The Truth about College: Money, Lies and Deception
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We’re gonna get some hard truth right here when it comes to colleges and universities, and I guarantee I’m gonna get some pushback here. But again, I’m not Mary Poppins, no spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down. We’re gonna tell you the truth, the big college lie. Colleges and universities are, they’re hedge funds, is what they are, they’re hedge funds with non-profit status. We’ve just had this Supreme Court case when it came to racial preferences, and oh my God.
Oh, the folks over at Harvard. Oh, it’s a terrible day. It’s an awful day.
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Why don’t we talk about legacy? You take a look at the people that they allow into Harvard simply because their parents went there. Let’s get into that, shall we? Students for Fair Admissions vs. Harvard exposed how Ivy League admissions
favored not only blacks and Hispanics, but also the children of affluent alumni and donors at the expense of others, especially Asian Americans. Harvard could boast of its commitment to equity, even as its admissions were anything but equitable. Alyssa Finley in the Wall Street Journal today puts out a piece, again, covering many of the things
we’ve discussed here. According to a statistical analysis, so-called legacy students enjoy a slightly greater admissions advantage than blacks, nearly twice that of Hispanics, and 2.5 times that of low-income students. Hmm. Economists found that for high school students between 2010 and 2015, a legacy or a child of a donor or faculty
who ranked in the top 20% of his high school class was four to six times as likely to be admitted as other students with similar qualifications. The, what Harvard says is, we’re building a community. It’s a community building function.
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No, it’s about alumni and donations. It’s about money, period, the end. Again, we’ve talked about this before. They did Wall Street Journal years ago, I think it was colleges, it was a small, I don’t know, was it Lafayette? I can’t remember exactly. And they were going through their admissions process. And one of the directors, you know, we gotta pay the bills here.
We’ve got to make sure that we have people here that are actually going to pay the freight. And that’s another aspect is too. They’re saying many of these parents, these legacies, guess what? They can pay the full amount. It’s about the money. A 2021 study found that removing legacy preferences automatically. You do not need a racial preference.
Removing legacy preferences would boost black, Latino, and Asian-American admission rates by 4% to 5% and reduce the white admissions rate commensurately. Again, think about that. The people that were most harmed, okay, by Harvard’s admissions system, and they’re not the only ones around the country that do this, we know this, were white and Asian-American students who were not.
either recruited athletes or children of alumni. 43% of white students admitted to Harvard were members of one of those privileged groups compared with less than 16% of blacks and Latinos.
Yeah, unless you have an inside track, you’re having a much more difficult time getting in there. Again, you also think about it in terms of how much money, let’s use Harvard as an example, but Harvard’s not the only one. I’ve made this point again and again and again. Harvard could provide full scholarships for every single student, every single student at the school with
1% of its annual return on its $50 billion plus endowment. And they’re not the only ones. You’ve got many elite colleges and universities that could do the same thing. Why do they not do that? Well, they wanna be exclusive. They want to be exclusive. And Alyssa today in her column, she writes, and again, it’s the same point I’ve been making for years here on the program.
Harvard students pay close to $80,000 a year, not for an education, which they could get at a public college for a quarter of the price, but for the high powered connections they’ll make and the doors their degree will open up afterwards. Legacies are part of its business proposition. They provide networking opportunities students wouldn’t get at a state school. Elite colleges act like an aristocracy.
while pretending they’re not. Yep, it’s our caste system that we have here. It is, it’s a caste system, again.
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My kids, you know, getting recruited to go to some private high school there. They want to get them in for, and it happens all the time, for LaCrosse. And they give you, you know, a benefit. You still have to pony up some money. These are feeder schools. And if you’re not an athlete and you can’t get some sort of a deal, guess what? You got to pay the full freight. How many parents can afford to be spending?
70, $80,000 a year on high school and then college. But that’s what these schools do, they get you in.
they get you in. So don’t tell me we don’t have a bit of a caste system in this country. We do, okay? And again, all of these colleges and universities, they are business and big business at that. They are hedge funds with nonprofit status. Watchdog on wallstreet.com.