Congress allows Ivy League antitrust exemption to expire

SO now that the ivies exemption to collude and not have athletic scholies is expiring, you wonder who is the first to do it, I mean you could in theory have an ivy offer one to a kid in jan for hockey

The obvious one to do it would be us, but pragmatically nobody can do it except HYP. The rest rely on the luxury brand, and can't break with it without losing their status.

It would be interesting to see HYP say "fuck it" and start swinging their ahem endowment about. It hasn't hurt Stanford, and it would be the same con: stop the hypocrisy of claiming you don't pay athletes, maintain the fiction you respect academic integrity when admitting them, then start pulling in 4 star door knobs.

I suspect the Ivy brand is so seared into the East Coast psyche it would take a century to dissipate it. The rest of the country quite frankly doesn't really care anymore; the golden years of being considered the dream destination of every valedictorian in Palookaville are long gone (perhaps thankfully).

But only if they did it. If Penn or Columbia or we did it we'd just be the turd in the punchbowl.

tldr: the Ivies are bullshit and dying; let's win some games and have some fun. We'll still all be rich until the proles come for us.

The Ivy League is a sports conference where members aren't allowed to give athletic scholarships. Is that a condition that is subject to anti-trust persecution?

The antitrust exemption has to do with the lack of any merit-based aid at Ivies, not just the lack of athletic scholarships. A lawsuit against the Ivies and a few other schools, which can now proceed, alleges that this arrangement is part of a price-fixing scheme.

It goes deeper than just lack of merit-based scholarships. Back in the day, the Ivies met to determine the amount of financial aid common applicants would get to make cost not a factor in the student’s decision. It applied to athletes and the rest of us alike.

NYT article from earlier this year.

I’ve always wondered how they adjusted for New York’s contract colleges with their lower tuition.
.

Why don't they just keep colluding? Is anyone outside or inside the Ivies likely to care? Applicants, I guess...Non-Ivy schools compete for hot applicants. So they might feel Ivies should too. But does competition have to penetrate every niche of the market? So what if a handful of colleges go off and do their own thing? Isn't there enough competition to go around?

Even if worse came to worst, would Cornell be disadvantaged? Cornell vs. HYP can be like UNC vs. Duke. There are plenty of competitions between better vs. next tier schools where the lesser hold their own. How has Auburn fared against Alabama lately, Michigan vs. Ohio State?

If the Ivies were colluding on financial aid, I expect that losing the protection would open them up to severe liability if they continued.

I doubt the welfare of a legitimate institution of higher education depends upon the success of its amateur college sports teams. On the flip -side, not one successful sports team has spawned an institution of higher (or even lower) education!

osorojo
I doubt the welfare of a legitimate institution of higher education depends upon the success of its amateur college sports teams. On the flip -side, not one successful sports team has spawned an institution of higher (or even lower) education!

I've heard or read that good but small schools, like Union and Colgate, use athletic success to increase their visibility. Williams and Oberlin, being top tier, don't have this problem. But then you have a place like University of Rochester that just goes merrily along, maintaining its standards and filling its slots without any problems and without any athletic celebrity at all.

Troyfan

osorojo
I doubt the welfare of a legitimate institution of higher education depends upon the success of its amateur college sports teams. On the flip -side, not one successful sports team has spawned an institution of higher (or even lower) education!

I've heard or read that good but small schools, like Union and Colgate, use athletic success to increase their visibility. Williams and Oberlin, being top tier, don't have this problem. But then you have a place like University of Rochester that just goes merrily along, maintaining its standards and filling its slots without any problems and without any athletic celebrity at all.

Not to nit-pick, but FWIW Colgate is ranked 18th in US News' 2022 Liberal Arts College rankings, Oberlin is ranked 39th.

osorojo
I doubt the welfare of a legitimate institution of higher education depends upon the success of its amateur college sports teams. On the flip -side, not one successful sports team has spawned an institution of higher (or even lower) education!

I remember an article I read a few years ago which concluded that Trotsky's favorite Land Grant school was elevated from a second rate Moo U into a legit university by some guy named Paterno.

scoop85

Troyfan

osorojo
I doubt the welfare of a legitimate institution of higher education depends upon the success of its amateur college sports teams. On the flip -side, not one successful sports team has spawned an institution of higher (or even lower) education!

I've heard or read that good but small schools, like Union and Colgate, use athletic success to increase their visibility. Williams and Oberlin, being top tier, don't have this problem. But then you have a place like University of Rochester that just goes merrily along, maintaining its standards and filling its slots without any problems and without any athletic celebrity at all.

Not to nit-pick, but FWIW Colgate is ranked 18th in US News' 2022 Liberal Arts College rankings, Oberlin is ranked 39th.

US News rankings? Meh.

Al DeFlorio

scoop85

Troyfan

osorojo
I doubt the welfare of a legitimate institution of higher education depends upon the success of its amateur college sports teams. On the flip -side, not one successful sports team has spawned an institution of higher (or even lower) education!

I've heard or read that good but small schools, like Union and Colgate, use athletic success to increase their visibility. Williams and Oberlin, being top tier, don't have this problem. But then you have a place like University of Rochester that just goes merrily along, maintaining its standards and filling its slots without any problems and without any athletic celebrity at all.

Not to nit-pick, but FWIW Colgate is ranked 18th in US News' 2022 Liberal Arts College rankings, Oberlin is ranked 39th.

US News rankings? Meh.

Note the "FWIW" caveat

scoop85

Al DeFlorio

scoop85

Troyfan

osorojo
I doubt the welfare of a legitimate institution of higher education depends upon the success of its amateur college sports teams. On the flip -side, not one successful sports team has spawned an institution of higher (or even lower) education!

I've heard or read that good but small schools, like Union and Colgate, use athletic success to increase their visibility. Williams and Oberlin, being top tier, don't have this problem. But then you have a place like University of Rochester that just goes merrily along, maintaining its standards and filling its slots without any problems and without any athletic celebrity at all.

Not to nit-pick, but FWIW Colgate is ranked 18th in US News' 2022 Liberal Arts College rankings, Oberlin is ranked 39th.

US News rankings? Meh.

Note the "FWIW" caveat

I did. Just reinforcing the skepticism.

Serious academics disdain the rankings, but much of the public seems to look at them as gospel. I've always felt that the original 1984 US News rankings had the most credibility. They simply asked presidents and provosts (I think both...memory is fuzzy) to give a score to peer institutions, and averaged the results. No consideration of SAT scores, faculty salaries, selectivity, class sizes, etc. Having spent ten years working with these senior higher ed administrators, I would say they knew which of their peers belonged where in the pecking order. This is how they measured the success or lack thereof of their own institutions vis a vis their peers, with faculty quality a major factor in their thinking.

Here's the 1984 top ten, in 1 to 10 order: Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Berkeley, Chicago, Michigan, Cornell and Illinois (tied), MIT and Dartmouth (tied).

Note that state schools like Berkeley, Michigan, Illinois and partly-statutory Cornell were not penalized in this ranking (and rightly not, IMO) because of their lower selectivity resulting from being a state school. Sometimes too much data in can result in garbage out.

< Sees Dartmouth and MIT tied. >

< Stops reading. >

IIRC, among the Ivies, they collud—sorry, came to agreement, with the best interests of students in mind—that if the Ivies provided equal or equivalent aid packages to those admitted to more than one Ivy, this was a great advantage to the admitted applicant because he or she then could choose the best fit based on academic reasons.

Critics and free-market types made the point that some student might believe that if, say, Brown was a slightly better school than Dartmouth for their needs, but if the Dartmouth famly contribution came in $5,000 less, that student might decide Dartmouth was the better place to go.

I thought the Ivies in this older suit got their hands slapped and were told to stop "helping" accepted applicants by offering them essentially the same aid package for all the Ivies.

The current lawsuit seems to be a consensus-on-aid challenge but of a larger group of schools. (Brown, California Institute of Technology, University of Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Emory, Georgetown, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northwestern, Notre Dame, University of Pennsylvania, Rice, Vanderbilt and Yale.) It says some of the schools are not really need-blind, which they claim to be:

Stephanie Saul and Anemona Hartocollis, 1/10/2022, New York Times
The suit claims that nine of the schools are not actually need blind because for many years, they have found ways to consider some applicants’ ability to pay.

The University of Pennsylvania and Vanderbilt, for example, have considered the financial needs of wait-listed applicants, the lawsuit says. Other schools, the lawsuit says, award “special treatment to the children of wealthy” donors, which, given the limited number of spots, hurts students needing financial aid.

The wait-list thing suggests it's not 100% need blind. But maybe the wait-list kids should be happy they got in even if they're getting less of a discount.

The part about wealthy donors, well, okay, that's the way the Ivies have worked. And when a rich kid gets in, that leaves a fractionally bigger pot of money to aid the scholarship students.

billhoward
IIRC, among the Ivies, they collud—sorry, came to agreement, with the best interests of students in mind—that if the Ivies provided equal or equivalent aid packages to those admitted to more than one Ivy, this was a great advantage to the admitted applicant because he or she then could choose the best fit based on academic reasons.

Critics and free-market types made the point that some student might believe that if, say, Brown was a slightly better school than Dartmouth for their needs, but if the Dartmouth famly contribution came in $5,000 less, that student might decide Dartmouth was the better place to go.

I thought the Ivies in this older suit got their hands slapped and were told to stop "helping" accepted applicants by offering them essentially the same aid package for all the Ivies.

The current lawsuit seems to be a consensus-on-aid challenge but of a larger group of schools. (Brown, California Institute of Technology, University of Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Emory, Georgetown, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northwestern, Notre Dame, University of Pennsylvania, Rice, Vanderbilt and Yale.) It says some of the schools are not really need-blind, which they claim to be:

Stephanie Saul and Anemona Hartocollis, 1/10/2022, New York Times
The suit claims that nine of the schools are not actually need blind because for many years, they have found ways to consider some applicants’ ability to pay.

The University of Pennsylvania and Vanderbilt, for example, have considered the financial needs of wait-listed applicants, the lawsuit says. Other schools, the lawsuit says, award “special treatment to the children of wealthy” donors, which, given the limited number of spots, hurts students needing financial aid.

The wait-list thing suggests it's not 100% need blind. But maybe the wait-list kids should be happy they got in even if they're getting less of a discount.

The part about wealthy donors, well, okay, that's the way the Ivies have worked. And when a rich kid gets in, that leaves a fractionally bigger pot of money to aid the scholarship students.

GM and Ford used to set prices like that too. It was also to allow their customers to pick what car was best for them free of cost considerations.

Need blindness doesn't sound like a difficult condition to meet. Figure out how much a family can pay, subtract it from your cost, and give aid for the difference. To get around the collusion aspect, the universities just have to supplement this aid amount with additional enticements to get kids they really, really want, be it for athletic or academic or artistic prowess.

In any case it doesn't seem like very fertile ground for a lawsuit even if it's well-intentioned.

Troyfan
In any case it doesn't seem like very fertile ground for a lawsuit even if it's well-intentioned.

You might underestimate the rage engendered when somebody feels somebody else got a good deal based on old school connections or being a legacy.

I'm still working my way around how, if more affluent families who can pay more of the list price, are admitted, how that substantially disadvantages poorer applicants, because the pot of scholarship money expanded fractionally for each rich kid/needs no aid admitted.

Maybe some school will be truthful (mercenary?) and say, 10% of our entering class will comprise students who ask no financial aid, and against that we'll make 10% of the slots available to students whose families are unable to pay anything.

Maybe the Ivies should run campaigns saying, "There's nothing wrong with Colgate, Bowdoin, Lafayette or the U of R."

billhoward

I'm still working my way around how, if more affluent families who can pay more of the list price, are admitted, how that substantially disadvantages poorer applicants, because the pot of scholarship money expanded fractionally for each rich kid/needs no aid admitted.

I think you are conflating two different issues here. (For discussions sake, let's assume there is a fixed number of students admitted in a given year and a fixed amount of financial aid.)

This isn't about the affordability of the school once you're admitted; It's about getting admitted in the first place. If you are preferencing more affluent students in the admissions process, you are likely to admit fewer less affluent students than you would with a need-blind policy.


FYP:

You might underestimate the rage engendered when somebody feels that somebody else got a good deal could take their spot, because they were a rich kid, based on old school connections or being a legacy

I don't have a problem with using ability to pay as an admissions criterion provided it doesn't get carried to extremes. For one thing, it leaves more money to be distributed among kids who need aid. Also, except for Harvard, which could eliminate tuition entirely and not miss a beat, every college has to be aware that, hey, we can get this kid for free and his parents might have a little left over for us on top of it.

Even if the kid is a little weak academically, so are many others that are admitted anyway because they meet other admissions goals.

Are we in violent agreement here? Yes, this is about the admissions process and getting admitted. That's the year when the university figures out how much aid money there is for how many students. It probably assumes that on average, family need doesn't change between the admissions year and the four years as a student.

Whether it's a good thing or not, if a university gives admissions preference to some cohort of students who do not need aid, then that fixed pot of aid money is fractionally higher for those in need.

A lot of grousing on campus, all campuses, is preferences or quotas, and some group that isn't preferenced enough, gripes that they're being harmed. The current most contentious issue may be the percentage of admissions of Asian students. The U.S. population is ~7% Asian, Cornell's is 21%, Harvard's is 28%. Yet there are lawsuits alleging Harvard should have more Asian students if it paid more attention to academic prowess. The Students for Fair Admissions lawsuit is being heard by the Supreme Court Oct. 31. There are two similar cases, another versus University of North Carolina, which suit was to be heard jointly but then severed b/c new Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson had served on Harvard's Board of Overseers. [www.thecrimson.com]

All this bushwa about the "best" ranked colleges/universities is an exercise comparing wrestlers to high-jumpers. e.g.: Which is better, Cornell's Veterinary School or Harvard's Foreign Language Department?

osorojo
All this bushwa about the "best" ranked colleges/universities is an exercise comparing wrestlers to high-jumpers. e.g.: Which is better, Cornell's Veterinary School or Harvard's Foreign Language Department?

There is money to be made rating colleges. There is intense interest among high schoolers and parents in knowing which is the best school to attend – or "give me 10 good schools to pursue" students – and so people want to know how the school is, overall.

Columbia is the latest well-ranked school to apparently try to game the rankings, in this case by reporting small class sizes. US News then dropped them from #2 to #18, and if that was the only metric that was off, that seems a LOT of weight to give to one item. A Walter LAFeber (RIP) lecture to 300 was a highlight, for many.

billhoward

osorojo
All this bushwa about the "best" ranked colleges/universities is an exercise comparing wrestlers to high-jumpers. e.g.: Which is better, Cornell's Veterinary School or Harvard's Foreign Language Department?

There is money to be made rating colleges. There is intense interest among high schoolers and parents in knowing which is the best school to attend – or "give me 10 good schools to pursue" students – and so people want to know how the school is, overall.

Columbia is the latest well-ranked school to apparently try to game the rankings, in this case by reporting small class sizes. US News then dropped them from #2 to #18, and if that was the only metric that was off, that seems a LOT of weight to give to one item. A Walter LAFeber (RIP) lecture to 300 was a highlight, for many.

Class size is a weird one. I understand the value of small classes, but it gets wonky at the extremes. I was in a three person class that I wished had more people. Also, if a huge lecture has 200 people, it's not gonna be much worse if it goes up to 500.

billhoward
if that was the only metric that was off, that seems a LOT of weight to give to one item.

A large issue seems to be spending per student, ten percent of the rankings. The whistleblower suggests that Columbia was lumping in the cost of patient care at their teaching hospital as instructional costs. Another issue was percent of full time faculty with PhD or terminal degree in their field. Columbia was claiming 100 percent while their own website listed about 10 percent with masters or bachelors degree. Peer schools like H-Y-P are in the low 90s.

[www.math.columbia.edu]

About rankings, criteria: I have some modest interaction wiht media companies doing best colleges, best doctors, best places to live ratings. IMO the rankings might be a bit better with more data factors. For instance, in the emerging Best Places for Boomers to Retire then Die category (if I ran the place, that'd be the headline), no one as yet has let the user mark their political standing and then set a comfort dial for how far that from you do you want the community to be. Old liberals are having second thoughts about many parts of Florida.

The words, not the class size, are the key to excellence in teaching. British Scholar Dr. Samuel Finer once taught a history class in Goldwin Smith to a half- full lecture hall. When the word got out even those enrolled in the course had to show up ten minutes early to get a seat.

billhoward

osorojo
All this bushwa about the "best" ranked colleges/universities is an exercise comparing wrestlers to high-jumpers. e.g.: Which is better, Cornell's Veterinary School or Harvard's Foreign Language Department?

There is money to be made rating colleges. There is intense interest among high schoolers and parents in knowing which is the best school to attend – or "give me 10 good schools to pursue" students – and so people want to know how the school is, overall.

Columbia is the latest well-ranked school to apparently try to game the rankings, in this case by reporting small class sizes. US News then dropped them from #2 to #18, and if that was the only metric that was off, that seems a LOT of weight to give to one item. A Walter LAFeber (RIP) lecture to 300 was a highlight, for many.

James Maas regularly filled Bailey Hall for Psych 101. [news.cornell.edu]

If only there were fewer applicants with both intellectual and physical talent the organization, operation, and finances of colleges and universities would be greatly simplified. We could have universities for athletes and separate universities for scholars.

osorojo
We could have universities for athletes

We do.

We do.

osorojo
If only there were fewer applicants with both intellectual and physical talent the organization, operation, and finances of colleges and universities would be greatly simplified. We could have universities for athletes and separate universities for scholars.

I was about to say: How many spaces from known-for-sports universities would we need for a scholars school(s) of the SEC conference? Could they just build an annex abutting Vanderbilt? But really, the SEC is heavily populated by the top state schools of the Souuthest and they're pretty much okay academically.

There must be 10X the number of academics qualified to teach at an Ivy/MIT/Stanford/Amherst/Wellsley as there are positions available. Many wind up at the best state universities

Some SEC schools and their USNews ranking (national universities, the one that has the Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, etc.), ratings FWIW:

 
 13 Vanderbilt  (SEC football outlier, 2000s football record 35-124, .243)  
 29 Florida 
 38 Texas (when it joins circa 2025) 
 49 Georgia (although it is painful to hear Herschel Walker speak) 
 67 Texas A&M 
 97 Auburn 
137 Alabama

Plus give credit to SEC coach Bear Bryant to putting sports and academics in perspective: "It's kind of hard to rally around a math class."

billhoward

osorojo
If only there were fewer applicants with both intellectual and physical talent the organization, operation, and finances of colleges and universities would be greatly simplified. We could have universities for athletes and separate universities for scholars.

I was about to say: How many spaces from known-for-sports universities would we need for a scholars school(s) of the SEC conference? Could they just build an annex abutting Vanderbilt? But really, the SEC is heavily populated by the top state schools of the Souuthest and they're pretty much okay academically.

There must be 10X the number of academics qualified to teach at an Ivy/MIT/Stanford/Amherst/Wellsley as there are positions available. Many wind up at the best state universities

Some SEC schools and their USNews ranking (national universities, the one that has the Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, etc.), ratings FWIW:

 
 13 Vanderbilt  (SEC football outlier, 2000s football record 35-124, .243)  
 29 Florida 
 38 Texas (when it joins circa 2025) 
 49 Georgia (although it is painful to hear Herschel Walker speak) 
 67 Texas A&M 
 97 Auburn 
137 Alabama

Plus give credit to SEC coach Bear Bryant to putting sports and academics in perspective: "It's kind of hard to rally around a math class."

Texas is much stronger academically than 38, but selectivity numbers kill the state schools in US News rankings. Same for Berkekey, UCLA, Illinois, Michigan et al.

Al DeFlorio
Texas is much stronger academically than 38, but selectivity numbers kill the state schools in US News rankings. Same for Berkekey, UCLA, Illinois, Michigan et al.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could X out from the rankings every factor you don't want to know, and make it more applicable?

I've done some surveys (as a non-stats-major person assigning and editing) on PC and vendor satisfaction and have worked where another department has done college surveys. If you allow the reader a set of sliders, they can dial in multiple outcomes. Not matter what: You'll always have MIT, Harvard and Princeton, Duke and Stanford, Amherst and Williams near the top. They have great faculty. They're exclusive (snob appeal counts for something) and have very high yields. They have more scholarship money to give to lower-income families and their high rankings give them a leg up on getting minority students. If one cares more for engagement (social good engagement? diversity engagement?), or puts a high or low premium on scholarship money, or career earnings, or % employed or on to grad school in the following year, it varies. Cornell should have a breakout rating for the state/public colleges for NYS residents because they're more affordable.

BTW when you have lots of breakouts including national universities, liberal arts colleges, regional universities, you can have 10 or more schools with #1 rankings. Each of which (#1 rank) can be licensed for fees (USNews does this for reasons beyond altruism). For big schools, there could be breakouts for popular majors, giving, say, CMU a shot at #1 for computer science.

The more ways you have to drill down and make the survey more useful, the more data you gather, the greater the chance of a screw-up, and it always all comes together last minute. How do you know until afterwards that Columbia (allegedly) fudged its class-size numbers. (Because somebody at Columbia said their Class Size stat didn't make sense on its face, based on what he knew.) Also, some stats guys can't write, and some writers don't know squat about stats. Example of smart people confronting statistics: When I handed off the City Hall beat from me to a Seven Sisters grad, she took on the proposed city budget that was going from $102M to $107M and needed calculator help. I asked, do you have a guestimate of how much the increase is (4%-6% would be a good guess), no idea she said, said she needed a calculator, thought I played a trick handing over an HP RPN ("this is a calculator?! There's no bleeping equals key" ), walked her through the steps, she got an answer of 1.049, and said, "You said it would be about 5%. But it's 1.04%, [truncates the something-point-nine part] unless your calculator can't do math." <sigh>

Who hasn't worked with someone who doesn't understand percent vs. percentage points? A 4-point electoral lead, 47%-43%-10% undecided lead is a lot safer than a 4% lead with two weeks to go. I just never know if the writer for a daily paper (well, available daily, online) has those two down pat.

Lots of people don't math well.

Always hated HP calculators, BTW.

Just running an issue through a calculator (or computer) and accepting the results ignores the accuracy of the data and too often legitimizes conclusions based upon faulty evidence and just plain lies. The old boys who founded an institution where any person could find instruction in any study broke new ground and pretty much delegitimized overall ratings of educational institutions offering over a dozen major courses of study.