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p>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 
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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.
i found the article about why alums donate. two important points from it:
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:
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).
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.
not that this is central to your discussion, but henry yang became chancellor of ucsb nearly a decade back. he was a ‘FOB’ from tw who worked hard to cleanse his accent – and it stirred things at that time in the chinese-taiwanese community.
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
Yup – I know. I lived there for a couple of years – in Hillsborough County. Never knew that USF had a campus in St Petersburg. Thanks for information.
what museum? wait…-scroll-scroll- uh.. Dali! ayyo!… not my style but I’m glad it works for you. 🙂
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.