiner22• 9 days ago

they come from advantaged households

They also tend to be smarter because smarter people have smarter kids.

pc863• 9 days ago

legacies tend to have stronger academic profiles

Maybe for Harvard, but I'm not sure a legacy for some random private liberal arts school nobody has ever heard of (or $STATE University) will be any more academically gifted than someone whose parents both went to college anyway.

Maybe we need to differentiate between "legacy of a school" and "legacy of a school with a historically high academic quality"

avs7332• 9 days ago

Looking at this without consideration for two factors (number of applicants and the number of applications per applicant) is borderline malpractice.

I can’t pull older numbers on my phone at the moment but in the last 12 years the number of applications to colleges (applicants*applications) has risen 50%.

So correct for the reality that…

1) that immediately skews your denominator and changes your percentages.

2) the upper middle class students are the most likely to apply to the most schools (because they can and don’t have the other paths)

3) more and more marginal students who previously would not have gone to college are getting encouraged to apply.

And their model is just breaking.

avs7332• 9 days ago

So with some searching…

In the UK you can apply to upto five colleges.

In the US the recommendation seems to be between 5-8

pc863• 9 days ago

On the sixth application does someone knock on your door?

chasd002• 9 days ago

The price portion of this hits hard. My oldest starts college in 2 year and then his younger brother follows 2 years later. We make enough to not qualify for need based aid but not enough to just write a check, merit based aid + a meager 529 and our savings is their only hope besides debt.

Further, both are male, hetero, only 1/4 hispanic, and my wife and I are not drug addicts or alcoholics so they'll get nothing from the "whole student" review. There's a huge swath of the population in this boat. The middle/upper-middle class pays for everyone else as always.

blackoil• 9 days ago

my wife and I are not drug addicts or alcoholics

Yet, you still have two years.

chasd002• 9 days ago

no.freaking.kidding

rationalist• 9 days ago

only 1/4 hispanic

If you mean only one grandparent is born in a Latin American country, then according to the U.S. Census Bureau, you are Hispanic.

steveBK1234• 9 days ago

Exactly.

All this stuff is self identifying too, so there are far more dishonest applicants than someone with a single LatAm grandparent marking themselves hispanic.

StrageMusik3• 9 days ago

Thats why its called price discrimination: you are trying to get as much money as possible from each buyer without regard to fairness. Heroin dealers at least set a fixed $/oz because they know that word getting around that someone gets it cheaper would get them shot.

NoahZuniga• 9 days ago

We make enough to not qualify for need based aid

Are you sure? If you're household income is <$340k (depending on details) you'll still get some scholarship, and as long as your household income <$200,000 tuition is free.

[1] https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/net-price-calculat...

jawilson22• 8 days ago

This is going to screw me hard. I didn't make a meaningful income (>$95K) until I was 35, 10 years ago; I got a PhD, did a 4 year postdoc, and was an assistant non-tenure-track professor for 3 years. My monthly student loan payments were $1800/month. I changed jobs to HFT, and we have lived comfortably but not able to save much. I have 3 kids aged 17, 15, and 13, the oldest is applying to colleges very soon. 2 years ago I changed jobs again, and now make $700K on paper, but it is 60%+ bonuses, half of which is in a 3 year RSU. So, my take home pay is about $400K cash, taxed in a high bracket; I paid $145K or so in taxes this year. I have about $150K saved, $350K in 401K, and my mortgage is at $500K, with $300K to go. We are finally stable, e.g. we can take a vacation or 2, we can afford groceries without worrying, and can do travel baseball, but it also isn't an extravagant lifestyle or anything.

Now, this is a pretty phenomenal position to be in for most Americans, I can't complain too much. But, my oldest (white, straight, varsity basketball, 4.7 GPA, 35 ACT, 36 on Math) wants to go to a school like USC or Vanderbilt, and we will get 0 aid help. I refuse to let my kids suffer through student loans like my wife and I had to; at one point I made $2500/month as a postdoc, and $1800 went to loans while I had 2 kids under 2. My search history at that point was pretty grim, involving what circumstances life insurance would pay out, etc.

So, assuming all 3 kids go to a $100K/year type school, and we pay cash, that is $12 MILLION dollars over the next decade I will be paying (ignoring inflation, etc). This is the worst case, etc, but still bleak. And, apparently Stanford CS students can't get job offers, so they are entering a horrific job market. I don't think any college is worth that, not even Ivys, but not going to a good college is still worse. If I had a crystal ball 10-15 years ago, we would have left the country.

treis• 8 days ago

It's a bit of an interesting Chesterton's fence. For most of human history your job is whatever your dad's job was (with a large degree of hand waving). It makes sense because there's at least some genetic disposition there and you're likely willing to train your children for free. Instead we pay strangers massive amounts of money for make work training that is often only loosely related to productive skills.

Obviously a lot of reasons to do it this way. But you gotta think at some point not working for 4 years while paying ~2x median annual wage has gotta go the way of the dodo.

meetingthrower• 8 days ago

The Dartmouth analytics say that is true. The top 1% is taking from the top 10% in admissions.

That said, your view that they need "trauma" to get in is very wrong. You need to find a hook. The hook should be positive and not negative. (Why should they let you in to the private club?)

Source: I've gotten my kids into 6 Ivies. Non-athletes, white, public schools, and I am not a doner.

baking2• 9 days ago

"The published cost of attendance is a fiction almost no one pays."

"Net effect: a $175k household with a house and a 401(k) is judged "full pay," pays near-sticker from already-taxed income, and receives essentially nothing."

I never know how to resolve these two statements. In our case, my daughter happened to choose a good public university. Maybe that is what they mean.

pc863• 9 days ago

What do either of those quoted statements have to do with public universities specifically?

baking2• 9 days ago

At high-end private universities, "The published cost of attendance is a fiction almost no one pays."

Yet, most upper-middle-income students are considered "full-pay."

Therefore, most upper-middle-income students now attend public universities.

Or at least that is the conclusion I drew from the two statements I quoted.

postflopclarity• 8 days ago

it's easily resolvable. the first statement is a lie: MANY students pay the full, published cost of attendance.

cliglot• 8 days ago

I gave up with a dreams of returning to school when I realized in my early 20s, despite paying my own rent, bills, taxes, etc, the financial aid system considered me a dependent of my father still and lumped his income in with the calculations done to determine what I get/don’t get.

az226• 9 days ago

Pretty much the whole thing in a nutshell is the one chart showing the same student as Asian, 25%, White, 36%, Hispanic 77%, and Black 95%.

This is institutionalized racism. Perhaps Affirmative Action was needed in the past to kickstart the disproportionate enrollment demographics, but it was past due to get rid of it.

The most interesting part following SCOTUS' ruling is that Harvard said it wouldn't change their ways, and nobody enforced the ruling.

robrenaud• 9 days ago

Do consider the incentives of those developing the model that made those predictions. Afaict, it was not selected for purpose other than testimony.

orsorna• 9 days ago

If you treat prestige acceptance rates as a derivative of the progression of racial policy, it absolutely makes sense why affirmative action is in place given the history of racial justice in America.

Can you really claim that the trend won't reverse if purely meritocratic admissions are reinstated (disregarding legacy admits...although very unfair to disregard since their racial makeup heavily tracks with asian/white/etc)

It's simply a single lever to change the racial makeup of the upper class. And certainly it goes both ways, but to simply remove it with no solution implies a regression to the former system, which was all but equal, much less equitable.

sobellian2• 9 days ago

Why are we treating it as a derivative, and what's the slope? Do we have proof it's not zero? Let's say Johnny and Kareem both study poli-sci at Harvard. When Johnny graduates with his gentlemanly C's, his dad puts in a word with his golf buddy and it's off to Wall Street. Kareem shoots his resume off through online portals but no one bites. He goes to law school and takes on even more debt. Johnny's sister, Sally, passes the bar on her third try and is hired by a white-shoe law firm. Et cetera.

dahart20• 9 days ago

This is institutionalized racism. Perhaps Affirmative Action was needed in the past

Affirmative Action is institutionalized discrimination, at least when used to promote some groups over others. (Though it didn’t start that way; it started as a call to be purely race-blind in hiring.) I wouldn’t call it racism though, because it’s not based on any belief that races have different capability, it is purely intended to correct systemic bias based on the belief that races are equally capable.

it was past due to get rid of it

This might be true, but there are still achievement and pay gaps in the US. There are lots of debates about why, and I don’t want to start one. I’m just curious how else to solve systemic biases if they’re still here. The whole problem with cultural bias is it’s sticky and difficult and people don’t believe they have biases. Today’s politics has done a lot to convince me that we haven’t solved it yet, but at the same time I’ll be the first to point out that we’ve come a long way even in my lifetime. The last little bit might take longer to fix than suffrage did just because of how subtle the issues are. If we take any preferential treatment off the table, preferential treatment that tries to artificially force equal opportunity, the question is what’s the alternative? We might have momentum, and do nothing might work, but what if it doesn’t? Wouldn’t that also be a form of institutionalized discrimination, effectively, like it was before Affirmative Action existed?

rayiner22• 9 days ago

Lots of problems in society that are hard to fix. But there's nowhere else in society where our solution to a problem is to subject people who had nothing to do with the problem to unfair treatment. "Two wrongs don't make a right" is a good general principle.

armchairhacker2• 9 days ago

Except preferential treatment backfires.

People will think “if XYZ group has a handicap maybe it’s because XYZ group is genetically inferior?” XYZ members themselves will think that and it will subconsciously affect them. People around them will think that and it will subconsciously affect their opinions towards them.

If you point out that XYZ group is only handicapped because they’re statistically environmentally disadvantaged, then it follows, why not handicap everyone with that disadvantage, or any comparable disadvantage? Why not handicap ABC minority? Some members of ABC will be jealous of XYZ and subtly discriminate against them (for this reason; these members would otherwise).

It creates the background conditions it seeks to destroy. Instead, handicap on things like health and income, which are more obviously fair and necessary (most people can accept that bad health and income are an especially serious disadvantages in today’s world).

JuniperMesos4• 8 days ago

This might be true, but there are still achievement and pay gaps in the US. There are lots of debates about why, and I don’t want to start one. I’m just curious how else to solve systemic biases if they’re still here.

If you're unwilling to have a debate on why achievement and pay gaps exist, then you should be unwilling to assert that systemic bias is a problem, or even that achievement and pay gaps are a problem.

nsvd2• 8 days ago

How could race-determined discrimination be anything other than racism?

digitaltrees3• 9 days ago

You didn't think the 50% admit rate for athletes, 40% admit rate for deans interest ie large cash donors, and 35% legacy admit rate were "the whole think"?

Yizahi• 9 days ago

Honestly, the combination of extremely discriminatory, extremely corrupt, extremely predatory and then again discriminated differently by the fact if they are a sportsball player or not is rather amusing and at the same time baffling when observed from the other side of the globe.

Of course it is too late by now, by have Americans considered maybe abolishing all that and admitting students only based on the exam results, with preference given to the kids with better results (or no preference)? And replacing professional sportsball with a 1 lesson/week of general fitness? Maybe then they won't need to get so much debt to study too.

Aunche2• 8 days ago

Legacy and donor admissions aren't the gotcha against race neutral admissions that you think they are. In fact, they go hand in hand. It's not a coincidence that the universities with strong legacy preferences all practiced affirmative action. Legacy students actually have slightly better grades and SAT scores than average, but this would unlikely to be the case if they used purely merit based admissions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_preferences

alistairSH3• 8 days ago

What data do you have to support the assertion that affirmative action is no longer necessary to ensure proper representation of minorities on campus?

I'm open to arguments that there are better ways to achieve the goal of equitable access to higher eduction, but looking at enrollment numbers, the problem is far from solved.

blagie4• 8 days ago

The open question is the meaning of "proper representation:"

- One which maximizes Harvard's power network?

- Most likely to succeed in the future?

- Representative of the general public by race?

- Representative of the general public in other ways (e.g. religion, political affiliation)?

- Academically, best-qualified right now?

- Academically, most potential? At birth? Now?

- Most likely to donate?

Etc.

However defined, Harvard has much modest discrimination by race compared to discrimination by religion, political affiliation, or home town.

Harvard is 95% liberal, and much more so at the faculty level. If you look at the further-out evangelical, born-again Christian groups, or more conservative Muslim groups, the discrimination is even more extreme. Atheists are vastly over-represented, in contrast.

Until one is aligned on goals and definitions, one can't speak of goals being met or unmet. Harvard can be -- and indeed, is -- racist against blacks by one definition, against whites by another, against Asians by a third, and so on.

JuniperMesos4• 8 days ago

What specific ethnic groups do and do not count as minorities? What specific ratio of people from various ethnic groups admitted to college campuses counts as "proper"? Why specifically do the enrollment numbers at college campuses today count as a "problem"?

onetimeusename• 8 days ago

Yes but there's some nuance. I don't think Harvard admission is necessary for Affirmative Action goals. We're talking about a tiny minority of people who attend. In my own opinion, we're looking at rival elite groups fighting with each other.

The SFFA lawsuit targeted Harvard specifically and made the claim not that Affirmative Action was a problem but that secretive racial policies to help whites at the expense of Asians were. There wasn't any direct evidence of it and it's kind of laughable to think Harvard would do that. The SC didn't evaluate that claim and just struck down using race for admissions. But that doesn't mean you can't ask people to write a diversity essay about their race and grade them on that.

Harvard's present demographics[1]:

    Of students in the class who self-identified their race, 11.5 percent
    identified as African American or Black, 41 percent identified as Asian 
    American, 11 percent identified as Hispanic or Latino, and nearly 2 percent 
    identified as Native American, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander.

I don't know why they collate it like this. This doesn't include international students who aren't identified by ethnicity. So based on percentage of the demographic, it would appear this is saying whites underperform on admissions substantially compared to everyone else which seems unlikely to me.

[1] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/10/class-of-2029...

cycomanic• 8 days ago

You conveniently left out the fact that all the "easy" tracks (athletics, legacy, donor) are heavily skewed toward white applicants. It's interesting how everyone is riling about affirmative action, while at the same time nobody bats an eyelid about those nepotism tracks. And those definitely seem to be institutionally biased against black and Hispanics (in particular the Athletic track it seems, considering the proportion of black athletes in professional sport).

amazingamazing• 9 days ago

How likely is it to be a certain demographic given certain stats? Pretty much says it all.

The race factor is irrelevant in practice. Even more so when you look at literature indicating that your success is actually more predictive from high school success than college attendance.

In other words, if you get into Stanford you will likely succeed even if you don’t go.

ordx4• 9 days ago

It puzzles me why US colleges are allowed to consider anything other than standardized test scores.

drivebyhooting2• 9 days ago

Because the SAT is too easy and gets saturated.

ordx4• 9 days ago

so make it harder? Seems like a solvable problem.

kxyvr5• 8 days ago

There's a wonderful exchange in the movie Interstellar that speaks to this:

    Cooper: You're ruling my son out for college now? The kid's fifteen.
    Principal: Tom's score simply isn't high enough.
    Cooper: What's your waistline? 32? With, what, a 33 inseam?
    Principal: I'm not sure I see what you're getting at.
    Cooper: You're telling me it takes two numbers to measure your own ass but only one to measure my son's future?

The point being is that a person, and their future, should not be distilled into a single number like an SAT score because people are far more complex than a single number. I would also contend that splitting them into a few numbers, such as by subject area, doesn't help either.

triceratops5• 8 days ago

The SAT has 2 components with separate scores. The SAT score is usually the sum of both, but there's no reason colleges can't weight one section more than the other.

If you really care about multiple dimensions, add more types of standardized tests - general science (or specialized - separate physics, chem and bio sections), history, geography, whatever.

Or tell students to take the standardized tests that most closely map to their preferred major.

arjie• 8 days ago

You can invert nearly anything in the US with the right justification. You can cite the environment to ensure roads don’t have bike lanes, you can cite anti-racism rules to treat individuals by their race, to protect a man from a small home you can put him on the street. It just is how it is.

The framework to do it was introduced to prevent Jewish people from going to universities where it was found that when it was impossible to keep the Jewish people under 25% of enrollment it rapidly became possible once they accounted for well-roundedness.

The Jewish people of the age, like Asian people today, seem to have been narrow and pointed like a spear where others were like a sphere. Such is life. We aspire to spherical homogeneity. Other shapes need not apply.

zerobees• 9 days ago

For all these completely anonymous, AI-generated investigative pieces that are hitting the front page of HN every week, I'd love to see the prompts. Because I suspect they say more about what the proprietor of the site is trying to achieve than the article itself.

sobellian2• 9 days ago

When you combine the fraction of "hooked" admits with the number of seats affected by affirmative action, you get something between 35%-43% (depending on if you discount hooked admits that were extremely qualified anyway). I think this is an interesting way to frame it. Left to its own devices, Harvard would only devote around 60% of its undergraduate program to simply educating very very bright students. The other 40% is/was for les vieux riches, athletes, generally connected kids, and racial diversity.

While I'm sure it varies by school, I suspect you will find a similar dynamic at many other elite private schools. The undergraduate program is going to be much less important to a top-tier research university, and consequently the admissions board can go nuts with other priorities. When even the runners-up (on a merit basis) are quite strong you can go quite far indeed before anyone would notice a slip in standards.

daft_pink• 9 days ago

Really enjoyed your article.

Some random chart feedback. I found the use of red for elite colleges and then the use of red to mean white applicants to make the article slightly harder to read and understand. Recommend changing using completely different colors from that chart to he next one, because they are completely unrealted axis and

mhb• 9 days ago

What do "hooked" and "unhooked" mean here?

DangitBobby2• 9 days ago

"Hooked" is any foot in the door aside from merit such as sports recruitment, child of staff, child of alumnus, or international student. Unhooked is everyone who has to get in on merit alone.

samlinnfer• 9 days ago

Claude slopped html page.

exogeny2• 9 days ago

Alright, I’m going to try to weigh in on this subject in good faith. Wish me luck!

I grew up in suburban Pittsburgh and attended a very good public school. I had friends who lived only ten or fifteen minutes away but attended schools that were substantially worse by nearly every measurable standard. How should a university compare our applications on an apples-to-apples basis?

Some people would say, “Just use standardized test scores.” And sure, those can be part of the equation. But I attended a better school, benefited from years of stronger teaching, had access to better preparation materials, and had supportive parents with disposable income to invest in my education. The list goes on. How exactly should those advantages be measured? Is it a university’s job to account for them?

Others may disagree, but if I were on a university admissions team, I would say that it is...at least to some extent. I wouldn’t want a completely homogeneous student body. I would want every admitted student to clear a reasonable academic floor, but beyond that, I would value diversity in backgrounds, opinions, interests, intended majors, and life experiences.

In my opinion, the issue is much more complicated than people often make it out to be, and I don’t personally believe there is some vast liberal boogeyman behind it. I don’t think the process is perfectly fair to everyone, nor do I think perfect fairness is possible in the first place. But I also don’t automatically agree that it is wrong for universities to try -- however imperfectly or ham-fistedly they might do it -- to understand the broader context in which an application was submitted.

DangitBobby2• 9 days ago

Unfortunately as much as we love the idea of rewarding merit, it isn't actually "fair" in the truest sense of the word. Because everyone is born into different conditions, no one ever has the same opportunities, so you may be more capable than someone else through no fault of your own. Choosing the worse educated out of identically scoring students is one of the few times we decide to tip the scales. Unfortunately again good employment opportunities feel like a zero sum game right now.

foobarian• 8 days ago

but if I were on a university admissions team

OK but what would your goal there be? What do you think an existing admissions team's goal is in various different universities? What if some desire to build an elite club but can't say it on record? And is that such a bad thing?

triceratops5• 8 days ago

But I attended a better school, benefited from years of stronger teaching, had access to better preparation materials, and had supportive parents with disposable income to invest in my education...Is it a university’s job to account for [my advantages]?

I would argue: no. There are always applicants with even more advantages than you, and those with fewer.

Standardized tests level the playing field IMO. Money can only help you so much. Talent and hard work become the dominant factors.

Mommy and daddy can't pay for expensive hobbies, finagle unpaid internships at prestigious non-profits, or anything else. Personal tutoring for standardized tests has diminishing returns compared to just grinding. Think Leetcode: how much does coaching help a SWE vs just being good at coding and solving 2000 problems?

Now you may say: under-privileged students often have less stable home environments. So they have less time to grind problems. This is true. But it's also true for admissions as they're done today. They have less time, money, and opportunities for hobbies, volunteer work, sports, and internships. They can't hire essay coaches or admissions consultants.

Thrusting students into a more challenging academic environment than their current demonstrated abilities merit doesn't help anyone. On the other hand if poorer students can demonstrate merit without spending much money, just by writing a single test, this is as egalitarian as possible.

jawilson22• 8 days ago

Personal tutoring for standardized tests has diminishing returns compared to just grinding...

Eh, not so sure. My son got a 32 on the ACT the first time he took it, and after 4 months of private tutoring got a 35, with 36 on math. Could he have grinded himself and got there? Possibly, but I doubt it. Having someone who knows what they're doing and holding him accountable was invaluable.

nec4b4• 8 days ago

How exactly should those advantages be measured?

Why does it matter? How deep do you want to go to hunt for advantages? Are there no other places than Ivy League schools where one not so advantaged can get an education? Do you want the doctor saving the life of your loved one be the most qualified or one who ticked the disadvantaged boxes?

exogeny2• 8 days ago

I suppose I just disagree that someone from a less affluent or privileged than me with got a 1400 SAT is less qualified than me (1510) simply because one number is larger than the other. These numbers don't exist in a vacuum.

cleandreams3• 9 days ago

I was listening to a podcast where the host and the guest were both Black and both had been to Harvard. This was before the Supreme Court ruling. They joked that it was well known that the Black students at Harvard who were descendants of American slaves were about 10% of the Black student body at Harvard. There were a lot of children of Nigerians and 3rd world tycoons and such.

I think there is a good argument for a help up for people whose communities are still impacted by the history of American slavery (and all its ills) but giving these slots to children of the wealthy and often immigrants does not feel right.

blagie4• 8 days ago

This is not an accident.

If you talk to admissions officers, over drinks, they'll tell you that poor black students from marginalized US communities have abysmal performance at elite schools. The decision to admit rich black students is very deliberate.

There are many reasons why. Schools in the US are locally-funded, and a marginalized community might have 25% of the per-student spending of a rich community (actual, typical figures). Until inequities like that are addressed, there is little elite education can do to help, even if it wanted, which it doesn't.

The point of an exclusive university is to be, well, maximally exclusive. That's the literal opposite of inclusive.

Georgelemental• 8 days ago

In my state, the poor Black inner city schools have the highest per-student spending in the state (and some of the highest in the country), as the state government funds them heavily. Performance remains abysmal

cleandreams3• 8 days ago

There is more to this story. I have heard Harvard (and its ilk) described as a smallish university attached to a massive investment fund. One of the criteria for admission is how much you and your family will be "good for" donations to the university. They much prefer students from rich families, even if they are the children of disagreeable dictators.

rahimnathwani• 8 days ago

Glenn Loury & John McWhorter?

cleandreams3• 8 days ago

No. Briahna Joy Gray and a guest whose name I don't remember.

StrageMusik3• 9 days ago

This post got removed from the front page after reaching #7. Unclear what happened.

codedokode• 8 days ago

What's the point of giving preferences to athletes at places like computer science department? Would not it make more sense to create an athletic department and accept all athletes there so they do not have to struggle with math?

Also, they could make a separate department for the riches where there also is no math.

s1artibartfast• 8 days ago

Presumably the athletes want it and they have leverage.

mrguyorama• 8 days ago

The entire premise of the NCAA for the longest time was "They aren't employees, they are getting a good education for free and playing sports in their off hours!"

This has long been a farce though. They would be put in made up classes with no actual work and given fake grades.

What did SFFA vs. Harvard reveal about admissions?

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