- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
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Wait, this wasn’t known? I thought this was standard practice for all prestigious schools.
This shit happens in hospitals, too.
In every facet of life the rich, wealthy and powerful choose to put their descendants before others. It’s literally what modern society is built upon: the idea that your children will have it better than you did.
That’s everyone.
But we should be able to trust systems and institutions to keep things on the level .
On what level?
Have you ever worked anywhere and saw that people didn’t put their friends, family and coworkers ahead of the others?
Have you ever seen a human system that didn’t put “others” behind whatever group they decided to create?
Even nonprofits and charities end up playing favorites. Once any organization gets to any real size it’s going to be corrupt. It’s human nature. All of humanity competes over this world’s limited resources. People will do anything to win.
It’s not “human nature” per se, it’s human nature within this specific material context.
We cultivate competition on every level of society. We shouldn’t be surprised when people turn everything into a competition.
Nature in and of itself is competition. The theory of evolution depends on it. The strong survive and the weak perish because of natural selection. The strong multiply and become our future generation.
It can be smart to keep the weak around. Like a weak animal in a big herd. Sometimes a sacrificial lamb is useful when it’s time to ride or die. Your kids though, they HAVE to survive, right? Two kids are about to get killed and you can choose to save only one. It’s always yours, right? This example only works if you’re a parent but I don’t think you’d find many parents who would put a stranger’s child over their own.
Sure, maybe tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago we decided as a society to eliminate people who put their family and friends above others’ a different human imperative could have emerged, but like it or not this one is the dominant one. Ignoring the competitors just takes you out of the running and statistically means you will not be moving up the ladder very much if at all.
Nature is not just competition! It’s also cooperation and companionship and symbiosis. Cultivating a different human nature is entirely possible if we decide we want to - a world where no one puts their own children ahead of anyone else’s is not unimaginable.
The concept of parenthood isn’t even universal! Some human societies view all children as the collective children of the tribe. The nuclear family is actually fairly new.
Human nature is a choice we all make together.
No, this is Capitalism and our culture. There were and still are societies where there is very little competition between individuals or even where the concept of “competition” is unknown.
This works with small communuties living naturally, like tribes in South America. But I think with technological advancement and a cultural shift towards are more social and less individualistic society this could also work on greater scales.
Nepotism is prevalent everywhere, sure. On another level, network and connections matter. Rich have connections and the consequences of not kissing their ass can backfire.
But in theory, we should all recognize that regulations should be in place to inhibit such acts. It’s like saying the family of the victim a HP be the judge, jury, and executioner in a court of justice. Obviously we’d all be happy to take up that role… But is that what’s best for society?
What is best for society is generally not what is best for the individual.
Enforcement of rules and regulations is one area that seems to always have potential corruption since nobody wants someone looking over their shoulder all the time for things that they are not doing right. It’s easy to say “investigate those crooks!” so long as those investigations aren’t targeting us.
I just don’t believe this. This is so untrue.
If a bunch of people become stranded on an island it doesn’t become lord of the flies turns out. Human nature is to help one another because what is good for the tribe is good for you.
We know this because it has happened, there are documentaries about it, and those are circumstances where there are actually limited resources. Currently there may as well be unlimited resources because there aren’t enough resources for one person to completely consume. I think it is perfectly unnatural the way the rich in particular act, and I believe it is under our current system in particular that drives people to act that way.
“what is good for the tribe is good for you” is the key take here. They’re only nice to others when it benefits themselves.
Just a shitty fact of life.
If you’re trapped on an island with a group you’re probably under the size of the monkeysphere.
When group or tribe size exceeds the monkeysphere, that’s when you start seeing all the weird shit and blatant exploitation.
It’s usually not the rich and wealthy directly doing evil shit either, it’s the people under them following through on it to reach an objective - generally more money or resources for the ones on top of the food chain. By utilizing middlemen who feel like they have no choice if they want to “climb the ladder” no one feels like it’s their fault for causing the pain, so no one thinks they are a psychopath and no one person is blamed for the fault- it’s all those “big companies”
The nuance for this stuff goes on and on and on and on.
I think it depends on the school. Monty Python were all Cambridge boys and mocked Oxford for the exact same thing, Oxford has a huge reputation for nepotism.
Not sure outside the US. Also, even in the US I only heard Stanford doing this openly iirc and if I think about it.
In the US, Legacy admissions are common at any school selective enough to have admissions.
And all the conservatives scream and yell about affirmative action
This is another case of “is anyone surprised”? Next up you’ll tell me Yale does the same thing
I’m shocked. Shocked I tell you!
Actually, not that shocked.
A bit shocked that anyone is surprised by that.
Bears under fire for shitting in the woods
It amazes me every day that anyone still believes the shitty US has even a glimmer of meritocracy.
Only the United States has this problem… yeah…
The admission of legacy students is estimated to be around 10 to 15 percent.
A lot more info to start with: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_preferences#:~:text=University in 2023.-,Current practices,entering class using legacy admissions.
It’s more than that at Harvard. ALDC is legacy admissions.
While only 5% of applications come from ALDC students, they make up about a third of acceptances.
That means a legacy applicant is at least 6x more likely to be admitted than a non-legacy.
Yes, but how is this different than always?
On a larger scale, I think this points out the flaws in using a school’s “reputation” to evaluate how qualified a given graduate may be. If employers and the general public no longer gave the Ivies the consideration they often get, then where someone goes to school would not matter in the end. But even with standardized testing, and other performance metrics, employers (and others such as graduate schools) always factor in an applicants’ schools’ “reputation” when considering the applicant. Even though time and time again, it’s been shown that the school does not make a difference, it is the individual. The primary way in which the school influences a person’s success is in the implicit bias everyone has about their perceived reputations.
You have to know that the employee learned what you want them to know though. Yeah, you can and will teach most of what they need to know, but you have to know the basics. Also, the reputation of the ivies is to know that you know the right people and have a pool to pull from. It’s a lot like being famous, it’s usually nepotism, wealthy helping other wealthies and they teach stuff you don’t learn at the other schools.
