Harvard is full of rich, white low-achievers

43% of white Harvard students didn’t get in on merit.

Harvard is a very, very selective school. Only 3.43% of applicants get in. But that’s not the whole story. Writing in The Guardian, Tayo Bero says that 43% of the white student body was admitted on criteria other than merit.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/17/harvard-university-students-smart-iq

Those 43% are ALDCs: athletes, legacies, dean’s interest list (children of major donors) or children (of Harvard faculty). Three quarters of ALDCs do not have the grades to be admitted to Harvard on their own merit.

70% of Harvard legacies are white. 16% of ALDCs are Black, Asian or Hispanic.

As Bero writes, you don’t need Varsity Blues-style bribery to get your underachieving white kids into a top university. There’s a huge affirmative action program in place to get those ALDCs into super-competitive schools, rather than better-qualified brown and poor kids.

Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, and blogger. He has a podcast, a newsletter, a Twitter feed, a Mastodon feed, and a Tumblr feed. He was born in Canada, became a British citizen and now lives in Burbank, California. His latest nonfiction book is How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism. His latest novel for adults is Attack Surface. His latest short story collection is Radicalized. His latest picture book is Poesy the Monster Slayer. His latest YA novel is Pirate Cinema. His latest graphic novel is In Real Life. His forthcoming books include The Shakedown (with Rebecca Giblin), a book about artistic labor market and excessive buyer power; Red Team Blues, a noir thriller about cryptocurrency, corruption and money-laundering (Tor, 2023); and The Lost Cause, a utopian post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias (Tor, 2023).