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Message: [QUOTE="Engineer90, post: 3076420, member: 9712"] This has little to do with being a legacy. It is more about buying your way into a coveted spot whether legacy or not. It is coveted for several reasons. First, you have the network. Some schools simply have a better network to wealth and power. Second, you have ego. There are a lot of parents who are projecting their desire for achievement onto their kids. They like to brag about their kids at dinner parties and so on. It is the same mentality that drives parents to behave like psychos at sports. Sometimes it is the same parent. Sometimes the parent only rides their kid to succeed at school and sometimes it is only in sports. Whatever the combination, the result is the same, if my kid succeeds then I am a successful parent. For those with an insatiable need for validation, it just goes on and on. Little league today, spelling bee tomorrow, high school class rank, college admissions, graduate school... Some people are calling for admissions to move to a straight meritocracy. But a straight meritocracy won't stop this. People will just cheat on what they need to cheat on. SAT cheating will just get worse. Prep schools that hand out As will get worse. We will have fake prep schools like we now have fake schools that are just there to get athletes qualified for sports. And what about the damage that Tiger parents are doing to their kids? That will only get worse as well with a straight meritocracy. Anxiety and depression in colleges is rising rapidly. Kids seeking counseling is rising rapidly. Their parents are riding them like racehorses from a very young age. The parents are robbing their kids of a normal childhood so they can study more and do better on the spelling bee or practice more and win music competitions or spend ungodly hours working with Olympic coaches so they can become good enough to get recruited to top colleges. It is great for the ones that achieve their parent's goals but what happens to the ones that don't? Train wreck. You can't just focus on the cheaters to fix this very broken system. You have to look at the bigger picture and that includes the abusive tiger parents. The bigger problem here is that *people with a particular political ideology* broke the original Holistic admissions system. Yes, the original one was evil in that it was created to address "The Jewish Problem" at Princeton. But, really, it makes sense to include soft skills along with SAT scores and grades. Emotional intelligence matters. Being able to communicate matters. Being able to operate as part of a team matters. Being able to lead matters. The problem is that none of those things matter to admissions anymore. They now say they want "pointed applicants", not well rounded applicants. So long as you meet a surprisingly low bar for everything else, you just need to be noteworthy in one of the areas they deem worthy. Being a minority gets you in. Being a recruited athlete gets you in. Being associated with a wealthy donor gets you in. It is much easier, and much more tempting, to game a system where one thing can get you in so long as you meet the minimum requirements in the other categories. [/QUOTE]

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