wifeisafurd said:
BearlyCareAnymore said:
wifeisafurd said:
juarezbear said:
BearlyCareAnymore said:
Bobodeluxe said:
From the Alden Global Capital owned eb times
"Stanford University will continue considering legacy status in admissions through fall 2026, opting out of state financial aid assistance for students in order to comply with California's ban on preferential treatment for applicants with alumni or donor ties.
While the university studies a long-term policy, it will maintain its current legacy practice, according to a recent public announcement. The decision places Stanford at the center of the legacy admissions debate as it confronts a $140 million budget shortfall, hundreds of layoffs, and heightened scrutiny of admissions after a 2023 U.S. Supreme Court rulingcurbing the use of race as a factor."
I'm sure that all the employees that Stanford has laid off will take solace that their sacrifice is not in vain and that Stanford is using the savings from eliminating their salaries to make sure that rich applicants don't unfairly lose their unfair advantages over everyone else.
I'm clearly in the minority on this point. I've said forever that if someone is willing to cut a huge check to a university to get their kid in the school, I'm okay with it. In exchange for that one spot, thousands of other students will benefit from the donation in whatever for that takes. I also like seeing Cal legacies like the Spieker family on campus. It foments deep connections to the school and continued support. Let's face it, Cal and UCLA have terrible percentages of alumni support when compared to Furd and USC. For some reason our alums feel that because it's a public uni, there's no obligation to help the next generation. Michigan and UT Austin don't have this same issue. Their alums are very loyal and give back.
Furdies have not been giving much preference to children of alums for some time now, if you ask their alums. My cynical read is that this is an opportunity to say to alums is if you want to get your kid into Stanford, better start donating more.
Before we start casting aspirations on admissions that favor rich kids, appreciate:
1) The median family income for a UC Berkeley student's parents is $119,900, with 54% of students coming from families in the top 20% of income earners. This is very much on top end for publics and higher end for all colleges.
2) Parents of children attending Stanford come from a broad income range, with the median family income for Stanford students being $167,500 (which is the 4th highest among major colleges), and 66% (top 10) from families in the top 20% of the income distribution.
3) The median family income of a student attending a four-year institution is around $58,500. Many schools don't collect data on parent income classes (e.g., top 20%) given the modest medium income levels of parents.
Like it or not, Cal and Stanford are elite schools that cater to students of the affluent.
1. I absolutely don't care about educating "rich" kids. I care about fairness and educating qualified kids.
2. Society favors rich kids. You would expect a class to have more rich kids where admissions doesn't favor rich kids.
3. Median is not rich. And it certainly isn't the kind of money that are dipping into the legacy Ivy pool.
4. Your numbers are very misleading. California has the 5th highest median income. We have high income and high cost of living. National income percentiles are irrelevant to Cal as Cal primarily draws from in state. California's median household income is $95K which puts the median household in California at roughly the top 25% of income earners in the country. If Cal's median household income was California's median income, we'd already be in the top 26% of income distribution. And even that is misleading because that is covering a lot of territory in California that makes a lot less money than the territories Cal mostly pulls from. The median household income in San Francisco is $145K. San Jose is $135K. Oakland is $100K. Oakland!!! The 80th percentile in San Francisco makes $250K. Pretty much twice what your national numbers are. Affluent in Nebraska is not affluent in San Francisco. $120K in the Bay Area is not an affluent family. My first house in Oakland was a hundred year old, two bedroom house with less than 1100 square feet in an okay/not great neighborhood where I was 5 blocks from a dive bar on MacArthur ave. That house sold for $1M 8 years ago and is now estimated at $1,250,000 on Zillow and $4,500 in rent. That would be $54K a year. Can you afford that on $120K gross? I don't see how. And no family living in that house is affluent. So, I dispute that your numbers mean that Cal caters to the affluent.
5. Even based on that, Stanford's numbers are 50% higher than Cal's. That is a big difference.
6. To bring it back to the beginning, I don't care if Stanford (or Cal) naturally caters to affluent families. That is not the issue. The issue is giving them an advantage they don't need.
7. Lastly, I'll give you this. Stanford is laudably not among the worst offenders in the legacy admissions racket. They are actually pretty good. Which is all the more mind boggling that at a moment when they are laying off hundreds and are $140M in the hole every year, they are choosing to protect their remaining legacy admissions by footing the bill for all of the California financial aid. That is my criticism of Stanford on this deal. Yeah, if I had just been laid off, I'd be pretty fried.
I realize a lot of people thumbed-up this post, and philosophically they want the world to be fairer. But they never tried to finance a university.
Number 7 is laughable if you understand the economics of colleges. Foregoing $140 million annually to alienate those giving $Billions is a no brainer. Take a look at my prior post where the university makes Billions in new donations annually, and you are talking about a school with s $9.7 billion annual budget. They didn't blame the layoffs on minuscule CA financial aid. They blamed the layoffs on the reduction in federal funding of research and the increase in the endowment tax.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://stanforddaily.com/2025/08/06/stanford-to-layoff-over-360-staff-following-140-million-budget cuts/&ved=2ahUKEwj8tpvPkouPAxU4JEQIHfzWGX8QFnoECBgQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2aNBcTJQl2a0O2Ts8-pb9n
Even this explanation is a little sleight of hand. Stanford was under pressure to lay off bureaucrats from numerous stakeholders due to the exceedingly high staff to faculty ratio and the view that so many bureaucrats looking for stuff to do made Stanford no fun (per students), and implement stupid rules (like having your computer school determine what un-PC words were to be deleted from the computer system) that had offended almost all stakeholders both in context and implementation. Even senior administrators felt that the staff was bloated and it was becoming impossible to get anything done. Cal might take a lesson, That said, a certain numbers of researchers were let go, and to blame it all on Trump is politically adept.
Addressing some of your other concerns about privates. Donor and legacy preferences are done at private schools for financial reasons and to strengthen alumni networks. Legacy and donor admits as students are more likely to attend, require less financial aid, and are more likely to donate after graduation, benefiting the school's bottom line and fostering a sense of community. It offsets not obtaining state funding like state schools. Unless the State of California to fund the Billions each year that comes from Stanford donors, there is nothing to talk about. Your suggestions regarding more fairness in admissions at privates make no economic sense.
There is some merit to the comments about Cal and fairness. While affirmative action is out per the voters and SCOTUS, Cal wants more diversity in its incoming students for laudable reasons, and attempts to do work arounds within a qualified student base. And Cal does a good job getting Pell Grant students.
You say that the numbers favoring students from high income families is based due to California's high salaries and cost of living. About 25% of Cal students are from out of state (about 10.5% are international). I'm not sure there any numbers on how many students are from the Bay Area or what you consider high income areas across the State, but let's assume it is a decent size number. The Bay Area has consistently had some of the highest living costs in the US, though some data suggests that the relative cost of living has slightly declined since 2018, though it remains significantly higher than the national average. And the main driver is high real estate costs, and in particular high housing costs. Now these families who have large salaries for some time and now sending their kids to college are sitting on millions of dollars of home equity, stocks and stock options, pension plans and other investments and to compare that to families making a little over $50K a year seems incredibly disingenuous. You are talking out of both sides of your mouth to say Cal recruits students from primarily rich areas of the state and then lay a poverty trip on us. The people struggling to get by are not from the wealthy enclaves that feed into Cal, but more recent graduates and those commuting in to do more low income jobs. I'm sensing that you live in Bay Area suburb and don't get what real struggling is about, and don't appreciate how irritated people get when Californians whine they can't afford to live in Beverly Hills, Orinda, Piedmont, Claremont, Atherton or other ares that Cal typically draws students from. There is a huge disconnect.
The real reason Stanford has a higher median income is that approximately 17% of Stanford University's undergraduate students come from families in the top 1% of wealth in the United States, while that number is 3.8% at Cal. That is the power of donations. Cal interesting has a very high percent at the top 5% level of 23% (29% at Stanford) which suggests that your 50% number maybe misleading becuase of the very high number of 1%ers at Stanford.
I don't know how to finance a university, and neither do you. You know who does? MIT. They ended legacy consideration in admissions decades ago and they seem to be doing fine. Occidental College ended them in response to the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action before California was realistically considering legislation. They are clearly more economically susceptible than Stanford. Johns Hopkins stopped in 2020. Wesleyan stopped. Amherst stopped in 2021 (good on you Amherst! unfortunately our tour was too early) Pomona stopped in 2017. Alums in much of the private school space, especially young alums are more and more divided on the issue with a lot of activism going on among alums, against their interest, lobbying to eliminate legacy admissions.
Harvard's endowment is so large they can run the school simply on the annual returns without charging tuition, let alone collecting massive donations. I got that from Harvard. They proudly proclaim this on their tours and in their literature. They don't need to sell legacy admissions to get by but they do. Which brings me to another interesting point in your post. Virtually all the most elite private schools trumpet that they have needs blind admissions. And yet you say they take legacy admits because they require less financial aid. You 100% may be right about that. In fact, I think you are. But if you are, it is another example of private schools touting bullshyte. They don't have a line item specifically factoring in individual need, but (as you say) they deliberately consider other factors (in this case legacy, also taking athletes who at most elite privates are overwhelming extremely wealthy) to deliberately advantage the wealthy. Although, I do not for a second think it is the money that they care about. See Harvard's endowment. See your arguments about Stanford. The money they save in financial aid by taking legacies is a pittance. It's not the money. It's the status. But mostly it is the unstated mission to educate the nation's economic elites vs. the bullshyte publicly stated mission to educate the nations academic elites.
The fact is that some schools are looking at the reputational hit of legacy admissions that is growing and deciding it isn't worth it and that is largely because the financial benefits are not nearly as great as claimed and that is a scare tactic argument. An argument that MIT has individually blown out of the water for decades and that is getting harder to ignore as more schools eliminate legacy admissions and continue to thrive.
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It (Legacy admits) offsets not obtaining state funding like state schools. Unless the State of California to fund the Billions each year that comes from Stanford donors, there is nothing to talk about. Your suggestions regarding more fairness in admissions at privates make no economic sense
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The implications that legacy admits are worth billions of dollars in donations to Stanford is ludicrous. First of all, if this were true, Stanford wouldn't have put off the decision for a year as that could chill donations from donors who now have to wonder if legacy and donor preference will be around when it is time for them to get their privileged treatment. They would have forcefully made their decision now. This is a consistent flaw in your arguments where you essentially imply that every cent of donations is at risk if a university doesn't do what you want, when the fact is that the vast majority of Stanford's donations do not rely on its legacy policy. What Stanford is doing is waiting to see which way the wind blows and whether the reputational hit of taking legacies will continue to be worth it.
The supposed benefit of legacy admits fostering community at these schools is an off cited mushy excuse often used as an argument of last resort when the practical arguments fall away. It does the opposite. Students know who don't belong and why they are there. At many of these private schools, legacies walk in with built in privileges like elite dining clubs that don't foster community. They divide it.
Your statement that legacies are more likely to attend is laughable. Of course they are. They don't get in to any other equivalent schools. The legacy got them their admission. See legacies being 10 times more likely to be admitted to Harvard than non-legacies. A kid without legacy who gets into Harvard is very likely to have multiple Ivy and other elite private school options. A legacy simply does not. Even the excellent students. Their differentiator is being a legacy.
We all know it "strengthens alumni networks" which translated means, whose daddy can get who a job.
There have been many academic studies and books published on the subject. It's not about finances. It is about forming elite clubs to serve elites and keep them elite. Even the actual donor numbers are more about marketing and ranking than about the actual need for the dollars.
On your first point about Stanford and the $140M of budget shortfall and the layoffs, I know full well that Stanford does not have a real $140M budget shortfall and that is small potatoes compared to their endowment. Something is obviously not Kosher in what Stanford is presenting publicly. I know there is no way that or the federal funds is the cause of the layoffs. But that is Stanford's public statement. If they want to bullshyte and cry poverty they need to live by it. So when you do that one week, and then the next week you forgo funding to keep legacy admissions, it doesn't fly. They could have said we are laying off employees because we need to streamline. They didn't. So I think it is fair for me, and certainly fair for those laid off, to say, gee it seems like your actions and your words taken together indicate that your employees are less important to you than maintaining unfair advantages for privileged applicants.
On the finances of California families, spare me the man of the people indignation. Over the years it has been very clear that you are completely out of touch with middle class issues. You cited $119,900 as the median household income of Cal student families and then said 54% of students come from a nationally derived top 20%. Again that is a ridiculous metric when California's median income and cost of living is so much higher than the average. It takes a lot more to be affluent in California than it does elsewhere.
2024 stats have 79% of Cal's incoming class being from California. The top counties were LA, Santa Clara, Alameda, Orange and San Diego. Again, Cal's median income is much closer to the median income of California. Again, Oakland's median income is $100K. Not Piedmont. Not Orinda. Not Beverly Hills. Not Atherton. Oakland. Are you now arguing that Oakland is a bastion of immense wealth?
And, by the way, that means half the households at Cal make less than $119,900. I say that because you seem to be confusing mean with median. At least, I don't see how your argument in the last paragraph makes sense for median statistics while it would make sense for mean statistics.
But then instead of using your numbers you rant anecdotally about Piedmont and Atherton and claim I'm crying poverty for them. I'm not. I'm using your number - $119,900, and pointing out that the cost of living in the Bay Area makes that number a lot closer to median income buying power in places like Nebraska than it is to affluence. No one living in Piedmont or Atherton has a median household income of $119,900. And this is where your rant against Bay Area wealth gets really out of touch. You portray the California family as they "are sitting on millions of dollars of home equity, stocks and stock options, pension plans and other investments and to compare that to families making a little over $50K a year seems incredibly disingenuous". First of all, I never compared them to people making $50K a year. The median household income in the US is $80K. Nebraska, to pull a state out of my butt, is $75K a year. The difference for whining Californians is not nearly as much you claim. I ran Oakland compared to a couple of cities in a cost of living calculator. Including rent, it is 49.8% more expensive to live than Cleveland. It is 46.5% higher than Kansas City. Oaklanders have lower buying power (salary to cost of living) than Kansas City. To be clear, households earning $119,900 a year in the Bay Area or Orange or San Diego are not sitting on millions of dollars of home equity, stocks and stock options, pension plans and other investments. Hell, they probably aren't in any county for that matter. Are their rich and affluent people who do? Absolutely. But that median Cal family that you are portraying are not in that category. A family who is earning $119,900 when their kid hits college did not buy a house that now gives them millions of dollars in equity. Hell, I am rich and bought my house almost 20 years ago and I have a lot of equity, but it does not equal millions plural. Do you want to do the math on how much they would have had to spend on a house say 20 years ago to have $2M in equity today? And figure out what salary that would have required. It isn't equivalent. People here making $119,900 are not in poverty by any means, but they are, like most living month to month. You are also assuming they have a house, when they probably rent. That median Cal family is not rolling in millions of dollars in stock and pensions. The fact that you think they are speaks to how out of touch you are with middle class finances.
By the way, that $58,500 figure for median household income of students at four year colleges that you got from the Penn Wharton study - that data is from 1996. From the study:
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The distribution of students by family income (in 1996) for each of the three groups is displayed in Figure 1. Students who first attend four-year universities tend to come from higher-income backgrounds than their peers. The median family income among students who first attended four-year institutions in our sample is $58,500, 39 percent above the $42,000 median for two-year attendees and 89 percent above the $31,000 median for non-attendees
The US median household income in 1996 was $35K. It is now $80K. More than double. Which is in line with inflation that has a little more than doubled as well. (2.06 to be exact) Let's see, 2.06 x $58,500 = $120,510. What was Cal's median household income again? Oh, yes. $119,900. So virtually exactly in line.
You seem to blow off Stanford's median of $167,500 vs. Cal's number of $119,900 as somehow being in the neighborhood of similar. I realize that $47K doesn't move the needle for you, but the practical difference of $47 more when you are talking about $120K and $167K is enormous. I don't even know what to do with a statement like:
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The real reason Stanford has a higher median income is that approximately 17% of Stanford University's undergraduate students come from families in the top 1% of wealth in the United States, while that number is 3.8% at Cal.
No shyte. The real reason Stanford's student body is a lot richer is that they take a lot of uber wealthy kids. Kinda knew that. That was kinda the point. The 50% number (which was based on your numbers) is not misleading at all because it is a median number. The fact that Stanford takes more 1%ers does not drag up the median number. If anything, if we were to look at average income instead of median, it almost assuredly would show a much bigger difference. As you move up the percentile scale, the income differential skyrockets. The difference between 5% and 1% is well over $200K a year. And once you get into the 1% range, which neither of them show splits for, the income goes into the stratosphere. At 17%, Stanford has a lot more opportunity to be dipping into the 99.9% range where the money dwarfs the 99% range. I don't know what you think your point is with that argument, but your numbers just show that Stanford has a lot more uber wealthy students than cal (4.5 times more) and still has more kinda wealthy students.
BTW - I lived in Oakland most of my adult life. I have never been poor. I did not grow up rich or affluent or upper middle class. My parents' salary would have hovered around California median income. I know how hard they worked to keep things going and they were always in debt. No savings. I never wanted for necessities and I never had a lot beyond necessities and the knee patches on my jeans were not for looks. I am rich now. I make much more than $119,900 and do not feel sorry for myself in the slightest. You are portraying that $119,900 family as if they are like me. They are not. I have actually lived like that family. When I was at Cal, I first lived in someone's basement and then I got a roommate in run down, roach infested apartment. I get that you think the Bay Area is just filled with vast amounts of wealth. That is the bubble you run in. Certainly they are here but there are a lot of other people as well - the wealth disparity in the Bay Area is accute. That Cal family making $119,900 is not in that bubble. If anything, the wealth that you think represents everyone has made it extremely hard for the average person to live, especially with the housing costs that result.
