"Had institutions like Harvard and Columbia behaved just a little less haughtily in recent decades, and been just slightly more inclusive, many millions of Americans might have been a little less gleeful about seeing them be taken to the woodshed in recent weeks."
Great piece. They don't know how to be anything but haughty. How many of your Honors College peers made it to the Ivies? Their futures were stolen by DEI commissars and international students.
I'd say the prime purpose of the program was not really for kids like me, who were already on the college track and very likely to leave the state, but to get the super talented kids who'd never really considered college into the pipeline or at least thinking about it. I don't think the program came with automatic admission to Mizzou, but I didn't meet a single person in the program who couldn't have readily earned a full scholarship to Mizzou's Honors College.
It sounds cool to me. There was never any doubt I’d go to college either (both parents college educated, my father with a PhD), but I did grow up in a small town in a rural part of a rural state. I was a big fish in a very small pond, intellectually speaking. Having a chance to meet other kids of a similar caliber earlier than college would have been good for me, I think.
It was definitely a highly formative experience for me and in some ways a significant pivot point in my life, I am very glad to have had the opportunity. Unfortunately, the program was rather politically unpopular across much of the state and always at risk of getting its funding cut -- a lot of farming families wanted their super-talented kids to stay home and run the farm, not go to college to have their minds polluted with the indoctrination of a bunch of commie professors. That month at Mizzou is probably the only time in my personal experience that the "popular kids" -- the equivalent of the quarterback and the cheerleader prom king -- were fervent evangelical Christians.
I don't have a issue with legacy admissions at private schools; they are, in theory at least, private institutions who get to pick and choose who goes there. But, they do need to obey laws, and that includes laws against discrimination. But, the Fed gov't gets to choose how many peoples are allowed in via visa, and that includes student visas.
Yes, international students and teachers are a boon to American students, but, as you say, there needs to be a cap on the amount as the system we now have is a finite resource, and each of those foreign students takes a slot away from a US student. Indeed, they are currently being used as a cash cow for universities who have greatly overstretched their financials, and are being pushed to the limits of that now with Trumps visa restrictions.
Another issue re: legacies is that it's hard to know if that's why they actually got in. If someone is from an accomplished family of professionals, it would not be so surprising that they were on the track to becoming an accomplished professional themselves and might have been as competitive a candidate as any. Still, I feel society would benefit from more transparency around the issue. My fantasy would be to see it become a norm that selective schools publish a list of all the students with relatives who have attended the institution, so there's an implied asterisk and warning to all concerned to be on the lookout that some of these students might not honestly have earned their way into the school. It's a pipe dream, but a pleasant one!
But, as they are private institutions, who cares why they got in, other than the jealous. Legacies, I am betting, are what fuels the endowment, which should be, absent gov't handouts, what pays for poor students and such. In other words, elite universities need them, and should need them just as much as foreign students.
Now, granted, we have allowed the financial signals to get screwed up via the sheer amount of cash the gov't hands out for various things, some good, some bad. And this is what should be looked at. As long as a university remains private, then how they deal with legacies is up to them, which we should judge them by. If the sheer amount of grads from an institution are lazy cads, only chasing girls and drinks, then the reput
utation goes down in proportion. But, if they all seem to be good, hard working kids who have a great sense of duty and community, then, again, why should we care if they come from a long line of former students?
I'm most interested in transparency or at least the legacy issue being something that gets talked about a lot to help the public understand that being a Yalie for instance does not always mean somebody who's particularly intelligent or works particularly hard. The Ivy League sort of presents itself to the world as a black box of dazzling unimpeachable genius where if you disagree with their official truth you're just a yokel who doesn't get it, and that succeeds at intimidating a lot of people out of the conversation. I wouldn't say that I had an idealistic view of prestige academia growing up so much as that it had never occurred to me to question its narratives and rhetoric about itself, so I was stunned when I got there how filthy and corrupt and greedy and unethical an industry it so often is despite all the high-minded rhetoric. The public needs to have more sense of that, and hence my Substack.
Although I used to be against legacy as a means to boost an admissions chance, I actually now don’t think it’s so bad. Mostly because I think the ruling class should be partly composed of people born into it and partly composed of people who work their way into it.
It’s also my understanding that unless you’re a huge donor to an ivy, that having one parent who went to the university doesn’t count for much except perhaps getting picked over someone else with identical stats.
It’s interesting that your perception is that people assume that an Ivy League degree is awarded based on merit. I have been in workplaces where an ivy league grad degree has worked against me, at least in the sense that managers made snide comments to imply that I must be a stupid rich kid (despite the fact that PhD programs don’t use legacy as an admission factor). In many ways, if you want to get hired by a manager who went to Penn State, it’s much better for you to have gone to Penn State yourself vs. having gone to Harvard.
Nevertheless, interesting read and interesting thread of comments here!
Before higher education got nationalized and then globalized, it was routine for companies to prefer people who were educated in the state or regionally over those exotic characters who went far away. It was probably healthier for society to have many parallel regional hierarchies because it gave a lot of people the opportunity to feel like relative big shots, whereas the consolidated one hierarchy creates a smaller category of bigger "winners" while leaving many more people feeling shut out. It's encouraging in a way for me to hear anecdotes of people reflexively skeptical of Ivy League preeminence.
Also regional. If you want to practice law in, say, Kansas, you need to go to KU law school because that’s where the relevant connections are made. It also indicates a commitment to practicing in the state. A Harvard Law graduate would be utterly useless in these circumstances.
But, putting a so called asterisk next to any name removes an individuals attempts to shine by their own lights, and unfairly tars them with so-called elitism.
There are plenty of people who get into good or great state schools who suck at anything other than preparing themselves for getting in. My father was a prof at a highly ranked engineering school, and the number of kids there who smoked pot all day and learned nothing other than the best way to get the degree without learning a single thing was just as large a number as legacy kids who learn nothing and just want a degree.
Further, I would bet dollars to donuts that a huge percentage of those legacies get hired the same way: nepotism. Which takes away any need for them to be shown as such to the rest of us, because it, in the end, doesn't matter. The degree is just a box to check off as they glide their way through life.
It’s a tough call on nepotism because if you take steps to prevent it you are also making it impossible for outsiders to make their pitch. Bureaucratizing everything to make it more “fair” simply reorients the hiring process away from “who is the best person to do the job I need done” to “who checks the most boxes”. Same principle in education.
Those institutions like international students because they pay full tuition, inflated by administrative bloat. The ability to pay what is approaching $100k per year is a mystery in some cases - how can a Palestinian who grew up in an “open air jail” afford this? Where is the money from and what does the student need to do in return for that money? Same question for some Chinese students.
This was nuanced and I appreciate you writing it. It struck me that the “conversation” of course doesn’t differentiate (from either “side”) between those foreign students in graduate programs who absolutely are essential to research that keeps us competitive versus international students admitted for undergrad. The former is far more defensible than the latter; I don’t see much argument at all justifying their entitlement to those artificially scarce seats versus talented students from outside the coasts. It’s a similarly idiotic conversation as the one about affirmative action, wherein those who defend it refuse to recognize that it is indeed a zero sum game. And in the case of international students in undergrad programs, I don’t think there’s any moral argument to be made in their favor - they’re less deserving of those spots if you consider the purpose of the American university to be educating the American population. But then again, elites are generally known to have more affiliation with each other across borders than with their own countrymen across socioeconomic class.
I do think there's something to be said for cultural exchange and for fostering relationships across national boundaries, 0% foreign undergraduates would not be maximally benefiting American students, but anything above somewhere in the range of 10-15% is abusive to Americans and should rightfully call a school's public funding into question.
I’m going to push and ask what precisely the benefit of international undergrads who are almost all wealthy is to American undergrads if the scarcity is the point and assuming international students would still be allowed into graduate programs.
That's a fair point, admissions is absolutely a zero-sum game and an international undergraduate is absolutely taking the spot of an American who would have been thrilled to get in. Perhaps this is selfish of me, but as a Midwesterner not from a super-wealthy background I often found that I could relate more to international students and American students from immigrant families more than to preppy boarding school types. My Nicaraguan economist friend was even more clueless about the aristocratic folkways that dominate the Ivies than I was, and that common sense of alienation helped us bond. When I look back at my undergrad years many international students really enhanced my experience, far more than admitting another cookie cutter Andover archetype would have done. On the other hand, if it were possible to meet the American who would have otherwise taken that spot, and if that person were like the amazingly talented working-class people I met at the Missouri Scholars Academy, I may well see that very differently.
I was underwhelmed by Brown, I'd probably grade it as a B minus education, but without the contributions of my international friends it would probably have been more of a C plus. I'm not sure which is the least bad option: 100 Americans receiving a C plus education plus the fancy credential or 90 Americans and 10 foreigners receiving a B minus education plus the fancy credential. 90 Americans come out ahead of where they would have, and 10 get screwed for that benefit. It's a real moral conundrum.
Overall, I think society would be much better off were the ultra-elite boarding schools like Exeter et al knocked down several pegs. I'm not saying to dissolve them, many of those schools have fantastic teachers and proud traditions, but a ten-year moratorium on accepting any of those young aristocrats into the Ivies, MIT and Stanford might do wonders for leveling the social and educational playing field.
I see legacy admissions slightly differently. Legacies are much less likely to try to tear down the institution. The racing away from legacies towards FGLI and ‘holistic’ admissions has brought about a cohort of students who don’t care about the histories, traditions and future trajectories of the institutions. Too many current students and alumni are blind to how much the current chaos is harming the long term viability of the schools because they don’t really give a shit. This does not bode well.
I had a couple of experiences over the years with legacies who just flagrantly seemed like they could not otherwise have "gotten in," but it's probably not fair to assume those people are a representative sample of the legacy pool. A couple of other commenters have made some interesting arguments in favor of legacy admissions as well, and I could see how a family's ancestral links to a school might be an important source of ballast in intellectually choppy times. I'll have to chew on it.
Most “unqualified” legacies are lazy and unmotivated more than idiotic. But statistically kids whose parents went ivy tend to have more Ivy qualifications e.g. grades/scores/etc. than FGLI applicants
I am one of those people from flyover country who probably had the brains to get into the Ivies and never even tried. I also applauded when they were castigated even if I disagreed on the why.
I will say this: what happened was not just a “happening”….
You are correct about what you have said, but let’s be real. The chance they will change is in the low single digits
If Republicans can hang on to power in 2028, and continue to hang the threat of cutting federal funding like a Sword of Damocles over elite higher ed, I could see universities capping the number of foreign undergrads and essentially reserving some of those slots from top students from red states to mollify Republican senators. Some reform is possible, but yeah it's still going to be mostly cosmetic, as colleges and universities don't have the muscle memory anymore to operate much differently.
I think that Missouri Scholars program is clearly doing a fantastic job . The Ivies need to try making an outreach to programs like it in their admissions process. And I really see your point about foreign students. There should be a quota on them and the standards need to be exceptionally high. But flatly forbidding them is going WAY too far.
The sad thing is, as I mention elsewhere in the comments, is that the Missouri Scholars Academy was controversial in the state and always at risk of having its funding cut. I doubt that it still exists today, and I don't have the heart to google it. The way a lot of farmers saw it, the program was a way of indoctrinating their most talented children into strange urban ways and enticing them away from their communities. I can see why they'd feel that way, but a bunch of those kids were genuine prodigies and deserved the opportunity to be exposed to more of the world.
You write about the ivy's as the "most selective and desirable schools in America"
This is not true for all fields. I would guess the Ivy schools are very good in the traditional liberal arts and sciences. But for non-digital engineering, you want to go to the state schools in the Great Lakes region, the big tech schools in the South, MIT and Caltech of course, and the smaller more specialized tech schools. Or at least you used to, I don't really know today, but I know we (Pfizer) hired Chem Es from these kind of schools.
That's a fair point. One of the things I liked about working for Columbia Engineering was that engineers tend to be way less snooty about where one went to school or where particular research was conducted than just how productive the content is, as compared to law and humanities people who are often hyper-fixated on outranking others on the status totem pole. A talented enough engineer from pretty much any full-fledged program with resources can climb to the peak of their specialty, whereas in law one is essentially cut off from the most desirable clerkships and firms if one happened to attend a non-T14 law school. I always found it amusing that Columbia Law would address its students all the time as if they were the absolute cream of the crop, but the school's revealed preference in terms of faculty hiring was blatantly in favor of Harvard and Yale grads; the Columbia Law grads on faculty represented only a small fraction of the Harvard and Yale contingents.
I like the idea of a 10-15% cap. UNC-CH had a similar cap on out of state students. My experience as a grad assistant there led me to appreciate those out of state students as they usually were top-notch.
It is in American students' best interests to be exposed to people from around the world, every college or university with international students benefits from the perspectives they bring. If my college had been 100% American I would not have learned nearly as much. But for Harvard to accept the mediocre children of Chinese Communist Party higher-ups when that opportunity could have changed the lives of deserving Americans is a grave injustice.
These institutions are anti-White and anti-working-class. They churn out anti-White and anti-worker functionaries for government, NGOworld and business. The problem is 'international students'. The problem is the role of these institutions in the race war against Whites and the class war against working Whites.
"Had institutions like Harvard and Columbia behaved just a little less haughtily in recent decades, and been just slightly more inclusive, many millions of Americans might have been a little less gleeful about seeing them be taken to the woodshed in recent weeks."
Great piece. They don't know how to be anything but haughty. How many of your Honors College peers made it to the Ivies? Their futures were stolen by DEI commissars and international students.
The wife of a good friend of mine that he met in the Honors College eventually did her graduate work at Princeton, but I don't know of any others.
Does that program at least come with some sort of pipeline into the flagship state school?
I'd say the prime purpose of the program was not really for kids like me, who were already on the college track and very likely to leave the state, but to get the super talented kids who'd never really considered college into the pipeline or at least thinking about it. I don't think the program came with automatic admission to Mizzou, but I didn't meet a single person in the program who couldn't have readily earned a full scholarship to Mizzou's Honors College.
It sounds cool to me. There was never any doubt I’d go to college either (both parents college educated, my father with a PhD), but I did grow up in a small town in a rural part of a rural state. I was a big fish in a very small pond, intellectually speaking. Having a chance to meet other kids of a similar caliber earlier than college would have been good for me, I think.
It was definitely a highly formative experience for me and in some ways a significant pivot point in my life, I am very glad to have had the opportunity. Unfortunately, the program was rather politically unpopular across much of the state and always at risk of getting its funding cut -- a lot of farming families wanted their super-talented kids to stay home and run the farm, not go to college to have their minds polluted with the indoctrination of a bunch of commie professors. That month at Mizzou is probably the only time in my personal experience that the "popular kids" -- the equivalent of the quarterback and the cheerleader prom king -- were fervent evangelical Christians.
One of the most valuable things I learned in college is that I was not as smart as I thought I was. It’s a big country.
I hear that!
I don't have a issue with legacy admissions at private schools; they are, in theory at least, private institutions who get to pick and choose who goes there. But, they do need to obey laws, and that includes laws against discrimination. But, the Fed gov't gets to choose how many peoples are allowed in via visa, and that includes student visas.
Yes, international students and teachers are a boon to American students, but, as you say, there needs to be a cap on the amount as the system we now have is a finite resource, and each of those foreign students takes a slot away from a US student. Indeed, they are currently being used as a cash cow for universities who have greatly overstretched their financials, and are being pushed to the limits of that now with Trumps visa restrictions.
Another issue re: legacies is that it's hard to know if that's why they actually got in. If someone is from an accomplished family of professionals, it would not be so surprising that they were on the track to becoming an accomplished professional themselves and might have been as competitive a candidate as any. Still, I feel society would benefit from more transparency around the issue. My fantasy would be to see it become a norm that selective schools publish a list of all the students with relatives who have attended the institution, so there's an implied asterisk and warning to all concerned to be on the lookout that some of these students might not honestly have earned their way into the school. It's a pipe dream, but a pleasant one!
But, as they are private institutions, who cares why they got in, other than the jealous. Legacies, I am betting, are what fuels the endowment, which should be, absent gov't handouts, what pays for poor students and such. In other words, elite universities need them, and should need them just as much as foreign students.
Now, granted, we have allowed the financial signals to get screwed up via the sheer amount of cash the gov't hands out for various things, some good, some bad. And this is what should be looked at. As long as a university remains private, then how they deal with legacies is up to them, which we should judge them by. If the sheer amount of grads from an institution are lazy cads, only chasing girls and drinks, then the reput
utation goes down in proportion. But, if they all seem to be good, hard working kids who have a great sense of duty and community, then, again, why should we care if they come from a long line of former students?
I'm most interested in transparency or at least the legacy issue being something that gets talked about a lot to help the public understand that being a Yalie for instance does not always mean somebody who's particularly intelligent or works particularly hard. The Ivy League sort of presents itself to the world as a black box of dazzling unimpeachable genius where if you disagree with their official truth you're just a yokel who doesn't get it, and that succeeds at intimidating a lot of people out of the conversation. I wouldn't say that I had an idealistic view of prestige academia growing up so much as that it had never occurred to me to question its narratives and rhetoric about itself, so I was stunned when I got there how filthy and corrupt and greedy and unethical an industry it so often is despite all the high-minded rhetoric. The public needs to have more sense of that, and hence my Substack.
Although I used to be against legacy as a means to boost an admissions chance, I actually now don’t think it’s so bad. Mostly because I think the ruling class should be partly composed of people born into it and partly composed of people who work their way into it.
It’s also my understanding that unless you’re a huge donor to an ivy, that having one parent who went to the university doesn’t count for much except perhaps getting picked over someone else with identical stats.
It’s interesting that your perception is that people assume that an Ivy League degree is awarded based on merit. I have been in workplaces where an ivy league grad degree has worked against me, at least in the sense that managers made snide comments to imply that I must be a stupid rich kid (despite the fact that PhD programs don’t use legacy as an admission factor). In many ways, if you want to get hired by a manager who went to Penn State, it’s much better for you to have gone to Penn State yourself vs. having gone to Harvard.
Nevertheless, interesting read and interesting thread of comments here!
Before higher education got nationalized and then globalized, it was routine for companies to prefer people who were educated in the state or regionally over those exotic characters who went far away. It was probably healthier for society to have many parallel regional hierarchies because it gave a lot of people the opportunity to feel like relative big shots, whereas the consolidated one hierarchy creates a smaller category of bigger "winners" while leaving many more people feeling shut out. It's encouraging in a way for me to hear anecdotes of people reflexively skeptical of Ivy League preeminence.
Also regional. If you want to practice law in, say, Kansas, you need to go to KU law school because that’s where the relevant connections are made. It also indicates a commitment to practicing in the state. A Harvard Law graduate would be utterly useless in these circumstances.
But, putting a so called asterisk next to any name removes an individuals attempts to shine by their own lights, and unfairly tars them with so-called elitism.
There are plenty of people who get into good or great state schools who suck at anything other than preparing themselves for getting in. My father was a prof at a highly ranked engineering school, and the number of kids there who smoked pot all day and learned nothing other than the best way to get the degree without learning a single thing was just as large a number as legacy kids who learn nothing and just want a degree.
Further, I would bet dollars to donuts that a huge percentage of those legacies get hired the same way: nepotism. Which takes away any need for them to be shown as such to the rest of us, because it, in the end, doesn't matter. The degree is just a box to check off as they glide their way through life.
It’s a tough call on nepotism because if you take steps to prevent it you are also making it impossible for outsiders to make their pitch. Bureaucratizing everything to make it more “fair” simply reorients the hiring process away from “who is the best person to do the job I need done” to “who checks the most boxes”. Same principle in education.
That's a great point about nepotism.
They are private institutions, and they can do anything they want as long as they don’t break the law. But they have been doing that.
Those institutions like international students because they pay full tuition, inflated by administrative bloat. The ability to pay what is approaching $100k per year is a mystery in some cases - how can a Palestinian who grew up in an “open air jail” afford this? Where is the money from and what does the student need to do in return for that money? Same question for some Chinese students.
I don't see how you can treat these credential-mills for government and NGO service like they're behavior is not a public matter.
There are regulations on the behavior of ice cream trucks but some 'higher education' can't be held accountable to the public?
Complete nonsense.
This was nuanced and I appreciate you writing it. It struck me that the “conversation” of course doesn’t differentiate (from either “side”) between those foreign students in graduate programs who absolutely are essential to research that keeps us competitive versus international students admitted for undergrad. The former is far more defensible than the latter; I don’t see much argument at all justifying their entitlement to those artificially scarce seats versus talented students from outside the coasts. It’s a similarly idiotic conversation as the one about affirmative action, wherein those who defend it refuse to recognize that it is indeed a zero sum game. And in the case of international students in undergrad programs, I don’t think there’s any moral argument to be made in their favor - they’re less deserving of those spots if you consider the purpose of the American university to be educating the American population. But then again, elites are generally known to have more affiliation with each other across borders than with their own countrymen across socioeconomic class.
I do think there's something to be said for cultural exchange and for fostering relationships across national boundaries, 0% foreign undergraduates would not be maximally benefiting American students, but anything above somewhere in the range of 10-15% is abusive to Americans and should rightfully call a school's public funding into question.
I’m going to push and ask what precisely the benefit of international undergrads who are almost all wealthy is to American undergrads if the scarcity is the point and assuming international students would still be allowed into graduate programs.
That's a fair point, admissions is absolutely a zero-sum game and an international undergraduate is absolutely taking the spot of an American who would have been thrilled to get in. Perhaps this is selfish of me, but as a Midwesterner not from a super-wealthy background I often found that I could relate more to international students and American students from immigrant families more than to preppy boarding school types. My Nicaraguan economist friend was even more clueless about the aristocratic folkways that dominate the Ivies than I was, and that common sense of alienation helped us bond. When I look back at my undergrad years many international students really enhanced my experience, far more than admitting another cookie cutter Andover archetype would have done. On the other hand, if it were possible to meet the American who would have otherwise taken that spot, and if that person were like the amazingly talented working-class people I met at the Missouri Scholars Academy, I may well see that very differently.
I was underwhelmed by Brown, I'd probably grade it as a B minus education, but without the contributions of my international friends it would probably have been more of a C plus. I'm not sure which is the least bad option: 100 Americans receiving a C plus education plus the fancy credential or 90 Americans and 10 foreigners receiving a B minus education plus the fancy credential. 90 Americans come out ahead of where they would have, and 10 get screwed for that benefit. It's a real moral conundrum.
Overall, I think society would be much better off were the ultra-elite boarding schools like Exeter et al knocked down several pegs. I'm not saying to dissolve them, many of those schools have fantastic teachers and proud traditions, but a ten-year moratorium on accepting any of those young aristocrats into the Ivies, MIT and Stanford might do wonders for leveling the social and educational playing field.
I see legacy admissions slightly differently. Legacies are much less likely to try to tear down the institution. The racing away from legacies towards FGLI and ‘holistic’ admissions has brought about a cohort of students who don’t care about the histories, traditions and future trajectories of the institutions. Too many current students and alumni are blind to how much the current chaos is harming the long term viability of the schools because they don’t really give a shit. This does not bode well.
I had a couple of experiences over the years with legacies who just flagrantly seemed like they could not otherwise have "gotten in," but it's probably not fair to assume those people are a representative sample of the legacy pool. A couple of other commenters have made some interesting arguments in favor of legacy admissions as well, and I could see how a family's ancestral links to a school might be an important source of ballast in intellectually choppy times. I'll have to chew on it.
Most “unqualified” legacies are lazy and unmotivated more than idiotic. But statistically kids whose parents went ivy tend to have more Ivy qualifications e.g. grades/scores/etc. than FGLI applicants
I am one of those people from flyover country who probably had the brains to get into the Ivies and never even tried. I also applauded when they were castigated even if I disagreed on the why.
I will say this: what happened was not just a “happening”….
You are correct about what you have said, but let’s be real. The chance they will change is in the low single digits
If Republicans can hang on to power in 2028, and continue to hang the threat of cutting federal funding like a Sword of Damocles over elite higher ed, I could see universities capping the number of foreign undergrads and essentially reserving some of those slots from top students from red states to mollify Republican senators. Some reform is possible, but yeah it's still going to be mostly cosmetic, as colleges and universities don't have the muscle memory anymore to operate much differently.
I think that Missouri Scholars program is clearly doing a fantastic job . The Ivies need to try making an outreach to programs like it in their admissions process. And I really see your point about foreign students. There should be a quota on them and the standards need to be exceptionally high. But flatly forbidding them is going WAY too far.
The sad thing is, as I mention elsewhere in the comments, is that the Missouri Scholars Academy was controversial in the state and always at risk of having its funding cut. I doubt that it still exists today, and I don't have the heart to google it. The way a lot of farmers saw it, the program was a way of indoctrinating their most talented children into strange urban ways and enticing them away from their communities. I can see why they'd feel that way, but a bunch of those kids were genuine prodigies and deserved the opportunity to be exposed to more of the world.
You write about the ivy's as the "most selective and desirable schools in America"
This is not true for all fields. I would guess the Ivy schools are very good in the traditional liberal arts and sciences. But for non-digital engineering, you want to go to the state schools in the Great Lakes region, the big tech schools in the South, MIT and Caltech of course, and the smaller more specialized tech schools. Or at least you used to, I don't really know today, but I know we (Pfizer) hired Chem Es from these kind of schools.
That's a fair point. One of the things I liked about working for Columbia Engineering was that engineers tend to be way less snooty about where one went to school or where particular research was conducted than just how productive the content is, as compared to law and humanities people who are often hyper-fixated on outranking others on the status totem pole. A talented enough engineer from pretty much any full-fledged program with resources can climb to the peak of their specialty, whereas in law one is essentially cut off from the most desirable clerkships and firms if one happened to attend a non-T14 law school. I always found it amusing that Columbia Law would address its students all the time as if they were the absolute cream of the crop, but the school's revealed preference in terms of faculty hiring was blatantly in favor of Harvard and Yale grads; the Columbia Law grads on faculty represented only a small fraction of the Harvard and Yale contingents.
I like the idea of a 10-15% cap. UNC-CH had a similar cap on out of state students. My experience as a grad assistant there led me to appreciate those out of state students as they usually were top-notch.
It is in American students' best interests to be exposed to people from around the world, every college or university with international students benefits from the perspectives they bring. If my college had been 100% American I would not have learned nearly as much. But for Harvard to accept the mediocre children of Chinese Communist Party higher-ups when that opportunity could have changed the lives of deserving Americans is a grave injustice.
These institutions are anti-White and anti-working-class. They churn out anti-White and anti-worker functionaries for government, NGOworld and business. The problem is 'international students'. The problem is the role of these institutions in the race war against Whites and the class war against working Whites.