October 16, 2007
Scaling the ivory minarNews
Renu Khator is about to become President of the University of Houston [Hat tip: Ruchira Paul]. While this isn’t an issue I’ve followed closely, I suspect that there are few desi, or even asian university presidents in America. Given that female presidents of major (co-educational) academic institutions is a fairly new thing (Harvard just appointed its first), this is a major step forward, even if it is only in Houston 
.
Khator held the number 2 job at University of South Florida for four years, during which time she turned down offers from 3 different universities. She was the only candidate at University of Houston, basically because she’s a stud:
Khator recruited top faculty and more students from diverse backgrounds while raising millions from government and private sources. During her four years as provost, South Florida’s sponsored research grew by 22 percent, from $255 million to $310 million. She also took the lead reeling in the university’s largest donation ever, a gift worth $34.5 million from a Tampa couple. [Link]
I’m not surprised that she rose through the ranks at major public universities. Private universities are very conservative places because they’re run by wealthy, moneyed alums and their administrators have to get along with them. This results in nepotistic admission policies at elite private universities that try to regenerate the last generation of elites by giving less qualified students from the right families a hand up:
Researchers with access to closely guarded college admissions data have found that, on the whole, about 15 percent of freshmen enrolled at America’s highly selective colleges are white teens who failed to meet their institutions’ minimum admissions standards… White students who failed to make the grade on all counts [GPA, SATs, recommendations, and extracurricular activities] were nearly twice as prevalent on such campuses as black and Hispanic students who received an admissions break based on their ethnicity or race… Leaders at many selective colleges … instruct their admissions offices to reward those who financially support their institutions, because keeping donors happy is the only way they can keep the place afloat. [Link]
Hopefully under Khator’s guidance, University of Houston will cultivate the next generation of elites, a more meritocratic one.
ennis on October 16, 2007 10:42 PM in Business, News · T·r·a·c·k·b·a·c·k address · Direct link · Email post
Very useful information to bash the anti-affirmative action racists with.
interesting. not unlike illegal immigration. the white elites and selected ethnic minorities are in cahoots against everyone else. Congress should pass a law denying federal $$$'s to any university that practices legacy or racial preferences. Then america will be more american.
'even if it is only in Houston.'
Hey now...Houston is a fine place!
Wow! Congratulations, Provost Khator!
Where would their children go to college then? Consider the legacy-in-chief ...
1)Kudos to Khator!!
2)Ennis,
system of higher education, it seems to me that a strong case can be made for having a good number of private universities that are successful in raising a lot of private funds (even if that means some compromises on merit in admissions), which makes them strong--so, even if a particular admissions decision, looked at in isolation, seems "unfair," the total # of slots available at top-notch univesities is actually far higher, due to the private $$ coming in--so actually the applicant with a lot of merit does well. I think this is a major reason for the (conventional) view of why US higher education is, all things considered, now better than in, e.g., Germany or Canada, which lack strong private universities.I don't think the case for purely "meritocratic" admissions at private universities is as clear-cut as you're suggesting--if one considers the
No, then america's elite colleges will be overwhelmingly east asian and jewish. They have the highest IQs.
Why not just auction them off to the highest bidder? Would make more money that way, so you could sell fewer of them and still do what you need. Why this pretense that they're coming within the regular admissions system? [And yes, I feel similarly about athletic admits]
Non-Hispanic white people are also more than 5 times more prevalent than black people and a just less than 5 times more prevalent than Hispanic people generally.
yes. ergo, the illegal immigration analogy. the interests of the powers that be are completely aligned with that of a special interest.
Well, I'd guess it's because there's a trade-off--Duke wouldn't be Duke if rich kids with 800 SAT's could buy their way in--that said, if a few rich kids with 1150 SAT's buy their way in, it actually means more places at Duke in the overall picture (thx. to the extra $$), without much compromise in terms of who's in the classroom with you. So, I think the US private universities, while far from perfect, are striking this balance, and that there would be bad consequences if we shook the system up (like Manju is advocating) (in terms of less $$ leads to fewer slots in the long run).
does anyone know what's up with harvard and yale? their endowmwnts have hit the ball out of the park with buffet like returns, to the point that the roi dwarfs the $$ from tuitiion and they are sitting on hordes of cash. so do they still practice legacy?
Yes they do, but at the more competitive schools the distortion is considerably less. There are enough children of wealthy and well educated parents who can pass the threshold on their own, and even those who cannot had enough advantages (SAT test prep, etc) that their numbers shouldn't be that low. Also, because of their reputation for being elite, they probably let in many fewer legacies. The number one and two schools in America for legacy admits (last I checked) were USC and Notre Dame, both above 25%. I looked into this years ago for a post I wrote in my pre-Mutiny days, so my data may be out of date.
i am quite sure they do. given how much power and influence propagates through lineage, it is in their best interests to practice legacy so that they increase their chances of having their alums where it matters. in any case, i assume legacy, while distasteful, is a small fraction of all seats, so it doesn't affect the recruitment significantly i.e. they can still admit almost all the deserving students.
Yeah but it still ignores Asian (desi) students who are hurt the most by affirmative action.
That assumes some fixed notion of "deserving"--look, Ennis is correct to the extent that some less-deserving students get in due to legacies--my point is that that's OK, given the overall effects on the system (i.e., compared to just having public universities, or prohibiting private universities from giving preferece to legacies, which would hurt their fund-raising).
I know it's been said already...but only Houston!
*mock glares at Ennis*
Yes, of course they do--lesson #1 in running any business--what are my sources of revenue--answer here, a big one(in spite of whatever roi is) is alumni donations--so, you can't rationally run the place if you're going to screw too much with the donations--so, a judicious amount of legacy preference seems to be called for, if you want your institution to continue to flourish, in both absolute and relative terms.
but branding matters. and universities sell prestige. so for the same reason ferrari does not increase production and sell cars for 75K, and in fact sells them at below market prices in order to benefit from the aura that comes form skyrocketing after-market prices, elite colleges may want to eschew preferences. managing the brand matters, and harvard & yale are nothing without the exclusivity that comes from their image of a only accepting the best and the brightest.
Not only that, but the football team is pretty damn good too after basically being in existence for 10 years
Too bad she can't bring the Dali Museum with her as well.
Yes, absolutely!
That's why their use of legacy admissions is "judicious" (i.e., only if plausibly qualified), rather than, e.g., auctioning off some slots to the highest bidder--the former seems to strike the right balance.
perhps they should tap the corporate market...haliburton library, girls gone wild dormatory...more $$ and less conflict of interest.
They are tapping the corporate market--that's what their (in all but name) professional sports teams are about, as well as university "research parks," etc.! Only question is how far they can go without losing tax-exemption--as they say with some reason in Connecticut, "Tax Yale, not us"!
Manju - the board of directors are all alumni with big $$$$. Are you saying they should vote to change policies to make it harder for their own children to get in?
hey, narayana murthy's son got to cornell (search for "safety") on his own merit!
well, the BOD does open itself up to litigation if they act in their own interst and not in the interest of the organization, at least in the corporate world. SEC regulations require public disclosure, perhaps non-profis should have the same requirments, allowing the market to better wack universities that sully their brand.
but more importantly, i wonder if individual donations in return for lowered standards account for big $$$. the best hedge funds don't accept individual money, unless its from a billionaire. how much can all these little upper middle class donations really add up to?
$30 billion, if you're Harvard.
Non-sequitor: the new President of Harvard is a Bryn Mawr woman, I'm happy to report.
I'm not sure all private colleges are that hide-bound about whom they'd choose for top spots, but probably they are very much so in terms of what changes they will allow. In many ways, heading a big public university gives you, or rather, Renu, more leverage.
30 bill a yr? hmmm. but how much woulb be lost (or gained) if they didn't practice legacy?
Isnt the USF in Tampa while the Dali museum in St Petersburg in two different counties.
now this is interesting. the market forces schools to balance prestige with legacy because if they use too much legacy and lose the prestige, they eventually lose the money...thus the elite schools have less wiggle room.
now, i've hired people, and i never distinguished between a usc, notre dame or ohio state, but definitely gave preference to an ivy or mit/stanford, since they'd add cache to the firm. i also never checked (we had no human resources) so anyone could lie. also when other firms hired my ex personnel and called me, all they'd ask is if they worked here and what were the dates. that's it. i talking big banks: csfb, lazard, etc.
so all you kids padding your rez, you didn't hear this from me.
wait. wtf am i thinking? this number is all out of wack, rob. what this? the total endowmennt?
no, that's their endowment--i.e., accumulation over 300+ years from gifts (+ roi - contributions from endowment to yearly operating budget--so, not so transparent of a figure, except in a relative sense) (Federal funding doesn't go to endowment, it pays for programs, though of course in some sense $ is fungible).
I don't know how much would be lost if they dropped legacy, but I am "conservative" enough in the traditional sense to not want to screw with their (globally bench-marked) success to try to find out!
31 · Manju
Too true!
I only have one employee, but I went through a lot of cv's, and I did check, and I was shocked at the amount of stuff that didn't check out!
harvard started going downhill ever since they integrated with radcliffe and let those pesky women in! ("not wanting to screw with their success" is no argument to not end discrimination).
Of course not, but that's not a fair characterization of my argument--I've given what I take to be a pretty strong argument (see above, ad nauseum), for why the legacy admits at private universities don't limit, instead help, the chances of high-merit applicants to get into a top-notch university.
Explaining the logic behind the size of Harvard and Yale's endowments, someone from Bard said if there was a nuclear war and the entire land mass of North America was leveled, can we still pay our faculty for the next 100 years. 'Twas something like that.
You are cert. correct that it's obscure, at best, what the purpose of the endowments at that level is, but the underlying univ's (&, more broadly, US higher education) are strong.
rob @36, fair point. i recall reading earlier this summer about a paper which tried to infer why alums donated to universities. i think they found that parents with kids give more money than those without, and that parents with kids really ramp up their donations right around 2-3 years before the kids become eligible for applying to schools, and then ramp down right around when kids end school
but doesn't this all this only mean that colleges need to give the impression that legacy matters? they don't need to actually have legacy, right? after all, no school really releases numbers on the number of legacy admits.
also, manju @26 and rob @27, i think the data that they had also said that big donations account for most of the money (like most things in life).
i am trying to find the study or the article i read about it - i think it was by guys at stanford and princeton.
Here is a statement from Princeton that summarizes one perspective nicely:
Other studies argue that this isn't true, although again, at the top of the prestige ladder, there is much less distortion in part because the legacy applicants are fairly high quality.
I love this. Rob, just be honest and say that you believe in admission preferences (a form of "affirmative action" without the underlying assumption of qualifications, perhaps?) for legacy students, ESPECIALLY those who do not make the "merit cut." The whole cash flow argument is, in my opinion, incidental at this point in time. It doesn't really matter what private colleges would have done -- we all already know what they would have done and did. What is much more interesting, in my opinion, is what they will do.
Yale definitely still practices legacy admissions, but as Ennis said, most of these kids come from families monied enough to keep their kids at Choate or Andover, fund their expensive sport participation, pump them full of SAT-prep, give them foreign language and music classes, and fund their summer travel to Guatemala to build houses. These are all things that are considered "pluses" in admissions and are all things that are generally unavailable to lower-income families. We already know that the policy of looking for "well-rounded" candidates was initiated to help limit the number of "merit" applicants (i.e. Jews) and to retain (WASP) legacy admits. I'll plug it again, but The Chosen (not the one by Chaim Potok) is a great book for looking at the history (and current reality) of admissions policy.
And lastly, congrats to the new University President. This is surprising and interesting. Out of curiosity, how big is University of Houston? I wonder if this is a phenomena that is more or less likely to occur at a university that is not as well known (nationally) as others.
Manju, here's something I posted years ago:
Note that they're both citing the same article which was published in 1991, and which I have not read.
Indira Samarasekera is president of the University of Alberta in Canadaland. :)
camille, except for the summer travel, are the rest really expensive? arguably sat prep, but my impression is that one can maximize ones scores by studying hard with a cheap barrons or stanley kaplan book as boatloads of immigrants have been doing for generations. these really expensive courses strike me as overkill by nervous parents and i wonder if they produce higher scores in comparison to lesser expensive courses especially when controlled for other factors like gpa. but sports and music being expensive? does one get a leg up for playing polo?
i do agree with the underlying assumption of getting rid of as much subjective criteria as possible. i don't trust the admissions office either, and i'm not surprised by ennis' investigation in #43, as legacy really does // aa...they don't want us to know what here up to.
if we must keep this system, we should require transparency in return for non-profit status so the market can filter ithe info. but i prefer to have it gpa/sat (or another standardized test).
And you forgot to mention...we have an amazing football team this year!
This is my neighborhood, peeps.
As for the big donor Tampa couple - you're going to love this, DESI!!
Meet the Patels both are doctors.
And yes you get bonus points for polo, just as you get points for lacrosse, crew, equestrianism, and crew. You would probably get bonus points for steeple-chase, too. There are more people playing soccer, football, track, basketball and other "lower cost" sports, so a "unique" sports angle is an asset.
I taught SAT test prep and it does make a big difference, over and above the books. We routinely got students up 200 points, and these are students who had taken the SAT and studied for it before.
Sports and Music have to do with how wealthy the community is. Most poor schools don't have instruments, nor do they have the gear for sports like ... Lacrosse, which can get you into college.
That's a dangerous way to look at things, if you care about the long-term health of an institution--once you just start viewing it as a pie to be divided up, your pie starts shrinking.
That's awesome to hear an Indian will be heading up UH, a university already big in the Indian community. Congrats!
i found the article about why alums donate. two important points from it:
1. alums with kids give 13% more than alums without kids (so roughly 56-44 split).
2. about half of giving by alums with kids is self-interested.
so, if universities made it explicit and clear that they would not honor legacy any more, that is about a 28% hit in alum donation (and i assume alum donation is a substantial fraction of all donations every year).
of course, this does not answer many questions:
1. how elastic is donation? if universities are working towards some funding goal, can they just exert more pressure on people and get more money in the case that they do not get any legacy related donation? for example, there are checkboxes that ask people to donate $5, 10, 20 and so on, what if they just remove the $5 checkbox, will they get much more money that way? can they get this money from other sources? (for harvard, the number says that roughly $600 mil was alum donation, therefore they would lose about $150 mil without the prospect of legacy, for a smaller school like usc or notredame, i assume the number is closer to $30-50 mil, but i don't know).
2. in any case, you don't really need much legacy, you just need the perception of legacy. so isn't it enough to keep a very very small number of people happy to keep that going? for example, one george bush feeds the harvard legacy mills, at least in popular perception.
as for the distribution question earlier, the article has numbers - Their average gift is $466, with distribution heavily skewed by large gifts. In 2006, the top 1 percent of gifts accounted for 69 percent of the total.
of course if all schools dropped legacy preference---as would be the practical effect of a congressional mandate in order to receive fed funds or non-profit status, or to a lesser degree if one uses a less draconian transparency requirement---then no school would be hurt relative to another.
they'd all have to find different ways to raise money, and people like warren buffet, who don't believe in lucky sperm privilege, would give more.
Not true - those which are currently getting more money from alumni donations would lose more than those which are getting little money that way.
If I raise the capital gains tax to 50%, it might be uniform, but it's not true that this hurts all people the same.
true ennis. btw, how much did your sat prep course cost?
Don't know. Since local pricing varies, I don't know how much Princeton Review charges (and I never saw the money). My guess is probably $1,000 today, and that's just for the classroom courses, not the direct tutoring.
Technically you are right. USF (main campus) in Tampa and the Dali museum is in St Petersburg, but USF also has a St Petersburg campus which is right next to the Dali Museum. The two cities are only about 30 mile apart
Kind of like Minneapolis-St Paul, Dallas-Ft Worth. Needless to say the museum is definitely worth visiting.
that princeton review course raised my SAT score 400 pts.
congrats on your 890 pulli.
yes manju...im an idiot...
That's really useful, thanks. I hadn't known that.
Why do people on this board take the time to show some disrespect by using terms such as fresh off the boat when they can easily say that this person was from Taiwan?
Camille, RE: the cost of all these application-padding activities, isn't that (theoretically) the point of affirmative action as practiced by most elite private colleges? The admissions committee presumes that underrepresented minorities come from low-income families (not true in a lot of cases at private schools), and thus considers their race and gives them a 'leg up' for that reason. Increasingly, some colleges (the filthy rich ones, which can afford to) are looking at family income/parents' education level/parents' occupations and considering students' activities, grades, scores, etc. in the context of those. I recently went through the college process and ended up at an 'elite' private university, and I work in my university's admissions office, and I get the impression that all those things you list-- all those things that you pay money for to put on your resume but don't *excel* at-- are things that might help you get into flagship public schools or less-selective private schools, but not schools like Harvard or Yale (unless you're a legacy). I get the impression that the 'parents who can afford to send me to Andover and are triple legacies at all the Ivies' types get admissions preferences, but not the kids who went to good public school districts in middle class suburbs whose parents may have paid for SAT classes, piano lessons, etc. - but none of this will make an applicant stand out unless they really excel at something, e.g. are an Intel semifinalist or something. While your chances of 'standing out' like that are obviously higher if you go to a school with lots of funds, your parents can afford to drive you around, etc. - these kids still have to stand out on their own, and that's not something paid and bought for.
/corniness
Speaking of museumery, the one positive memory I have of houston, which I found unbearably ugly, is meandering around a manicured university campus and chancing upon this graffiti-ridden slab in the middle of a courtyard. What of it, you say! well it was a piece of the Berlin wall, cool to the touch and to the mind. it was all good after that.
oh! donggg! that dali museum is in florida. i get it. my reading comprehension skills are suck-y. this thread is too long and i rely tawtally on STM.
I know of a desi kid, who was a validectorian from a large public school with perfect SAT and great EC's who got waitlisted from Harvard, Princeton and Yale (waitlisted just means a polite rejection). The ironic thing is that a person who had same exact extracurriculars and same letter of recommendation got accepted to Yale, even though his class rank was much lower. He was a double legacy. Legacy matters, otherwise they would not ask for that information.
The desi kid is now going to University of Michigan on a full ride. The middle class desi kids suffer the most from this 'caste syatem.' Not every desi parents are like Kaavya Vishwanathan's parent that can fork out $30,000 to a private admission counselor.
Why is it that grades after high-school / SAT scores the ultimate measure of the quality of student ? Education is a process and a reasonably good GPA, SATs, recommendations, and extracurricular activities ( dim white/brown kids ) with an institution which has a strong infrastructural/resource base and good teaching and research faculty can churn out very good folks after college in diverse fields. So whats wrong with some amount legacy admissions of average/above average brown/white kids if that legacy admission can get you money and average/above average students ?
Brij
There may be nothing wrong with it, but most admission counselors at these university pretend that it does not exist, when it clearly does. A Kennedy name, (or Bush for that matter) makes you a senator or a Governor. There is a caste system in the US, and if you are brown, you cannot be the brahmins. Sort of ironic, but that's the way it is.
Yes, you can--first, not sure politicians are at the top of the US caste system, but there's Jindal, second, there are desi CEO's, entrepreneurs, etc.---drop the defeatism.
It's ironic, too, you mention "Kennedy" as high-caste--that shows how flexible things are here--Irish weren't anywhere near the top 100years ago!
nala, affirmative action tends to benefit subsection of people of color (although historically the biggest group of beneficiaries have been white women). For POC, that subsection is generally the (relative) elite, i.e., those students whose families are middle-class, usually relatively highly educated, and likely to go to a top institution anyway. (aside: I personally think it is still important to have AA if you are not going to take any other positive steps towards ensuring a diverse population, which I also think is important, but that's a different conversation). There are some low-income students who make it through, but certainly not as many as one would expect. It's just that, typically, the very few low-income students who make it through are the ones the news outlets cover when discussing AA. See here, and here.
I would argue that this is also highly driven by whether or not your folks, or your school, have the funds to allow you to do this. And it's true that colleges want a "stand out" person, but that doesn't negate the point that money can often buy you the CHANCE to stand out. Some families don't even have access to that opportunity. Can you be an Intel champion without proper lab equipment? It's unlikely. And how will you find the time? I'm a scholarship reader for 4 different "non-academic" achievement scholarships for my alma mater, and I can't tell you the number of times I have to explain to the reading committee why we should take into account whether or not someone had to work to support their family in high school. I think there are heavy assumptions about what is feasible/infeasible for low-income families, and oftentimes low-income applicants are dinged for that. (and that's assuming they're able to get together the resources to nail the SAT)Brij, if that's your argument, then do you also favor (race/ethnicity-based) affirmative action? I personally think the madness over the "SAT/GPA" is silly, largely because people like to think it's an indicator of merit when it is highly correlated with the same factors that already benefit a small % of people in the admissions process. All that said, I think there's a difference in whether an aspect of your educational mission values diversity (of background, class, gender, etc.), or whether its purpose is to give yet ANOTHER "leg up" to those who already enjoy the benefits of a high SES. When you give hugely disproportionate benefits to legacy students (who would not otherwise be admitted in their own right), you promote a social order that continues to benefit a small elite with little acknowledgment of what might build a dynamic or forward-moving learning community.
nala, actually, if you don't mind I'll email you a (slightly longer, more clear) explanation re: the "intent" of AA. I don't want to drag the thread even further off-track.
Rob
There are low caste succesful entreprenuers and businessmen in India too. In fact it may be argued that the bania or the trader caste is the richest people in India, yet they are considered somewhere in the middle of caste hierarchy. The Irish were looked down upon , but they are WASPy looking so they could move up. I am in middle management in middle of blue collar red-neck america, and some of the workers have made comments that 'I will never be considered an american' and have been openly hostile to the idea that they have to report to a brown man. Admittedly the situation is much better on the coasts. I do not have a defeatist attitude. I am a realist and work within the system and make it work for me.
Ennis,
Yash Gupta, who is if Indian origin is the dean of the business school of University of Washington.
sure, Camille. I see what you mean, it's just that I was actively told when I was in high school that I *shouldn't* be paying money to go overseas to do volunteer work or something ridiculous like that, b/c it's usually a waste of money and anyone with the money can do it, as opposed to get into something more 'selective' or 'prestigious' that could make you stand out. Of course that also involves money.
And doesn't the University of Houston have mad desis?
I mean, Where's the Party Yaar? took place there.
Re: the effect of SAT prep and the like on college admissions. For a genuinely talented student, there's nothing that ponying up the $1200 for Kaplan or TPR's SAT class that $30 won't get you from the stuff available at bookstores. Where companies like that (for the record, I teach for Kaplan)really excel is getting students is the midrange, say 900-1000 SAT, to the good-but-not-great range, say an 1100 or 1200. In my experience, rich morons buying their way into an Ivy-range score (say 1350+) doesn't happen very often. The 400+ point improvement someone referred to earlier is pretty rare-- more importantly, it indicates the test-taker has brains as well as money. No matter how much money your parents spend, getting an Ivy-range score is indications of at least some genuine ability. (That is NOT to say the SAT is a good test). I'm not disputing that college admissions are biased in favor of the wealthy, but the role the test-prep companies play in the undergrad admissions process is overstated.
Where there really IS an economic disparity is in the grad/professional school admissions tests (MCAT, LSAT, etc). Those courses are much more expensive AND there's stuff in the classroom course that even smart students won't get out of publically available materials. Interestingly, the grad/professional tests are much more valid tests than the SAT.
Speedy
Wow. i did not expect there would be so many wingnut desis.
Dr. Satish Tripathi is the provost of Univ at Buffalo, NY & he's a first generation Indian immigrant!! Also, Dr. Satish Mohan, again a first generation immigrant, is the supervisor of the town of Amherst, which is where the north campus of the university is located.