More so because grad students receive grants that cover their tuition and some basic salary. In other words, unlike undergraduate students, graduate students actually costs money.
Not all grad students get a salary. In particular older grad students who support other people and can't afford to live on a grad student stipend (which is a starvation wage for one, let alone more) and therefore must work a job while in grad school do not get any stipend, they pay their way. Which is of course a much easier arrangement for the student to manage if they have a trust fund or wealthy family to dip into (speaking to the article at hand)
"More so because grad students receive grants that cover their tuition and some basic salary."
That only tends to be true for PHD programs where the student is expected to work on research that actually brings in grant money.
That's not true for all grad programs. Some are not research-focused at all, and for those the student usually has to pay their own way or get other forms of financial aid (which not all students qualify for).
Even if they do qualify for financial aid, they might not get any, if the limited amount that is available has already been given out to other qualified students.
The abuse of grad and PhD students might be even more egregious than undergrad admissions. Paying objectively world class talent a meager $15,000 stipend to work themselves to the bone while they earn the university millions in grants and industry contracts, teach undergrad classes, and slave away on their own thesis. It’s super gross.
Well .. there is an upside to this. Typically grad students who are employed by the university as RA or TA don't have to pay tuition . About 18 months of misery that opens up a world of opportunities.
I work with many PhDs so I’m familiar with the problems. But I don’t know enough to have a solution.
It may just be “pay them a living wage!”. Pay them $75,000 and call it a day. The waived tuition cost is BS. They aren’t undergrads living on campus and taking a half dozen classes. It doesn’t cost $50,000 / year to have a PhD student do lots of work for the school. Quite the opposite! The school makes a lot of money of their labor!!
I've heard that, but at the same time the people that go to top grad schools are also overwhelmingly people from top undergrads, likely because of professor relationships.
I've talked to several people about my profile for grad school and the consensus is it's not good enough given my undergrad stature. I've talked to folks from schools like CMU and UIUC who got into elite grad schools without papers or ~3.9+ GPAs, but I'm already out of the running with these things with a degree from NC State.
It's incredibly depressing to know I'm already shut out of most forms of social mobility at 24!
If you’re wanting to go to grad school, go to grad school. Maybe you don’t go to an Ivy, but if you’re after the grad school experience then an Ivy is a nice potential bonus, not a necessary thing.
The opportunity cost of ~$150k a year x2-6 years doesn't work out unless it's an "impressive' name. NC State + Northeastern, for instance, on a resume doesn't engender respect even if they're both fine institutions on their own. NC State + MIT for instance does, but according to the several MIT profs I've talked to my resume straight up does not and will not cut it, so I'm sort of unimpressive for life as it seems.
I was accepted to Cornell as an undergrad, but my family couldn't afford it, so I had to go to a state university instead, with in-state tuition. My scores didn't even matter without the money.
I wonder how common this story is, my brother was accepted to Penn but our family didn’t have the money. We both ended up at large state schools getting honors degrees. The whole decision making process for us was money based not merit based.
Got accepted at Berkeley, didn't get a scholarship that I needed, ended up studying in India instead. To be fair, you can always go to MIT or any top notch university for a graduate/second undergrad degree, but you can only go to IIT/NIT once.
Usually big-name schools have high price tags but extremely generous financial aid.
MIT:
> Six out of every 10 students receive MIT need-based aid. the average price paid by an undergraduate receiving financial aid in 2019–2020 was $21,917—that’s approximately what it costs to attend a state school. And for students with family incomes under $90,000 a year, we ensure that scholarship funding will allow them to attend MIT tuition-free.
Harvard puts the following numbers front and center:
20 % of Harvard families pay nothing
55 % receive Harvard scholarship aid
12 K average parent contribution
100 % of students can graduate debt-free
Can graduate debt-free, or do actually graduate debt-free?
This also seems to ignore parental debt. Many parents cannot afford to pay $12K a year (or more) and have to take out home equity or other loans in order to pay the parental contribution that the university financial aid office decides upon.
Does this include graduate and professional students?
And what about "big-name" schools that don't have Harvard's $41B endowment? Some monetarily "poorer" ivies (Dartmouth and Brown) have endowments that are tiny by comparison (though $6B or $5B isn't exactly chump change. Also they had terrific returns of 8% and 12% for 2020.)
Same story, but Yale and a couple others. Had a great SAT score, national merit scholar, yada yada. The big names don't even offer academic scholarships. There's not a chance in hell my family or I could have afforded it.
Edit:
Not to be misleading - I hadn't been accepted as I never applied. The below replies are based on talks with recruiters prior to applying, which I ultimately never did.
2003. They called me unsolicited and talked for an hour. He specifically said they didn't offer academic scholarships, and that perhaps I could join something like crew and go for a scholarship that way.
It is rare, but every couple years I do that big what if for different scenarios in life. Just for fun mostly, but it's hard not to get frustrated when your dream life is so much better.
But no, I try to have no regrets. I know enough people saddled in student loan debt who didn't get their big shot. As an introvert, I could see that being me as I probably wouldn't have networked adequately. Then there's the whole fact that I would not have my wife and daughter likely. Very Butterfly Effect like thinking.
That's interesting, and after investigating it seems this is true. I'm sure my recollection is correct, which means the recruiter with whom I spoke was perhaps misleading me, whether purposely or not.
Sidenote, I ended up at a state school with in-state tuition but I didn't get into any top schools. Most of the studies that compare college rank to life outcomes track individuals that got accepted to elite schools but didn't go (like this subthread supports).
What does this say about people like me? Am I on a lower track for life now? *Feels like people like me are underrepresented in conversations like this!
Just as a counter anecdote, I went to Cornell, and they offered a very generous aid package. Between loans and grants, about 80% of total costs were covered. No, I wasn't an athlete or some other special situation.
Please don't avoid applying to a school just because you assume you won't be offered enough aid.
Also, if an aid package doesn't work for you, please call the aid office to explain your situation. Tell them you want to attend, but money is the only barrier. They will work with you.
It is incredible any family says no to a top tier college program for any reason. It’s like winning the lottery. Taking out federal loans to pay to go to Cornell is still a fantastic deal, as long as you study the right things, even considering the loans are mispriced due to all the people who do not pay them back.
It’s just basic arithmetic, so I cannot believe that the obstacle for families is knowledge of how the system works. Something else is always at play when people make completely drop dead stupid financial decisions, things that are usually personal and ancestral, deep problems that cannot be solved by arithmetic. On the financial flip side it’s also why people go into dentistry - the arithmetic is terrible considering how much dental school costs, but something about the relationship between the family and the kids is coercing kids into dental school anyway. This is not an unorthodox opinion.
Just because you can get a loan to cover the cost doesn't mean it's affordable.
I've noticed a definite difference between lower and middle income people in this regard.
People without much income, "working class" if you will, view loans as "something to help make ends meet"
More middle and upper-middle class people view loans as "access to cheap credit." I.e. ways to leverage a little excess money into a lot of excess money.
The main difference is the level of confidence that the leverage isn't going to turn on you and flip your life upside-down because you can't make the payments.
If it makes you feel any better, there's some research showing that the ability to be accepted is a better predictor for success than actually attending. I.e., students accepted to elite colleges who went to "lesser" schools had just as good of outcomes.*
* There's a caveat that for those in the lowest incomes, attending mattered. I wonder if this is due to a networking effect rather than the quality of the school
Accepted to MIT and given a generous financial aid package so I was able to attend (2006). I had been fully expecting to have to attend the local city college...
>First, the SAT, it turns out, does not measure scholarly aptitude or native intelligence independent of social and educational background. To the contrary, SAT scores are highly correlated with wealth.
Why start the article off with an obvious falsehood? The fact that SAT scores are highly correlated with wealth does not mean that none of the variation in scores is explained by aptitude.
When people make the argument in this article they never seem to propose a fairer alternative. I'm suspicious that the criticism of SATs is actually a movement towards returning to patronage and nepotism.
Is that somehow related to being able to afford all the prep courses that are specifically for getting a high score on <insert standardized test acronym here>?
I think this is largely false, and I took the SAT about 3 years ago. My only prep was a $25 book and some free official practice tests. Managed to get a 95th percentile score on my second try.
My family could have afforded prep courses, but I wanted to prove to myself that it could be done for much less (which it was).
The higher education situation in the US is quite depressing on quite a few angles, the (second?) biggest being the implicit income requirements for the crème de la crème. Any HN takes on how or if this can be addressed?
I don't think it's really true anymore. Pretty much all the elite schools charge tuition on a sliding scale based on family income. No one that gets admitted to Yale "can't" afford it. With can't in quotations because the systems not perfect, but for the most part money is not going to stop you.
That's good to hear, I had heard that this is not true for all Ivy, and especially not for other high-tier ones without significantly big endowments or merit scholarship funds though. Just wanted to check up on what the opinion here was.
Need-blind admissions only exists for a very small fraction of schools -- those that are in maybe the top 20? (I don't know the exact number). Also, it often leaves out middle class students, whose parents make too much to get substantial amount of aid, but don't make enough to pay the tuition out right without being buried in loans.
Because of this, high achieving, middle class students often go to state schools, which often give merit scholarships (top-20 schools don't), and have much lower tuition.
Every Gen X person I know who took out loans for professional school at top tier universities is richer than even people who were in technology in the early 2000s. They’re the ones who bought houses in all the gentrifying neighborhoods, they’re the ones with two or more kids, and they bought index funds with all that money, so the effects of going to a top tier university massively compounded.
Some people have already pointed out that top tier universities have been discounted for the last decade. But even in 2000, Harvard college cost less than half of what it does now. Taking out loans to pay for Havard in 2000 would be the best investment you could ever make in your life, just considering that same inflation that partly raised Harvard’s tuition price also reduced the real cost of your debt.
I believe the underlying problem is not financial literacy though.
How this correlate with multiple anecdotal claims in this thread from users saying that they were accepted into positions that didn't offer them scholarships at all, nor lowered their tuition?
They only offer financial aid. It is a distinct application process (at least was was I applied). But that financial aid is extremely generous. I.e. you can have family income of over 100K and still qualify.
A high school friend who went to an Ivy missed this part. She thought that not offering merit scholarships meant you couldn’t get any money to reduce the cost.
Meh. Article headline depends on your definition of “elite”.
Admissions to the top 5 schools are broken. There’s more qualified students than there are slots. The only solution to that is more slots.
If you get a 1500 on your SAT that’s a free ride to almost any university in the country. Especially if you come from an under-represented background. This includes Ivy League schools. But not Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT.
The best ticket to a top 25 world class education is a high SAT score. It’s a free ticket available to anyone.
I have many complaints about our university. But even a mediocre test score gets you a free ride to very very good state schools. Articles like this only reinforce the false necessity of Top 5 or Top 10 status.
If the students at these schools aren't any better than those at dozens of others high ranking schools, why are so many executives, judges and politicians graduates from these few school?
Network effect and credentials. It does not matter who is objectively better if quality is similar. It matters what people assume when confronted with uncertainity.
Different strokes for different folks, but if a school has a a lot of executives, judges and politicians graduate from them, that's a reason for me to avoid that school like the plague.
A bit OT, but: I was going to say that the 1600 point scale hasn't been used for years (since 2005, when they switched to a 2400 point scale), but it turns out that they went back to the 1600 point scale in 2016.
1500 is top 2%. Plenty to get you into a very very good school. And get you plenty of scholarship money. Especially if you come from a disadvantaged background.
A perfect 1600 won’t get you into top 10 schools on its own. Thus my original comment about there being more qualified candidates than openings.
> Plenty to get you into a very very good school. And get you plenty of scholarship money.
I mean, I didn't. I get what you're saying but the idea that you can just "work hard" to get into these sorts of institutions feels kind of insulting when there are lots of people like me that did work hard but didn't get in.
The highest average SAT score at the top schools is right around 1500.
I’m not saying a 1500 will get you into Harvard. It won’t. But it will get you into a very good school. University of Washington is a great school. It’s average SAT score is just 1340. 75th percentile is 1460.
1500 is literally top 2% of score distribution. For most circumstances that should get most people into a top 5% school. (Top 5%, not Top 5).
I got higher than a 1500. I guess I should have applied to an Ivy. But it was too expensive so I didn't. I certainly didn't get a free ride to the state school I went to.
Does the article say anything that substantiates the headline? I was expecting evidence of causality but didn’t see any when I skimmed through it. Did I miss it?
Agree the SATs aren’t a great measure. I got a 1430 on the older version of them and couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to spell Tyranny! It measures a very certain subset of skills.
> First, the SAT, it turns out, does not measure scholarly aptitude or native intelligence independent of social and educational background
Wouldn't this mean if you compared two groups of kids from the same income quintile one with a very low SAT score and one with a very high one they'd have the exact same life outcomes? I find this hard to believe.
Also this study disagrees that coaching has much of an impact on SAT scores.
Not necessarily. There are an infinite number of characteristics other than those listed that might affect both SAT outcome and life outcome among those groups...
I think two poor kids, raised on the same neighborhood/conditions, measured with each other, SAT will give you a proxy for academic ability/IQ.
Two wealthy kids, raised on the same neighborhood/conditions, measured with each other, SAT will give you a proxy for academic ability/IQ.
That comparison might break down when measuring A poor kid, with a wealthy kid. Or a ESL student (english as foreign language, to a native speaker).
The wealthy kids, probably went to better schools, had taken PRE-SATS since 8th grade, has tutor, and everything in between to get better. Poor kids are probably sharing a room with their parents, live in crappy conditions, and have to start working as teens to help out the family economically...
All upper middle class folks know this: the more testing practice you do, the better you become at that test...
SAT and IQ tests are a valid tool of measurement when two people have had the same conditions and training.
Let me translate into engineering terms: Two engineers go to interview, one is good and has some great experience, the other one is average, but just LEETCODES for months before the interview.
The average engineer gets the job, while the better one might not, as he probably didn't solve some Leetcode style of problem fast enough.
Im real life scenarios, the good engineer would have outperformed the average one.
The notion that SAT scores are a poor proxy for IQ in low income households is a commonly held talking point, but it’s just not borne out by research.
Testing prep just doesn’t matter in aggregate, because admissions rarely have a cliff between marginal score and slightly better marginal score. Upper middle class people spending money on it doesn’t mean it’s money well spent; like many things rich people spend money on, it’s largely signaling to peers.
Also, your caricature of why people get hired for engineering jobs bears very little relationship to what I and my colleagues look for in engineering interviews.
Being able to solve a few simple algorithm problems is table stakes. Being able to talk about what you’re doing and why is what’s being measured.
People who crammed leetcode but don’t actually understand the material are obvious 5 minutes into the interview; people who freeze up occasionally on the algorithm bits but can talk about why they’re doing what they’re doing generally get hired.
> Also, your caricature of why people get hired for engineering jobs bears very little relationship to what I and my colleagues look for in engineering interviews.
Yeah, I'm not sure I've ever even heard of anyone comparing the times it took different applicants to answer a question, except maybe in the binary "did they do it under the time cap" sense. And even then, very rarely is software development time capped in the way an interview was so as long as someone's thinking is along the right track I don't think not getting a specific answer in a specific timeframe would disqualify them.
The notion that practicing something, doesn't make you better at it, is ridiculous. Two, equal people, walk in a test room. One has never seen the test, the other has been practicing it for a while. The guy that has been practicing, will perform better.
Even for official IQ test taking, they don't recommend taking the test more than once a year, as it invalidates the results of the tests...
Why? The act of doing tests, makes you better at that particular test, and the test ceases to become a good measurement of what it was trying to measure (in this case, IQ).
I raised my score by 200-300 points in each category by spending some time with one of those study prep books with the example tests. This saved me about $8k / semester due to ‘merit’ based scholarships + honors program (my university publishes the SAT/grade cutoffs for each).
Honestly I would be surprised if it was possible to create a test that was both impossible to improve with practice and actually measured anything at all.
You provide an excellent argument for penalizing applicants who are good at Leetcode-type problems :)
How far are we from trying to "correct"/normalize SAT scores according to family income quintiles? It seems to make sense if it's actually true that you can't compare scores across quintiles. As someone who did above-average and came from the bottom quintile it would have helped me a lot. As someone whose kids will very likely grow up in the top quintile I'm not sure I'd want that to happen.
Cram school definitely helps with exam scores. Coaching isn’t cram school. That meta analysis talks about 3 hour Saturday sessions and the kids at San Francisco’s Lowell did Kumon 3:30pm-7:30pm DAILY for THREE YEARS. It’s a completely bonkers apples to oranges comparison. You would be completely and utterly dead wrong to not see the overrepresentation of kids who did cram schools in exams only high school admissions.
Really independence of educational background would imply education was ineffective at improving scholarly abilities. Which would essentially imply education is about as useful as astrology - quite the counterfactual.
I feel that the overall university admission process is broken. No matter how we evaluate people, we are prone to biases, and things like diversity and affirmative actions (whether you disagree with it or not) add another layer of complexity to the process.
I like the idea from the powerball revolution epsiode of Revisionist History (http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/44-the-powerball-revo...). Why not have some filter to get the top students in to a pool, then randomly select them? I mean there are more qualified students than there are slots, so it's only "fair" if each of them get the same chance. No politics - just a pure number game at that point. You can argue the filter could create a disadvantage to poor students etc..., but you can adjust that in ways that the initial pool of potential applicants will be even.
Of course when I mention the concept of randomly selecting a candidate, it makes people real uncomfortable :)
What does "the best" really mean? At the end of the day I assume they want to optimize for future success. In that case we humans have been proven to be not very good at that in many other areas.
And why can't you select a the best students and then randomly select among them? I don't believe that a 3.8 student will certainly perform worse than a 3.85 student, for example.
> I feel that the overall university admission process is broken.
I agree and think the brokenness is in the limited number of opportunities. Why are Harvard and other Ivies the only ones that matter on your resume? Once a society limits the number of opportunities to reach the upper echelons, it is bound to set off scramble among all the parents, since everyone wants the best for their children.
For some reasons, this is not only an American thing. I believe elite institutions in other countries as equally (or even more) selective.
It's not logical. If someone left google after a year.. it sounds like it wasn't a great fit for either but others will take it as a proxy for your greatness and select that person over someone who stayed longer at a less known entity.
Ivies matter on your resume because they are exclusive and everyone can't go there. You can't let everyone go to an elite institution because then they wouldn't be elite anymore.
I disagree that there are 'biases' no matter what. If students are evaluated purely by merit, without regard to that categories typically associated with biases (race, gender, etc.), then by definition the process is unbiased.
I think it’s really hard to evaluate “merit” in an unbiased way. Just because you’re not explicitly using those categories you list doesn’t mean they’re not creeping in to your other metrics.
i make the same argument for hiring. once you've done some basic filtering, you're likely better off hiring at random than trying to "pick the best", as alluring as that is, because your biases will select against intellectual and creative diversity.
economies of scale work to your advantage here as well. when hiring 1 person, you feel immense pressure to hire correctly. but when hiring for 10 similar roles, you can, for instance, hire 11 people at random from a qualified pool and find the best fits along the way (often even for the 'extra' hire, who might fit in an entirely different role).
> Second, the system of meritocratic admission that Conant promoted did not lead to the classless society he hoped it would produce. Inequalities of income and wealth have deepened since the 1940s and 1950s, and the social mobility that Conant saw as the remedy for a stratified society has not come about. The haves and have-nots have not been trading places from one generation to the next.
This is demonstrably untrue. First, the article’s use of a family making $200,000 is telling. If you look around that people who are billionaires today, most did come from upper middle class families, but not necessarily wealthy ones. Mark Zuckerberg’s parents are a psychiatrist and a dentist. Opening wide the class of the most elite to the children of upper middle class professionals is in fact a huge societal achievement. Few societies have that kind of mobility.
Another example is the economic mobility of Asians raised in the bottom 20% of income. These people lack both financial resources and social connections. But they have a 27% chance of ending up in the top 20% of income as adults. Test-based meritocracy like the SAT is a huge enabler of that.
> Opening wide the class of the most elite to the children of upper middle class professionals is in fact a huge societal achievement. Few societies have that kind of mobility.
I have trouble agreeing with that, especially given the tendencies of pulling up the ladder. The billionaires are basically irrelevant because they're too small in number, the upper middle class and everyone else is the chasm that is widening by the day [0]. It's absolutely becoming or has become a stratified structure.
I don't know how the industry could claim the SAT isn't coachable without knowing full well they were lying. The parents, teachers, and students knew when I was in high school 20 years ago, yet it was a secret to the industry?
These people are the gatekeepers to a higher education, they should be held to higher standards.
> The college counselors' report concludes that, on average, prep courses yield only a modest benefit, "contrary to the claims made by many test-preparation providers." It found that SAT coaching resulted in about 30 points in score improvement on the SAT, out of a possible 1600, and less than one point out of a possible 36 on the ACT, the other main college-entrance exam, says Derek Briggs, chairman of the research and methodology department at the University of Colorado in Boulder and author of the admissions counselors' report.
> Once scholars control for all these factors as best they can, they find that coaching has a positive but small effect: Perhaps 10 or 20 points in total on the SAT, mostly on the math section, according to careful work by Derek Briggs of the University of Colorado Boulder and Ben Domingue of Stanford University.
> Some estimates run a little higher: A 2010 study led by Ohio State’s Claudia Buchmann and based on the National Education Longitudinal Study found that the use of books, videos, and computer software offers no boost whatsoever, while a private test prep course adds 30 points to your score on average, and the use of a private tutor adds 37.
The exam is totally coachable, you just have to do cram school. Those studies look at private tutoring which spends possibly 1/20th of the time kids spend in cram school. Cram school is often conflated with private tutoring but they are completely different things.
Sure but the amount of time you have to spend on cram school starts to make it not worth the points gain. The top schools all reject a bunch of 1600 scorers every year. If all you have going for you are good grades + good SAT you probably aren't going to get into an elite place. Sure it'll help you get into a tier 2 school, but at that point you're usually better off with a public option.
That’s the point of the entire argument. Elite schools don’t go by scores and grades alone.
Parents who sent their kids to cram school, or tutoring or whatever, and kids with perfect scores are mad that schools aren’t basing admissions solely on scores and grades.
What it boils down to is that Asian American kids are outperforming most other groups on the SAT for whatever reason. Elite colleges don’t want student bodies that are 70% Asian American.
Well what they do is move people from the 96th to the 98th percentile without a meaningful increase in skill or attitude. The bigger issue is that schools have their heads up their asses when they insist on only selecting from the 99th percentile, when slumming it in and going down to the 93rd would be more meritorious and not negligible to their graduation rates.
Specifically 1-3 hours a week for a few months isn’t enough to dramatically improve the average score.
That’s all the referenced studies show.
That doesn’t mean that the SAT isn’t “coachable” with much intensive efforts, or that more minimal efforts don’t result in large improvements for some subset of test takers.
1. The results you list are just average. There could be a bimodal distribution.
2. What those studies call coaching isn’t remotely comparable to years of 20 hour a week cram school.
3. Of course the SAT is coachable. How do you think you learn the math techniques and vocabulary in the first place?
If it’s not possible to increase your vocabulary, how do people learn new languages?
4. The percentage of students who make a perfect score on a similar test, the ACT, has increased by 5x in the last five years while the average score has only risen slightly.
Clearly a subset of test takers has figured out a way to reliably prep for the test.
Based on info from a buddy of mine who runs an SAT prep business, this is a half truth. He says:
- It is tough to get gains from a kid who doesn’t want to be there — that is, the parents are pushing the students to prep when the student doesn’t want to. My friend actually tries to filter out these folks in his sales funnel.
- Motivated kids can get ridiculous amounts of improvement (40-100 per skill), especially if they are starting off in the lower or middle part of the scoring range (people at the top are capped in improvement by max scores).
- I have done some minimal tutoring for a friend’s kid, and his SAT score went up by 110 in math and 80 in verbal from a middling starting point. Anecdote, but still... My “curriculum” was just have him take a practice test every week under test like conditions, review the principles behind the math problems that he missed, review any test strategy issues that pop up, and give him 50 vocab words a week with skills on how to search for how these words are used in a natural setting. With a longer runway, I think he may have been able to double that improvement (the kid was smart enough to get a perfect math score, but didn’t have the confidence to execute in a testing context).
I don't know why you're getting downvoted. You are correct. It's very much possible to improve scores by practice. By simply taking a lot of practice tests over the summer, my daughter was able to substantially improve her ACT score from 30 to 34 - which is in fact what she got in the actual test.
A single second is a very small amount of time, but in a race it can be the difference between winning and losing. When you're in a competition with a thousand other people whose scores are almost the same as yours, 30 points can be huge.
And it should be noted that they changed the tests before these studies too.
> Many of the key studies of coaching effects were based on kids who took the SAT or ACT in the 1990s and 2000s, Briggs told me. The tests have since been changed a fair amount, in an effort to make them more like statewide achievement tests and to minimize their similarity to intelligence tests.
Just a quick note than your analysis (here, I don't know about elsewhere) depends on the effectiveness of test prep courses, but those aren't the only advantage well-off student have in the SAT; other advantages, all of which might be more important than coaching, include stuff as simple as "expectations and forcing functions to take the SAT more than one" and as lurid as "phony IEPs to enable the taking of the test over multiple days", which is a thing.
"The SAT isn't gameable" is an extraordinary claim. And "suburban families try hard to game the SAT" is not so much a "claim" as "a fact your own analysis acknowledges". I could be persuaded, but what you've presented here doesn't constitute extraordinary evidence.
(Your other argument in this thread, about the possible Cobra Effect of eliminating the SAT, is much more persuasive).
That is only if you focus on the curriculum covered in SAT. If you instead see SAT as a proxy for the eventual success in the society, then I believe SAT is a great indicator of the factors which lead to this success - family wealth, willingness of parents to invest in their children, diligence and rote work required to ace such tests, ability to find loopholes to strategize and game the system (we love "hackers" here, no?) etc etc. In other words, if someone is going to succeed because of SAT, they will succeed even if you remove SAT from the picture.
> As we have seen, relatively few children of the poor rise to affluence, and relatively few children of affluence fall below the ranks of the upper-middle class. Notwithstanding the American dream of rising from rags to riches, upward mobility is less common in the United States than in many European countries, and there is no evidence of improvement in recent decades.
This I believe is the crux of the problem in how the "upward mobility" is measured. If it is strictly by income/wealth quintiles, then it is strictly zero-sum. But is the world really a zero-sum game? I'd content that 80-90% people in USA / Western Europe have a far superior quality of life than the top-1% of the past on many metrics like health, nutrition or peace. So one can say that their entire societies were upwardly mobile from 1946 onward.
> relatively few children of affluence fall below the ranks of the upper-middle class
Everyone talks about upward mobility, but we rarely talk about downward mobility. It's not impossible to go from "rags to riches", but who ever goes from riches to rags? It's not a true "meritocracy" unless the system reliably impoverishes the idiot children of the wealthy, but that almost never happens. The wealthy are protected, regardless of merit, and they take up space at or near the top of the system, reducing the number of positions open to more qualified candidates.
> unless the system reliably impoverishes the idiot children of the wealthy
While I agree that the idiot children of the wealthy should not get to wield any significant influence on the society, "impoverishing them" doesn't seem like the right goal, since that might provoke a reaction from their wealthy parents who are driven, connected and talented. Rather, such idiots should be managed out on a safe landing, where they don't influence society at all but their parents are still not worried about their future.
> "impoverishing them" doesn't seem like the right goal
I don't think anyone should be impoverished, and indeed I'm not a supporter of the idea of "meritocracy", but I think it's fair to take the arguments for it to their logical and abhorrent conclusion. After all, the supporters seem perfectly content to allow the non-wealthy (and assumed non-meritorious) to become impoverished.
statistically speaking, most high-income family implies parents with more self-discipline, better hard-working attitude, and normally they spend a lot more time with their kids' growth,etc.
in this fancy socialism-is-the-future era, our system now punishes "the evil rich" to make sure we are all going to have 'equity-result', as said the 'road-to-hell-is-paved-with-good-intention', guess what, those true 'bad' rich family always knows how to circumvent any rules that is targeting them, in the end it's always the honest hard-working high-income family got punished.
saying rich-family is key to elite university, is the same as saying exercise-person lives longer, the 'rich' or 'exercise' are nothing to blame most of the time.
"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries"
Sorry, how are rich people being punished in this straw man vision of reality of yours?
I came from a well off family (who were on food stamps when I was first born — socialism FTW), and had tons of advantages while I meandered through college before eventually graduating. I was not overly disciplined but had many extra chances someone from less means would not have.
food stamp is fine unless it's abused, it's designed to level the play field, the so-called 'equal opportunity'. poor family already got helped there. some made it by this help, many did not.
so the trend now becomes 'equity result', which will make nobody wants to work hard anymore, that's socialism at its worst.
this is also called mob to the hard working "rich" families.
US is moving to that direction, fast.
by the way, I was from a poor family, and now barely made it.
I would rather keep working my way up instead of seeing socialism-for-equity-result here.
I also hope for those who depends on food-stamp and now is in good shape, donating to the community, and always be thankful to other taxpayers who gave you and your family a hand, money is not from air, it's from other working persons' pocket.
google 'equity result' or something similar and you will see them, they're the new fad.
I'm all for splitting US into left and right states, a reverse of civil war but without the war. The nation is nearly split into 50:50 anyways in the last few decades and it's getting more and more divided. Both sides will be happy, and we can compete in parallel and see which system will win. This way, at least, those leftism will not fight for liberal agenda with money from other hard working people's pocket. Please leave them alone, they're already taxed enough and did their share for your dreaming welfare society.
It’s not a surprise that the Ivy league exists to educate the children of the wealthy.
What is a surprise is that the Ivy leagues and the wealthy are ashamed to admit this.
I think people wouldn’t get all worked up about this if people would be more honest.
Yes, there will always be some income differences, yes, some people self fragment into groups by race, class, interests, etc. when given a choice. What you see are natural consequences of people’s decisions.
Elite institutions want to admit who they think will be the future elite, because they will be writing the alumni checks, serving as trustees, and providing a prestigious halo around the institution.
As someone who attended an Ivy, it is simply untrue that it's mostly blue-blood old money hobnobbing around.
First, there's not enough of them to fill the classes every year. Second, wealthy people themselves want their children to be educated with other smart kids.
I don't think the argument is that most of the people at Ivies are blue blood WASPs. I think the argument is that if you happen to be a blue blood WASP you are disproportionately likely to get in regardless (or in spite of, in the case of legacies and donors) your merit.
This is almost certainly not the case any more. It was at one time, but it isn't. Princeton's recent incoming class was more than 60% what they called "persons of color", a term that included all Asians. Among the people who might be called whites, Jews were easily 20-30%. If you start to filter out Catholics, there just aren't that many WASPs at these places anymore. For extra credit, go look up how many WASPs are on the Supreme Court. How many years has it been this way?
The stereotypes just don't fit and haven't for some time.
But you see, where groups of people become a recognizable other and cement themselves into a position that grants them an advantage, then naturally other groups will try to take that advantage from them. Society exists because it is a structure that reinforces cohesion and cohesion means reducing animosity between groups. So within society there is a desire and the mechanisms to address imblances such as these. Where one group begins to dominate it can be in society's best interest to level the playing field. Diversity is a good thing for systems that whish to stay away from local minima.
>There's some very strong propaganda out there that you can do anything if you just apply yourself.
Heh, do people really fall for that? Even if the "can do anything" part is possible, it's not probable (compared to starting from a wealthy family and applying 1/10th the effort). Rich play life in easy mode, news at 11.
Define “wealthy.” My brother went to Yale. We were definitely comfortable—immigrants to the US in 1989, my dad worked in public health and my mom was making good commissions at a furniture store. That made us somewhat better off than the typical family at Yale—the median family income is $196,000. But we weren’t “wealthy.”
I worry about the collateral effects of these attacks on meritocracy and the SAT. As immigrants, my family and I didn’t have social connections and deep cultural familiarity. Applying to college, doing the “right” extra-curriculars, etc., was actually quite a challenge. We never knew to work teachers for extra credit or retakes on exams to keep our grades up. What we had to distinguish ourselves from other upper middle class kids was our SAT scores.
Today, my wife and I have vastly more resources and cultural competency to navigate “the system” than my parents did. My kids go to a tiny K-12 private school where their teachers and guidance counselors will know them from preschool. We know the trendy extra-curriculars, how to craft admissions essays, how to put together class schedules that look good on a transcript while minimizing GPA risk, etc. I feel like deemphasizing the SAT and objective measures is going to help established families like mine at the expense of the kind of family I grew up in.
If you were better off than the typical family who sends a child to Yale, and that typical family makes $196k/yr then yeah you were wealthy. By what metric would that not be considered better off than the vast vast majority of Americans?
I don't disagree with your point about admissions (and in fact I came from a family that had good income but both parents never went to college, so had little advice to give).
Still: your family was already well near the 75th percentile nationally for the time. In what sense would that not be wealthy?
We were certainly in the top 5% at the time. “Rich kids” would be a fair description in my opinion. But to me, “children of the wealthy” as used by the article carries a connotation of having enough wealth to have power and connections. My mom made over $100k/year as the top sales associate at her furniture store, but you don’t meet many Congressmen that way!
That is certainly a real distinction, though I think your point about immigrant families not knowing "the game" is probably the better one.
If parents know how the admissions game is played, then they can throw capital (fiscal and/or social) at the problem.
A non-tenured biology professor is by no means wealthy, but their daughter will almost certainly have an easier time finding a lab to volunteer at in high school than the child of the owner of a successful car dealership.
So wealth is an advantage conditional on knowing the rules of the game, and you've raised an important point: a lot of families don't even know the rules of the game!
I would disagree. If you experience poverty you realize that making over 50k is intense. Making over 100k means a lot of power and connection compared to most. You may just be underestimating how many advantages that amount of money truly gives you over everyone else, in terms of opportunity, time, educational resources, guidance, lack of prejudice, and sheer wealth. I would argue the article is taking about "rich kids"
Maybe I misunderstood, sorry if I am. Are you saying that you're family made greater than 196k and that you were not wealthy? If so I'd say you are out of touch. That is ridiculously wealthy for the majority of humans alive. You're view might be skewed by seeing the ultra rich at Yale as your classmates. Which all goes back to the original point, these ivy league schools favor the rich
- For the most part, high SATs are tables stakes for applying to elite schools, they are not the deciding factor. The exceptions are for athletes and other folks with preferred admissions. I don’t know why people continue to think that great grades and high SAT scores are the main or only factors in elite school admissions — the admissions materials themselves make it abundantly clear that they are looking for more.
- All that said, the “more” mentioned above is typically easier to access if you come from a high income family.
- The excerpt mentions low % of students who go from bottom quintile to top quintile after an elite education (~2%). Is that 2% of the total student body or 2% of the bottom quintile elite school students? This is unclear to me, but if it’s the former, that’s probably a big win since lowest quintile students are a small part of the student body to begin with.
- Note that some (many?) jumps from bottom quintile to top quintile may just be a well-off family that ran into bad times. This happened to a friend of mine — wealthy family one generation, the next generation lost it to drugs and alcohol, and the third generation reverted back to wealthy.
- The leap from the bottom quintile to the top typically requires much more than education. There are a ton of soft skills that are common in the top quintile that are foreign or antithetical to people from the bottom quintile —- general communication, conflict resolution, attitudes towards money, socializing skills, etc. Without these skills, it’s really tough to make it to the top quintile unless you effectively hit the time-in-history and degree lottery with a FAANG-type of high paying job. Even then, someone from the bottom quintile will have limited upside without the soft skills mentioned above.
- To close, I wish people would stop presenting elite schools as the gateway to riches or even a stable high income. Learning how to play the “game” that the top quintile plays is much more important than where someone went to school. Obviously schooling (esp. elite schooling) is part of that game, but based on the wide variety of winners in the game that I have known, the soft skills I have mentioned are a much more common and salient trait than an elite schooling.
This got me thinking: how can someone who didn't grow up with the relevant soft skills learn them later in life? Are there any specific books or places to role play these soft skills that are recommended?
Spend time around the target audience (in this case, top quintile), be observant, and minimize mistakes while learning.
I know a (formerly) middle class guy who was a walk-on football player at a big Midwestern state university who wanted to be rich. He did not come from an area or a family who knew how to function gracefully in the eight-figure net worth NE corridor crowd.
He parlayed his varsity status (I call it a totally-not-a-club club) into a random low level back room finance job in NYC. He made himself useful, socialized, networked, learned from those around him, and after two decades or so (leaving out a lot of the story) he was a partner of a hedge fund that ended up netting him a mid-eight-figure net worth.
Granted, that is not the same as jumping from the bottom quintile, but knowing his personal story, he had plenty of social challenges to overcome.
The first sentence seems factually incorrect or at least appears to be a bare assertion without basis. "SAT ... does not measure ... native intelligence independent of social or educational background." Studies have found an extremely high correlation between SAT and g-factor. Is this correlation completely due to social and educational factors? That's quite a strong claim and I would need to see some compelling evidence for it.
The correlation between SAT and wealth is not surprising. Wealth and g-factor are also correlated. In addition, g-factor of parents is extremely highly correlated to that of their kids through both genetics and upbringing. That there exists a transitive correlation between all of parental wealth, child-g, parental-g, and child-SAT is totally expected from our understanding of intelligence in the literature. Wealth as a driver independent of g needs to be explicitly tested for in a multivariable model (has this been done?).
I mean, if you have parents that can teach you stuff or pay someone to teach you additionally to the stuff you learn at school you'll always fare better.
I don't think there can be a way to measure any kind of aptitude independently from your upbringing. We don't need better tests, we need to help parents to raise better children.
Asking rich parents on HN:
Why bother sending your kid to ivy schools?
I'm far from being rich, but I plan to pick a private but modest school / university for my children. Even if I were multimillionaire I wouldn't change this.
My rationale is:
- I don't want to deal with underpaid and possibly bitter public school teachers
- It's not like you need an ivy school to find a job or be successful, that lies within you
- Education is as useful as your kids will have a passion for, not how much you pay for an oversized planetarium
- Rich kids sound like the worst people to surround your kid with
> I'm far from being rich, but I plan to pick a private but modest school / university for my children. Even if I were multimillionaire I wouldn't change this.
I'm genuinely a little confused by this sentence. You lay out your reasons below, but seem to be assuming you get to pick. By the time someone attends university, they're usually, you know, people. Adults in the 18+ sense, high school diploma, ability to get a job, have their own opinions about the world, access to federal student loans, etc. You'll have some influence in terms of the degree to which you'll support their decision and advice you can offer, but you don't get to pick anything, especially if your child is talented/driven enough to get into an Ivy League w/o being a socioeconomic outlier.
And that's totally within reason :) Just wanted to point out that they may choose something outside that. I know, personally, I was in a similar position, where my folks were willing/able to help, but I also chose a university that required that I take out an (imho, reasonable) amount of student loans to cover the difference. I remember the initial look of surprise on my parents face when I told them my decision, but even with the loan payments, I've yet to regret that choice.
For me the only real answer is "Connections" - they will miss out on connections with people that will make the world go around in the future (even if its only some local version of world for ex. Your city). Direct access and familiarity can be all that matters when Your children will be searching for good job or funds.
While there are elements of truth to the article's assertion (eg., legacy admissions), this narrative is mostly untrue and certainly unhelpful. Literally, if you study hard enough, you can go to an elite school if you want, full stop (source: did this myself.) The root of whatever "problem" may exist is mostly that kids from wealthier backgrounds are more often pressured by their parents to do the studying necessary to get into such a school.
In my experience, everyone complaining about elite admissions is either a self-hating old-money grad of such a school, or is salty because they got a mediocre SAT score.
It seems to me that ideally, college would admit some people as a result of family wealth, and some due to aptitude. The question is, what should the balance be?
To explain: it’s simply a fact in our current society that people with wealth have outsized power and influence, even if they do not have special aptitude.
In a society where wealth does accumulate, it seems beneficial for people with aptitude but not wealth to be able to build relationships with people who have wealth but not aptitude.
Thus, society benefits from colleges admitting a mixture of the two.
You know how when people in South Korea, with their practically unlimited internet bandwidth, look at home internet usage caps in the US and laugh at such a silly problem? Someday when our fiber internet arrives, we'll also look back and wonder why did we ever need to debate net neutrality.
Well it's kind of the same thing with university admissions. The problem that we've encountered is that the number of elite schools and admissions spots (established largely for the population of the post war growth economy) has not grown in proportion to the population. 1600 kids per freshman class has been the same for 30 years. And therefore the question of who gets in has gotten worse and worse as the number of kids competing has grown, and we're bickering over people's belief in different weighting schemes.
What the US needs is more good schools. Not tinkering around the edges and theoretical arguments of whether rich kids deserve good schooling more than poor kids. That will get us nowhere in the big picture.
The US invests more in education than it does in the military.
In 2019 the US spent roughly 720 billion on the military.
Public spending on elementary and secondary (high schools) was about 740 billion. That doesn't count all spending on public colleges or any spending on private schools both of which are substantial.
That’s a pretty unfair comparison given you are comparing Department of Defense federal discretionary dollars to _all estimated expenses at all levels of government_.
Even if you just add the VA into the mix your numbers come out upside down. Add any segment of Homeland security and it gets really obvious fast.
The VA budget is ~200B/yr right? Maybe a bit more?
Homeland Security is ~50B?
If we include all of both of those (and I would contend that "all" isn't really appropriate if we're just talking about the "military") we're around a trillion or so on the military.
Let's take the 740B on government spending on primary + secondary education and add the 175B or so spent by various levels of governments on college. That gets you to 915B. Is there 100B of private spending a year on education? I'm willing to bet there is.
At the end of the day, the numbers are probably pretty close. My overall point is that there is this idea that US military spending dwarfs US education spending. However you do the math, this is clearly not the case.
Investment per se is not the reason the US does not have enough good schools. The US spends more on K-12 education than almost any nation, including South Korea. The reasons are more complicated and (probably) far less politically pleasing.
We have a much, much larger country, with far sparser populations, and a major 'last mile' problem when it comes to our infrastructure. That fractalline, capillary spread of cable is the killer for nation-wide one-size-fits-all access and data plans.
We /do/ have major problems with offering alternatives to a given location, though.
I always tell the same stories in these comments, excuse me if you've read this before...
When I started at university (in the uk, top 10 but not top 5), the admissions tutor (for the school of physics, not the whole place) who admitted my year group was forced to do the job. He considered himself a scientist (he was an FRS, a leader in his field after all). He looked at all the factors used for entry and found them all to be bs. Grades (predicted and actual), personal statements, references, extra curriculars, age/gender/socioeconomic group etc.
So he admitted everyone that applied.
He admitted people with low grades, he admitted people without the maths requirements (usually the most important grade for a physics under grad, you generally can't do any physics course without one).
The result was a bumper class of 120ish instead of the usual 60ish. But by the end of the first year / start of second year, we were down to the usual number. Everyone else had transfered out, failed and left or was repeating the year.
The interesting thing was that there were a few of the people who wouldn't usually have made it who did not transfer out. 2 of the 10 without the maths qualifications went on the get degrees. 1 is a teacher, the other got a PhD.
His philosophy was that if someone could pass first year exams, labs, etc they deserved a spot in second year and so on. He didn't care what they came with. Just whether they passed. The chance he gave people was mostly wasted. But not entirely. He radically improved some people's lives.
I only know because we got drunk together because he was my tutor and we had a very friendly tutorial group and relationship.
As a straight A student with good extra curriculum activities, references, even work experience, I was scandalised and insulted to hear what he'd done. But I learned new definition of equality and it challenged me as a person. I think a lot of schools in particular work the other way around: hard to get in, then you just sit there for a few years and walk into jobs without further examination. That helps no one.
I feel that's what community colleges should be.. I went in high school in Virginia, and I know smart people, that wanted to stay close to home, for family reasons, and they went to community college. The mix of a community college is mix of very smart students, average folks, to straight up dummies.... but at least they have a second chance to perform well.
Some one that does well, in a community college, should be transfered into a proper 4 year college. I know a lot of state schools do this, but it should be more common/normalized.
> Some one that does well, in a community college, should be transfered into a proper 4 year college. I know a lot of state schools do this, but it should be more common/normalized.
As far as I know, this is radically common. Where are you from that this isn’t common? Most everyone goes to community college as prep for getting a four year degree later or do some particular 2 year program. I rarely meet people who do a two year associates just for the sake of it. (As it usually means very little in the marketplace) Usually the people who quit at two years never really could figure out what they wanted to do. (Which is fine)
Just want to add that parents play a major role. My parents, being highly educated and well off financially themselves, put enormous pressure on us to do well in school. We grew up with the idea that nothing surpasses the importance of performance in school. No (or little parties), no clubbing, no going out, we sacrificed our teenage years studying and as a result, that hard sacrifice paid out. It seems to me that the huge sacrifices we made are not accounted for at all (as if they don't exist) and the article only focuses on the parents financial status as a driver of success when in reality, talking with many or these students, is not the major driving factor, but the family culture and pressure from parents to perform in academia.
Also this, and maybe this is where social background comes into play. If my parents didn't value education, they wouldn't have moved us to a good school district or taken the time to look over my homework and assignments.
There’s more too it that that. There are advantages to wealth that go beyond encouraging children to study instead of partying. Things like going to a good school, not having to work through high school, not dealing with money stress in general.
And I don’t know that we necessarily want to encourage people to “sacrifice their teenage years” by rewarding people who do so. I did well on the SAT, and I didn’t spend all my time partying. But I definitely don’t feel like I sacrificed my teenage years.
I certainly don’t want my children to look back on their childhood like that.
That, and money allows you to cheat in this world. Bribery. Seen it happen on a private school.
I believe earning some money for yourself as young kid (edit: specifically, I mean ~teen and later) is good, as it allows you to feel accomplished and teaches you to deal with money (ie. learning to save). It feels very different to do that with your own hard earned money than with pocket/birthday/clothing/allowance money. Not too much though, as the wage is ridiculously low, and the work likely repetitive and boring. It also teaches discipline.
And that last word, is a keyword to higher success, on top of money. You need both; not either.
> My parents, being highly educated and well off financially themselves, put enormous pressure on us to do well in school.
Sorry, this is BS. I come from a competitive family. My parents put enormous pressure on me to do well in school, too. Pressure I could not handle. They wanted me to do 2 years in 1 to save 2k EUR on travel costs. I failed. If they had a tad bit more savings and listened better to me, I believe I would've succeeded. I'm good now, after a long struggle, but I should've learned a trait at age 12 instead. Not everyone is meant to take a traditional, higher education road to success. Not even when they have a high SAT score, or rich parents. Mine were average wealthy, though I had a chronically ill father. My cousins had no ill parent, and I suspect this is why they lack a general compassion for human beings in need.
If you were poor, you would not have the time to make those sacrifices. Instead all your free time would go into minimum wage job whose long term return is not being homeless and barely scraping by. Wealth give you the opportunity to not be homeless and invest in yourself instead of working, the long term returns of which are dramatic.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 193 ms ] threadThat only tends to be true for PHD programs where the student is expected to work on research that actually brings in grant money.
That's not true for all grad programs. Some are not research-focused at all, and for those the student usually has to pay their own way or get other forms of financial aid (which not all students qualify for).
Even if they do qualify for financial aid, they might not get any, if the limited amount that is available has already been given out to other qualified students.
It may just be “pay them a living wage!”. Pay them $75,000 and call it a day. The waived tuition cost is BS. They aren’t undergrads living on campus and taking a half dozen classes. It doesn’t cost $50,000 / year to have a PhD student do lots of work for the school. Quite the opposite! The school makes a lot of money of their labor!!
At least for STEM PhDs at research universities.
I've talked to several people about my profile for grad school and the consensus is it's not good enough given my undergrad stature. I've talked to folks from schools like CMU and UIUC who got into elite grad schools without papers or ~3.9+ GPAs, but I'm already out of the running with these things with a degree from NC State.
It's incredibly depressing to know I'm already shut out of most forms of social mobility at 24!
If you’re wanting to go to grad school, go to grad school. Maybe you don’t go to an Ivy, but if you’re after the grad school experience then an Ivy is a nice potential bonus, not a necessary thing.
MIT:
> Six out of every 10 students receive MIT need-based aid. the average price paid by an undergraduate receiving financial aid in 2019–2020 was $21,917—that’s approximately what it costs to attend a state school. And for students with family incomes under $90,000 a year, we ensure that scholarship funding will allow them to attend MIT tuition-free.
Harvard puts the following numbers front and center:
Other schools in this tier have similar policies.Can graduate debt-free, or do actually graduate debt-free?
This also seems to ignore parental debt. Many parents cannot afford to pay $12K a year (or more) and have to take out home equity or other loans in order to pay the parental contribution that the university financial aid office decides upon.
Does this include graduate and professional students?
And what about "big-name" schools that don't have Harvard's $41B endowment? Some monetarily "poorer" ivies (Dartmouth and Brown) have endowments that are tiny by comparison (though $6B or $5B isn't exactly chump change. Also they had terrific returns of 8% and 12% for 2020.)
Edit: Not to be misleading - I hadn't been accepted as I never applied. The below replies are based on talks with recruiters prior to applying, which I ultimately never did.
But no, I try to have no regrets. I know enough people saddled in student loan debt who didn't get their big shot. As an introvert, I could see that being me as I probably wouldn't have networked adequately. Then there's the whole fact that I would not have my wife and daughter likely. Very Butterfly Effect like thinking.
What does this say about people like me? Am I on a lower track for life now? *Feels like people like me are underrepresented in conversations like this!
Please don't avoid applying to a school just because you assume you won't be offered enough aid.
Also, if an aid package doesn't work for you, please call the aid office to explain your situation. Tell them you want to attend, but money is the only barrier. They will work with you.
It is incredible any family says no to a top tier college program for any reason. It’s like winning the lottery. Taking out federal loans to pay to go to Cornell is still a fantastic deal, as long as you study the right things, even considering the loans are mispriced due to all the people who do not pay them back.
It’s just basic arithmetic, so I cannot believe that the obstacle for families is knowledge of how the system works. Something else is always at play when people make completely drop dead stupid financial decisions, things that are usually personal and ancestral, deep problems that cannot be solved by arithmetic. On the financial flip side it’s also why people go into dentistry - the arithmetic is terrible considering how much dental school costs, but something about the relationship between the family and the kids is coercing kids into dental school anyway. This is not an unorthodox opinion.
Just because you can get a loan to cover the cost doesn't mean it's affordable.
I've noticed a definite difference between lower and middle income people in this regard.
People without much income, "working class" if you will, view loans as "something to help make ends meet"
More middle and upper-middle class people view loans as "access to cheap credit." I.e. ways to leverage a little excess money into a lot of excess money.
The main difference is the level of confidence that the leverage isn't going to turn on you and flip your life upside-down because you can't make the payments.
* There's a caveat that for those in the lowest incomes, attending mattered. I wonder if this is due to a networking effect rather than the quality of the school
I find school's love to offer loans.
Why start the article off with an obvious falsehood? The fact that SAT scores are highly correlated with wealth does not mean that none of the variation in scores is explained by aptitude.
When people make the argument in this article they never seem to propose a fairer alternative. I'm suspicious that the criticism of SATs is actually a movement towards returning to patronage and nepotism.
My family could have afforded prep courses, but I wanted to prove to myself that it could be done for much less (which it was).
Because of this, high achieving, middle class students often go to state schools, which often give merit scholarships (top-20 schools don't), and have much lower tuition.
Some people have already pointed out that top tier universities have been discounted for the last decade. But even in 2000, Harvard college cost less than half of what it does now. Taking out loans to pay for Havard in 2000 would be the best investment you could ever make in your life, just considering that same inflation that partly raised Harvard’s tuition price also reduced the real cost of your debt.
I believe the underlying problem is not financial literacy though.
They only offer financial aid. It is a distinct application process (at least was was I applied). But that financial aid is extremely generous. I.e. you can have family income of over 100K and still qualify.
A high school friend who went to an Ivy missed this part. She thought that not offering merit scholarships meant you couldn’t get any money to reduce the cost.
Admissions to the top 5 schools are broken. There’s more qualified students than there are slots. The only solution to that is more slots.
If you get a 1500 on your SAT that’s a free ride to almost any university in the country. Especially if you come from an under-represented background. This includes Ivy League schools. But not Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT.
The best ticket to a top 25 world class education is a high SAT score. It’s a free ticket available to anyone.
I have many complaints about our university. But even a mediocre test score gets you a free ride to very very good state schools. Articles like this only reinforce the false necessity of Top 5 or Top 10 status.
A bit OT, but: I was going to say that the 1600 point scale hasn't been used for years (since 2005, when they switched to a 2400 point scale), but it turns out that they went back to the 1600 point scale in 2016.
A perfect 1600 won’t get you into top 10 schools on its own. Thus my original comment about there being more qualified candidates than openings.
I mean, I didn't. I get what you're saying but the idea that you can just "work hard" to get into these sorts of institutions feels kind of insulting when there are lots of people like me that did work hard but didn't get in.
https://blog.prepscholar.com/sat-scores-for-colleges
The highest average SAT score at the top schools is right around 1500.
I’m not saying a 1500 will get you into Harvard. It won’t. But it will get you into a very good school. University of Washington is a great school. It’s average SAT score is just 1340. 75th percentile is 1460.
1500 is literally top 2% of score distribution. For most circumstances that should get most people into a top 5% school. (Top 5%, not Top 5).
A 3.81 GPA and a SAT score of 1540 were enough to get me a full ride at a decent school in the UT System (not Austin, though).
The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good? https://www.amazon.com/dp/0374289980/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_fabc...
It matters when elite admissions favor legacy students, athletes, and those with unique extracurricular activities. All of which favor the rich.
Wouldn't this mean if you compared two groups of kids from the same income quintile one with a very low SAT score and one with a very high one they'd have the exact same life outcomes? I find this hard to believe.
Also this study disagrees that coaching has much of an impact on SAT scores.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/h2pva2jus90c1el/2012-montgomery.pd...
Two wealthy kids, raised on the same neighborhood/conditions, measured with each other, SAT will give you a proxy for academic ability/IQ.
That comparison might break down when measuring A poor kid, with a wealthy kid. Or a ESL student (english as foreign language, to a native speaker).
The wealthy kids, probably went to better schools, had taken PRE-SATS since 8th grade, has tutor, and everything in between to get better. Poor kids are probably sharing a room with their parents, live in crappy conditions, and have to start working as teens to help out the family economically...
All upper middle class folks know this: the more testing practice you do, the better you become at that test...
SAT and IQ tests are a valid tool of measurement when two people have had the same conditions and training.
Let me translate into engineering terms: Two engineers go to interview, one is good and has some great experience, the other one is average, but just LEETCODES for months before the interview.
The average engineer gets the job, while the better one might not, as he probably didn't solve some Leetcode style of problem fast enough.
Im real life scenarios, the good engineer would have outperformed the average one.
Testing prep just doesn’t matter in aggregate, because admissions rarely have a cliff between marginal score and slightly better marginal score. Upper middle class people spending money on it doesn’t mean it’s money well spent; like many things rich people spend money on, it’s largely signaling to peers.
Also, your caricature of why people get hired for engineering jobs bears very little relationship to what I and my colleagues look for in engineering interviews.
Being able to solve a few simple algorithm problems is table stakes. Being able to talk about what you’re doing and why is what’s being measured.
People who crammed leetcode but don’t actually understand the material are obvious 5 minutes into the interview; people who freeze up occasionally on the algorithm bits but can talk about why they’re doing what they’re doing generally get hired.
Yeah, I'm not sure I've ever even heard of anyone comparing the times it took different applicants to answer a question, except maybe in the binary "did they do it under the time cap" sense. And even then, very rarely is software development time capped in the way an interview was so as long as someone's thinking is along the right track I don't think not getting a specific answer in a specific timeframe would disqualify them.
Even for official IQ test taking, they don't recommend taking the test more than once a year, as it invalidates the results of the tests...
Why? The act of doing tests, makes you better at that particular test, and the test ceases to become a good measurement of what it was trying to measure (in this case, IQ).
Honestly I would be surprised if it was possible to create a test that was both impossible to improve with practice and actually measured anything at all.
How far are we from trying to "correct"/normalize SAT scores according to family income quintiles? It seems to make sense if it's actually true that you can't compare scores across quintiles. As someone who did above-average and came from the bottom quintile it would have helped me a lot. As someone whose kids will very likely grow up in the top quintile I'm not sure I'd want that to happen.
I like the idea from the powerball revolution epsiode of Revisionist History (http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/44-the-powerball-revo...). Why not have some filter to get the top students in to a pool, then randomly select them? I mean there are more qualified students than there are slots, so it's only "fair" if each of them get the same chance. No politics - just a pure number game at that point. You can argue the filter could create a disadvantage to poor students etc..., but you can adjust that in ways that the initial pool of potential applicants will be even.
Of course when I mention the concept of randomly selecting a candidate, it makes people real uncomfortable :)
And why can't you select a the best students and then randomly select among them? I don't believe that a 3.8 student will certainly perform worse than a 3.85 student, for example.
I agree and think the brokenness is in the limited number of opportunities. Why are Harvard and other Ivies the only ones that matter on your resume? Once a society limits the number of opportunities to reach the upper echelons, it is bound to set off scramble among all the parents, since everyone wants the best for their children.
For some reasons, this is not only an American thing. I believe elite institutions in other countries as equally (or even more) selective.
Like having google on your resume.
It's not logical. If someone left google after a year.. it sounds like it wasn't a great fit for either but others will take it as a proxy for your greatness and select that person over someone who stayed longer at a less known entity.
economies of scale work to your advantage here as well. when hiring 1 person, you feel immense pressure to hire correctly. but when hiring for 10 similar roles, you can, for instance, hire 11 people at random from a qualified pool and find the best fits along the way (often even for the 'extra' hire, who might fit in an entirely different role).
This is demonstrably untrue. First, the article’s use of a family making $200,000 is telling. If you look around that people who are billionaires today, most did come from upper middle class families, but not necessarily wealthy ones. Mark Zuckerberg’s parents are a psychiatrist and a dentist. Opening wide the class of the most elite to the children of upper middle class professionals is in fact a huge societal achievement. Few societies have that kind of mobility.
Another example is the economic mobility of Asians raised in the bottom 20% of income. These people lack both financial resources and social connections. But they have a 27% chance of ending up in the top 20% of income as adults. Test-based meritocracy like the SAT is a huge enabler of that.
I have trouble agreeing with that, especially given the tendencies of pulling up the ladder. The billionaires are basically irrelevant because they're too small in number, the upper middle class and everyone else is the chasm that is widening by the day [0]. It's absolutely becoming or has become a stratified structure.
[0] https://www.brookings.edu/book/dream-hoarders/
These people are the gatekeepers to a higher education, they should be held to higher standards.
> The college counselors' report concludes that, on average, prep courses yield only a modest benefit, "contrary to the claims made by many test-preparation providers." It found that SAT coaching resulted in about 30 points in score improvement on the SAT, out of a possible 1600, and less than one point out of a possible 36 on the ACT, the other main college-entrance exam, says Derek Briggs, chairman of the research and methodology department at the University of Colorado in Boulder and author of the admissions counselors' report.
https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-the...
> Once scholars control for all these factors as best they can, they find that coaching has a positive but small effect: Perhaps 10 or 20 points in total on the SAT, mostly on the math section, according to careful work by Derek Briggs of the University of Colorado Boulder and Ben Domingue of Stanford University.
> Some estimates run a little higher: A 2010 study led by Ohio State’s Claudia Buchmann and based on the National Education Longitudinal Study found that the use of books, videos, and computer software offers no boost whatsoever, while a private test prep course adds 30 points to your score on average, and the use of a private tutor adds 37.
Parents who sent their kids to cram school, or tutoring or whatever, and kids with perfect scores are mad that schools aren’t basing admissions solely on scores and grades.
What it boils down to is that Asian American kids are outperforming most other groups on the SAT for whatever reason. Elite colleges don’t want student bodies that are 70% Asian American.
Also, middle schoolers don’t really have a choice in the matter. If it were up to them, they’d play Roblox and watch TikToks all day.
For example, looking at specific question formats; learning the only topics that would be covered by tests and nothing else.
That’s all the referenced studies show.
That doesn’t mean that the SAT isn’t “coachable” with much intensive efforts, or that more minimal efforts don’t result in large improvements for some subset of test takers.
2. What those studies call coaching isn’t remotely comparable to years of 20 hour a week cram school.
3. Of course the SAT is coachable. How do you think you learn the math techniques and vocabulary in the first place?
If it’s not possible to increase your vocabulary, how do people learn new languages?
4. The percentage of students who make a perfect score on a similar test, the ACT, has increased by 5x in the last five years while the average score has only risen slightly.
Clearly a subset of test takers has figured out a way to reliably prep for the test.
Based on info from a buddy of mine who runs an SAT prep business, this is a half truth. He says:
- It is tough to get gains from a kid who doesn’t want to be there — that is, the parents are pushing the students to prep when the student doesn’t want to. My friend actually tries to filter out these folks in his sales funnel.
- Motivated kids can get ridiculous amounts of improvement (40-100 per skill), especially if they are starting off in the lower or middle part of the scoring range (people at the top are capped in improvement by max scores).
- I have done some minimal tutoring for a friend’s kid, and his SAT score went up by 110 in math and 80 in verbal from a middling starting point. Anecdote, but still... My “curriculum” was just have him take a practice test every week under test like conditions, review the principles behind the math problems that he missed, review any test strategy issues that pop up, and give him 50 vocab words a week with skills on how to search for how these words are used in a natural setting. With a longer runway, I think he may have been able to double that improvement (the kid was smart enough to get a perfect math score, but didn’t have the confidence to execute in a testing context).
And it should be noted that they changed the tests before these studies too.
> Many of the key studies of coaching effects were based on kids who took the SAT or ACT in the 1990s and 2000s, Briggs told me. The tests have since been changed a fair amount, in an effort to make them more like statewide achievement tests and to minimize their similarity to intelligence tests.
"The SAT isn't gameable" is an extraordinary claim. And "suburban families try hard to game the SAT" is not so much a "claim" as "a fact your own analysis acknowledges". I could be persuaded, but what you've presented here doesn't constitute extraordinary evidence.
(Your other argument in this thread, about the possible Cobra Effect of eliminating the SAT, is much more persuasive).
This I believe is the crux of the problem in how the "upward mobility" is measured. If it is strictly by income/wealth quintiles, then it is strictly zero-sum. But is the world really a zero-sum game? I'd content that 80-90% people in USA / Western Europe have a far superior quality of life than the top-1% of the past on many metrics like health, nutrition or peace. So one can say that their entire societies were upwardly mobile from 1946 onward.
Everyone talks about upward mobility, but we rarely talk about downward mobility. It's not impossible to go from "rags to riches", but who ever goes from riches to rags? It's not a true "meritocracy" unless the system reliably impoverishes the idiot children of the wealthy, but that almost never happens. The wealthy are protected, regardless of merit, and they take up space at or near the top of the system, reducing the number of positions open to more qualified candidates.
While I agree that the idiot children of the wealthy should not get to wield any significant influence on the society, "impoverishing them" doesn't seem like the right goal, since that might provoke a reaction from their wealthy parents who are driven, connected and talented. Rather, such idiots should be managed out on a safe landing, where they don't influence society at all but their parents are still not worried about their future.
I don't think anyone should be impoverished, and indeed I'm not a supporter of the idea of "meritocracy", but I think it's fair to take the arguments for it to their logical and abhorrent conclusion. After all, the supporters seem perfectly content to allow the non-wealthy (and assumed non-meritorious) to become impoverished.
in this fancy socialism-is-the-future era, our system now punishes "the evil rich" to make sure we are all going to have 'equity-result', as said the 'road-to-hell-is-paved-with-good-intention', guess what, those true 'bad' rich family always knows how to circumvent any rules that is targeting them, in the end it's always the honest hard-working high-income family got punished.
saying rich-family is key to elite university, is the same as saying exercise-person lives longer, the 'rich' or 'exercise' are nothing to blame most of the time.
"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries"
this kind of report is absolutely trash.
I came from a well off family (who were on food stamps when I was first born — socialism FTW), and had tons of advantages while I meandered through college before eventually graduating. I was not overly disciplined but had many extra chances someone from less means would not have.
so the trend now becomes 'equity result', which will make nobody wants to work hard anymore, that's socialism at its worst.
this is also called mob to the hard working "rich" families.
US is moving to that direction, fast.
by the way, I was from a poor family, and now barely made it.
I would rather keep working my way up instead of seeing socialism-for-equity-result here.
I also hope for those who depends on food-stamp and now is in good shape, donating to the community, and always be thankful to other taxpayers who gave you and your family a hand, money is not from air, it's from other working persons' pocket.
Do you have a source for this? I'm very very left I haven't seen something like this being promoted anywhere.
> US is moving to that direction, fast.
No, it isn't. The current president is Donald Trump for crying out loud. It can barely even get less in that direction.
> I would rather keep working my way up instead of seeing socialism-for-equity-result here.
Why should people be required to artificially "keep working hard" if there's enough resources to not?
> money is not from air
It certainly is though.
I'm all for splitting US into left and right states, a reverse of civil war but without the war. The nation is nearly split into 50:50 anyways in the last few decades and it's getting more and more divided. Both sides will be happy, and we can compete in parallel and see which system will win. This way, at least, those leftism will not fight for liberal agenda with money from other hard working people's pocket. Please leave them alone, they're already taxed enough and did their share for your dreaming welfare society.
What is a surprise is that the Ivy leagues and the wealthy are ashamed to admit this.
I think people wouldn’t get all worked up about this if people would be more honest.
Yes, there will always be some income differences, yes, some people self fragment into groups by race, class, interests, etc. when given a choice. What you see are natural consequences of people’s decisions.
As someone who attended an Ivy, it is simply untrue that it's mostly blue-blood old money hobnobbing around.
First, there's not enough of them to fill the classes every year. Second, wealthy people themselves want their children to be educated with other smart kids.
The stereotypes just don't fit and haven't for some time.
It was very much a surprise to me until I was like, 25-26 years old, which was when I really learned how the world works.
There's some very strong propaganda out there that you can do anything if you just apply yourself.
Heh, do people really fall for that? Even if the "can do anything" part is possible, it's not probable (compared to starting from a wealthy family and applying 1/10th the effort). Rich play life in easy mode, news at 11.
But business/academic success/jobs/monetary success/is...
I worry about the collateral effects of these attacks on meritocracy and the SAT. As immigrants, my family and I didn’t have social connections and deep cultural familiarity. Applying to college, doing the “right” extra-curriculars, etc., was actually quite a challenge. We never knew to work teachers for extra credit or retakes on exams to keep our grades up. What we had to distinguish ourselves from other upper middle class kids was our SAT scores.
Today, my wife and I have vastly more resources and cultural competency to navigate “the system” than my parents did. My kids go to a tiny K-12 private school where their teachers and guidance counselors will know them from preschool. We know the trendy extra-curriculars, how to craft admissions essays, how to put together class schedules that look good on a transcript while minimizing GPA risk, etc. I feel like deemphasizing the SAT and objective measures is going to help established families like mine at the expense of the kind of family I grew up in.
Still: your family was already well near the 75th percentile nationally for the time. In what sense would that not be wealthy?
Not saying there aren't great scholars coming out them.
The question is how good can educational institution get, when it is design to be a investment vehicle for the wealthy?
- For the most part, high SATs are tables stakes for applying to elite schools, they are not the deciding factor. The exceptions are for athletes and other folks with preferred admissions. I don’t know why people continue to think that great grades and high SAT scores are the main or only factors in elite school admissions — the admissions materials themselves make it abundantly clear that they are looking for more.
- All that said, the “more” mentioned above is typically easier to access if you come from a high income family.
- The excerpt mentions low % of students who go from bottom quintile to top quintile after an elite education (~2%). Is that 2% of the total student body or 2% of the bottom quintile elite school students? This is unclear to me, but if it’s the former, that’s probably a big win since lowest quintile students are a small part of the student body to begin with.
- Note that some (many?) jumps from bottom quintile to top quintile may just be a well-off family that ran into bad times. This happened to a friend of mine — wealthy family one generation, the next generation lost it to drugs and alcohol, and the third generation reverted back to wealthy.
- The leap from the bottom quintile to the top typically requires much more than education. There are a ton of soft skills that are common in the top quintile that are foreign or antithetical to people from the bottom quintile —- general communication, conflict resolution, attitudes towards money, socializing skills, etc. Without these skills, it’s really tough to make it to the top quintile unless you effectively hit the time-in-history and degree lottery with a FAANG-type of high paying job. Even then, someone from the bottom quintile will have limited upside without the soft skills mentioned above.
- To close, I wish people would stop presenting elite schools as the gateway to riches or even a stable high income. Learning how to play the “game” that the top quintile plays is much more important than where someone went to school. Obviously schooling (esp. elite schooling) is part of that game, but based on the wide variety of winners in the game that I have known, the soft skills I have mentioned are a much more common and salient trait than an elite schooling.
I know a (formerly) middle class guy who was a walk-on football player at a big Midwestern state university who wanted to be rich. He did not come from an area or a family who knew how to function gracefully in the eight-figure net worth NE corridor crowd.
He parlayed his varsity status (I call it a totally-not-a-club club) into a random low level back room finance job in NYC. He made himself useful, socialized, networked, learned from those around him, and after two decades or so (leaving out a lot of the story) he was a partner of a hedge fund that ended up netting him a mid-eight-figure net worth.
Granted, that is not the same as jumping from the bottom quintile, but knowing his personal story, he had plenty of social challenges to overcome.
The correlation between SAT and wealth is not surprising. Wealth and g-factor are also correlated. In addition, g-factor of parents is extremely highly correlated to that of their kids through both genetics and upbringing. That there exists a transitive correlation between all of parental wealth, child-g, parental-g, and child-SAT is totally expected from our understanding of intelligence in the literature. Wealth as a driver independent of g needs to be explicitly tested for in a multivariable model (has this been done?).
Isn't this kinda obvious?
I mean, if you have parents that can teach you stuff or pay someone to teach you additionally to the stuff you learn at school you'll always fare better.
I don't think there can be a way to measure any kind of aptitude independently from your upbringing. We don't need better tests, we need to help parents to raise better children.
* SAT scores are highly correlated with intelligence
* Intelligence is highly correlated with wealth
* Intelligence is highly heritable (80% apparently)
I'm far from being rich, but I plan to pick a private but modest school / university for my children. Even if I were multimillionaire I wouldn't change this.
My rationale is:
- I don't want to deal with underpaid and possibly bitter public school teachers
- It's not like you need an ivy school to find a job or be successful, that lies within you
- Education is as useful as your kids will have a passion for, not how much you pay for an oversized planetarium
- Rich kids sound like the worst people to surround your kid with
I'm genuinely a little confused by this sentence. You lay out your reasons below, but seem to be assuming you get to pick. By the time someone attends university, they're usually, you know, people. Adults in the 18+ sense, high school diploma, ability to get a job, have their own opinions about the world, access to federal student loans, etc. You'll have some influence in terms of the degree to which you'll support their decision and advice you can offer, but you don't get to pick anything, especially if your child is talented/driven enough to get into an Ivy League w/o being a socioeconomic outlier.
University will be their choice but - assuming I'll be the one to fork out money for uni - I will set a budget.
To explain: it’s simply a fact in our current society that people with wealth have outsized power and influence, even if they do not have special aptitude.
In a society where wealth does accumulate, it seems beneficial for people with aptitude but not wealth to be able to build relationships with people who have wealth but not aptitude.
Thus, society benefits from colleges admitting a mixture of the two.
Why did it omit a whole swath of information in order to make a point?
How does the outcome of elite grads compare with those from public universities? Second tier colleges?
Well it's kind of the same thing with university admissions. The problem that we've encountered is that the number of elite schools and admissions spots (established largely for the population of the post war growth economy) has not grown in proportion to the population. 1600 kids per freshman class has been the same for 30 years. And therefore the question of who gets in has gotten worse and worse as the number of kids competing has grown, and we're bickering over people's belief in different weighting schemes.
What the US needs is more good schools. Not tinkering around the edges and theoretical arguments of whether rich kids deserve good schooling more than poor kids. That will get us nowhere in the big picture.
In 2019 the US spent roughly 720 billion on the military.
Public spending on elementary and secondary (high schools) was about 740 billion. That doesn't count all spending on public colleges or any spending on private schools both of which are substantial.
Even if you just add the VA into the mix your numbers come out upside down. Add any segment of Homeland security and it gets really obvious fast.
If we include all of both of those (and I would contend that "all" isn't really appropriate if we're just talking about the "military") we're around a trillion or so on the military.
Let's take the 740B on government spending on primary + secondary education and add the 175B or so spent by various levels of governments on college. That gets you to 915B. Is there 100B of private spending a year on education? I'm willing to bet there is.
At the end of the day, the numbers are probably pretty close. My overall point is that there is this idea that US military spending dwarfs US education spending. However you do the math, this is clearly not the case.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp
We /do/ have major problems with offering alternatives to a given location, though.
When I started at university (in the uk, top 10 but not top 5), the admissions tutor (for the school of physics, not the whole place) who admitted my year group was forced to do the job. He considered himself a scientist (he was an FRS, a leader in his field after all). He looked at all the factors used for entry and found them all to be bs. Grades (predicted and actual), personal statements, references, extra curriculars, age/gender/socioeconomic group etc.
So he admitted everyone that applied.
He admitted people with low grades, he admitted people without the maths requirements (usually the most important grade for a physics under grad, you generally can't do any physics course without one).
The result was a bumper class of 120ish instead of the usual 60ish. But by the end of the first year / start of second year, we were down to the usual number. Everyone else had transfered out, failed and left or was repeating the year.
The interesting thing was that there were a few of the people who wouldn't usually have made it who did not transfer out. 2 of the 10 without the maths qualifications went on the get degrees. 1 is a teacher, the other got a PhD.
His philosophy was that if someone could pass first year exams, labs, etc they deserved a spot in second year and so on. He didn't care what they came with. Just whether they passed. The chance he gave people was mostly wasted. But not entirely. He radically improved some people's lives.
I only know because we got drunk together because he was my tutor and we had a very friendly tutorial group and relationship.
As a straight A student with good extra curriculum activities, references, even work experience, I was scandalised and insulted to hear what he'd done. But I learned new definition of equality and it challenged me as a person. I think a lot of schools in particular work the other way around: hard to get in, then you just sit there for a few years and walk into jobs without further examination. That helps no one.
Some one that does well, in a community college, should be transfered into a proper 4 year college. I know a lot of state schools do this, but it should be more common/normalized.
Plus community colleges tend to be much cheaper.
As far as I know, this is radically common. Where are you from that this isn’t common? Most everyone goes to community college as prep for getting a four year degree later or do some particular 2 year program. I rarely meet people who do a two year associates just for the sake of it. (As it usually means very little in the marketplace) Usually the people who quit at two years never really could figure out what they wanted to do. (Which is fine)
And I don’t know that we necessarily want to encourage people to “sacrifice their teenage years” by rewarding people who do so. I did well on the SAT, and I didn’t spend all my time partying. But I definitely don’t feel like I sacrificed my teenage years.
I certainly don’t want my children to look back on their childhood like that.
I believe earning some money for yourself as young kid (edit: specifically, I mean ~teen and later) is good, as it allows you to feel accomplished and teaches you to deal with money (ie. learning to save). It feels very different to do that with your own hard earned money than with pocket/birthday/clothing/allowance money. Not too much though, as the wage is ridiculously low, and the work likely repetitive and boring. It also teaches discipline.
And that last word, is a keyword to higher success, on top of money. You need both; not either.
Sorry, this is BS. I come from a competitive family. My parents put enormous pressure on me to do well in school, too. Pressure I could not handle. They wanted me to do 2 years in 1 to save 2k EUR on travel costs. I failed. If they had a tad bit more savings and listened better to me, I believe I would've succeeded. I'm good now, after a long struggle, but I should've learned a trait at age 12 instead. Not everyone is meant to take a traditional, higher education road to success. Not even when they have a high SAT score, or rich parents. Mine were average wealthy, though I had a chronically ill father. My cousins had no ill parent, and I suspect this is why they lack a general compassion for human beings in need.