If all the elite stop sending their kids to elite schools, those schools will cease to be elite. For several reasons which may make me sound cynical

1) The network is part of the value. If the institutions can continue to retain the best of the best in terms of professors, that's a good part of the network. But the students and their connections, and their parents connections, is also part of the value.
2) Donations. Alumni donations are important. Kids of rich parents are more likely to grow up to be rich, and make donations. Also, their parents make donations. The donations of the parents, at least, will now be going to the other schools where the children now attend.
3) College is losing prestige, anyhow. Many people are questioning its value, given the price tag. It may be that soon, College may not be the marker of elitism that it has been. Something else will replace it, something harder to achieve than college. I don't know what it could be, but there will be a new marker by which the elite class recognizes itself.

BLM is testing the waters, kind of like it's mafia like shakedown of hispanic businesses last year. Try it in one area, deny it is happening or denounce it in others. Then if there is a lot of backlash ignore it or if not adopt it nation wide.
The 50 Ivy league Colleges won't survive it going nation wide more than one class, they won't notice if it is just Texas. The 51st one will rise to the top. Harvard won't allow that.

I think it's hilarious, but won't go nation wide, yet.

There are 8 schools in the Ivy league, not 50. Making it even easier for them to fall.

Imagine if those hundreds of thousands of spots at these institutions were occupied only by marginalized communities.

Talk about misunderstanding how it works. Harvard became an elite school not because it was Harvard, but because it limited its enrollment to the best students. As the first college in the Americas, it benefitted from having some of the finest thinkers teaching at it as well as having the finest students in the colonies studying at it.

As NicoleK points out, if average students populate the school to a large degree, Harvard ceases to be an elite school. It's not simply the name that conveys elite status, but the output the school produces - well-educated graduates.

And to do that consistently requires quality inputs - i.e., the best students in the country. Making places for students solely on the basis of race means potentially reducing the quality of the inputs and, thus, the quality of the outputs.

Imagine if those marginalized communities put a serious effort into improving the quality of the education their children receive. Imagine if those marginalized communities graduated people whom all schools clamored to have in attendance. Imagine how many members of those marginalized communities would be attending Ivy League or Top 50 schools then.
____________________

"No greater injury can be done to any youth than to let him feel that because he belongs to this or that race he will be advanced in life regardless of his own merits or efforts." ~ Booker T. Washington

The socialist world is noted for their inability to understand the difference between cause and effect.

Giving a lot of people something unearned does not change destructive values or behaviors, it just reinforces them.

As NicoleK points out, if average students populate the school to a large degree, Harvard ceases to be an elite school.

And that will trickle down into hiring decisions. Harvard grads will continue to hire Harvard grads, until they realize that the performance isn't there.

They'll actually interview people from Harvard instead of just hiring them. And when they find that random big state schools with solid programs are as good if not better than Harvard, then the game is up.

This will also impact the endowment, as these people will become more and more resistant to fundraising pitches. I can give 1/10th as much to that random state school AND get a building name!

It will definitely impact the endowment. If Grandpa went to Harvard, but Son and Grandson go elsewhere, Grandpa is less likely to give.

> There are 8 schools in the
> Ivy league, not 50. Making it
> even easier for them to fall.

 School	  Return 2019-20 Fiscal Year	Endowment 
1. Brown University	12.1%	$4.7 billion USD
2. Dartmouth College	7.6%	$6.0 billion USD
3. Harvard University	7.3%	$4.1 billion USD
4. Yale University	6.8%	$31.2 billion USD
5. Columbia University	5.5%	$11.26 billion USD
6. University of Penn	3.4%	$14.9 billion USD
7. Cornell University	1.9%	$7.2 billion USD
8. Princeton University	N/A	$25.9 billion USD

They've got farther to fall.  As the endowments are untaxed, it's difficult to feel sympathy for their plight.

I'm pretty sure that Harvard number is off by an order of magnitude.

In contrast, the average among the 10 National Universities with the largest endowments at the end of fiscal year 2019 was about $20.4 billion. Harvard University in Massachusetts once again had the largest endowment by far, exceeding $40.9 billion.

For Harvard at least the impact to the endowment isn't that big of an issue. For a long time Harvard has been a hedge fund with a school attached for tax purposes.

But losing the good will and political connections that school brings could majorly affect the endowment in the future. There are quite a few people who would like to tax that endowment to death.

It's not satire, but neither is it real.

https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/whos-behind-dallas-justice-nows-dont-send-white-kids-to-ivy-league-controversy-12098228

Youze guyz are too optimistic. Ivy elitism will not be deterred by mere wokism. Probable outcomes:

1. Whites will continue to use Ivy as a badge of achievement rather than a test of achievement.

2. Black grads will continue to be dogged by the presumption that they're affirmative action beneficiaries.

3. Asian applicants will grow encouraged to address their cruel, baseless & pointless exclusion in courts.

It'll be fun to watch, but it won't be satisfying.

Those "elite" universities, along with pretty much every higher-ed institution in the world except a few holdouts like Hillsdale College, are rapidly destroying the value of their degrees, both by adopting "wokism" and by practicing affirmative action in admissions (which requires a dumbing-down of the course material and/or grading standards).

I expect that within a generation, no one will want to send their children to a "woke" university, nor to hire anybody with a recent degree from one. Thus Gresham's Law appears to be applying to college educations, at least when taxpayers have to pay for them.

Let the system burn.

I'm going to rank this approach as "Low Probability of Success", much like asking violent criminals to stop shooting each other.

Students accepted into ivy league but who chose a state school (for cost, for other reasons) turn out to make just as much $ later in life. Men's enrollment in college is much less than women: you can say this is because men are doing badly but I think men are better at evaluating cost vs benefit.

In successful households, there are books and parents start reading to kids as infants. Books can be checked out of library so cost is not an issue. Go into a poor house and no books, no magazines, and no one reads to the kids. The way kids are talked to differs as well. All of this has an impact and can be changed. The woke claim that reading to your kids is unfair.

The woke claim that reading to your kids is unfair.
_________________________________________

I'm curious - who, exactly, has said that, in so many words? It's kind of hard to imagine.

I do seem to remember someone saying - here, maybe - that borrowing from a library isn't necessarily easy if you live in a bad neighborhood where even the adults try to stay indoors most of the time, out of fear. Or when you're already working 60 hours or more a week and you don't even have time to cook healthful dinners from scratch, let alone go out of your way to GET to the library in the first place.

On top of that, even well-off parents don't necessarily read to THEMSELVES for fun. So, they often see reading to the kids as an annoying chore, and the kids sense that. (Think of all the well-educated parents who let their kids wallow in video games when they'd never let them eat bags of candy every day - what's the difference?)

There are also those dimwitted parents who think KIDS have to be the ones to choose the books or they'll never enjoy reading - which often means reading dumbed-down Disney books or reading the same book over and over. On the contrary, there's nothing hazardous about picking three books the PARENT likes (such as Aesop's Fables) every other night, and saying "here, pick one of these."

Oh, and it's been said that it's VERY important for fathers (or uncles or other father figures) to read to boys, so the boys don't get the idea that "reading is for girls." (Back in the days when girls were routinely discouraged from going to college, boys didn't necessarily think that way.) But, even married mothers have been known to say "my husband? He doesn't have time to read aloud - he's a man."

(As quoted from the late educator and writer of 50 novels, Paul Kropp. I think that book of his was How to Make Your Child a Reader for Life (1993). Had he lived, he'd now be 73.)

Or maybe the book is Raising a Reader - not sure how much the two books overlap.

From Goodreads, regarding the first one:

"(Kropp) also identifies three danger zones where kids have a tendency to stop reading: When they enter kindergarten, around grade four and when they enter high school – and gives suggestions to handle these so your child will come through it with flying colors and continue reading..."

Reading the same book over and over to kids is not a bad thing. They memorize the book, which helps with word recognition and learning to read.

That's why I said "every other night." Maybe I should have put more emphasis on that.

In other words, parents have a right to a good time too, not a daily activity that bores them to tears. Another way to do it is to read TWO stories every night - one being a repeat, the other story being something new. But, as I said, regarding the latter, both the parent and child can have a choice in the matter, so the child won't feel completely forced.

The woke claim that reading to your kids is unfair.
_______________________________________

More specifically, I doubt anyone is saying that it's WRONG to read aloud to kids because it gives them an advantage over kids who don't get read to.

If people are saying that read-to kids have an unfair ADVANTAGE, well, that's just typical American mealy-mouthedness for you. What they likely meant to say is that it's unfair that so many poor kids DON'T get read to.

And for those who complain that it's too much woorrrrrrk to get small kids to sit still and not complain or run away because they hate books, one should ask, would you give up if we were talking about getting kids to brush their teeth every day?

(Of course, you don't brush your teeth for fun - no one does - but falling in love with reading is crucial to your education, just as learning to like being physically active - as opposed to thinking of it as a horrible chore - is essential to your health.)

"More specifically, I doubt anyone is saying that it's WRONG to read aloud to kids because it gives them an advantage over kids who don't get read to." ~Lenona

You are wrong.

https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/professor-reading-to-your-kids-having-a-good-family-is-unfair-to-others

"I don’t think parents reading their children bedtime stories should constantly have in their minds the way that they are unfairly disadvantaging other people’s children, but I think they should have that thought occasionally," says Professor Adam Swift. ~ from a link by Ben at August 5, 2021 6:19 PM

Professor Swift does understand that Harrison Bergeron was fiction, right?

We've become the Monkey House.

OK, fine. ONE crazy professor, at least...I can only hope it doesn't spread.

I see his mother is the novelist/critic Dame Margaret Drabble. Wonder what she thinks of that...

Conan, speaking of worlds in which physical strength is frowned upon, remember The Machine Stops (1909), by E.M. Forster?

https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/Machine_stops.pdf

We read it aloud in school in 7th grade. (That was pre-Internet.)

At that age, I couldn't really grasp the intellectual horrors Forster was predicting - only the physical ones. Pity I didn't read it again before, say, 1994. But I couldn't remember the name of the book. When I did find out what it was, I re-read it and then described it to others as being "like 'A Wrinkle in Time' with a sad ending." That is, love is a strong theme in the book, even if it's mainly a love of nature and not of people.

Never read that one, Lenona. I'll give it a read.

Enjoy!

It's only 25 pages long.