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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.
Very useful information to bash the anti-affirmative action racists with.
interesting. not unlike illegal immigration. the white elites and selected ethnic minorities are in cahoots against everyone else. Congress should pass a law denying federal $$$’s to any university that practices legacy or racial preferences. Then america will be more american.
‘even if it is only in Houston.’
Hey now…Houston is a fine place!
Wow! Congratulations, Provost Khator!
Where would their children go to college then? Consider the legacy-in-chief …
1)Kudos to Khator!!
2)Ennis, I don’t think the case for purely “meritocratic” admissions at private universities is as clear-cut as you’re suggesting–if one considers the
system of higher education, it seems to me that a strong case can be made for having a good number of private universities that are successful in raising a lot of private funds (even if that means some compromises on merit in admissions), which makes them strong–so, even if a particular admissions decision, looked at in isolation, seems “unfair,” the total # of slots available at top-notch univesities is actually far higher, due to the private $$ coming in–so actually the applicant with a lot of merit does well. I think this is a major reason for the (conventional) view of why US higher education is, all things considered, now better than in, e.g., Germany or Canada, which lack strong private universities.
No, then america’s elite colleges will be overwhelmingly east asian and jewish. They have the highest IQs.
Why not just auction them off to the highest bidder? Would make more money that way, so you could sell fewer of them and still do what you need. Why this pretense that they’re coming within the regular admissions system? [And yes, I feel similarly about athletic admits]
Non-Hispanic white people are also more than 5 times more prevalent than black people and a just less than 5 times more prevalent than Hispanic people generally.
yes. ergo, the illegal immigration analogy. the interests of the powers that be are completely aligned with that of a special interest.
Well, I’d guess it’s because there’s a trade-off–Duke wouldn’t be Duke if rich kids with 800 SAT’s could buy their way in–that said, if a few rich kids with 1150 SAT’s buy their way in, it actually means more places at Duke in the overall picture (thx. to the extra $$), without much compromise in terms of who’s in the classroom with you. So, I think the US private universities, while far from perfect, are striking this balance, and that there would be bad consequences if we shook the system up (like Manju is advocating) (in terms of less $$ leads to fewer slots in the long run).
does anyone know what’s up with harvard and yale? their endowmwnts have hit the ball out of the park with buffet like returns, to the point that the roi dwarfs the $$ from tuitiion and they are sitting on hordes of cash. so do they still practice legacy?
Yes they do, but at the more competitive schools the distortion is considerably less. There are enough children of wealthy and well educated parents who can pass the threshold on their own, and even those who cannot had enough advantages (SAT test prep, etc) that their numbers shouldn’t be that low. Also, because of their reputation for being elite, they probably let in many fewer legacies. The number one and two schools in America for legacy admits (last I checked) were USC and Notre Dame, both above 25%. I looked into this years ago for a post I wrote in my pre-Mutiny days, so my data may be out of date.
i am quite sure they do. given how much power and influence propagates through lineage, it is in their best interests to practice legacy so that they increase their chances of having their alums where it matters. in any case, i assume legacy, while distasteful, is a small fraction of all seats, so it doesn’t affect the recruitment significantly i.e. they can still admit almost all the deserving students.
Yeah but it still ignores Asian (desi) students who are hurt the most by affirmative action.
That assumes some fixed notion of “deserving”–look, Ennis is correct to the extent that some less-deserving students get in due to legacies–my point is that that’s OK, given the overall effects on the system (i.e., compared to just having public universities, or prohibiting private universities from giving preferece to legacies, which would hurt their fund-raising).
I know it’s been said already…but only Houston!
mock glares at Ennis
Yes, of course they do–lesson #1 in running any business–what are my sources of revenue–answer here, a big one(in spite of whatever roi is) is alumni donations–so, you can’t rationally run the place if you’re going to screw too much with the donations–so, a judicious amount of legacy preference seems to be called for, if you want your institution to continue to flourish, in both absolute and relative terms.
but branding matters. and universities sell prestige. so for the same reason ferrari does not increase production and sell cars for 75K, and in fact sells them at below market prices in order to benefit from the aura that comes form skyrocketing after-market prices, elite colleges may want to eschew preferences. managing the brand matters, and harvard & yale are nothing without the exclusivity that comes from their image of a only accepting the best and the brightest.
Not only that, but the football team is pretty damn good too after basically being in existence for 10 years
Too bad she can’t bring the Dali Museum with her as well.
Yes, absolutely! That’s why their use of legacy admissions is “judicious” (i.e., only if plausibly qualified), rather than, e.g., auctioning off some slots to the highest bidder–the former seems to strike the right balance.
perhps they should tap the corporate market…haliburton library, girls gone wild dormatory…more $$ and less conflict of interest.
They are tapping the corporate market–that’s what their (in all but name) professional sports teams are about, as well as university “research parks,” etc.! Only question is how far they can go without losing tax-exemption–as they say with some reason in Connecticut, “Tax Yale, not us”!
Manju – the board of directors are all alumni with big $$$$. Are you saying they should vote to change policies to make it harder for their own children to get in?
hey, narayana murthy’s son got to cornell (search for “safety”) on his own merit!
well, the BOD does open itself up to litigation if they act in their own interst and not in the interest of the organization, at least in the corporate world. SEC regulations require public disclosure, perhaps non-profis should have the same requirments, allowing the market to better wack universities that sully their brand.
but more importantly, i wonder if individual donations in return for lowered standards account for big $$$. the best hedge funds don’t accept individual money, unless its from a billionaire. how much can all these little upper middle class donations really add up to?
$30 billion, if you’re Harvard.
Non-sequitor: the new President of Harvard is a Bryn Mawr woman, I’m happy to report.
I’m not sure all private colleges are that hide-bound about whom they’d choose for top spots, but probably they are very much so in terms of what changes they will allow. In many ways, heading a big public university gives you, or rather, Renu, more leverage.
30 bill a yr? hmmm. but how much woulb be lost (or gained) if they didn’t practice legacy?
Take it with her to ‘Houston’ ?
Isnt the USF in Tampa while the Dali museum in St Petersburg in two different counties.
now this is interesting. the market forces schools to balance prestige with legacy because if they use too much legacy and lose the prestige, they eventually lose the money…thus the elite schools have less wiggle room.
now, i’ve hired people, and i never distinguished between a usc, notre dame or ohio state, but definitely gave preference to an ivy or mit/stanford, since they’d add cache to the firm. i also never checked (we had no human resources) so anyone could lie. also when other firms hired my ex personnel and called me, all they’d ask is if they worked here and what were the dates. that’s it. i talking big banks: csfb, lazard, etc.
so all you kids padding your rez, you didn’t hear this from me.
wait. wtf am i thinking? this number is all out of wack, rob. what this? the total endowmennt?
no, that’s their endowment–i.e., accumulation over 300+ years from gifts (+ roi – contributions from endowment to yearly operating budget–so, not so transparent of a figure, except in a relative sense) (Federal funding doesn’t go to endowment, it pays for programs, though of course in some sense $ is fungible). I don’t know how much would be lost if they dropped legacy, but I am “conservative” enough in the traditional sense to not want to screw with their (globally bench-marked) success to try to find out!
31 · Manju
Too true! I only have one employee, but I went through a lot of cv’s, and I did check, and I was shocked at the amount of stuff that didn’t check out!
harvard started going downhill ever since they integrated with radcliffe and let those pesky women in! (“not wanting to screw with their success” is no argument to not end discrimination).
Of course not, but that’s not a fair characterization of my argument–I’ve given what I take to be a pretty strong argument (see above, ad nauseum), for why the legacy admits at private universities don’t limit, instead help, the chances of high-merit applicants to get into a top-notch university.
Explaining the logic behind the size of Harvard and Yale’s endowments, someone from Bard said if there was a nuclear war and the entire land mass of North America was leveled, can we still pay our faculty for the next 100 years. ‘Twas something like that.
You are cert. correct that it’s obscure, at best, what the purpose of the endowments at that level is, but the underlying univ’s (&, more broadly, US higher education) are strong.
rob @36, fair point. i recall reading earlier this summer about a paper which tried to infer why alums donated to universities. i think they found that parents with kids give more money than those without, and that parents with kids really ramp up their donations right around 2-3 years before the kids become eligible for applying to schools, and then ramp down right around when kids end school
but doesn’t this all this only mean that colleges need to give the impression that legacy matters? they don’t need to actually have legacy, right? after all, no school really releases numbers on the number of legacy admits.
also, manju @26 and rob @27, i think the data that they had also said that big donations account for most of the money (like most things in life).
i am trying to find the study or the article i read about it – i think it was by guys at stanford and princeton.
Here is a statement from Princeton that summarizes one perspective nicely:
Other studies argue that this isn’t true, although again, at the top of the prestige ladder, there is much less distortion in part because the legacy applicants are fairly high quality.
I love this. Rob, just be honest and say that you believe in admission preferences (a form of “affirmative action” without the underlying assumption of qualifications, perhaps?) for legacy students, ESPECIALLY those who do not make the “merit cut.” The whole cash flow argument is, in my opinion, incidental at this point in time. It doesn’t really matter what private colleges would have done — we all already know what they would have done and did. What is much more interesting, in my opinion, is what they will do.
Yale definitely still practices legacy admissions, but as Ennis said, most of these kids come from families monied enough to keep their kids at Choate or Andover, fund their expensive sport participation, pump them full of SAT-prep, give them foreign language and music classes, and fund their summer travel to Guatemala to build houses. These are all things that are considered “pluses” in admissions and are all things that are generally unavailable to lower-income families. We already know that the policy of looking for “well-rounded” candidates was initiated to help limit the number of “merit” applicants (i.e. Jews) and to retain (WASP) legacy admits. I’ll plug it again, but The Chosen (not the one by Chaim Potok) is a great book for looking at the history (and current reality) of admissions policy.
And lastly, congrats to the new University President. This is surprising and interesting. Out of curiosity, how big is University of Houston? I wonder if this is a phenomena that is more or less likely to occur at a university that is not as well known (nationally) as others.
Khator is going from one second tier state university to another however they are both large:
Manju, here’s something I posted years ago:
Note that they’re both citing the same article which was published in 1991, and which I have not read.
Indira Samarasekera is president of the University of Alberta in Canadaland. 🙂
camille, except for the summer travel, are the rest really expensive? arguably sat prep, but my impression is that one can maximize ones scores by studying hard with a cheap barrons or stanley kaplan book as boatloads of immigrants have been doing for generations. these really expensive courses strike me as overkill by nervous parents and i wonder if they produce higher scores in comparison to lesser expensive courses especially when controlled for other factors like gpa. but sports and music being expensive? does one get a leg up for playing polo?
i do agree with the underlying assumption of getting rid of as much subjective criteria as possible. i don’t trust the admissions office either, and i’m not surprised by ennis’ investigation in #43, as legacy really does // aa…they don’t want us to know what here up to.
if we must keep this system, we should require transparency in return for non-profit status so the market can filter ithe info. but i prefer to have it gpa/sat (or another standardized test).
And you forgot to mention…we have an amazing football team this year! This is my neighborhood, peeps.
As for the big donor Tampa couple – you’re going to love this, DESI!! Meet the Patels both are doctors.
Manju, yes! I think this has to do with vantage point, but what kind of money do you expect low-income families to have? And beyond that, how much do you think is “reasonable” to spend to pad your resume with “enrichment” activities?
And yes you get bonus points for polo, just as you get points for lacrosse, crew, equestrianism, and crew. You would probably get bonus points for steeple-chase, too. There are more people playing soccer, football, track, basketball and other “lower cost” sports, so a “unique” sports angle is an asset.
I taught SAT test prep and it does make a big difference, over and above the books. We routinely got students up 200 points, and these are students who had taken the SAT and studied for it before.
Sports and Music have to do with how wealthy the community is. Most poor schools don’t have instruments, nor do they have the gear for sports like … Lacrosse, which can get you into college.
That’s a dangerous way to look at things, if you care about the long-term health of an institution–once you just start viewing it as a pie to be divided up, your pie starts shrinking.
That’s awesome to hear an Indian will be heading up UH, a university already big in the Indian community. Congrats!